Tales of the flood.(Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis)(Book Review)

Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis, by Otis L. Graham Jr. (Rowman & Littlefield, 264 pp., $26.95)

RADICALS loose in America. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants arriving, from countries less and less like those that founded the United States. A flooded labor market, with wages dropping for low-income Americans. Industrialists clamoring for more cheap foreign labor. Does all this sound familiar? It could be a description of today's reality, in which terrorists menace our country; masses of Third World immigrants continue to swamp our shores, displacing American workers in many job sectors; and industrialists cheerlead for the importation of even more foreign workers. In Unguarded Gates, however, historian Otis L. Graham Jr. shows that this would have been equally accurate as a description of another time of large-scale immigration: the period spanning the 1880s to the 1920s.

Graham, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, divides the history of American immigration policy and practice into three eras. First, states and, increasingly, Congress dealt piecemeal with who arrived, and decided who could stay, in the absence of an overriding national policy. Second, the Great Wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s culminated in adoption of a comprehensive policy designed to regulate the volume and character of the immigrant flow. Third, rising liberalism loosed a Second Great Wave, which continues--and increases--today.

Graham shows that Americans, from the beginning of the republic, have been ambivalent toward immigration. Colonies and, later, states disqualified foreign paupers and criminals. Thomas Jefferson counseled that the "inconveniences" associated with immigrants be weighed against the benefits they would bring. Alexander Hamilton agreed with Jefferson, saying immigrants' "heterogeneous compound" would "change and corrupt the national spirit." Graham notes that the Founders, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the republic they had struggled to create, opted against an immigration policy that would be constantly destabilizing: They expected mostly native-born increase, with the immigrants who did arrive becoming Americans in outlook and attachment.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of a flow of immigrants increasingly unlike the Americans already here. Western European nations that sent settlers to America "in the 17th to 19th centuries had been early and advanced incubators of constitutional democracy, religious pluralism (within a Christian framework), and unprecedented progress in science, technology, and economic development. By contrast, Great Wave arrivals were from nations or regions within the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires that by Western standards were profoundly backward."

Thus came restriction. Despite being a product of the Progressive Era, which in many ways broke with the Founding period, the new policy of restriction was profoundly conservative. The national-origins quota system was an exercise of republican self-government, reflecting a fair-minded, honest assessment of mass immigration's costs and benefits. The Great Wave had fed social upheaval, in the form of surplus labor, packed cities, unsanitary conditions, and cholera; it had also stretched social services. Alien anarchists could even ...