The most important thing about America

Is the hardest thing for Americans to accept

 

The emergence of the United States as a global power and of America as a civilization is one of the great stories of human history in the last quarter-millennium. Not all have welcomed this emergence, and not every aspect of it has made even Americans proud. But its significance for the world is undeniable.

What made it happen? What was the secret of America's success?

Fans and critics of America have proposed various answers. America's embrace of freedom. Americans’ ruthlessness toward the indigenous peoples they encountered. America's adherence to Protestant Christian values. Americans’ imposition of their values on other peoples and countries. American initiative. American aggressiveness.

There's something to all these explanations. But the likeliest explanation is one that Americans have wrestled with each other over from the beginning: immigration.

Immigration to America took several forms. Most immigrants were volunteers, albeit often prompted to leave their homelands by misfortune of one sort or another. Others came bound, in chains from Africa or the West Indies. Indentured servants voluntarily bound themselves for limited periods.

For most of American history most came legally. Slave imports were banned in 1808. Most Chinese were excluded starting in the 1880s. But nearly everyone else could enter legally until the 1920s.

Many immigrants faced opposition from native-born Americans. American Indians resented the influx of European settlers. English Americans complained about German immigrants. Germans groused about the Irish, who protested the Italians, who decried the Russians, and so on. 

Meanwhile the same immigrants were welcomed by those already here. Indians liked the technology the English brought. Germans purchased land from the English, making the English rich(er). Railroads hired the Irish. Italians filled landlords’ tenements.

This ambivalence toward newcomers on the part of the already-here has been the predominant attitude on immigration from the beginning until now. It’s why the “immigration problem” will never be solved. There will always be tension between those who want more immigration and those who want less. In this regard the immigration problem is like the tax problem. One party wants to raise taxes, the other to lower them. This difference in preference won’t go away. It’s part of what defines the parties. Much the same is true of immigration.

Beyond the political debate has been the practical effect of immigration. Most immediately, immigrants and their descendants swelled the population of what became a continent-wide country. From fewer than three million souls at independence, the American population multiplied a hundred-fold by the early twenty-first century, giving America the third largest population in the world, after India and China.

Immigrants provided the labor that built the American economy into the world’s largest by the beginning of the twentieth century, a rank it has retained until the present (with China coming close recently).

They didn’t merely work. They brought ideas and energy that put human life into the capitalist theories of Adam Smith and others. From the nineteenth century until today, immigrants have created many thousands of businesses that have provided jobs for their workers and goods for their customers.

Their success inspired envy. Generation after generation, the willingness of immigrants to start at the bottom of the economic ladder frustrated efforts by the native-born to lift the bottom rungs to a higher living standard. Chinese workers were barred from entry in the late nineteenth century following a campaign by the Workingmen’s party in California, where most Chinese entered America, to keep them out. Fear of economic dislocation continued to inform protests against immigration into the twenty-first century, when America-born engineers complain that immigrant engineers are taking their jobs and lowering the salary scale.

The complaints weren’t couched in economic terms alone. Cultural, religious and racial elements were piled on. English colonists in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century berated German immigrants for clinging to the German language and German folkways. Catholicism was held against the Irish in the nineteenth century, Judaism against Polish and Russian Jews in the early twentieth century, and Islam against immigrants from the Middle East in the twenty-first century. Fair-skinned children of English and German immigrants scorned the darker skins of Italians and Greeks and Mexicans.

The recurrent complaint was that the newcomers were changing America beyond recognition. The complaint was deeply and honestly felt, although it could be manipulated for political purposes. In every generation, people felt unsettled by the churning within the American population.

And this, above all, was the secret of America’s success. America was in a condition of constant turmoil. It was always a work in progress. Comfort in one generation didn’t guarantee comfort in the next generation. Americans had to stay sharp, to stay ahead of the competition, which arrived on each new boat. 

The churning made Americans wealthy. Not equally so. Laments at inequality have been a consistent feature of American life and politics.

But the laments never produced reforms that seriously limited inequality. Their failure to do so owed much to the immigrant ethos, which operated on the premise that one day we, or more likely our children, will become rich too.

Immigration made Americans rich. Did it make them happy?

Likely the opposite. Happiness entails a degree of contentment. Immigrants—the voluntary ones, that is—were self-selected for discontentment. They left their birth countries because they weren’t satisfied with their conditions and prospects. Things were better in America, but the immigrants didn’t suddenly lose the restless ambition that had driven them thousands of miles from home and family. They typically imposed their ambition for betterment on their children. If the third generation relaxed a bit, by then there were new immigrants with the drive of the first generation.

Emma Lazarus played a bad trick on America with her Statue of Liberty poem. “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free /  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

Poor the immigrants might have been. And yearning to breathe free. But they weren’t the wretched refuse of anyone’s shore. These were the men and women with the character traits most essential to success in America. 

Theirs were the traits that built America. They were the people who built America. We are their children and grandchildren.

Many of us complain about immigration. Of course we do. Our immigrant forebears made our lives easier than theirs, and we don't want to have to work as hard as they did.