Our Immigration Controversies are Nothing New

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“The past is not dead,” said William Faulkner. “It is not even past.” Nowhere is that more true than in America’s struggles over immigration, which, contrary to popular belief, are nothing new.

A major controversy during the 1880 presidential campaign was over the mass Chinese immigration into the West that the railroad companies were sponsoring. Both parties opposed it on the grounds that it put American workers at a disadvantage, as the Chinese immigrants worked for lower wages. The Democrats, who were obviously markedly different from the Democrats of today, pledged that “the toiling millions of our own people will be protected from the destructive competition of the Chinese, and to that end their immigration to our shores will be properly restricted.” The Republican platform likewise stated that:

Since the authority to regulate immigration and intercourse between the United States and foreign nations rests with the Congress of the United States and the treaty-making power, the Republican party, regarding the unrestricted immigration of the Chinese as a matter of grave concernment under the exercise of both these powers, would limit and restrict that immigration by the enactment of such just, humane and reasonable laws and treaties as will produce that result.

Nowadays such concerns would be dismissed as “racism,” but in those days, neither party appealed to race as they offered their arguments in support of their positions. They presented their concern about mass Chinese immigration as stemming from a desire to protect the American worker. No one doubted that immigration could or should be restricted in the national interest. Opponents of restricting Chinese immigration, however, did claim that racism was what was behind the proposal.

On October 20, 1880, less than two weeks before Election Day, the Chinese immigration issue threatened to upend the entire Republican campaign. The Democrats published a letter purportedly from Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield, in which the candidate supposedly wrote that he opposed restrictions on Chinese immigration, as “individuals or Company have the right to buy labor where they can get it cheapest.” One Democratic organ that published the letter called it “Garfield’s Death Warrant” and gleefully claimed that because of it, “A Prominent Republican Journal Deserts Garfield. And Hoists the Names of Hancock and English, the Glorious Leaders of the Democracy.”

Garfield dismissed the letter as a forgery, but it almost certainly cost him votes in the West. The election was extremely close: Garfield won the popular vote by only 1,898 votes, the smallest margin in any American presidential election, although his electoral margin over Hancock was more comfortable, 214 to 155.

In victory, Garfield felt an obscure sense of foreboding. “There is,” he wrote, “a tone of sadness running through this triumph which I can hardly explain.” On September 19, 1881, he died from the effects of an assassin’s bullet and pre-sterilization efforts to treat him.

Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, signed the Immigration Act of 1882, which excluded convicted criminals and other groups, including the insane and those unable to take care of themselves, from entering the United States. If he were president today, Arthur would be excoriated for this and accused of all manner of “hatred.” He was, however, acting in the interests of the American people—putting America first and excluding those who would be a danger to the country or a drain upon its resources. While it would be nice for the United States to take in all the needy people of the world, to do so would overtax the nation’s ability to care for them all and eventually overwhelm the country altogether; consequently, measures of this kind are sometimes necessary for the nation to continue and thrive, even if they appear heartless to modern sensibilities.

Under pressure from lawmakers, Arthur also signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was based on the proposition that large-scale Chinese immigration endangered American workers, as the Chinese would work for lower wages than the Americans would. However, many at the time believed that the whole controversy over Chinese immigration was really motivated by simple racism. An 1882 political cartoon depicted a Chinese man sitting forlornly outside the closed “Golden Gate of Liberty,” next to a sign reading “Notice–Communist Nihilist–Socialist Fenian & Hoodlum Welcome but No Admittance to Chinamen.” Massachusetts Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar said that the Chinese Exclusion Act was “nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.”

Maybe it was. If proponents of the measure had really been primarily interested in protecting American wage earners, they might have searched for and found a way to devise a bill that did not exclude people based on their ethnicity. That they did not do so has given rhetorical ammunition ever since to those who oppose responsible restrictions on immigration: any and all such measures are now greeted with charges of nativism, racism, and xenophobia, no matter how unjustified such charges may be.