Barbarians Inside the Gate

The Immigration Debate Need Not Be a Fact-Free Zone

Newsboy, St. Louis, Missouri. Lewis Hine, May 1910.

"Most Americans believe that illegal immigrants should 'get in line' and immigrate legally, just like their own ancestors did. There are several fallacies, however, that underpin this viewpoint. First, for most of American history, there was no immigration 'line.' Every immigrant who wanted to come to the United States could do so without any wait at all. The immigration of Asians was eventually limited quite severely, but otherwise, even after Americans began imposing various medical and financial restrictions, 98 to 99 percent of Europeans and North Americans who wanted to come to the United States could do so without standing in any line. Waiting in a line began only in 1921, and even then, close relatives of those already in the United States were allowed to skip the line altogether. Consequently, very few Americans have ancestors who waited in an immigration line.

"The second fallacy is the belief that a line exists in which most of today's illegal immigrants could have waited. This is simply not true. The vast majority of visas given to immigrants today are reserved for family members of those already legally in the United States, and almost all of the remainder are awarded to those with highly sought-after job skills (nurses, software engineers, even university professors). If you do not have such a skill or a close relative already lawfully in the United States who can sponsor you, there is no way to immigrate legally - no line to get in at all. A poor Mexican or Ecuadorean without American relatives thus does not have the same opportunity to immigrate that a poor Irishman or German or Italian or eastern European Jew once had. Americans are certainly within their rights to decide that they no longer want to give other people the same opportunities that their own ancestors had. But Americans ought to acknowledge as much rather than perpetuate the myth that their forebears followed the same rules that today's illegal immigrants flout."

- Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams, The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016), pp. 567-568. Footnotes omitted.

See also Citizens of the Planet.