Category: Ellis Island

The Politics of Compassion

Leave a comment

July 14, 2019

by Steve Stofka

It was a busy week in Washington. Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, testified before a House subcommittee. His dovish remarks signaled Wall Street traders that the Fed would almost certainly lower interest rates at their next meeting on July 30-31 (Note #1). The market rallied to new highs even as investors continued to transfer funds from stocks to bonds during the past month (Note #2).

Not so dovish was the atmosphere at a House subcommittee hearing this week on immigration proceedings at the southern border. Very emotional testimony from several freshman House members who had visited immigrant detention facilities in Texas. The former head of ICE under Presidents Obama and Trump testified about the challenges that border patrol officers face under the surge of immigrants. Human and drug trafficking along the southern border has been at crisis levels for many months. Patrol officers are not trained to be social workers or medical attendants but find that most of their time is spent caring for people who lack the physical stamina necessary to navigate the harsh conditions of the deserts of northern Mexico.

Many immigrants are sick or injured after a long treacherous journey from Central America. The crowded facilities pose a challenge even for healthy immigrants. They are certainly no place for mothers with young children, but neither was Ellis Island (Note #3). However, most of the immigrants at Ellis left the building after several hours (Note #4).

I was reminded of my grandmother and aunt who were turned away twice for whooping cough and pink eye. It was easy to pick up contagious diseases on the 7-10 day journey in third-class quarters on a crowded transatlantic steamer a century ago. Processing hundreds of immigrants a day, doctors at Ellis Island were quick to reject those with even the hint of TB or trachoma (Note #5). In the years before World War I the northern states needed workers and government officials were largely forgiving of many disabilities and illnesses. Less than 2% of immigrants were deported. My family was one of the unlucky ones – twice. My grandfather waiting on the Manhattan shore a few miles away must have been confused and angry.

Some Americans are insistent that immigrants should follow our Constitution, but our founding document has little to say about immigration. Article 1, Section 8 states that the Congress shall “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” End of story. For the first hundred years of our nation’s existence, each state processed immigrants. Many immigrants did not present any paperwork or pass a medical examination. State and Federal governments simply took an immigrant’s word as to their name and personal information. Those who insist most loudly that immigrants follow our laws may be descended from people who followed no laws when they immigrated into our country.

In 1891, Republican President William Henry Harrison signed into law the Immigration Act of 1891 passed by a Congress dominated by Republicans (Note #6). Republicans represented the interests of northern businesses who needed able bodied workers who were unlikely to become dependent on government for their care. The flood of immigrants into the northern states gave Republicans additional congressional seats and an edge over Democratic majorities in the southern states.

The founding documents of this country were forged in the fires of heated debate and hard bargaining (Note #7). In 230 years, the debate has not cooled. Today, Democratic majority states like California and New York stand to gain Congressional seats as they welcome and champion the rights of immigrants. While the Senate has a filibuster rule, only the Democratic Party can fix our broken immigration laws because they are the only ones capable of securing a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The Republican Party has not enjoyed such a majority since Senators were first popularly elected in 1914. If Republicans are ever going to take the lead on contentious issues, they will have to abandon the Parliamentary filibuster that chokes most legislation to death in the Senate.

Why didn’t the Democratic Party address the issue of immigration while they had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and controlled the Presidency and House? Was it not important then? Nancy Pelosi was House Speaker then and now. She is known for her political ability to “count votes.” Perhaps she would be more effective if she looked further than votes. In a deeply divided nation with a constitutional architecture that resists change, a resolution of our most intractable problems is a formidable challenge for any leader.

After the Financial Crisis in 2008, Pelosi helped patch together two large pieces of legislation under Obama’s first term. ARRA was an $800B stimulus package passed in February 2009 that did help keep unemployment from getting even worse but was ineffective in many areas because the stimulus was diluted over several years (Note #8). That and the passage of the controversial ACA, dubbed “Obamacare,” cost the Democrats dearly in the 2010 midterm elections. Obamacare has withstood both legislative and judicial assault but may fall sometime this year to yet another judicial challenge that was just heard by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s a topic for next week’s blog.

///////////////////

Notes:

  1. Schedule of Fed meetings
  2. ICI flow of funds
  3. Crowded main hall at Ellis Island
  4. Relatively short processing time at Ellis Island
  5. Medical examinations of immigrants at Ellis Island
  6. Immigration Act of 1891
  7. Michael J. Klarman’s “The Framer’s Coup” is a thorough account of the construction of our nation’s Constitution. The audio book
  8. ARRA – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

A Nation of Farm Kids

Leave a comment

June 30, 2019

by Steve Stofka

This week the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had not provided an adequate reason to include a proposed citizenship question on the 1920 census. Here’s a snapshot of that section of the census form (Note #1).

This week I’ll look at past census questions through the lens of personal family history – completed copies of census pages. In 1850, the Census first asked people their place of birth and naturalization status. For a hundred years, the census asked the question until the topic was dropped for the 1960 census (Note #2).

In 1860, just before the Civil War, some of my family ancestors were farmers in Mississippi. All forty people listed on that census page had been born in a southern state, most from Mississippi or Alabama.  The Education section of the census did not yet ask whether a person could read and write; only whether each person had attended school in the past year. Fourteen out of forty people listed on that census page had gone to school. There was only one child of school age who had not attended school. A rural farming community in the deep south with limited resources made sure that their children could read and write. That was an essential part of the American project.

In drafting the 14th and 15th Amendments after the Civil War, there was some discussion about adding an English language requirement for voting. At that time, German was the second language of America and was the most taught foreign language in schools. Considering the industriousness and good character of German men, lawmakers decided against such an exclusion. Fifty years later, in the midst of the WW1, Americans would excoriate the hated “Hun” and demean the character of many German immigrants. War changes attitudes.

Let’s skip ahead to the 1900 census taken in a Texas county east of Dallas. The question can you read and write had been added to the census. In a rural farming community, only four out of fifty people listed on that census page could not read and write. All were adults. One was over fifty. All the children aged eight and above were literate.

Let’s travel in time and space to an environment that couldn’t be more unlike rural Texas – the lower east side of Manhattan for the 1930 census. Of the fifty people listed, all adults were immigrants, most of them from eastern Europe. The earliest on that page had arrived in 1890; the latest was just a year earlier, in 1929. All except four people from Russia could read and write. The census asked the language spoken in the home before they came to America. Most people on that page answered Yiddish, except my grandparents, who spoke Slovak. My grandmother, a woman from a rural farming community, could read three languages. It was all part of growing up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time she died, she had added English to that list. I imagine that the Yiddish speakers had some familiarity with German and Hebrew. How many of us today can read several languages?

The farmers from western Europe had spilled out into the farms of America during the 19th century. In a second wave near the turn of the century, many farmers from eastern and southern Europe found work in the rural communities of the northern states. Many, like my grandparents, crowded into the dense streets of New York City when they first arrived. They worked hard because farm kids learn about hard work as they grow up.

A new generation of farm kids is arriving, but not by ship. They are coming from areas to the south that have been hit hard with drought, violence and political corruption. They come from hard work for little pay (Note #3). They have not waited in line for years to come into this country. Instead, they are showing up at the southern border just as many of our ancestors showed up at Ellis Island and other eastern ports.

Most of us in this country are the descendants of farmers who made sure their kids could read and write. That is the heart of the American spirit: character, hard work and education. Maybe the Congress needs to rewrite the laws so that they conform with the rules that we carry in our hearts and our guts from our parents and their parents and their parents…

//////////////

Notes:

  1. Some background on the 2020 census question from Pew Research
  2. Short history of census questions and index of past census questions
  3. See the six part series “Borderland” ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3300988/ for info). Six Americans follow the routes of migrants from Central America. An Idaho farmer experiences grueling work for little pay and understands the attraction of his farm to these migrants where they can make 5x as much or more harvesting crops.