Birthrates and Immigration

In 1921, a professor from Stanford University testified to a Congressional committee that by the year 2000 a majority of the population of California would be of Japanese heritage. He extrapolated this stunning conclusion from birthrate data, which showed a tremendously higher fertility rate among Japanese than the general population.

Perhaps standards for faculty hiring at Stanford University in its early years were shockingly low. What's more likely is this professor was simply lying with math to reach a preordained conclusion -- that he didn't like Japanese immigration. Obviously, old people don't typically embark on transoceanic emigration voyages, and the birthrate he cited was simply a product of the Japanese population being much younger than the rest.

Demographers at Pew, in releasing their findings that 8% of births in 2008 were by illegal immigrant mothers, dutifully made this point up front. But let's start the clock on how fast immigration opponents start spinning these figures to claim some demographic cataclysm is coming, or to prove that the 14th Amendment really does need revising.

Like internal migration within a country, immigration/emigration is about a search for resources and employment. Sure, some percentage of immigrants in the nation's past were fleeing oppressive regimes in their homelands -- my great-grandfather left Lithuania because the Russians were going to conscript him to fight the Japanese. Especially since the end of the Cold War, however, immigration policy has had little to do with a flight to freedom, which remains the domain of national refugee policy (and vice-versa, when it comes to the differences between Haitian and Cuban refugees, for example.) What we are essentially talking about when we talk about immigration is what to do with a particular, transnational labor pool.

Law professor Bill Ong Hing was totally right last week writing for Slate that the real solution to keeping the largest (Mexican) portion of this labor home is economic development in their home countries. It's what richer EU countries did, he notes, to stem emigration from nations like Greece and Portugal when they joined in the 1990s. And NAFTA's been a disaster for many working and farming Mexicans.

The reason we're still talking about birthrates and the 14th Amendment, though, is the same reason the professor's proposal has not a snowball's chance in hell of going anywhere. If conservatives have a problem giving WIC cards or even public school education to the children of illegal immigrants on the grounds that it's redistributing resources to people who don't deserve it, how are they going to feel about giving away the billions it would take to boost the Mexican economy?

An issue like immigrant birthrate is illuminating because it's fundamentally a visceral one. Those squeamish about the racial diversification of the country imagine "they are making more of them." How far the Republican leadership at the national, state, and local level will want to run with this issue will be telling because of all the angles of attack on the illegal immigration problem, this is the one that closest to outright white supremacy.

Duncan Hunter echoes California's nativist past

I wanted to give something I saw this week a bit of historical context: Rep. Duncan Hunter's comment that he supported the deportation of native-born American citizens who are the children of illegal immigrants. The comment came during a Q&A and you can view it here:



I'll get back to this issue being American reflecting "what's in our souls" later. His call for American citizens to be deported (and children no less) obviously runs smack into the 14th Amendment, which must be left out of the copies of the Constitution Hunter's Tea Party crowd carry around with them. That such a proposed law would engender some debate at all is rather shocking to me. I'm no Con-Law scholar, but "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" sounds like a description of American territories in the 1860s.

Anyway, anti-immigration leaders in the 1920s at least knew their constitutional precedent better than Hunter and his lot. At that time, California Senator James Phelan and Sacramento Bee editor V.S. McClatchy supported the proposal of a constitutional amendment that would strip the right of citizenship from native-born children of Japanese immigrants. The initiative went nowhere in Congress but in 1924 the National Origins Act did outlaw the further immigration of Japanese or any other Asians. And states in the West passed a swath of laws that restricted Japanese land ownership and rights of commerce. Supporters of these measures, like Hunter, focused on the supposed negative economic impact that Japanese immigrants had on state and local economies. They argued that Japanese farmers and businesses routinely undercut the price of their "American" competition.

Of course, that wasn't the whole story. Racism seeped into the seams of these arguments. Japanese farmers were able to reduce their prices so aggressively because they held much lower standards of living. They weren't concerned about their impact on their native-born neighbors because Japanese immigrants were loyal to a foreign land and an inferior religion. I have read Congressional testimony by demographic experts of the era that claimed that because of the high birthrates of Japanese immigrant families, which were reflective of their racial difference from whites, California would be majority Japanese by 2000.

The terminus of this logic was the World War II internment camp. While we will almost certainly avoid anything resembling that blight on the nation's "soul," if you will, elected representatives need to take a bit more pause before playing to the nativist rabble and calling for the expunging of people's citizenship rights.