Posted by When I started this blog, I told myself, “Self, avoid political issues. This country is too divided and its political discussion too vitriolic. As King Lear said, ‘That way lies madness.’” However, I am going to make an exception with respect to the issue of immigration. This is a personal issue to me and a biblical one. I am planning to avoid the policy questions. I wish to explore two aspects of the immigration issue. First, I want to discuss the history of immigration into the United States and second, I want to see what the Bible says about what God’s thinks about strangers.
English settlement of the United States began with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620. (Actually, the first permanent settlement was the Lost Colony of Roanoke in 1587).
From those first tentative steps in the early 17th century to 1780, when the young republic was still fighting for independence, the population increased from 2,300 to 2.78 million people, an increase of 4.5% per year. Over the next 90 years, America’s population grew from 2.8 million to 31.4 million. In 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Congress passed the first Immigration Act, establishing the position of Commissioner of Immigration. Eighteen years later the Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1882, the first modest attempt to regulate immigration, which called for the screening of immigrants and the prohibition of anyone deemed to be a convict, lunatic, idiot, or unable to take care of himself.
The figure above, which shows the main immigration data between 1820 and 2000, is somewhat complicated. Along the left-hand axis are arrayed the main countries of origin –the various regions of Europe, Asia and Latin America, all color-coded. Along the bottom axis are the decades from 1820 to 2000. The height of the various lines depicts the number of immigrants in that decade. Thus, between 1901 and 1910, 3,836,000 immigrants from Eastern Europe immigrated to America.
The first great wave of immigrants came from Northern Europe (Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia) between 1850 and 1890. The second great wave of immigrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Italy, Poland and Russia, including areas of Jewish settlement) from 1890 to WWI. After WWI, immigration declined substantially. The Third great wave began in the 1970s and continues up to today. Third wave immigrants come largely from Latin America (4.3 million in the decade 1990 to 2000) and Asia (2.8 million over the same decade).
Challenges of Immigration
It is important to recognize that the last fifty years have been marked by a major increase in the numbers of immigrants now living in the United States. As the figure below shows, the third wave has led to a large increase in both the number (blue line) of immigrants living in the U.S. and their proportion to the overall population (orange line). There are now 45 million immigrants living in the United States, and they make up 15% of the population. Moreover, each successive wave of immigration to the United States has brought people increasingly different in culture, language, skin color, religion and habits and skills from the people living here at the time.
The Irish were feared and distrusted because they were bringing the papacy to America; the Italians, because they were seen to be dirty, darker-skinned, and crime-ridden. The Jews were feared and hated because they were Jews. The Chinese were feared because they were clannish, worked for low wages, and looked so different. The attitudes of the earlier populations toward the newcomers was always the same –they will take our jobs, they will subvert our religion, they are mentally inferior, they will never assimilate, etc. Following are a series of cartoons which graphically express these beliefs.
The xenophobia and racism demonstrated by these cartoons are not, thankfully, the whole story. While Part 2 of this series details how these fears and hatreds were translated into the changing landscape of legal restrictions of immigration, Part 3 explores the positive synergies between immigration and America’s history. Part 4 examines immigration from the perspectives of the immigrants, and Part 5 discusses how the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, treat what the Bible calls “sojourners.”