Attitudes to immigrants: the contemporary debate

In 1982, when the Gallup Organization asked Americans whether specific ethnic groups had been good or bad for the USA, on the whole, the longer the group had been the country, the more favourable was the public response. Thus, by then large majorities thought Irish Catholics and Jews, who earlier suffered from widespread discrimination, had been good influences on the country. Racial attitudes, however, appeared to be decisive in creating long-term low opinions of non-white ethnic groups. Less than half of the Americans questioned in 1982 thought Japanese, Chinese and African Americans had favourably affected the country, and only one in five or less approved of having recent non-white groups, such as Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese and Haitians in the USA.

Large numbers of Asian immigrants in the fourth wave arrive with more

capital and a higher level of education than most Latinos. Those facts and popular

attitudes towards some Asian cultures’ emphasis on respect for parents, education

and hard work have led some media commentators to lump all Asian Americans

together under the label of the ‘model minority’. This ignores the large majority

of Asian immigrants who come with little money and education; the problems of Asian refugees who have experienced wartime traumas; and job discrimination and violence against Asian Americans. For its own convenience, the federal government invented the word ‘Hispanics’ to put in a single category all the Central and South American Spanish-speaking cultures arriving in the USA in

the fourth wave. A handy label for official statistics, the word became identified

with illegal immigrants in the popular mind because of the large number of

immigrants unlawfully crossing the border with Mexico. It thus contributed to

prejudice against hugely diverse Latino populations, even though ‘illegals’ come

from countries as diverse as Ireland and Iran.

Illegal immigration causes heated debate over government policy to control

entry to the USA. One segment of public opinion stresses that tolerating illegal

immigration encourages a general disregard for the law, lowers wages for other

workers, and undermines the 1965 law that gives all nationalities an equal

chance for immigrant visas. Other Americans emphasize that illegal immigrants take jobs that US citizens do not want, are paid less than the legal minimum wage, work in substandard conditions, and, while needing the benefits of social- welfare programmes, dare not reveal the facts of their situation for fear of being deported.

The federal government responded to this ongoing debate in 1986 by passing the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The law attempted to minimize illegal immigration while expressing acceptance and giving rights to people already inside the USA. It sets fines and penalties for employers who hire illegal aliens and also attempts to prevent employment discrimination through rules that outlaw firing or refusing to hire people because they look foreign. The law offered ‘amnesty’ (legal immigrant status) for illegals who had stayed in the USA for four years, and for some temporarily resident farmworkers. Almost 3 million people became legal immigrants through IRCA. Their improved situation was the one great success of the legislation. It proved difficult to document evidence that employers had broken the law, and the number of illegals, which declined at first, rose again to between 9 and 11 million in a few years.

In spite of rising reactions against immigration in the 1 980s, national policy became more liberal through the Immigration Act of 1990. It raised the annual total of immigrant visas, the limit for individual nations and the number of asylum seekers who could remain in the USA. It also removed restrictions on the entry of many groups, including homosexuals and communists, people from nations

adversely affected by the 1965 law, and additional family members, including

the spouses and children of illegals given amnesty. During the economic boom

of the 1 990s, the shortage of unskilled labour made most Americans willing to

overlook the problem of illegal immigration.

Since 1990, sharp differences in public attitudes to immigration have been evident. The backlash against the level of immigration grew strong by the mid- 1 990s, especially in some groups in the seven states (California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Illinois and Arizona) where over three quarters of newcomers settled. In California, a referendum that denied illegal immigrants educational and social services passed easily but was blocked by court challenges initiated by opponents of the measure. More restrictive attitudes also found expression in the federal immigration and welfare reform laws of 1996. These strengthened border controls against illegal immigration, made it easier to deport ‘suspicious’ visitors and immigrants, required family in the USA to take more responsibility for keeping newcomers off the welfare roles, and denied legal immigrants federal welfare benefits (illegal immigrants never received them). Court cases and action by the Clinton administration prevented this last provision from having much impact.

President George W. Bush expressed generous attitudes towards some foreign workers in early 2001, when he welcomed a proposal from the President of Mexico for a new bracero worker programme and amnesty law. During the recession and the War on Terror that followed, however, he did not implement the proposal. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, polls showed that large majorities of the public favoured further strengthening border controls against illegal immigration and a decrease in legal immigration. In response, the government more energetically used the provisions of the 1996 law, and through the USA Patriot Act of 2002 developed new biometric identity checks to regulate entry to the country, conducted intensified surveillance of the foreign-born and called in immigrants, especially Arab Americans, for questioning and possible detention or deportation.

Five years into the twenty-first century, US law still allowed the world’s highest level of legal immigration, nearly a million annually, most of it non-white and non-Western (culturally). An inability or unwillingness to enforce existing law resulted in the continued tolerance of additional millions of illegal immigrants, most of them Latinos. This situation suggested that in the forty years since the 1965 immigration-reform law, Americans’ self-image had become extraordinarily inclusive when compared with the narrow Anglo-American national identity enshrined in US law until that time.

Sharp differences, nonetheless, continued to mark American public opinion about immigration after 2001. Most of the country’s economic, political and cultural elites accepted high levels of legal and illegal immigration. The general public, on the other hand, increasingly linked immigration to concerns about national security, population growth, environmental problems and cultural differences. Majorities of those polled therefore favoured more effectively restricting entrance to the country. A dramatic example of this chasm in attitudes about immigration occurred in 2004. Having implemented a variety of national security measures in response to the 9/11 attacks, President Bush announced his support for a revised guest-worker-amnesty plan, similar to the one proposed by Mexico three years earlier. The public rejected the idea by large margins in a series of polls, and it quietly disappeared from the presidential agenda. In this divided climate of opinion, it was uncertain whether the public’s concerns would in time bring a less generous American immigration policy.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 890