The Sordid History of Immigration Restriction

I have been dreading this post, because it deals with explosively controversial and often very ugly topics. I have been intending to write it for several months, and I have written and discarded several drafts already. For those who will find it highly disagreeable, I apologize, but the subject has been weighing heavily on my heart, and I do not wish to put it off any more.

As many readers know, I have some firsthand experience with the American immigration system. My late wife came to the United States in 2018 on a K-1 visa, which is designed to facilitate immigration for fianc(é)es of American citizens. But I held very pro-immigration views long before I met her. I am proud that I had a chance to put my views into practice and not merely talk about them.

I choose to write about immigration now because I am disturbed by an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment, and so many people who ought to know better participate in this sentiment, or at least accept it. Even hardcore restrictionists generally know that their movement has some history that is not the most savory, but I think most people will be shocked to learn how bad it is. And so we’re going to go there. If you think this will be offensive or are squeamish about ugly topics, consider this your last warning.

Immigration to the United States: the First 150 Years

For more than a century after the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, the United States had limited and sporadic restrictions on immigration. The most notorious of them was the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a series of laws that, among other things, increased the residency time for naturalization of immigrants and expanded the President’s authority to imprison and deport immigrants. The laws were passed amidst the Quasi-War with France and were transparently aimed against the opposition Democratic-Republican Party, which was disproportionately favored by newly naturalized citizens. After the election of 1800, President Jefferson allowed the laws to expire before they could face a constitutional challenge, which the laws almost certainly would not have survived. The Alien and Sedition Acts are widely considered to be a major blight on the John Adams administration.

Despite a lack of major restrictions, pro-immigration sentiment in the first century after independence, and in the years before, was not universal. In his pro-population growth essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc., Benjamin Franklin wrote,

…why should the Palatine (a region in Germany) Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

The Quasi-War also brought Fries Rebellion, an armed rebellion against a window tax that was assessed by the federal government to pay for the conflict. As the rank and file of the rebellion consisted of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, anti-German sentiment flared up in a way not entirely unlike anti-Muslim sentiment after September 11.

Anti-German sentiment was not confined to the United States, of course. In 1871, amidst anti-German attitudes from the Crimean War, Russian Czar Alexander II revoked privileges that had been granted to German settlers a century earlier, leading many to emigrate over the following four decades. Some of my ancestors were among the emigrants, a story documented in Monseigneur George P. Arberle’s From the Steppes to the Prairies.

The 19th century saw large waves of migration of Catholics from Ireland and Germany and a reaction in the form of the nativist American Party, more commonly known as the Know Nothing Party. The Know Nothings were not the first nativist movement in American history, but they were the first to attain national prominence. The major goals of the party were to ban non-native born Americans and all Catholics from holding public office, the latter due to their alleged loyalty to the pope over the Constitution, and to curtail immigration. The Know Nothings nominated former president Millard Fillmore in the 1856 election, after which they declined and disappeared.

Like nativists before and since, the Know Nothings capitalized on wobbly economic conditions and blamed immigrants for the problems. They portrayed immigrants as a form of pollution that threatened to destroy the culture of the United States. Thomas Whitney, a Know Nothing leader, wrote,

No man will say that an individual can be a subject of two distinct, and opposite sovereigns at the same time . . . the predominant attachments, and sense of duty in the individual, must lean toward one or the other. . . . Therefore, in the issue before us, if a papist (Catholic) realizes within himself a sense of duty to the papal sovereign over his duty to the sovereignty of the United States, he will throw his influence, heart, soul, and body upon the side of the papacy, and against the United States. . . . I do not hesitate to aver, that no papist ever took or can take an oath of allegiance to the government of the United States, in its letter and spirit, and hence, no papist can become a citizen of the United States by the process of naturalization.

Such sentiments persisted a century after the disappearance of the Know Nothings, such that in 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy felt compelled to affirm his commitment to separation of church and state and to decry religious bigotry.

Anti-Italian sentiment flared up in the late 19th century, and immigrants, especially Italians, were scapegoated for competing for scarce jobs in the economic depression of 1893-1897, as well as associated with the Mafia and anarchist terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan and other nativist organizations thrived, dozens of Italians were lynched, and novel racial theories were advanced positing that Southern Europeans were inferior to Northern Europeans.

The first major immigration restriction in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The bill put such restrictions on the immigration of Chinese laborers as to serve as a near total ban, and it remained in effect until 1943. “You cannot have a country with open borders” is one of the talking points of the restrictionist movement, and so I wonder if they consider the father of the country to be Chester Arthur, who signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, rather than George Washington. Chinese immigrants were also subject of bigotry, a sentiment that is now back on the rise with China seen as a major geopolitical rival to the United States.

I could go on, but the picture is clear. Most anti-immigrant tropes we see today—immigration as a globalist conspiracy, immigrants bringing crime and terrorism, immigrants taking jobs from native-born Americans, immigrants polluting native culture, and immigrants as racially inferior—are things we have seen many times in the past. These tropes are advanced mostly by people who have ancestors who immigrated to the United States under a system they would decry as “open borders”.

The Progressive Era and the 1920s

The Progressive Era, which is considered to have lasted from 1901 to either 1919 or 1929, was a time of major social reform, much of which was badly needed. The Progressive Era was also a time of the highest level of faith in American history in the capacity of government to solve problems and shape society toward better ends. Much of the federal apparatus we know today, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the progressive income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve, was created during this period. In 1926, in Euclid v. Amber, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that cities had the right to establish zoning codes, ratifying the principle that urban growth should be rationally planned rather than subject to market forces. Prohibition—motivated in no small part by nativist and especially anti-Catholic sentiment—sought to use the government to regulate personal consumptive behavior; Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but its legacy lives on in the drug war. And then there was eugenics, about which I wrote last year.

Eugenics is the attempt to encourage the genetically fit to breed and the genetically unfit not to breed (however fit and unfit are determined), thereby improving the quality of the genetic stock over time. Eugenics had a strong public stature in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s, with many state forced sterilization laws, especially in California, Better Baby contests, and so on. For obvious reasons, eugenics fell out of fashion in the 1930s and has not recovered.

Madison Grant was an anthropologist and zoologist, and a prominent advocate of eugenics. Notable works include the 1916 The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History, which argued that the “Nordic race” is inherently superior to other human races. Adolf Hitler considered the book a major inspiration. The Passing of the Great Race promulgates theories that are now scientifically widely rejected.

Grant saw in eugenics and immigration restriction a match made in heaven. As vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, Grant successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, using faulty racial science. The act was the most restrictive immigration law in U.S. history, and it brought to an end the era of mostly unrestricted immigration.

The Eugenics Research Association lobbied for the bill using figures compiled by Harry Laughlin, from charitable institutions and mental hospitals, about the alleged cost to taxpayers of supporting “social inadequates”, especially Italians and Eastern European Jews. The Eugenics Archive states,

In 1920, Laughlin appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Using data for the U.S. Census Bureau and a survey of the number of foreign-born persons in jails, prisons and reformatories, he argued that the “American” gene pool was being polluted by a rising tide of intellectually and morally defective immigrants – primarily from eastern and southern Europe. Sympathetic to Laughlin’s message, Committee Chairman Albert Johnson of Washington State appointed Laughlin as “expert eugenics agent.”

Upon signing the bill, President Coolidge stated, “America must remain American”.

Eugenics and immigration restriction are two key pillars of the 1920s population control movement, the belief that the population and genetic stock should be rationally managed. We do need to comment on the third pillar of the 1920s.

Margaret Sanger is best known as the founder of the American Birth Control League, an organization dedicated to providing birth control and a precursor to Planned Parenthood of America, which was founded in 1942. Sanger was also a prominent eugenicist, and she saw her advocacy of birth control as overlapping with the goals of eugenics by preventing births among women who were least able to afford it. Sanger was particularly interested in promoting birth control in immigrant communities.

Ecologism

So far the story has been pretty bad, and I’m afraid that things are about to get worse.

As noted above, Madison Grant was an anthropologist and zoologist. He created the New York Zoological Society, the Bronx Zoo, the Save The Redwoods League, and Denali National Park, among other achievements in conservation. According to Jonathan Spiro, Grant saw his conservation work and eugenics work and two facets of the same project. According to Jean Baker, Margaret Sanger was deeply concerned with overpopulation, and this was part of the motivation for her birth control work. Sanger chaired a session at the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian Conference.

It is difficult today to fully appreciate the extent to which population anxiety motivated the post-World War II environmental movement. Authors such as Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin spoke openly and loudly about the issue. The issue is not merely academic. Under Deng Xiaoping, China implemented a One-Child Policy, with great influence by the Club of Rome and the Sierra Club, which was enforced with forced sterilizations and forced abortions. The Chinese government claims that the One Child Policy prevented 400 million births. This claim is controversial, but I think it is more plausible than Western academics want to admit. That is a subject for another time.

Immigration restriction was another tool for population control, and no one better exemplifies this link than John Tanton. Human Life Review documents how Tanton was instrumental in the founding of three leading anti-immigration groups in the United States: the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA. Tanton chaired the population committee at the Sierra Club, but he left as the Sierra Club’s increasingly liberal membership made their anti-immigration stance untenable. Also as the Competitive Enterprise Institute explains,

Tanton served as board member for local Planned Parenthood organizations, founded the Michigan Women for Medical Control of Abortion, chaired the Zero Population Growth Immigration Study Committee and served as a sexuality education consultant and curriculum development advisor for local middle schools. He worked for the Sierra Club until the mid-1970s.

I don’t think I need to spell out the connection between these activities.

The environmentalist logic behind immigration restriction is sickening but simple. Immigrants generally move from poorer to wealthier countries. Per-capita consumption is generally higher in wealthier countries than in poorer countries. Therefore, immigration/emigration will generally cause wealth and resource consumption to go up. Tanton made use of the I=PAT equation, problems with which I discussed last year.

Garrett Hardin too was actively involved with population control, eugenics, and immigration restriction. I do recommend reading his 1974 essay, Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor, which will at least help us understand the logic behind his stance.

Not many people, either environmentalists or immigration restrictionists, today open talk about population control, again for what I hope are obvious reasons. But the idea is still potent. Television personality Tucker Carlson, for instance, asserts that immigrants are a source of environmental pollution.

Conclusions

This essay is getting long, and so it is time to wrap it up with some conclusions.

It is interesting to observe that in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have, respectively, made abortion access and immigration restriction centerpieces of their campaigns, in turn reflecting their parties’ long-standing ideological commitments. Much of political alignment comes down to chance circumstances rather than ideological coherence, and if party alignment reflected the historical development of these ideas, the pro-abortion and anti-immigration stances should be in one party, and the anti-abortion and pro-immigration stances should be in the other.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2241) makes clear their support for immigration, though it is not the maximalist position that the Church takes on abortion or homosexuality. Nevertheless, as most highly active Catholics and much of the American Church’s hierarchy are right-wing politically, the American Church seldom talks about this issue in the way they talk about abortion. Their silence on the grave moral evil of contempt for immigrants, for the purpose of political expedience, is noticed and will not be forgotten, and it is all the more inexplicable given the degree to which the Church itself has been a target for nativism.

Restrictionists like Garrett Hardin do not make their case with open bigotry. Instead, they present themselves a “realistic” truth-tellers. They know the world’s resources are finite, that the economy is a zero-sum competition, and that genetic stock is a valuable resource that must be managed properly. It is only misguided political correctness, they would argue, that keeps people on wishful thinking instead of hard-nosed realism.

But there is nothing realistic or truthful about it. The restrictionist position is built on discredited zero-sum economics; discredited racial theories; discredited fears about overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution; conspiracy theory; and bigotry. There are no redeeming factors to it.

However, my final comment is that we should be careful about understanding how we observe moral value. Many people mistakenly believe that modern prosperity breeds moral degeneracy. The opposite is true; morality requires prosperity, and material threats breed moral coarseness. People selling malevolent ideas always seek to portray prosperity as a zero-sum game; if an immigrant gets a good job, it must come at my expense, for instance. Morality is only possible if we reject a zero-sum worldview and embrace a world of prosperity.

Quick Hits

Ted Nordhaus at The Breakthrough Institute wrote a piece on vegetarianism. I am a vegetarian myself, and I am not entirely sure if I meet the criteria to be in the ecomodernist tent as outlined in this piece. To elaborate would require another long, controversial piece, and today’s has been quite enough for a while. Nevertheless, the piece is worth reading and one that I find mostly agreeable.

As mentioned a few times in the past, I am working on a big project on learning curves, and I look forward to sharing it in a few months. The more I study the subject, the more skeptical I become that learning curves are a responsible tool for forecasting the development of the energy system, let alone for setting policy. I found this paper by Sagar and van der Zwaan especially interesting, which (among much else) points out that there is a survivor bias in learning curve studies; those technologies which have succeeded commercially are more likely to be the subject of studies and also more likely to show technological learning, and so a literature review is likely to give an upwardly biased view of learning rates. William Nordhaus points out that if endogenous cost decreases occur, which is often the case and hard to detect, then we may also have an upwardly biased learning curve estimate. By now, I am starting to doubt even compelling-looking figures like Swanson’s Law for solar photovoltaics, and the case for learning-curve based subsidies of emerging technology seems very shaky to me.

There was a power bump in my area last week due to a thunderstorm, which knocked out the power for a few seconds. For most people, such an event is a minor inconvenience that might mean, at worst, having to reset the microwave and oven clocks. However, the event occurred less than an hour before I started my shift at the semiconductor fab. When I got there, I found that many of the machines were disabled for several hours until an engineer could inspect them. Several lots (a lot is a collection of wafers, and a wafer will eventually be cut up into dies or chips. Each lot contains what may be eventually be thousands of chips) got stuck in machines, and some may have been damaged. I guesstimate that this event may have cost the company millions of dollars in lost productivity and damaged product. It is a good reminder of the importance of stable power grid in supporting a thriving industrial base.