Editor's Note: Immigration attorney Carl Shusterman was selected by the American Immigration Lawyers Association to speak to over 350 immigration attorneys on August 16, 1996 at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles about the future of immigration law. Representatives of the major new media were in the audience. We are reprinting Mr. Shusterman's speech in its entirely as a public service to our readers.
The most draconian anti-immigrant law of this century was just passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic President. And in 1997, the second shoe may fall as Republican Lamar Smith reintroduces a bill which would drastically curtail legal immigration while Democrats like Ted Kennedy have pledged to scale back H-1Bs and employment-based immigration.
We have already lost most of the following: Suspension of deportation, most waivers of inadmissability, the right to apply for asylum after one year in the U.S. and judicial review. Now, we have to contend with summary exclusion, mandatory detention, restrictions on the rights of immigrants and their representatives alike.
All that stands between us and disaster would be Congress' failure to extend Section 245(I) past September 30, 1997, less than one week after the Entitlement Bars become reality. This one act would effectively remove most of the 3.7 million potential immigrants with approved petitions, most of them close family members of U.S. citizens and residents from the waiting lists.
It is unfortunate but true that much of the history of our Nation of Immigrants reflects hostility toward immigration. From the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s to the powerful anti-immigrant American ("Know Nothing") Party of the 1840s to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s to the National Origin Quotas of the 1920s; from our failure to accept refugees from Hitler's Germany and our imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II to Operation Wetback in 1950s, our record has been consistent. Bring in foreigners when we need cheap labor. Scapegoat and deport them during times of economic uncertainty.
Now we are told that the age of large-scale immigration is over, that we have reached our "carrying capacity", that immigrants represent a "silent invasion" of our country and it's cultural values, that America is becoming a Third World Country. We need a breathing space, a temporary moratorium on immigration to allow those immigrants already here to assimilate into American society.
Immigration restrictionists are insulted when they are branded as racists and accused of dividing people against each other. They insist that they are not opposed to persons of any particular race, nationality or religion. It's just that Americans must take care of our own before providing for foreigners, either at home or abroad.
In 1923, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Asian Indians were ineligible for naturalization and therefore unable to immigrate to the U.S. Although the Court conceded that they were Caucasian, they were not white and the intention of the Founding Fathers was to "confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons that they knew as 'white'" While "it may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity..the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today."
Again, in 1934, the Supreme Court interpreted the Naturalization Law of 1790 to define "white peoples within the meaning of the statute (as) members of the Caucasian race as defined in the understanding of the mass of men. The term excludes the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians and the Filipinos."
The event which triggered this "instant Enlightenment" was the Second World War. Why should Chinese and Indians, Koreans and Filipinos fight and die to help a country who had discriminated against them for so long?
When a bill was introduced in Congress just before the war to grant citizenship to Asian-Indian immigrants who had resided in the U.S. for over 15 years, the American Federation of Labor representative opposed it bitterly: "First, it will be the people who are here in our country now... Then they will find some other means of breaking some other hole in the immigration law here and there..."
As the war proceeded, the U.S. realized the inconsistency of opposing Nazi racism and practicing racial discrimination at home. During the War, the politicians, the press and American people became more discerning about differentiating our friends from our enemies.
Such enlightenment did not come easy. A mere two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Time Magazine published the following article:
HOW TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS FROM THE JAPS: Virtually all Japanese are short. Japanese are likely to be stockier and broader-hipped than short Chinese. Japanese are seldom fat; they often dry up and grow lean as they age. Although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid, Japanese eyes are usually set closer together. The Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese is hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time. Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard heeled. Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait, sometimes shuffle.
It was no coincidence that at the beginning of the Cold War, the U.S. began to see the light on de facto racial division that prevails in this country. In 1947, President Truman integrated the Armed Forces. The Supreme Court, after more than half a century, reversed its stance on "separate but equal" laws. Between 1957 and 1968, Congress passed and the President signed a string of civil rights laws.
In the midst of this anti-colonialist and civil rights revolution, Senator Edward Kennedy sponsored, and President Johnson signed, a new law which treated immigrants from all countries the same. All racial impediments to citizenship and immigration were abolished.
The system worked so well that the law was liberalized on several occasions between 1976 and 1990. Even as the U.S. suffered through oil crises, hostages crises and severe economic recessions, no movement to restrict immigration emerged.
Many Americans saw immigration as an economic necessity, even as a major plus for a country engaged in a Cold War with a Communist superpower. In California, in particular, the economy flourished as immigrants, legal or otherwise, worked the fields of the biggest agricultural economy in the world. Wealthy immigrants sent their children to universities in the U.S. where they stayed on to give America a technological edge over the Russians. U.S. scientists, both American and foreign-born, worked side-by-side developing transistors, microchips, genetically-engineered pharmaceutics and constantly more powerful computers. Immigrants were prominent in each new cutting edge-industry. It's large immigrant population established Los Angeles as the Capital of the Pacific Rim.
Ironically, the end of the Cold War caused California, the home of what President Eisenhower had dubbed the "military-industrial" complex, to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs in a short period of time. Eventually, the economy would begin to recover, but long before it did, some people could not accept what had happened. They needed a scapegoat and they found one in the growing immigrant population.
In 1994, California voters passed a proposition which would have deprived illegal immigrants and their children of health care, public assistance and even the right to an education. Two years later, with this proposition tied up in the courts, the federal government, split between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President targeted the immigrant population, illegal and legal alike, with a pair of laws pertaining to welfare and immigration. Unlike anything which had come before, these laws threatened to remove the security blanket from some of the neediest people in society.
The immigration bill is now a law. The national elections are now over. Some think that the changes wrought in the elections were not all that significant. They should look more closely. The anti-immigrant message spewed by Governor Wilson helped to defeat the Republicans in the State Assembly. It is no coincidence that the new Speaker, for the first time, is a Latino. Rabid anti-immigrant legislators like Andrea Seastrand in Santa Barbara and Robert Dornan in what was once arch-conservative Orange County were rejected by the voters. The victor over Dornan was a little-known Latina named Loretta Sanchez.
Dornan charged voter fraud, but he can not or will not see the big picture. Thirty years of immigration to California have radically changed the demographics of the state. The anti-immigrant tide has energized the Asian, Latino and other immigrant voters. Any political party which endorses an anti-immigrant platform in California is committing political suicide.
Stuart Spencer and other Republican pundits have expressed this opinion to Governor Wilson, but perhaps the Governor has started to believe his own rhetoric. The new emerging majority in California, the most populous state in the Union can stop the anti-immigrant crusade dead in its tracks. With 54 electorial votes, no Presidential candidate will take the chance of offending California voters.
Let AILA join with other pro-immigrant organizations in a grand coalition to preserve the multi-racial, multi-cultural society that we have worked so hard to build. A country where the population density is among the lowest in the world, the immigrants include the best and brightest, and the present quotas that allow for only a fraction of one percent of the population to immigrate annually has not reached "carrying capacity".
In 1945, General Stillwell flew to California to award the Distinguished Service Cross to a young Nisei soldier, Sergeant Kazuo Masuda who had single-handedly fired a mortar on Nazi positions and had been killed at Cassino, Italy. The General pinned the medal on Masuda's sister Mary who had recently returned from an internment camp.
A young actor who participated in the ceremony and who later became the Governor of California and President of the United States paid tribute to the fallen soldier in words that express AILA's philosophy toward the kind of society which we wish to nurture:
Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race, but on a way - an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. This is the American way.
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