This is what immigration used to be: the Statue of Liberty, your grandparents’ journey across the ocean and the institution that made our country great.
This is how it can seem today: out of control, breaking the law and stealing American jobs.
Those are not necessarily two sides of a debate. Americans are very capable of exalting immigration in the past even while fearing it in the future. But we need to move away from that paradox in order to manage immigration in the present.
We’ve been locked in a stalemate over immigration for more than a decade. Political polarization is certainly at fault. So are the many people — including anyone who eats vegetables or uses a computer — who benefit economically from the status quo. But our public disagreements are matched by private conflicts. When it comes to immigration, we are not only a divided nation — we have a divided brain.
The national ambivalence is evident. A Gallup survey this year found that a majority of Americans, 53 percent, said it was “extremely important” for the government to halt the flow of illegal immigrants at the border. Yet an even larger majority, 64 percent, said that illegal immigrants already in the country should be allowed to remain and become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements.
On the stump, this paradox is captured by a formulation favored by President Obama and many other politicians: “We are a nation of immigrants, and we are a nation of laws.” Even in the marketplace of truisms, that one is not particularly useful for crafting public policy.
In vowing to fight the Obama administration’s court challenges to his state’s “strongest in the nation” immigration law, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said recently, “As a physician, I would never ask a sick person if he or she was legal or illegal.” Nonetheless, he proclaimed his “sworn duty” to uphold a law that would require schools to check the status of pupils.
One explanation for how we live with such irreconcilable views lies in the stories we tell about migration. Simply put, we have contradictory narratives of past and present. Our history does not connect to our future. We love immigration looking backward, but we are apprehensive looking forward.
The master builder of the historical narrative was Oscar Handlin, a Harvard scholar, who died in September at the age of 95. In the first lines of his 1951 classic, “The Uprooted,” Handlin declared: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” The story he told was of peasants “thrust away” from what had been a stable existence for generations “and carried cruelly to a distant land, and set to labor, unrewarding labor.” Whether on the prairies or in the cities, the immigrants of the transatlantic wave — Handlin dates it from 1820 to 1920 — suffered alienation and isolation. But, in an epic individual struggle repeated millions of times, the newcomers made homes and communities, and they bred children who became more American than they had ever imagined possible (or had ever intended).
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