By Carolyn Lochhead, Washington Bureau
Jan 14, 2018
WASHINGTON — Expressing a fondness for Norwegian immigrants and disdain for those from poor and swarthy nations, President Trump seemed last week to be channeling the infamous national-origins quotas that sharply reduced U.S. immigration from 1924 to 1965, all but blocking arrivals from anywhere but Northern Europe.
“If the president thinks Norway is the ideal, then it fits perfectly into that,” said Daniel Tichenor, a University of Oregon expert on the history of U.S. immigration policy.
Trump’s outburst Thursday arrived amid an intense new GOP drive to restrict legal immigration, which currently admits 1.2 million people to the United States each year. The administration is negotiating limits on two visa categories in exchange for providing legal status to roughly 700,000 young immigrants known as “Dreamers” who arrived in the country as children without authorization.
At the center of the firestorm are family-based visas that have been the foundation of U.S. immigration policy since national-origins quotas were abolished in 1965, and a quirky diversity visa lottery, created in 1990 to help Irish citizens but now a major immigration path for Africans.
Family and Diversity Visas
The family-based visas were introduced as part of three landmark civil rights laws and have transformed the nation’s racial and ethnic composition. Experts said the newly emerged GOP strategy to restrict them is a sharp departure from decades of political focus on ending unauthorized border crossings.
“This administration has ushered in what’s pretty new in our political sphere, which is heavy skepticism of legal immigration,” said Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, D.C. “Over past decades we’ve had big debates over illegal immigration, but there’s been a reasonable bipartisan consensus that legal immigration is part of our national heritage and good for the country.”
The shift reflects the emerging influence of the GOP’s restrictionist base over the party’s business wing, which for decades has sought — and won — more employment-based visas.
Opening and closing the gates
But such movements are nothing new in U.S. policy, which has lurched between bouts of expansion and restriction, from the open borders of the nation’s founding to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, from the proliferation of new work-based visas in 1990 to a harsh border crackdown in 1996.
“Our policies have always reflected a mix of opening and closing the gates for different kinds of immigrants,” Tichenor said. “Anxieties about the racial composition of newcomers, not to mention religious and ethnic identities, is a constant in the American tradition.”
Under current law, legal permanent residents, or green-card holders, may sponsor their spouses, minor children and adult unmarried children. If they become citizens, they can also sponsor their parents, siblings and adult children, single or married. These visas holders may then, in turn, sponsor their family members.
The basic contours of family-based immigration were created under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which lifted the national-origins quotas that had been imposed during a backlash to a historic immigration wave at the turn of the last century.
“We largely barred Asians and Africans during that period, and we also had really stringent limits on Southern and Eastern Europeans,” Tichenor said. “And we did so very much based on notions of eugenics and other kinds of racist pseudosciences, so by the time we got to the 1960s, immigration reform really placed an emphasis on dismantling these explicitly racist policies.”
The 1965 law emphasized family ties, admitting more than two-thirds of all immigrants on that basis. Its sponsor, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, thought that the new law would still favor Europeans, given their existing family ties to the United States. But newly prosperous Europeans weren’t interested.
“One of the unintended consequences of the law was that by the late 1970s it was clear that the vast majority of legal immigrants with family ties were from Asian and Latin American countries,” Tichenor said.
Chain Migration
Immigration scholars have long used the term “chain migration” to describe how immigrant networks become established. Restrictionists adopted the term to characterize family migration as “an out-of-control, endless migration that the country can’t stop,” Gelatt said.
But the concept of a family multiplier effect, and efforts to restrict family visas by eliminating the adult child and sibling categories, is not a new idea, said Lindsay Lowell, former director of research at the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, a body created by Congress in 1990 that recommended ending the adult child and sibling categories. The commission, headed by the late Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, found that every new adult immigrant on average sponsors about three more people.
“Migrants coming to the U.S. whose motivation is to come to work often self-select as very skilled or at least very motivated,” Lowell said. The commission thought that allowing those migrants to sponsor siblings and adult children would weaken that effect, he said.
Diversity Visa for Italians, IRISH
The diversity visa lottery was enacted in 1990 to try to counteract the unintended effects of the 1965 law. Again sponsored by Kennedy, its aim was to open a new avenue for Italians and a growing population of unauthorized Irish immigrants whose U.S. family connections had dissipated. People from countries that sent few immigrants to the United States could apply, and be selected by lottery. But Italians showed little interest, and Irish migrants soon dwindled as Ireland’s economy boomed.
In 2016, the last year for which data are available, the top 10 countries using the diversity visa were Algeria, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Benin, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Liberia, Belarus and Togo. About 40 percent of the visas go to Africans, Gelatt said, 31 percent to Asians, mainly from Central Asia, and about 20 percent to Europeans, primarily from Eastern Europe.
The administration wants to eliminate the visa. Trump’s eruptions came in response to a bipartisan proposal floated last week that instead of eliminating the category, would shift some of the visas to migrants from Haiti and El Salvador whose temporary protected status was revoked by the administration.
What hangs in the balance is permanent legal status for the 700,000 young immigrants, raised as Americans, who enrolled in the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. About a third live in California. Trump canceled the program last fall and gave Congress until March 5 to devise a legislative fix.
There is strong bipartisan support to do so.
As a political maneuver, the Trump administration’s cancellation of the DACA program turned the Dreamers into a potent bargaining chip for reductions in legal immigration. Republicans appeared to be gaining considerable leverage, until Trump’s outburst cast the effort as racist and strengthened the hand of Democrats, who want no part in restricting legal immigration.
“The Republicans can only absorb so much in terms of public punishment, and letting the DACA kids fall through the cracks I think would not sit well,” Lowell said. “The question is what will they do in terms of a trade-off on immigration policy.”
Carolyn Lochhead was the Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she covered national politics and policy for 27 years. She grew up in Paso Robles (San Luis Obispo County) and graduated from UC Berkeley cum laude in rhetoric and economics. She has a masters of journalism degree from Columbia University. Twitter: @carolynlochhead
Comments