University of Minnesota Moment: Historical Perspective on Immigration Debate

Transcription

[Announcer]: I’m Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. Some of the issues raised in the current debate over illegal immigration sound surprisingly familiar to the ones voiced when legal immigration was debated in the 19th century, says Donna Gabaccia, director of the U of M’s Immigration History [Research] Center.

[Gabaccia]: When I look at this debate, it’s really the similarities that astonish me. A hundred years ago, when the doors to the United States were relatively open, Americans nevertheless feared some of the same things that they fear when they look at illegal immigrants today: they feared that Southern and Eastern Europeans were coming to take their jobs; that they were depressing wages; that they were bringing dangerous and radical ideas, not those perhaps today of Islamic fundamentalism, but in the past the ideas of anarchism and socialism and communist internationalism. There was a great deal of fear that the immigrants of one hundred years ago were going to out-reproduce Americans who were already here.

[Moore]: Gabaccia says illegal immigration is a fairly new phenomenon.

[Gabaccia]: Illegal immigration almost was impossible in the past. A hundred years ago the United States simply welcomed almost anyone who wanted to work hard and to take a job, with a few exceptions—from 1880 onward the migration of the Chinese was restricted—but beginning in 1920 the United States imposed very significant reductions in the number of immigrants it sought each year, and with the rise of restriction came the rise of illegal immigration.

[Moore]: That’s Donna Gabaccia with the University of Minnesota Moment.