The McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952 was no isolated piece of legislation, but rather one expression of the now dominant attitude of exclusion which has worked a reversal in the American tradition of welcoming the oppressed of the Old World. If we hope to develop a newer immigration philosophy more in accord with authentic scientific fact and traditional democratic ideals—and, above all, to do away with the national-origins and racist features marking immigration policy in recent decades—we must, William Petersen contends here, understand the rationale of this policy of exclusion with its supporting “scientific” data.

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According to the arguments of many of its opponents, the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952 is not merely bad policy but a kind of freakish accident. The late Pat McCarran, the son of a poor Irish immigrant, somehow did not develop into the champion of the people one might have expected from his background. Elected to the Senate by the smallest constituency in the United States, he became a permanent fixture there and chairman of several of its key committees. When he sponsored an immigration bill in conflict with American ideals, two-thirds of the Senate passed it over President Truman’s veto out of fear of the retaliation that lay in McCarran’s power through his control over appropriations.

So at least one standard liberal argument runs. In another version of this devil theory, the culprit was not a single individual but the small minority of the electorate that espouses racism. Somehow, according to this view, the democratic credo has been frustrated by the activities of certain nativist and proto-fascist groups on the periphery of our society.

But the amorphous prejudice that the mass of native Americans feel, or felt, against immigrants was not sufficient in itself, even in its extremist versions, to effect the basic change in American policy that the “national quotas” system represents, and that made this latest offense to democratic ideals possible. The responsibility must be sought elsewhere. What social group made racist sentiment respectable, and thus an appropriate basis for American legislation? Who, to use the term of the German sociologist Max Weber, “legitimized” the national-quotas system?

The process by which a policy becomes legitimate ordinarily begins with its explicit justification in terms of logic, science, or religion—in terms, that is, of universally accepted values. By its very nature, such a transformation can be undertaken only by those whose intellectual authority the society respects—in this case, America’s leading social scientists. Before the immigration laws of the 1920’s could be passed, a generation of anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and historians had labored to give the principle of the national-origins quota an underpinning that would square with the dominant American value system. By the writings of these scholars during the half century before 1920, a new, alternative system of values was established in sufficient strength to sway the thinking of the mass and, eventually, to set national policy. But if this analysis is correct, proponents of a more liberal immigration policy will not be able to get their ideas written into law until they recognize that this new, divergent value system has achieved a certain legitimation, which can be shaken only by fundamental opposition.

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One of the principles established by the American and French revolutions was that—as the French constitution of 1791 put it—“the liberty of all to move about, to remain, or to leave” is a “natural and civil right.” In the United States, this doctrine was reinforced by another: this country was ordained as a haven for “the wretched refuse of your teeming shores”—to quote Emma Lazarus’s words inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Against this background, the xenophobia implicit in the present immigration policy could not be established as a general norm. The Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed under Jefferson, and in the aftermath were an important reason for the eclipse of the Federalist party that had enacted them. The nativist movement of the 1830’s, the Know Nothing party of the 1850’s, the American Protective Association of the early 1890’s, the Ku Klux Klan reborn in 1915—all these movements, while indicating the persistence of anti-foreigner sentiment in America, also reflect the fact that it was, and is, usually limited to noisy groups of merely local importance. In the face of America’s dominant value system, as exemplified in such fundamental documents as the Declaration of Independence, even the government’s power to deny entry to various categories of people universally agreed to be undesirable—prostitutes, “lunatics,” “idiots,” “anarchists,” criminals, polygamists—was established only gradually, after the Supreme Court had denied the constitutionality of a series of state laws. The first attempts at a broader restriction of immigration were formally an extension of this type of regulation. Thus, a number of states tried to check the influx of the poor by imposing a head tax on immigrants, but these attempts were frustrated by several Supreme Court decisions. Similarly, successive bills in Congress barring the admission of illiterates were vetoed by Presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson. As the last put it, illiteracy was a measure not of a man’s small innate ability but of his limited opportunities, and in Wilson’s day these were not considered a legitimate reason for denying anyone his “natural” right to immigrate here.

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Even the laws barring Chinese immigration were enacted without obliterating the distinction between police regulation (e.g. exclusion of criminals) and restriction based on a broader criterion (e.g. exclusion of illiterates). The argument of white Californians that the Chinese were unassimilable to American life was valid—because, as Milton Konvitz has put it, they were denied citizenship through naturalization, held ineligible to testify in any case in a court of law for or against a white person, subject to special heavy taxes, unable to vote, excluded from schools. The Chinese were made “the scapegoat for mining and real estate booms and slumps; for crime waves requiring vigilance committees; for corruption, extravagances, and profligacy in state and city government; and for the land and railway monopoly.”

But even though the rest of the country had almost no reliable knowledge on which to judge the question, white California could not get its way immediately. American law and institutions were based on principles that could not be used to sanction the exclusion of any ethnic group. Twice the Supreme Court threw out Chinese exclusion laws as unconstitutional, and it finally accepted them because one member of that court, Justice Stephen J. Field—a native of California—was able to persuade his colleagues of the correctness of his arguments. The Chinese were thus the first to be excluded as an ethnic group, rather than as individuals with specifically objectionable personal characteristics. So gross a violation of the national ethos, accepted finally only because it affected . what was regarded as a peripheral case, set a precedent, and the interpretation of cultural differences in racial terms eventually became the keystone of American immigration policy.

Whom We Shall Welcome, the report of the Perlman Commission that President Truman appointed to review and criticize the McCarran Act, pointed out—correctly—that the national-quotas system was based on anthropological theories that no reputable social scientist would now defend. America’s immigration policy runs counter to the basic credo of the country, and the policy gets no support from present-day science. How then was it established? Let us retrace the steps by which a man’s place of birth became a legitimate criterion for judging his application to enter the United States.

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At the beginning of the 19th century one Elkanah Watson noticed that without immigration—which had been interrupted by the wars in Europe—the population of the United States had increased by about one-third during each of the two decades following the 1790 census. His calculation as to how the population of the country would continue to increase up to 1900 if that same extraordinary rate of growth were maintained was widely accepted as a significant contribution to demography.

In 1873, Francis A. Walker, the Superintendent of the Census, wrote an article gently deriding Watson’s thesis and those who took it seriously. In the first place, Walker wrote, “Geometrical progression is rarely attained, and never long maintained, in human affairs. Whenever it is found, the most improbable supposition which could be formed respecting it is that it will continue.” That is, the fact that the population of the United States had twice increased by about a third within ten years warranted no prediction concerning the future. That Watson’s forecast had been confirmed for a while was simply a matter of luck: “Mr. Watson simply bet nine times upon the red. Five times the red won—a wonderful run of luck, certainly.” The rate of population growth would have declined much earlier had not immigration happened to compensate for the decline in the birth rate:

The change [in the birth rate] came; came later even than it had been reasonable to expect. It began when the people of the United States began to leave agricultural for manufacturing pursuits; to turn from the country to the town; to live in up-and-down houses, and to follow closely the fashion of foreign life. The first effects of it were covered from the common sight by a flood of immigration unprecedented in history.

All this Walker wrote in 1873, when the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe totaled only 12,703.

Twenty years later, when the new immigration was approaching its peak of more than half a million a year, Walker wrote three articles in an entirely different vein. Immigration, he now found, “instead of constituting a net reinforcement to the population, simply resulted in a replacement of native by foreign elements.” He proved this by using Watson’s projection of American population growth, but now in the contrary sense. In 1840 and 1850, he pointed out, in spite of the large immigration during this period, the census count differed from Watson’s projection by only a few percentage points. The threefold increase in immigration from one decade to the next, Walker asserted, had merely caused the native birth rate to decline proportionally; for the American “was unwilling himself to engage in the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of population . . . [and] even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into the world to enter into that competition.”

The typical immigrant, in Walker’s view, had changed from “the most enterprising, thrifty, alert, adventurous, and courageous of the community from which he came” to “the least thrifty and prosperous . . . [from] every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, which no breath of intellectual or industrial life has stirred for ages.” He therefore proposed a new policy—the exclusion not only of criminals, paupers, etc., but also of hundreds of thousands of people “the great majority of whom would be subject to no individual objections” but who came from the wrong sort of country. For Walker, the question was how to protect “the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.”

In spite of Walker’s high standing as a social scientist, it is rather easy to show that his later articles were ad hoc concoctions designed to lend scientific flavor to certain ethnocentric prejudices without foundation in empirical data. The most significant fact to be noted about the three articles in which he advanced his vehement objections to immigration is their dates: 1891,1892, and 1896-—the decade after the main source of American immigration had shifted to Southern and Eastern Europe. His emotional reaction to the foreignness of “tumultuous” hordes of “brutalized” peasants led him to conclude that immigration had to be curbed; then, and only then, did he look for a scientific theory that would support this conclusion. Nor did he even attempt to refute his own earlier article; he simply ignored it.

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In the meantime, American historians had been fashioning evidence to show that a fundamental affinity existed between the Germanic peoples and the American way of life. Edward N. Saveth has given us the story of this episode of historiography in a fascinating work, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875-1925 (Columbia University Press, 1948). Historians like John Fiske, John W. Burgess, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. (until he became a candidate for political office) held that American institutions were derived from the ancient Teutons, either directly or through the Anglo-Saxons; and they supported this hypothesis by finding analogies, say, between the structure of the Teutonic and the New England village. Accordingly, an infusion of such “alien” and “inferior races” as the Latins or the Slavs would weaken the foundations of American society.

A revolt against this “Teutonic hypothesis” was led by Frederick Jackson Turner, who emphasized the original elements, without European precedent, of America’s frontier society. But he, too, considered immigrants from Southern Italy to be “of doubtful value judged from the ethical point of view,” and the Jews a “people of exceptionally stunted growth and of deficient lung capacity.” He wrote: “Italians, Slovaks, Poles and other immigrants of Eastern Europe, together with the Russian Jews, have struck hard blows since 1880 at the standard of comfort of the American workmen. They have made New York City a great reservoir for the pipe lines that run to the misery pools of Europe.” Though the eminent John Bach McMaster, for instance, sounded a contrary note, this was the dominant tone of American historians up to the 1920’s, when the national-quotas act was passed. And their theories provided a good part of that act’s scholarly underpinning.

The only important counterweight to the pro-Nordic tendency of the professional historians was the ancestor veneration (what Dr. Saveth calls “filiopietism”) of the amateurs with non-Anglo-Saxon names. However: “Because their insecurity was greater,” writes Dr. Saveth, “the jingoism of the historians of recent immigrant ancestry far exceeded the chauvinism of historians derived from the older American stock.” The patent exaggerations of the writings sponsored by the Huguenot Society of America, the Scotch-Irish Society of America, the American Irish Historical Society, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the rest probably served only to reinforce by contrast the Teutonic and frontier myths, which were at least offered with the proper professional credentials and the appropriate academic apparatus

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More important, however, in clearing the way for the national-quotas act of 1924 than either Walker’s or the historians’ theories was the Report of the Senate Immigration Commission of 1907-11, headed by Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont. The sheer mass of data contained in this document, much of it based on first-hand investigation, tended to overwhelm opposing views: no one person or organization could stand up against four years of investigation and forty-two volumes of evidence and interpretation. Even the one member of the Commission who disagreed with some of its important recommendations, Congressman William S. Bennet of New York, did no more than say so in a half-page statement: “As the report of the Commission is finally adopted within a half hour of the time when, under the law, it must be filed, there is no time for the preparation of an elaborate dissent.” The Commission presented its views in abridged form in two volumes; and a more popular version by Jenks (one of the Commission’s members) and Lauck long remained a standard text on immigration.

One of the forty-two volumes prepared by the Senate Immigration Commission was a Dictionary of Races or Peoples that classified immigrants to the United States in forty-five ethnic groups in accordance with the practice of the Bureau of Immigration. These groups were defined in different ways—by physical differences (for example, Negroes); by language (Germans, including German-speaking Swiss, Austrians, etc.); by nationality, even when not associated with a state (Ruthenians); by geography (Scandinavians, West Indians). Though the practice of the Bureau of Immigration had included Jews among the Slavs, the more “scientific” Dictionary pointed out that the “Hebrews” were in the Chaldaic “group” of the Semitic “stock” of the Caucasian race.

Almost all the data that the Commission collected on the different peoples of the world were broken down according to “race.” Sometimes the scarcity of the individuals available from which to draw conclusions about a specific group in a specific situation was disguised by presenting the data as percentages: thus, of the Greeks employed in the packing industry who had been in the United States for over ten years, “60 per cent” had visited abroad—or three out of a total of five persons.

The main body of the Commission’s Report traced in great detail the immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and declared it to have a causal connection with the economic dislocations and troubles in the United States over the same period—which was marked by rapid industrialization and urbanization. In the only significant contemporary rejoinder to the Report, Isaac Hourwich’s Immigration and Labor (Putnam, 1912), a wealth of data was presented to show that this causal relation was specious. Dr. Hourwich pointed out that the correlation between immigration and unemployment was negative, not positive; that the “displacement” of native American girls from the mills was motivated by their own desire for the new office jobs then opening up; and that, similarly, miners and those in other low-status jobs were “displaced” not by unemployment but by the attraction of better-paying, higher-status jobs.

Strangely enough, Dr. Hourwich was accused by the other side of having too much documentation behind him. “It is a safe assumption,” said an important review of the book by Henry Pratt Fairchild, now Professor Emeritus at New York University, “that the impressive mass of material—statistical tables, charts, diagrams, and footnotes—will seem to the ordinary reader a sufficient proof of any conclusions which the author wishes to draw from them. It is because this assumption is grounded in human nature that the book is dangerous.” This was a peculiar criticism altogether, and especially as applied to a book written in answer to forty-two volumes crammed tight with tables, charts, diagrams, and footnotes, and stamped with official authority to boot.

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The most direct connection between racist doctrine and American immigration policy was established by the influence of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Well known as an advocate of sterilization of inmates of institutions, Laughlin became “expert eugenics agent” to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. A report he submitted to it in 1922, Expert Analysis of the Metal and the Dross in America’s Melting Pot, so impressed Congress that, according to one authority, “it is often considered the principal basis of the Act of 1924.”

Laughlin used a so-called contingency analysis, in order to show that the distribution of social ills was not random. He compared the proportion of persons from each ethnic group in prisons, asylums, and similar institutions with the proportion of the country’s total population that this ethnic group constituted. For example: in 1910, persons of Italian birth made up 1.46 per cent of the total population and, if proportionally represented in the 93 insane asylums that Laughlin surveyed, they would have constituted 1.46 per cent of the total number of inmates, or 1,228. Since there were actually 1,938 Italian-born persons in these institutions, the incidence of insanity among Italians was concluded to be more than one and a half times higher than that of the general population. For social inadequacies of all types, Laughlin found that the various groups into which he divided the population were represented as follows in relation to their “expected figure” of 100:

Laughlin concluded from these statistics that all foreigners were inferior, and especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe. He also asserted that the “first and primary factor” that had caused the different proportions of ethnic representation in institutions was “differences in constitutional susceptibility of specific races and nativity groups to certain definite types of social inadequacy.” That is to say, such “degeneracies” as “criminality” were “inherited in the blood.” The implications of such an analysis for policy were clear: “There has, thus far, been no suggestion in our laws of any requirement except personal value in our sorting of would-be immigrants. [However] the surest biological principle . . . to direct the future of America along safe and sound racial channels is to control the hereditary quality of the immigration stream.”

The flaws in this “expert analysis” were numerous and fundamental. The notion that “criminality” and most other social inadequacies are hereditary was no longer generally accepted even in the 1920’s, so unfounded had it been shown to be. Today only crackpots dare repeat it.

Strangely enough, Laughlin’s own data on feeble-mindedness (one of the few such inadequacies that may be inherited) refute his general conclusion. Only two foreign groups showed a ratio of feeble-mindedness higher than 100—Serbians, with two cases, and Australians, with three cases. The foreign-born as a group showed a ratio for feeble-mindedness of only 31.6, and those from Southern and Eastern Europe one of 33. In contrast, native whites as a group were above 100, as also the subgroup formed by those with native parents.

Moreover, even if one should grant that “criminality” is inherited, it does not follow that its heredity can be traced through such vague and ambiguous groups as Laughlin’s “races.” In general, he used the classification of “races” recommended in the Senate Commission’s Report, but he went beyond even its grossly unscientific methods—breaking down, for example, native white Americans into four sub-groups: “Mountain White,” “American Yankee,” “American Southerner,” and “Middle-West American.” That these classifications should have been accepted as “races or nativity groups,” rather than as the cultural groups they patently were, indicates an extraordinary will on the part of the Congressmen to accept Laughlin’s main point.

His data were in any case incomplete and statistically biased. He had returns from only 445 of the 657 state and federal institutions that were relevant to his analysis, and he made no allowance for the bias that this incomplete sample introduced. He did not correct for the differences in age structure and sex ratio of the several groups, although immigrants tended to be concentrated in the middle male age group, which in every society has the highest incidence of many social ills.

Finally, Laughlin ignored the differences in the availability of institutional care in the various sections of the country. Institutions were relatively scarce in the immigrant-free South, for instance, while immigrants were concentrated in Northern cities, where social care was much more adequate. As Antonio Stella has demonstrated, by Laughlin’s method of analysis Negroes prove to be far less afflicted with “social inadequacies” than white Southerners. Feeble-mindedness is eight times more prevalent among native white Southerners than among Negroes, epilepsy nearly ten times, blindness twenty-four times, tuberculosis two and a half times, insanity one and a half times, deafness one and a half times, physical deformity eight times, dependency four times. In only one social ill, crime, is the quota fulfillment of Negroes higher than that of native whites, for the one institution with which the Southern Negro is adequately supplied is prisons.

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Laughlin submitted his report in 1922, and two years later the policy he recommended was enacted into permanent law. It is true, as many have pointed out, that the immigration laws of the 1920’s were passed during the period of xenophobia and labor unrest following the First World War. But it is not true—as this observation is meant to imply—that these laws, like the Palmer raids, were merely another manifestation of temporary hysteria. Their enactment came as the culmination of decades of effort, and on the basis of principles that had thus become legitimized.

In an article in Reader’s Digest, Congressman Walter declared that the act of which he was co-sponsor has removed the racial discrimination contained in the old law of 1924. This assertion was based principally on the fact that most Asiatic countries, whose emigrants used to be barred altogether, are now given a face-saving annual quota of 100 persons each. In every other respect, however, the McCarran-Walter law has continued and even extended the racism implicit in the 1924 act. Quotas used to be based on the country of birth, and this is still so except for a person who is Asian “by as much as one-half of his ancestry”; such a person, no matter where born, must immigrate under the minuscule quota assigned to the country of his Asian parent. Similarly, by the new law natives of the British West Indies—many of whom are Negroes—may no longer immigrate under the large British quota: they now have one of their own amounting to 100 per year. More fundamentally, the McCarran-Walter act has retained the national-origins system as the basis of American immigration policy, and this system can be justified only by the racist principles Mr. Walter disavows.

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Why was it that American social scientists of the pre-1914 period generally supported a national-quotas system and the anthropological theories implicit in it? Without attempting a definitive answer to so large a question, one can suggest three probably relevant factors.

1. The main source of immigration to the United States shifted from Northwest Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe at about the same time that the American economy under-went a fundamental transformation. The German or Swedish peasant who immigrated during the years right after the Civil War took advantage of the Homestead Act and became an American farmer; but when the Italian or Polish peasant arrived this frontier was closed, and burgeoning American industry had begun to call for more and more unskilled labor. The new immigrants, therefore, had simultaneously to undergo two processes of adjustment: from their native cultures to the American one, and from a rural to an urban way of life—the second adaptation being much the more difficult one. The social ills attributed to the innate inadequacies of the new immigrants were the result basically of the extremely rapid development of an industrial society, but it was the new immigrants who became the most conspicuous casualties of this process. Not only did city slums (for example) develop much faster after large numbers of Poles (for example) began to arrive, but it was the Poles who lived in the slums and thus developed the characteristics typical of slum residents. Given the level of their scientific disciplines at that time, social scientists drew the “obvious” conclusion that Poles had caused slums.
2. Such a conclusion, moreover, was in line with the general climate of opinion of the period. The Darwinian theory, having conquered biology, was advancing into the social sciences: this was the heyday of social Darwinism and physical anthropology. Man had finally come to be viewed as part of nature, and his physical group characteristics—such as pigmentation and cerebral index—acquired a new significance by analogy with the characteristics differentiating other animal and plant species and varieties. While a racist analysis at that time often had the same nastiness that it has today, as in the writings of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, sometimes it also became, by its link with evolutionary theory and the dispassionate application of the latter to human origins, the expression of a kind of naive, science-oriented progressivism. We contemporaries of Adolf Hitler have been taught that false anthropological theories can have horrible consequences, but it would be anachronistic to expect people living before 1914 to have either our greater knowledge on this matter or our far greater sensitivity to the implications.
3. Finally, virtually all the men who legitimized the national-origins system were themselves of Anglo-Saxon background. The new immigrants, just because they had come to this country only recently, had not yet produced their share of professors or statesmen. The men who wrote the important works on immigration and race were named Walker, Fiske, Burgess, Lodge, Turner, Dillingham, Fairchild, Hall, Commons, Ross, Garis, and so on; while the few who answered their arguments were named, for example, Hourwich and Stella—and, as an exception to the rule, Willcox. With respect to any one individual, such a distinction would be invidious, but the predominantly Anglo-Saxon family background and German intellectual tradition of the American scholarly community as a whole in that period certainly had some influence on the theories it evolved.

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None of these three points holds today. We now know that the scholarly basis on which the national-origins quota rests was itself compounded out of ignorance and prejudice. Why, then, though aware that racist theory is both false and gravely dangerous to our democratic system, do we retain a law deriving from that theory? In broadest terms, it is because the national-quotas system has acquired an independent legitimation: during the thirty years that it has been part of the law of the land it has established a certain tradition, so that the burden of proof now lies with those who advocate a different immigration policy. The opponents of the national-quotas system have two enormously powerful weapons—our present knowledge concerning group differences and the continued pertinence of the basic American credo—but very often these weapons have not been used effectively.

What alternative shall we offer in place of the present act? Eliminating racism, and going back to deny entry only to specific persons with objectionable individual characteristics would not suffice of itself to define an immigration policy. The standard of living in the United States is high enough to make migration attractive to a sizable proportion of the world’s 2.4 billion people, and some more or less arbitrary limit must therefore be set to the number of those admitted in any one year. The Perlman Commission recommended that the annual maximum of immigration be set at one-sixth of one per cent of the country’s current population—which, at the present time, would amount to slightly more than 250,000 persons, compared with the 150,000 admissible under the McCarran-Walter Act. But how would these 250,000 be selected?

Certain persons would continue to be excluded (criminals, prostitutes, etc.); and the Commission recommended that preference be given to applicants in four specific categories—those seeking asylum, those seeking to rejoin their families, those who could fill occupational needs in the United States, and those in areas suffering from population pressure that could be relieved by emigration. But there would certainly be enough in the last group alone to fill the full quota of 250,000 many times over—not to mention the hundreds of thousands who would find a way to escape from the Communist countries if they could hope for a final refuge in the United States. In 1953, the year of the riots in East Berlin, exactly 305,737 refugees were registered in West Berlin alone. There are more than a million refugees from Communist China presently in overcrowded Hong Kong.

Finally, the Perlman Commission recommended a fifth category of “general” immigration:

The standards to be applied under this category should not be rigid. The agency charged with such a responsibility should have a reasonable latitude in reaching a fair, impartial and workable result, and should safeguard this category so that no one country, group, or area would obtain unfair advantages under its operation.

But in a dispute over values, such words as “reasonable,” “impartial,” “fair,” and “unfair” mean nothing unless they are very explicitly defined. In effect, the Commission has recommended that, within the very broad limits set by the law, actual policy should be determined by an administrative agency. Such a flexible system has been in force for decades in Canada, for example, where our same policy of discrimination against all but Northwest Europeans has been practiced in fact without ever being written into law. As a matter of fact, the Senate Immigration Commission of 1911 itself recommended that serious consideration be given to the convenient and flexible procedure that Canada had developed:

The Canadian immigration law is admirably adapted to carrying out the immigration policy of the Dominion. Under its terms no immigrants [except Chinese] are specifically denied admission solely because of their race or origin, or because of the purpose for which they have come to Canada, but the discretion conferred upon officials charged with the administration of the law does make much discrimination entirely possible.

The responsibility of finding an adequate basis for policy cannot be evaded by establishing one more Washington bureau.

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Our thinking about the values underlying immigration policy, as about many other social and political issues, can be clarified by distinguishing between the views of two types, which we will term Liberal and Progressive. The Liberal is attached to those values of rationalism, humanitarianism, and individual rights characteristic of the modern Western world at its best. The Progressive, though he often speaks with the same words, got many of his ideas of what is socially desirable from leftist politics, either directly or indirectly. The Liberal and the Progressive are not real persons; indeed, part of our problem lies in the very fact that these two patterns of thought are not so sharply distinguished in American society as they are drawn here in the effort to define them.

The nativist argument against immigration has been in terms of values: “100-per-cent Americanism,” and in terms of alleged fact: the immigrant never completely loses his alien culture. From the beginning, proponents of a less restrictive immigration policy have tended to ignore the first point and to concentrate on answering the second. Thus, a generation ago the nativist campaign against “hyphenated Americans” was answered with Israel Zangwill’s gruesome metaphor of “the melting pot.” Everything we have learned since then, however, corroborates the stand of Henry Pratt Fairchild and the others who denied that those put into the pot were melted down into an indistinguishable mass. To cite only one example, but a crucial one: we now know from such studies as those by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Samuel Lubell that a person’s vote is strongly influenced by his religious and ethnic affiliations. “The Jewish vote” or “the Irish vote” is not a reactionary stereotype, but a fact of American politics; it is a fact, however, that the Progressive cannot use and so must suppress.

Since the Progressive cannot make the new empirical data indicating that distinctive ethnic differences persist fit his idea of the good society, he is reduced to his own brand of Know-Nothingism. He refuses to use words that designate any group differences other than those of social class. For him there are no races—or, more typically, race is synonymous with species (“There is only one race, the human race”). Negroes are “the colored people,” Italian-Americans are “the Italian-speaking people,” Puerto Ricans are “Spanish-speaking Americans,” and so on. Such somatic characteristics as skin color and hair texture must be glossed over; and the facts of cultural difference are equally taboo.

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That is to say, the nativist and the Progressive disagree sharply concerning the facts of acculturation; but the nativist, who insists that significant group differences do exist, is closer to the truth as we know it. Concerning the values underlying immigration policy, however, the disagreement between the nativist and the Progressive is less sharp. An answer to xenophobia that consists principally in an attempt to cover over and disguise existent group differences implicitly affirms the “100-per-cent Americanism” assumption that all such differences are reprehensible. To deny the fact of the Jewish vote, for example, is only superficially a discussion of empirical data; more fundamentally, it is to assert that there may not legitimately be a connection between a man’s being Jewish and the way he votes. But this is a moral issue, which can be discussed meaningfully only in terms of values. The immigrant generation of the 1920’s was too insecure to face this issue squarely, and this pattern of evasion set a precedent that is still often followed.

In terms of values, the nativist has a weak case, for his claim to represent the fundamental American credo is fraudulent. In what do the “100-per-cent-American” and the “un-American” differ? Is the distinction ethnic, cultural, or political? It is all three together, and indeed the essence of the dichotomy is that it tends to fuse the three into one. It is of the nature of such invidious distinctions to spread: the Nazi persecution of the Jews eventually extended to “Jews” with one Jewish grandparent and then to “Jew-lovers”; the Soviet persecution of kulaks eventually included that most urbane of city-bred intellectuals, Nikolai Bukharin, because of his “kulak soul.” The American nativist is not typically a totalitarian, but he does tend to see the world as black or white, and all who differ in any way from his parochial provincialism essentially one. It is therefore entirely in keeping that the McCarran-Walter Act, which continues and reinforces the racism of the immigration laws of the 1920’s, should also impose a more rigid bar to “subversives”—a term it defines loosely and broadly.

There is much in the American culture that facilitates such a trend toward the absolute uniformity of the mass society, but the American democratic credo does not. That all men are equal does not mean that all men are the same, for the egalitarian theme is balanced by one of federalism. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, later the slogan of the French revolutionaries, gave some of its ideological underpinning to the revolt of the American colonies, but the motto of the United States became E pluribus unum. By now, the doctrine of states’ rights has too often become what Dr. Samuel Johnson called patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels; but the federal framework of values remains, and with it the task of defining in modern terms the legitimate range of group differences within an encompassing national unity.

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Unhappily, this is a task in which few are interested. The inter-relation among America’s diverse ethnic strains, which is American history, is still studied principally in terms of pious exhortations to mutual tolerance and of filiopietistic success stories—as though the success of immigrants and immigrants’ sons were still something to be considered remarkable. The brilliant pioneering work of Marcus Lee Hansen, out short by his untimely death, has not established a new school, as had Turner’s grosser insight a generation earlier. Hansen’s masterwork was to have been a trilogy on modern emigration from Europe; but only the first volume, The Atlantic Migration (Harvard, 1940), which took the reader only up to 1860, was ever written. The four years Hansen had spent on research in the countries of Northwest Europe gave his volume a unique authenticity; and the mass of data he accumulated, which might have overwhelmed a lesser historian, Hansen used to give his account greater depth. “The” immigrant never merged into a vague, flat stereotype; immigrants were persons who wrote letters home (which Hansen quotes), and whose difficulties and successes were recounted in the local newspapers (which he dug out of dusty files). On the other hand, the common experience of pulling up roots and establishing themselves in a new country cut across individual and cultural differences: immigrants were not only persons but also the raw material out of which Americans, a new cultural type, were formed.

Hansen’s extraordinary ability to combine psychological insights with historical data is well illustrated by a small essay that COMMENTARY readers may remember (see “The Third Generation in America,” November 1952). It is well known—and perhaps even true—that the second generation tends to reject its parents, whose alien origin it regards as a stigma. The third generation, on the contrary, is secure enough to take its Americanism for granted, and is often interested in the cuisine, history, and folk art of its grandparents in the Old Country. In this article, Hansen gave some empirical substance to this generalization by showing that the various filiopietistic historical societies in America had generally been founded at one generation’s remove from the time when the respective ethnic group’s immigration was at its quantitative peak.

The concept of a multicultural society implicit in Hansen’s work has not been developed to the full, but other scholars are contributing to an eventual synthesis. Oscar Handlin’s several highly readable books on immigrants and their American progeny—the latest is The American People in the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1954)—are clearly in the same tradition as Hansen. Melville Herskovits has also done research on both sides of the Atlantic; and by his precise knowledge of West African societies, he was able to see the subculture of the American Negro in deeper perspective than any of the scores of scholars who had taken slavery as their base line. In Samuel Lubell’s interpretation, such important divisions in American politics as the split between isolationists and interventionists have turned out to be half-disguised indices of persistent ethnic differences. The provincial horror with which an earlier generation of sociologists viewed marginality is not shared, for example, by David Riesman: whether the “marginal man” who partakes of two subcultures is torn apart or enriched by his situation depends on whether society and he himself see this intermediate status as legitimate. Margaret Mead and Geoffrey Gorer have tried to analyze the effect of the immigrant father’s ambiguous authority on child-rearing in America; and if some of their answers are highly speculative, they have at least asked the right questions. Thorsten Sellin has made extensive studies of die relation between crime and ethnic background. In several of Milton Konvitz’s books, immigration law is interpreted in a new value framework. The terms multicultural society and cultural pluralism come, I think, from Horace Kallen, who has written a dozen essays defining them.

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This heterogeneous group of writers does not yet form a climate of opinion. That is to say, they and others like them write without necessarily being aware that they are all elaborating the same two basic propositions—that Old Country traits do not completely disappear in American society, and that the resultant cultural pluralism does not of itself weaken national unity. Thus, these scholars are a counterpart to those whose works have been summarized in this article; and the facts and values they offer constitute the beginning of a scholarly legitimation of the different immigration policy that will perhaps one day become law.

The theories that were developed in the decades before 1920, it has been maintained in this article, were largely rationalizations to justify the primitive dislike that Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock often felt for the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Similarly, many of the counter-arguments offered now are—and will have to be—rationalizations of some other, more humanitarian sentiment. In the end, something more than an appeal to scientific evidence or self-interest is needed. For, though the arguments of Walker, the Senate Immigration Commission, and Laughlin are no longer acceptable, this does not mean that a larger immigration would necessarily bring the benefits that the Perlman Commission spells out in its report. Immigration of a politically feasible size will in general have no marked effect, whether detrimental or beneficial, on this country’s population structure, economy, or culture. It is easier to suppose that America’s foreign relations would be improved if the discriminatory restrictions against certain aliens were removed, but even this point may have been exaggerated. Immigration to the United States will not solve any problems overseas, and it will never make an important contribution to the national interest of this country, if this interest is defined in terms of Realpolitik.

There is really only one reason for a less restrictive immigration policy—human decency.

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