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The debate over immigration policy in the United States continues with increasing rancor and agitation. Questions about who should be allowed to become an American elicit strong feelings among many citizens. Consider several occurrences over the past few years. California voters in 1994 passed Proposition 187, which bars the children of illegal aliens from attending public school (a measure now under legal challenge). The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 allows states to deny Medicaid and welfare benefits to legal immigrants who may have long held jobs and paid U.S. income taxes.
The most recent immigration law (the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996) may send tens of thousands of people who are now illegal-but have been following an established procedure to become legal-out of the country for a period of three or ten years. "Congress has essentially moved the goal posts in the middle of the game," say two reporters in a recent Washington Post article.1
Are we becoming a nation of xenophobics? Have we lost that circle of compassion for other living creatures that Einstein describes in the quotation prefacing this article...or did we ever have it? Are we not all just people looking for somewhere safe to live?
We have, of course, been through this before. Successive waves of immigrants have encountered hostility as well as welcome in America-especially during the great waves of immigration. In colonial times, German pacifists seeking safe ground in Quaker-founded Pennsylvania were looked upon unfavorably by some English colonists. Irish victims of the 1840s potato famine faced job discrimination and vicious racial stereotyping for decades after their arrival here.
The same tune of racial inferiority was played during the great wave of late 19th and early 20th century European immigration, which brought a huge influx of Italians,Jews, and other southern and eastern Europeans to our great industrial cities. On the West coast, meanwhile, nativist resentment against job competition from Asians (expressed by Irish workers among others) led to the first national restrictions on immigration based on place of origin, in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Is the current wave of anti-immigrant feeling really any different from what has occurred in the past? Yes, according to Nathan Glazer, author of a classic study of...