The agonizing difficulty of finding loopholes in existing law through which to draw into this country even a few survivors of Europe’s disaster offers a pitiful commentary upon the reversal of the historic American attitudes towards immigration. There is surely subject for reflection, ironic or compassionate, in the apprehensive protests against the invasion of the Oswego handful, in the obdurate barriers that greeted the forty-eight Latvians who ventured to expect admission at the end of their flight across the Atlantic.

Four decades ago, the same Atlantic shores welcomed in a single year more than 1,000,000 new residents. Hardly a serious voice then spoke out in favor of cutting off the stream. At that time, this golden land still stood forth as the refuge of the persecuted and exploited of all nations. The bitter movement that walled it off and closed its ears to the cries of the excluded had just been born and still awaited the travail of a world war to come to maturity.

The five years after the armistice of 1918 brought about the critical change in policy. By 1924, a new intention was plain to read in the statute book: the United States would accept no more than 100,000 entrants in any year, and an invidious quota system penalized some peoples, rewarded others, for having been born in certain areas of the earth’s surface.

Not so plain at the moment were the consequences. This measure was to put an end to immigration of the old order. The principle that some men were by their place of birth better fitted than others to be Americans cast the imputation of inferiority upon the peasants and workers of Southern and Eastern Europe who were in process of repeating the emigrating experience of Ireland, England, and Germany a half-century earlier. The law which snatched away all

assurance of welcome made the costs of crossing, and the innumerable human and legal difficulties, seem more formidable even to the few eligibles. Only the most desperate were willing to crawl through the limited gaps left open to them. Since 1924 there have been years when more people left the United States than entered it, years when even the meager quotas remained unfilled.

But the men who pressed the quota scheme to enactment thought less of consequences than of gratification of chauvinistic sentiments stirred up in the wake of the war. The new departure was one in kind with the Ku Klux Klan, the renunciation of the League, and the great Red scare.

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Today, the same narrow forces that put an end to immigration stand in the way of resumption. The outlook for any significant alteration in policy is not roseate. Yet experience in the interim has already outlined the probable effects upon the country of the failure to bring in new citizens. The contrast between the recent period of restriction and the earlier period of relatively free entry discloses the useful role immigrants are still capable of playing in the development of the United States.

Few Americans, for instance, are conscious of the real gravity of the problem of population. The number of people in this country has risen steadily and rapidly until now. But the curve of growth is flattening out, and the rate of increase has already slackened appreciably. Within the foreseeable future, our population will be static if not declining, with an ever larger proportion of elderly people. The effective labor force will be smaller, the number of dependents it will be required to support larger, and the consequent strain upon the system of production heavy.

We shall find small consolation in the efforts of statesmen and social scientists elsewhere to reverse such declines by offering bounties, family allowances, and similar inducements to raise the birth rate. Democratic and totalitarian regimes alike have

found these expedients unavailing. If such concerns have not troubled Americans in the past, that was due to a significant difference in experience. The United States also felt the depressing effects of a falling birth-rate among large segments of the native-born population after the middle of the 19th century. But to compensate for this loss, we enjoyed a steady inward flow of immigrants. Always a select group, in the prime of life, and given, because of clear if complex causes, to large and prolific families, these people by their presence accounted for the phenomenal increase in our numbers. With the ever replenishing source stopped up, there will be a serious inversion of many conditions of growth hitherto basic to our society.

How serious that inversion will be is still difficult to predict. Even to think in those terms seems strange in a nation where expansion has been a constant. But the French who faced the same trend a half-century ago have already discovered its meaning in terms of world politics. And the relevance of their experience for Americans is emphasized by the Scripps Foundation’s and the Princeton Office of Population Research’s estimates of population for the year 1970 (in millions):

International considerations today loom largest in our minds. But the consequences for the internal structure of our economy and our society of whether the population shall rise or fall are, if anything, fully as significant. The experience of the year since V-J day has demonstrated that this country is actually underpopulated in terms of the needs of industrial expansion at the rates of the years before 1929. With demobilization of the armed services complete and re-conversion accomplished, with a working force larger than ever before, we still face a serious deficiency in manpower. The farmer caught without essential help at the picking season, the contractor bogged down by lack of workers and of materials—which are in turn short because of shortages of labor, will offer positive confirmation of this fact.

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In the past, immigration played a vital role in the adjustment of labor supply to the requirements of a widening economy. This was the fluid element that took rigidity out of the whole system, falling off in periods of depression, but providing a ready source of cheap and eager hands that sparked the expansion of industry in the years of growth.

It was precisely this attribute that once contributed to hostility against the policy of open gates. The decade before 1924 in particular witnessed the spread of charges that immigration lowered the standards of native workers. It would have been difficult at any time to demonstrate that nations unaffected by such recruiting of their labor forces enjoyed higher standards. But these objections nevertheless had a spurious appearance of validity at the time, an appearance which vanished, however, into thin air under the light of more recent experience. It could not be said after 1929, as it had been before, that the newcomers caused unemployment. The great depression, coming well after the end of immigration, showed that the volume and the character of unemployment were altogether unrelated to either the size of the population or the number of recent entries.

More persistent, although it ran counter to the day-to-day experience of most American workers, was the claim that competition from foreigners willing to take jobs at any price lowered the wages of native labor. Occasional local examples, as in the Pennsylvania coal fields, lent substance to this charge. But the unskilled peasants who came to these shores from isolated and backward European villages rarely were fit to hold the positions Americans wanted. More generally, the foreign-born filled the hard and burdensome places that the better-trained natives would not accept.

The impact upon workers already here was quite different. Almost a hundred years ago, Edward Everett Hale noticed that the effect of immigration upon labor was analagous to the effect of pouring water into a vessel that held oil. The injection of the new served only to raise the level of the old contents. The experience of a century has documented this observation. As population mounted with wave upon wave of new arrivals, countless new opportunities opened up. The need for foremen and managers in industry, for clerks and bookkeepers, for minor executives in business, for shopkeepers and local artisans with special skills, for numerous doctors, lawyers, and teachers, built a social ladder up which many American families climbed. Immigrants had neither the training nor the capital to take up these pursuits and supply their own wants. The earlier comers or their children, more fortunate in this respect, filled the places thus made ready.

Meanwhile, the greater degree of division of labor, and the constantly rising efficiency that met the needs of the swelling home markets, markets in part made larger by the buying power of immigrant groups, operated together to increase the returns for every element of the population. The economy in all its branches was expansive. Despite enormous wastage in human and natural resources, the tremendous outpouring of goods brought gains to all. It carried also the assurance that growth had no limits, and the hope, on which men could build, that improvement would continue.

Here was the central factor that perpetuated social mobility in the United States and added special connotations to the meaning of democracy in America. Constant expansion opened places at the upper levels and permitted a steady movement of families and individuals from one rank to another. That movement, unabated, robbed social classes of their rigidity and warded off the stratification that was the lot of other industrial societies.

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Hardly two decades have elapsed since the close of the immigrant movement. The implications of the slackening of expansive energies are just beginning to emerge. The contraction in the range of opportunities, which threatens to spread to every field, is already apparent in some professions. Thus, if the number of doctors remains stationary, as seems the tendency, serious impediments will face those who wish to break into the calling. Everywhere; bright young men without connections find discouraging obstacles to the establishment of successful careers. Their discontent has not yet taken form, but their grievances are real. They perceive a disturbing discordance between events and the American dream of open opportunities.

The growth of population that would come from relaxation of immigration restrictions would make room for some of these energies and add new vigor to our economy. To persist in a policy that raises barriers predicated upon prejudice and lack of vision is to deprive America of an important source of strength.

Lurid fears of the immediate social consequences of immigration obscured these considerations for those who advocated restriction before 1924. But what has, in practice, happened since can easily dispel their foggy misconceptions. I will pass mercifully by the arguments of the very respectable thinkers who were once concerned with maintaining the purity of the liberty-loving “Teutonic race” in America. Recent events have cast a pall over such arguments in defense of “Anglo-Saxon” exclusiveness, if not over the sentiments behind them. But it is instructive to regard the objections of worthy people who then thought of immigration in terms of a relationship to crime, pauperism, insanity, intemperance, and machine rule in local government. It was child’s play with the use of statistics to show connections; and many of the statistical studies of the period seem now like the play of children.

Again, experience since 1924 is enlightening for those who wish to be enlightened. The end of immigration had no effect upon these social questions. Should the quota restrictions be removed, there will undoubtedly once more be foreign-sounding names among the criminal, the poor, and the diseased. But in the light of what happened in the era of prohibition, depression, and war, it will be less simple to hold newcomers responsible or to escape the conclusion that these are problems, not of immigration, but of the whole society.

Yet neither the groundlessness of these frenetic forebodings, nor the positive benefits that will accrue to the nation from a more liberal policy, have been enough to clear the way even for the legal trickle. The year after liberation still saw quotas unfilled, while Europe remained unwilling host to millions eager to depart. To all these miserable human beings, wasting where they are, potentially useful here, there has not been a single real sign of welcome. President Truman felt constrained to make his modest little proposal for the admission of 50,000 displaced persons after the adjournment of Congress. Indeed, despite this precaution, the chairmen of both the House and the Senate immigration committees immediately rejected the idea in no uncertain terms. And has not the D.A.R. already been called to arms to resist the threatened invasion?

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This unwillingness to face the question of a change in policy, the reluctance of most significant groups or public figures to handle the issue, comes from the fact that its resolution seems likely to be made less in terms of rational considerations of interest than of deep-rooted prejudices and unconscious intolerance. The Boston Post, for instance, gave my approach to revision of the immigration laws a sympathetic spread when it was first presented some months ago in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, but the very same issue of the paper carried an editorial that swallowed whole the specious claim of the Commander of the American Legion that immigration would take housing away from veterans. This variant of the familiar plea that there is not enough for everyone serves as the familiar red herring to cover up a failure to meet a social problem. It would seem obvious that the newcomers will be in no immediate position to compete for the GI’s dream bungalow, and that they could more than pay for whatever accommodations they do take by supplying the labor essential to destroy the bottlenecks now throttling the housing program.

There is little profit in pointing to particular sections or groups particularly infected with this prejudice. The South, the region that in the past has absorbed fewest immigrants, has resolutely turned its face against any revival. The uncompromising hostility of Southerners originates in the failure of their own efforts to attract newcomers early in the century, and in the mounting strength of racist ideas under the impact of the Negro problem. In other areas of the country, the same manifestations spring from other causes. In some places, a lingering, latent isolationism, feeding on the delusion that the United States can somehow cut itself off from the rest of the world, is unwilling to establish any contacts beyond our shores.

There are veterans for whom travel was narrowing rather than broadening, who came for the first time into relations with foreigners under unfavorable conditions that were calculated to encourage xenophobia rather than tolerance. For many second-generation citizens, the drive to establish their own Americanism leads to a rejection of older cultural ties and to exaggerated hostility to foreigners. There are Protestants who fear that a renewed flow of immigrants would further reduce the proportionate importance of the old American denominations. There are Catholics who fear the importation of radical ideas by atheistic Communists. There are Jews who fear that a revival of anti-Semitism will be among the secondary effects. There are labor-union members who fear that the strangers will in some undefined way rob them of hard-earned security. But the outward form or specific place in which this prejudice manifests itself is less significant than the fact that its underlying roots run deep through almost every sector of American society.

Fundamentally, all these resistances involve an unwillingness on the part of those who are already here and well established to move over and make room for the new arrivals, physically, economically, and in ways of thinking. These people have lost their faith in a nation capable of holding promises for an ever-widening circle of participants, promises underwritten in the past by the abundant energies of an ever-expanding society. Only such confidence could evoke the tact and adaptability, the willingness to understand and to be tolerant of diversities, that took the edge off the frictions of the past, that accepted 35,000,000 newcomers on conditions of equality without serious disorder and with substantial contributions to national life and national culture.

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The absence of that confidence now reflects a general uncertainty concerning the vitality and validity of our own social values. The young Americans of a century ago did not shirk their opportunity. They had absolute conviction of the virtue of their own institutions and ideas, and were eager to put them to the test of contact on equal terms with men raised under other institutions and swayed by other ideas. They believed implicitly in the efficacy of democratic institutions and in their adaptability to all the peoples of the world. That assurance had induced Americans to contribute men, money, and diplomatic support to the struggle against tyranny of distant folk, Greeks and Poles and Magyars, to say nothing of the Irish who had closer claims to aid. The same faith suffused the expansive impulse that carried the boundaries of the United States to the Pacific. Manifest destiny, even though it led to aggressive war, produced no colonies; until 1898, new territories became integral parts of the Union—their residents, citizens endowed with the same rights and privileges as the old. This confidence, too, lay at the root of the old refusal to make a selection among immigrants. Anyone who wished was free to come because those already here knew that the elements of likeness, of brotherhood, made it possible for all men to live together to their mutual advantage. Diversity of origin was an asset, not a liability, an enriching rather than an enfeebling factor. There was no anxiety about fixing American character into a rigid mold. Rather, there was an eagerness to behold what the grafting on of new stocks might bring—as Emerson put it, to let “all the European tribes,” in this new melting pot, “construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature.”

It is no coincidence that the renunciation of the potentialities of immigration at home has been accompanied in the last twenty years by the abandonment of our alliance with democratic forces abroad. The quota system had its counterpart in diplomacy, in the acceptance of the propriety of dictatorship, of illiberal regimes, and of colonial status for nations “unfit for democracy.”

In both foreign and domestic affairs, we now act the part of old men who seek security in the evasion of troublesome questions. Unwittingly we forfeit opportunities for imaginative leadership in order to safeguard what we have. Vaguely we trust in the durability of established patterns and hope that adjustment to disruptive innovations will never be demanded of us.

Yet we shall surely be disappointed, for such adjustments increasingly become essential to survival in the modern world. There will be no standing still even were that desirable. We need only compare Negro and white birth-rates, or observe the experience of Detroit since the last war, to perceive how illusory is the expectation that the composition of American population will remain as it is. Within our territorial limits or without, we shall more frequently brush up against outsiders and more frequently face the compulsion to make room. And to get by at the internal or the international level will call for the identical qualities of tact, tolerance, and vision.

The needy people of the earth—and almost all the people of the earth are needy—look now to the United States for omens of these redeeming qualities. Uneasily, they weigh the historic meaning of America and Americanism in the scales of actual occurrences, diplomatic and domestic. Their anxiety turns about a single point: Is our belief in democracy coupled with the reservation that it is viable only in favored climes and in the hands of favored men, or does it have the inner energy for continued, untrammeled expansion? In the formulation of an answer critical for our place in world opinion, our general attitude toward minorities, and, in particular, our immigration policy, will count heavily. And we might well apply the same test to ourselves in self-judgment.