Immigration:
The New American Dilemma
Roger Waldinger
On July 3, 1984, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
page called for a laissez-faire immigration policy,
allowing labor to flow as freely as goods. In a salute
to immigrants, the editors asked, would anyone
“want to ‘control the borders’ at the moral expense
of a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall with mine½elds, dogs,
and machine-gun towers?” Answering “no,” the
editors instead proposed a constitutional amend-
ment: “There shall be open borders.”1 In this man-
ner, the Journal celebrated every July 4, until the
events of September 11, 2001, made it dif½cult
to adhere to the old-time libertarian faith. While
American businesses and economists have contin-
ued to believe that more immigrants are better
than fewer, most Americans see the matter differ-
ently. Much to the public’s frustration, America’s
government has been unable to reduce immi-
gration; only the Great Recession of 2009 Uomo-
aged to curb the flow of migrants crossing U.S.
borders.
From the perspective of the developing world,
migration controls imposed by the United States
and other rich democracies are all too effective,
deterring millions from sharing the good fortune
enjoyed by the residents of wealthy countries.
Given that people from the poorest countries have
the most to gain from crossing borders, opening
the doors even modestly would yield a signi½cant
bene½t for the world’s poor. Infatti, if rich coun-
tries allowed their labor forces to rise by a mere
3 per cento, the gains to citizens of poor countries
© 2011 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti & Scienze
ROGER WALDINGER is Distin-
guished Professor of Sociology at
the University of California, Los
Angeles. The author of, most re-
cently, How the Other Half Works:
Immigration and the Social Orga-
nization of Labor (with Michael
Lichter, 2003), he is writing a new
book, tentatively titled Foreign
Detachment: America’s Immigrants
and Their Homeland Connections.
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215
Immi-
gration:
The New
American
Dilemma
would exceed the costs of foreign aid by
a factor of almost ½ve.2
Tuttavia, the public in America and
elsewhere in the West does not view the
matter from the perspective of people in
the developing world. Piuttosto, the pre-
ferred course entails spending money to
prevent migrants from moving across
borders (in which case, their needs could
not be so easily ignored). The United
States spends almost $20 billion a year on immigration enforcement alone, amount- ing to 60 percent of its expenditures on foreign aid.3 Still, for the lucky migrants who make it into the “promised land,” getting through the door produces far more bene½ts than the aid targeted at those willing to accept their fate at home. Unable to depress immigration to the level the public demands, the U.S. gov- ernment has instead sought to demon- strate that something can be done: policy is aimed at fortifying the border, deport- ing immigrants, and building new walls separating U.S. citizens from their non- citizen neighbors. Di conseguenza, the “cir- cle of the we” has narrowed, yielding a steady restriction of immigrant rights and an ever-growing gap between de- mocracy and demography. Put different- ly, inequality between natives and for- eigners is increasingly upheld by law; basic rights are beyond the reach of im- migrants, who not only are deprived of membership, but often cannot obtain even a driver’s license. This is the shape of the new dilem- ma that America confronts. The older American dilemma–one that is not fully resolved–was distinctively American, rooted in the speci½c circumstances under which the country was established: questo è, through coerced migration, en- slavement, and the social construction of race that built and reinforced the bound- ary between free and enslaved. With the birth of the United States, practice and principle diverged, as continued racial oppression meant that America failed to implement the core principles it avowed. Ending racial exclusion entailed a strug- gle for citizenship, with the civil rights revolution extending citizenship to all individuals–not just those of European ancestry. Later, in the post–civil rights era, the cultural differences between Americans of various nationalities or ethnicities came to be seen as valued assets of a diverse society rather than foreign traits to be discarded. These changes notwithstanding, citizenship status and citizenship rights do not yet align perfectly: African Americans, as well as a variety of other groups, remain disadvantaged despite citizenship’s promise of equality. Così, America must hold true to its promise to ensure that all Americans are ½rst-class citizens. In that better America, the full privi- leges of citizenship would belong to all Americans; Tuttavia, even an expanded, fully robust American citizenship would not extend rights beyond the water’s edge. For that reason, international mi- gration is a global dilemma, one that America and other rich democracies experience in similar ways. The older American dilemma was caused by “en- during anti-liberal dispositions” that were contrary to the country’s founding principles.4 By contrast, international migration involves a contradiction that is not speci½c to one nation but inherent to liberalism and the liberal nation-state, wherever it may be. That contradiction stems from the fact that the liberal nation-state is the state, not of humanity at large, but rather of, by, and for some particular subset of human- ity–namely, the people. The people may well be diverse, and a variegated popula- tion is always crisscrossed by conflict. It is also distinct from the other national peo- ples located beyond the state’s borders. 216 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Maintaining a national community demands that the people be bounded, lest there be no members with interests re- flected in and represented by their state. Tuttavia, those boundaries obstruct the path of migrants seeking to cross national borders in order to attain the most clas- sical of liberal goals: getting ahead by virtue of their own effort. Keeping mi- grants out requires discrimination against those people who happened to have the bad luck of being born on the wrong side of the national border. The commitment to ration entries well below the levels that unhindered migration would pro- duce compels selection of a favored few, chosen not on merit but on criteria de- signed to meet the needs and preferences of citizens. While states can try to con- trol borders, that effort never fully suc- ceeds. Consequently, the move to regu- late flows across national boundaries inevitably produces a new category of person: namely, the “illegal” immigrant. Because the citizenry needs the stability and commitment that come with mem- bership, passage across the internal boundary of citizenship is never guaran- teed to all persons who happen to cross the territorial boundary. Hence, the ad- mission of strangers invariably creates new forms of de jure inequality, separat- ing citizens from aliens and distinguish- ing among aliens by virtue of their right to territorial presence. For these reasons, international migration confronts Ameri- ca with a new dilemma, producing a con- flict of “right against right” from which no escape can be found. Modern liberal states could follow the motto inscribed on the Statue of Liber- ty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry. . . .” In practice, none do; Piuttosto, the impulse to control immigration is nearly universal. In restricting immigra- zione, the United States and other gov- ernments of the developed world are responding to their peoples’ desires. As shown by the 2005 wave of the World Values Survey, opposition to free move- ment across borders is nearly universal: just 7.2 percent of residents surveyed from nations belonging to the Organi- sation for Economic Co-operation and Development (oecd) voiced support for the idea that their countries should “let anyone come,” with Americans slightly less inclined to support open borders than Germans–even though the former considers itself a nation of immigrants and the latter long insisted that it was not a country for immigra- zione. Infatti, almost half of all Ameri- cans wanted “strict limits,” and 7.6 per- cent wanted an absolute ban on immi- grants–making Americans more restric- tionist than nationals elsewhere in the oecd, to say nothing of the Germans. The Pew Research Center’s 2007 Global Attitudes Survey revealed the same pat- tern: the residents of rich democracies support foreign trade and free markets, but the idea that people should move as freely as goods has no appeal. Large ma- jorities everywhere prefer rigorous con- trols: 75 percent of Americans thought that immigration should be further con- trolled and restricted, once again outdis- tancing Germans as well as residents of the remaining oecd countries.5 Americans not only view immigration similarly to nationals in other rich de- mocracies; maintaining immigration control is one of the rare issues on which Americans themselves agree. Data from the 2004 International Social Survey Program, a multicountry survey coordi- nated with the U.S. General Social Sur- vey, af½rm that when it comes to migra- tion policies, America is not exceptional. As Table 1 shows, 55 percent of Ameri- cans would like to see immigration re- duced, proving themselves to be less Roger Waldinger l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 140 (2) Primavera 2011 217 Tavolo 1 Percent of Respondents Who Said Immigration Levels Should Be Reduced, Stay the Same, or Be Increased Immi- gration: The New American Dilemma Immigration Levels Should: Be Reduced Stay the Same Be Increased U.S. Respondents All 55% 35% 10% By Race/Ethnicity Whites Blacks Hispanics By Ideology Liberals Conservatives By Party Af½liation Strong Democrats Strong Republicans Non-U.S. Respondents Germans All Other oecd Countries 59 54 37 43 62 50 64 73 54 34 33 38 44 31 33 31 22 34 7 14 24 13 7 17 5 5 14 Fonte: NOI. data are from the 2004 General Social Survey. Data for other oecd countries are from the 2003 International Social Survey Program. restrictionist than Germans but more restrictionist than the residents of all other oecd countries. Not all Ameri- cans share this opinion; Tuttavia, divi- sions do not fall along the usual cleav- ages. Regardless of group or political af½liation, only numerical minorities– and small ones at that–favor expanded migration, a view endorsed by roughly a quarter of Hispanics, 17 percent of strong Democrats, E 14 percent of African Americans. By contrast, majori- ties of most categories–including whites, blacks, strong Democrats, and strong Republicans–favor reducing immigra- zione; this view is held by more than one- third of Hispanics and more than four- tenths of liberals.6 Thus, the immigration policy preferred in today’s democracies entails discrimi- nation against foreigners on the wrong side of the border: it is what the people 218 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 want. Yet policy-makers and citizens alike understand that zero immigration is neither a feasible nor a desirable goal; they also realize that many more immi- grants would arrive were there no con- trols at all. Hence, immigration policies in the United States and other developed countries are designed to keep the door only partially open, so as to select just a small portion of the many would-be immigrants ready to leave home for a brighter future abroad. Today, selection takes a different form than it did when the last age of mass migration came to an end after World War I. Though the portals were never shut entirely, the lucky outsiders who gained entry after the war were almost always selected on the basis of national background; migrants with ethnic back- grounds similar to those of the nation’s dominant groups were deemed most ap- pealing. In the twenty-½rst century, se- lection by ethnic origin is in retreat, In- creasingly replaced by an alternative prin- ciple that sociologist Christian Joppke has called “source country universalism.”7 In a sense, the end of ethnic selection was tied to the process by which Ameri- ca solved, or at least alleviated, its older dilemma. Ethnic selection ½t poorly with the ideological environment that swept through rich democracies after World War II. Di conseguenza, the traditional settler societies–Australia, Canada, and the United States–all felt obliged to discard the ethnically driven policies they had put in place several decades before. For the United States, IL 1924 National Ori- gins Act, which drastically curtailed immigration from Southern and East- ern Europe and prohibited immigra- tion from Asia, was an embarrassment, undermining the U.S. claim to lead the “free world.” In 1965, the apogee of the civil rights movement provided the essential ½llip needed to move to a dif- ferent, more open system–albeit one that constrained options for legal im- migration from Mexico.8 What is true of the United States gen- erally holds for the rest of the developed world: policies discriminating on the basis of ascribed characteristics are, if not taboo, at least in retreat. As Joppke argues, liberal states seek neutrality when it comes to the ethnic or cultural differ- ences among the existing people of the state. The same principle applies to po- tential members of the state. Così, se- lecting on the basis of inborn character- istics–race, national origins, or ethnicity –no longer proves acceptable. The shift from ethnic to a more universal form of selection has transformed American immigration by producing a population with origins in the Americas, Asia, E, increasingly, Africa. Its advent inevitably will yield an America in which “minori- ties” will become the majority. While selection on ethnic grounds may be obsolete, other forms of selection re- main alive and well. Policies can use any number of selection criteria: these days, higher degrees or technical skills are the qualities preferred among those foreign- ers allowed to settle for good; by con- trast, brawn suf½ces for the migrants al- lowed to move on a temporary basis to do dangerous, dif½cult, and dirty work– but who are then obliged to go home. Either option may be equally legitimate, though recruiting more foreign brains or cracking down on asylum seekers may raise the red flag of ethnic selection. Tuttavia, to be acceptable, exclusion policy simply has to be applied univer- sally, focusing not on the color of an immigrant’s skin, but on the number and mix of immigrants most likely to advance a country’s competitive posi- tion in today’s global, interconnected world–and keeping out the rest. In- Roger Waldinger l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d . / f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 140 (2) Primavera 2011 219 Immi- gration: The New American Dilemma deed, door-keeping is biased toward those foreigners who bring the most to the table: virtually all developed coun- tries allow for temporary migration of skilled workers, and most encourage their permanent migration as well (which is to say that developed countries are keen on creaming the developing world). By contrast, impeding or barring perma- nent migration of unskilled workers is a widely shared goal.9 Put differently, citizens decide which aliens may enter. Residence is necessary to acquire citizenship; così, existing club members determine the rules by which newcomers gain membership. For the most part, the rules reflect the prefer- ences of people who did not obtain citi- zenship on merit, but rather inherited it as a birthright. Not surprisingly, the rules reinforce those privileges relative to those who want entry into the club. Club mem- bers have some obligation to admit per- sons in flight from persecution, whether found abroad (refugees) or on home soil (asylees); by and large, refugee admis- sions are kept tightly controlled. Other- wise, selection is based on what is good for club members: questo è, brains or brawn for employers and nepotistic ties for ordinary citizens. Discrimination against the aliens on the wrong side of the border is so natural as to be invisible; to many citizens, it hardly bears mention. Today, migrants “have a right to have rights,” the basic fundament of citizenship famously de- scribed by Hannah Arendt in 1951; even the undesirables are no longer cast out of humanity as they were in the mid- twentieth-century world she depicted.10 Lack of citizenship status no longer im- plies lack of citizenship rights. Ancora, the package of rights that the United States and other democratic states make avail- able to all persons found on their soil is fairly limited. Hence, inequality inheres in the rela- tionship between citizens and foreign- ers, whether resident or visiting. Rights and entitlements further vary depending on status. Not all legal immigrants are the same; refugees and asylees–persons who are certi½ed victims of persecution elsewhere–have special entitlements that ordinary legal immigrants do not enjoy, which is precisely why developed states grant this status so reluctantly. “Non-immigrants,” who are present legally but only for sojourns of limited duration, lack the full range of privileges accorded legal residents. Other persons are present without authorization, but this, pure, is a group with legally vary- ing statuses. Some ½nd themselves in a “twilight” zone: they lack permanent residency but may be en route to legal status; così, they enjoy some protections while remaining vulnerable to deporta- tion.11 Others qualify for “temporary protected status”–still another liminal category reserved for persons whose presence may be unauthorized, but who have fled countries where disaster, civil war, or some other consideration makes return perilous. Others are simply un- authorized; they are not utterly bereft of rights or protections, but they do without many of the entitlements that citizens take for granted. Così, international migration–a prod- uct of categorical inequality among na- tions–inevitably produces categorical inequality within nations, yielding differ- ences between citizens and aliens and among the various groups of aliens them- selves. In the United States, Tuttavia, the divergence between policy and public preference has caused the differences between those groups to widen. While Americans clamor for tighter borders, policy has veered in a different direc- zione: foreign-born shares of the popula- 220 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 tion climbed from 4 percent in 1970 A 12.5 percent as of 2009; annual inflows of legal and undocumented immigration averaged one million during the ½rst de- cade of the twenty-½rst century. To some extent, the dynamics of the political process explain why policy has diverged from public preference.12 Pub- lic views have generally been easy to ignore, as immigration usually ranks far below other issues in salience. Until re- cently, it has been dif½cult to draw at- tention to the issue, in large measure because opposition to immigration has yet to ½nd an acceptable voice. Although some on the political fringe are willing to play the nativist card (activating the type of racist sentiments that fueled restrictionists’ efforts a century ago), established political ½gures are not yet ready to head down that route. Howev- er, in contrast to its low position on the public’s agenda, immigration has ranked high on the agenda of established inter- est groups from both the Right and the Left. On the one hand, employers are eager to tap into foreign sources of la- bor (whether high- or low-skilled), and on the other, ethnic groups and human rights activists feel an af½nity toward immigrants and want America to be welcoming of newcomers. This coali- tion of strange bedfellows has long been mobilized to secure policies that produce expanded flows. While policy favoring expansion has recently been replaced by stalemate, the impasse naturally favors perpetuation of the status quo. Inoltre, once begun, migrations have a momentum of their own: the social networks linking settlers in the United States with their friends and relatives abroad reduce the costs and risks associated with migration. This reality is reinforced as settlers earning U.S. wages can effectively absorb the costs produced by ever-tighter restric- tions.13 Once implanted in a workplace, recruitment networks funnel newcom- ers with great effectiveness; consequent- ly, immigration has steadily diversi½ed across industries and places.14 Stalemate is also consistent with the front door/ back door divide–distinguishing legal from illegal immigration–that has char- acterized policy for the past nine decades. The government has put the brakes on legal immigration and made illegal bor- der-crossing more dif½cult and more costly for those willing to take matters into their own hands. But more vigorous measures that might signi½cantly curb illegal immigration have been avoided: by focusing enforcement on the border while abandoning internal enforcement at workplaces, the United States has im- plicitly opted for a policy that facilitates, rather than constrains, undocumented migration. By making border-crossing a more arduous, costly experience, policy has made the undocumented population both more selective–and therefore bet- ter able to avoid further detection–and more eager to settle in the United States for good, as the risks entailed in another unauthorized border-crossing are too much to bear. To correct the divergence of public pol- icy from the preferences of a public that insists on controls, the course of least re- sistance has been to widen formal differ- ences between the people of the state and all the other people in the state. Facilitat- ing that option is the fact that immigrants, though present on the territory, remain outside the polity. Of America’s thirty- eight million foreign-born residents, just over one-third are citizens, having ac- quired the right to vote. Of the remain- ing two-thirds, roughly one-third is com- prised of candidates for citizenship: questo è, permanent residents who are deprived of the franchise but enjoy a broad–if Roger Waldinger l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d / . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 140 (2) Primavera 2011 221 Immi- gration: The New American Dilemma limited–panoply of rights. Another third consists of undocumented immigrants who enjoy far fewer protections and face ever-growing barriers to the transition to candidate-level membership.15 Hence, expanding admissions has gone hand in hand with both a restriction on rights and with a growing divergence between demography and democracy. Borders within the United States have been sharpened, as de jure inequality between citizens and foreign residents has grown. The rights and protections available to undocumented immigrants have undergone particular contraction. Undocumented immigrants are not utter- ly deprived of rights: children under age eighteen are guaranteed the right to schooling; and emergency rooms have to accept all patients, regardless of legal status. Otherwise, the pattern is one of exclusion. Once eligible for social secu- rity bene½ts–America’s most important and successful program of social provi- sion–undocumented immigrants have lost any means of access. The many who contribute (via false or fraudulently ob- tained social security numbers) are per- manently frozen out of the system, with no chance of ever bene½ting from the contributions they make when in unau- thorized status.16 Immigration legisla- tion of the mid-1990s prohibited illegal immigrants from access to federal, state, and local bene½ts and mandated that state and local agencies verify that immi- grants are fully eligible for the bene½ts they apply for. Undocumented immi- grants are not con½ned to the back of the bus, but the possibility that they might obtain a driver’s license is an idea that a majority of voters opposes. Allo stesso tempo, those voters show no interest in improving mass transit for individuals who are not supposed to drive–many of whom also work for the citizens who do not want to pay for foreigners’ hospi- tal bills. Because they lack the right to drive, undocumented immigrants are also deprived of another fringe bene½t: the fact that the driver’s license has be- come a de facto identity card. Inoltre, the wall between undocu- mented immigrants and candidate Amer- icans has become less penetrable. Per- sons who once crossed the border with- out authorization can no longer transi- tion to permanent residency without ½rst returning to their home countries for an extended stay; for all practical purposes, unauthorized border entry is grounds for permanent exclusion from the United States. As the last amnesty for undocumented immigrants was ap- proved a quarter-century ago, undocu- mented status is increasingly a long-term trait. Inoltre, any future amnesty is unlikely to be as generous as the am- nesty of the past, which allowed eligible undocumented immigrants to gain legal status quickly. Piuttosto, the more likely course is the one signaled by the last ill- fated effort at comprehensive immigra- tion reform: IL 2006 McCain-Kennedy bill that provided a multiyear transition out of undocumented status, with no guaranteed track to citizenship. As of this writing, the prospects for the type of comprehensive immigration reform that could yield amnesty of any sort ap- pear increasingly dim. Even foreigners interested in lifelong settlement who reside in the United States legally are not guaranteed membership in the people’s club; instead, citizenship is carefully rationed and its privileges in- creasingly restricted. The divide between citizens and permanent residents, which had narrowed in the aftermath of the civil rights era, has once again begun to widen. Legally resident non-citizens are no longer eligible for bene½ts that are now available to citizens alone; state and lo- cal agencies are forced to verify that im- 222 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 4 0 2 2 1 5 1 8 3 0 0 1 3 d a e d _ a _ 0 0 0 8 9 p d . / f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 migrants are fully eligible for the bene- ½ts they apply for; and legal residents are at risk of losing their residence rights if they fall seriously afoul of the law.17 Unlike citizens, legal residents enjoy lim- ited border-crossing rights. Residency rights can be lost if an immigrant has spent more than a year outside the Unit- ed States; legal residents who received welfare or some other public bene½t can lose the right to return to the United States after only 180 days out of the coun- try. Most important, residency is not a guaranteed right: international law for- bids governments from expelling their own citizens, but no such bar applies to non-citizens. Infatti, legislation passed in the 1990s made deportation a likeli- hood for non-citizens guilty of a number of crimes, including minor infractions. Interior deportation, once an unusual occurrence, is becoming a common real- ità, with deportations up from roughly 114,000 In 1997 A 396,000 In 2009. Though not the majority, immigrants legally present in the United States ½gure prominently in this group, Mainly long- term residents with family members living in the United States, most were deported for nonviolent crimes.18 Moreover, the challenge posed to de- mocracy, given the influx of people liv- ing in the state who are not of the state, is one that Americans have generally preferred to ignore. As the size of the foreign-born population has grown, the proportion obtaining citizenship has declined. Failed efforts at naturalizing residents have become ever more com- mon, and the cost of citizenship acqui- sition has risen sixfold (from $100 A
$600 in constant dollars) over the past
twenty years.19 In contrast to the last
era of mass migration, when “alien vot-
ing” was a common phenomenon at
state and local levels, non-citizens are
almost universally barred from the polls.
Restriction from the franchise may not
bother the individual alien; Tuttavia, IL
consequences add up in socially mean-
ingful ways. That disparity between de-
mography and electorate yields concrete
effects, in contrast to the turn of the twen-
tieth century, when the state’s main job
was to get out of the way.
In the twenty-½rst century, the made-
in-America distinctions between citizens
and foreigners of different types give the
people of the state far greater influence
than their presence among the people in
the state would suggest. The case of Cali-
fornia–the epicenter of contemporary
immigration, containing almost 30 per-
cent of the nation’s foreign-born popu-
lation–demonstrates the dynamics at
play. As of 2000, California’s whites
were a minority of the population but
made up 70 percent of the electorate and
were overrepresented among voters in
2000 to a greater extent than they had
been ten years before. Likewise, people
with the traits of white voters–those
who are older than ½fty-½ve, do not have
children living at home, are well edu-
cated, and earn higher incomes–vote,
make political contributions, and par-
ticipate in political parties at far higher
rates than the younger, poorly paid, E
poorly educated parents who predomi-
nate among the foreign-born. Inoltre,
tomorrow is likely to resemble today:
forecasts for 2040 project that whites
will make up just 26 percent of Califor-
nia’s population but will account for
53 percent of its voters.20
What holds true in California applies
nationwide, albeit to a lesser degree. IL
proportion of the adult population lack-
ing citizenship grew from 2 percent in
1970 A 8 percent in 2009. Due to the in-
creasing discrepancy between population
and democracy, combined with the low
skills and modest earnings of the immi-
Roger
Waldinger
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140 (2) Primavera 2011
223
Immi-
gration:
The New
American
Dilemma
grants left outside the polity, the question
of “who is what” has had a steadily wid-
ening impact on “who gets what.” Non-
citizens are poorer than citizens, a gap
that has substantially widened over the
past four decades. Inoltre, the poorest
of the non-citizens are those most ½rm-
ly excluded from the polity: two-thirds
of the immigrants with less than a high
school education are in the United States
illegally. But these are also the people
whom the citizens entitled to influence
policy and most likely to engage with
politics are least inclined to help. Where-
as the median voter has always been
more selective–better educated and
more affluent–than the median citizen,
that discrepancy has remained relatively
unchanged. By contrast, the gap between
the median voter and the median resident
(legal or otherwise) has grown, as the lat-
ter has fallen increasingly behind the for-
mer. Consequently, redistribution has be-
come less attractive to the median voter
because it requires sharing resources with
non-citizens. Given that the burden of
America’s growing inequality has been
born disproportionately by non-citizens,
the motivations to divide the pie more eq-
uitably have correspondingly declined.21
In the end, the United States has let
circumstances take their course. Decid-
ing not to decide, it has allowed mobili-
ty across the border to increase yet has
proved unwilling to provide new foreign
residents with membership in the people
of the state. On the contrary, America,
like other rich democracies, is doing more
to constrain its new foreign residents
from trying to get ahead by dint of their
own efforts–just like everyone else. Po-
licing the internal boundary between the
people in the state and the people of the
state is not attractive, but it is very hard
to avoid if and when the external bound-
ary cannot be better controlled. While a
democratic state cannot tolerate a (quasi)
½xed distinction between citizens and
aliens who have long resided in the coun-
try, the problem does not appear to be
one that disturbs many Americans in
their sleep. On the contrary, it seems
there is nothing better than gardeners
or maids to whom one does not have to
attend and whose voices will not ring in
the public arena, at least not in the short
term. To be sure, policy-making around
immigration is always beset by a tempo-
ral illusion, focusing on short-term bene-
½ts, as opposed to the long-term costs
which cannot be evaded. But the prob-
lem is that the very pressures making for
ever-more trespassable borders are the
same that make it easy to ignore the
strangers in our midst. The new Amer-
ican dilemma, ahimè, is here to stay.
endnotes
1 “In Praise of Huddled Masses,” The Wall Street Journal, Luglio 3, 1984.
2 World Bank, Global Economic Prospects 2006: Economic Implications of Remittances and
Migration (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005), 25.
3 Immigration enforcement data from Doris Meissner and Donald Kerwin, DHS and Immi-
gration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course (Migration Policy Institute, 2009), http://www
.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/DHS_Feb09.pdf (accesso a gennaio 26, 2011); Foreign aid data
from usaid Greenbook, Total historical dollars on economic assistance, http://gbk.eads
.usaidallnet.gov (accesso a gennaio 26, 2011).
4 Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Massa.: Harvard
Stampa universitaria, 1995), 12.
224
Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze
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5 Calculations from the 2005 World Values Survey, Online Data Analysis, http://www
.wvsevsdb.com/wvs/WVSAnalize.jsp; Pew Global Attitudes Project, Primavera 2007 Survey
Data, http://pewglobal.org/category/data-sets.
6 Data on attitudes toward immigration policy in the United States are calculated from the
General Social Survey; data for non-U.S., oecd countries are calculated from the Inter-
national Social Survey Program survey, “National Identity II," 2003, http://www.gesis
.org/en/services/data/survey-data/issp.
7 Christian Joppke, Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State (Cambridge,
Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2005), especially chap. 2.
8 Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and
the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
9 United Nations Development Program (undp), Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and
Development (New York: undp, 2009), 35–36.
10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., New York: Harcourt, 1994),
295–296.
11 David A. Martin, “Twilight Statuses: A Closer Examination of the Unauthorized Popula-
zione,” Migration Policy Institute Policy Brief no. 2, Giugno 2005.
12 Aristide Zolberg, “Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy,” in The Handbook of
International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Josh Dewind, E
Philip Kasinitz (New York: Russell Sage, 2000); Gary Freeman, “Modes of Immigration
Policies in Liberal Democratic Societies,” International Migration Review 29 (4) (1995).
13 Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican
Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage, 2002).
14 Roger Waldinger and Michael Lichter, How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the
Social Division of Labor (Berkeley: Stampa dell'Università della California, 2003).
15 Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United
States” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Hispanic Center, 2009).
16 Paul Van de Water, “Immigration and Social Security” (Washington, D.C.: Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, novembre 2008), http://www.cbpp.org/½les/
11-20-08socsec.pdf (accesso a gennaio 26, 2011).
17 Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Five Basic Facts on Immigrants and
Their Health Care, Marzo 2008, http://www.kff.org/medicaid/upload/7761.pdf (avuto accesso
Gennaio 26, 2011).
18 Of½ce of Immigration Statistics, 2009 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (Washington, D.C.:
Department of Homeland Security, 2010), Tavolo 36; Human Rights Watch, Forced Apart
(By the Numbers): Non-Citizens Deported Mostly for Nonviolent Offenses, April 15, 2009.
19 Julia Galatt and Margie McHugh, “Immigration Fee Increases in Context,” fact sheet no. 15
(Washington, D.C.: Migration Policy Institute, Febbraio 2007).
20 Jack Citrin and Benjamin Highton, How Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Shape the California
Electorate (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2002).
21 Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of
Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, Massa.: con la stampa, 2006).
Roger
Waldinger
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140 (2) Primavera 2011