America grows with legal immigration

Reading time: 8 – 14 minutes

Legal immigration has resulted in solid growth of the US population, despite declining birth rates and an increasing number of old people.

This is good news for investors in stocks and real estate .

See: “Profits and Population“

Despite loud railing against illegal immigration by Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, and Pat Buchanan, the real story is the size and scope of legal immigration, as the graph indicates.

US Legal Immigration

Illegal immigration appears to be less than 5% of legal immigration, and legal immigration is at an all time high.

The second great wave

The graph shows that we are now riding up the slope of the second great wave of US legal immigration.

In the 18th Century, slaves and indentured servants made up a large part of American immigration

• The first wave started with the indigent coming to America as indentured servants and slaves, enduring perilous passage by sea on sailing ships. An abundance of land and an opportunity to be self-employed in agriculture attracted the early settlers. By the 1880s, the frontier had disappeared and industrialization reigned. (See: “Capitalism Evolves“)
  

  Steam-driven screw propellors made immigration cheaper and safer.

• In the latter half of the 19th century, screw propellers and iron steam ships made transatlantic passage safer and cheaper, attracting millions of Europeans who wanted to escape war, oppression, and poverty. However, these immigrants came not with the hope of becoming self-employed farmers, but rather intent on living in cities and working in factories. This created more labor than capital, giving rise to worker unrest.
  

  Labor unions became powerful in the 20th century, opposing immigration. Here, in 1919, are strikers in Gary, Indiana, an industrial city later severely debilitated by union action.

• In 1869, the first union, the Knights of Labor, was formed. By 1910 there were 800,000 unionized workers with growing political power. Within a generation of the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty, rather than welcoming the ‘huddled masses’ to America’s shores, unionized labor combined with home-grown xenophobes to lobby for ‘immigration reform’ and quotas.
  

  Ruins of railroad station in Gary, Indiana, a city almost destroyed by trade unionism.

• During the first half of the 20th century, labor unions continued to grow powerful, as American industry became the most productive on earth. By 1940, there were 27.6 million union workers, solidly backing the Democratic Party and quotas on immigration. As the graph shows, legal immigration fell from almost nine million in 1910 to less than one million during World War II.
  

  President Roosevelt's funeral in 1945 marked the nadir of immigration in the 20th century and the zenith of trade unionism.

See: “FDR and Workers’ Capitalism“

• After World War II, anti-business policies favored by the dominant Democratic Party, backed by labor unions, drove US business abroad, resulting in deindustrialization across the ‘rust belt’. With less industry to provide jobs, union membership fell and by the 21st century only 8.9 million union members remained in the private sector, less than one-third the membership of the 1940s, although the population had doubled.


Fall of Saigon (1975): Vietnamese refugees landing on US aircraft carrier.

• As union power waned, so did restrictions on immigration. During the second half of the 20th century, as the graph shows, legal immigration, mainly by jumbo jet, grew steadily, until by the millennium the record levels of one hundred years earlier were surpassed. These new immigrants were made up of refugees from World War II, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, and the Cold War, as well as economic refugees from failing economies in Latin America and international employees and their families pushed by the globalization of business.

The question of illegal immigration

For a good portion of American history, until the late 19th century, immigration was more or less free — although slaves from Africa obviously did not come to America of their own free will.

Political cartoon (1912) criticizing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act limited immigration from Asia.

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act established quotas by country of origin.

Whereas, the first wave of immigration, at its peak, amounted to 10% of the population each year, with an obvious impact on the labor market, the annual flow from the newly rising wave is less than 4% of the population, serving to counterbalance declining birth rates and ensure expansion of the Gross Domestic Product.

The question of illegal aliens seems to be related more to matters of national security, the culture war, and political posturing, than to rational debate about the desired level of immigration and quotas.

A permanent political theme

On the one hand, Americans have been proud of their history as a ‘Nation of Immigrants’, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886.

A patriotic appeal based on the theme of open immigration.

On the other hand, since the late 19th century, there has been a persistent impulse towards the limitation of immigration from countries with peoples different from those that made up the majority of the earlier established population.

Because of the extreme diversification of American origins — unlike any other country — and the ever-changing composition of this population — racism, bigotry, and xenophobia have always been an element in political discourse.

Derogatory terms for peoples of certain national origins have long been part of American English.

Wikipedia has a long list of ethnic slurs in American English — ethnophaulisms.

At the same time, there has been general recognition that immigration has been a — or even the — major reason for the success of the United States and pride in the history of immigration is endemic.

The issue is complicated and emotional.

The extreme diversity of the US population and the fact that people from most countries can easily find fellow countrymen in the United States, is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the wide acceptance of the US dollar as the preferred currency of international commerce.

The economic element in immigration

The need for less expensive, general labor has been a driving force in US immigration since colonial times.

Farmers in the northern state and plantation owners in the South relied upon imported indentured servants and slaves for agricultural output.

Immigrant Chinese railroad workers building railroad in 19th Century America to attract immigrants from Europe. (Hypocrisy of immigration policy)

In the mid-19th century, with the railroad land boom, immigrants from Europe were actively sought as customers to buy lands in the western states.

By the end of the 19th century, capitalist entrepreneurs saw the need for cheap industrial workers to run American factories.

In the 20th century, scientists and technical workers were avidly sought in Europe and Asia to maintain the American edge in science and technology.

The economic element in opposition to immigration came, at first, mainly from organized labor.

By the 21st century, with the establishment of expensive, government-run social systems, financed by the ‘progressive’ income tax, the perception grew that ‘illegal immigrants’ did not pay their fair share to support such systems.

This gave rise to calls for mass deportation of those who came to the US outside of the official quota system.

The arguments against illegal immigration generally do not deal on any rational level with the important and complex question as to what  level of  legal immigration would actually be in the long-term economic interests of most Americans.  Passions and bias cloud useful debate.

More recently, those in favor of ‘zero population growth’, generally from the environmentalist movement, have opposed immigration to the United States on the general premise that people are bad for the environment.

Due to the complexity of immigration issues, the political parties are conflicted on these questions — sometimes supporting illogical and contradictory positions for or against immigration in order to appeal to specific segments of the population.