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What Should Our Immigration Policy Be?
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11858 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
3,130 Words |
| Author
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Annelise Anderson
Annelise Anderson is a senior research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, California. |
When my great-great-grandfather, Ferdinand Sievers, emigrated to the United States in 1847, there were no limits on the number of people who could enter the country in any given year; nor were there any limits when his fiancée, Caroline Koch, arrived in New York to marry him three years later.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, people were leaving Germany for the United States in astonishing numbers--or perhaps not so astonishing. Political and economic turmoil were the order of the day; jobs were scarce; young men could not marry without owning property. Many young people lived together without marrying.
Between 1840 and 1860, almost 1.4 million people arrived in the United States from Germany. Emigration to the United States from all over the world totaled 4.3 million during these two decades. Most people arrived in city or countryside with little money. My ancestors cleared virgin forest in Michigan to build log cabins for shelter. There were no limits on immigration (provided one could pay for passage), but there were also no food stamps, public housing, aid to low-income families with dependent children, Medicare, or Medicaid--not even emergency medical treatment. One got help from friends and family, or sometimes private charities. The federal government's expenditures at the turn of the century were about 1.6 percent of the gross national product; today, they are close to 25 percent. In 1850, 14 percent of the population was foreign born; by 1900, their numbers had risen to over 19 percent. Today, they total only about 8 percent.
IMMIGRATION INTO OUR WELFARE STATE
0ur welfare state is the heart of our immigration dilemma. Instead of a resource, immigrants are often seen as a burden. Their children go to public school; they avail themselves of emergency medical care as well as Medicaid; they get unemployment insurance when they lose a job, food stamps when their income is low. Perhaps they receive public housing or emergency shelter, if they become homeless, or taxpayer-subsidized tuition at our state university systems.
In addition, legal immigrants (those who enter with permission to remain and become citizens) now have available to them the full range of public-assistance and welfare benefits provided by the states. This is not a result of bureaucratic rulemaking or congressional statute but rather of the Supreme Court's pronouncements on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The history has been
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