Reply to Mark Krikorian
Over on the Corner, Mark Krikorian has posted a response to my Wall Street Journal column last week on Reagan and immigration:
I suspect…[Peter is] right that open immigration appealed to Reagan ideologically….He came of age and was formed intellectually in the post-immigration era; mass immigration came to an end when he was 13 years old. From the time he was 20 until he was 34, annual immigration never exceeded 100,000, and was usually much lower. When he gave his “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964, total legal immigration was less than 300,000 and Ted Kennedy had not yet laid the statutory groundwork for today’s mass immigration of well over a million a year.
The context is vital—Mark is exactly right about this. And to the statistics Mark cites, I’d add a few more. As recently as 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in only ten of California’s 58 counties did the Hispanic proportion of the population stand at 25 percent or higher, while in 13 counties the Hispanic proportion of the population stood at five percent or less. By 2006, the number of counties in which Hispanics accounted for 25 percent or more of the population had risen to 25, while the number in which Hispanics accounted for five percent or less had fallen to zero. Ronald Reagan’s California—the California he encountered when he moved here to become a contract player at Warner Brothers and that remained overwhelmingly Anglo all the way through his two terms as governor—represented a kind of Iowa on the Pacific. The California of today—the California, that is, in which non-Hispanic whites now account for less than 43 percent of the population—would have seemed unimaginable.
What would he have made of the changes immigration has wrought in California? I thought a lot about this as I was pulling together my notes. A man with a particular admiration for those who make their living from the land, Reagan would have been acutely aware of the changes in the Central, Salinas, and Imperial valleys, the regions devoted to agriculture. Entire towns have become, in effect, outposts of Mexico, and from Stockton south to Calexico you can now trace a line of travel along which you would seldom hear a word of English. To Reagan, immigration meant assimiliation—that, at a minimum, the children of immigrants would be brought up speaking English. Yet in swaths of California today, English is the second language, seldom used. Reagan would have found this unnerving.
Against that, though, Reagan would have recognized what nearly everyone who lives here in California recognizes: that immigrants to the Golden State are overwhelmingly hardworking and decent. Reagan would have known Mexican-Americans like the man who runs the auto repair shop here in my own town. After working for years as a mechanic, he bought out the owner. He’s cheerful, honest, and efficient—and he employs a dozen people. Or like the man who does a lot of the gardening in our neighborhood. He doesn’t speak much English, but he runs an efficient and friendly small business that employs, again, a dozen or so people. After campaigning against an amnesty for illegal aliens in his primary challenge to Barbara Boxer, maverick Democrat Mickey Kaus put it like this:
On immigration, it’s a very hard row to hoe in a state like California where everybody appreciates the contribution of both legal and illegal immigrants to the state economy. You can’t live here without sort of liking the people who have come here because by and large they are good people.
Reagan would have liked the people who have come here. Even as he grew concerned about the effects they were having, he’d have liked the people themselves a lot.
Were he with us today, I argued in my column, Reagan would have insisted on restoring the rule of law at the border before we so much as considered comprehensive immigration reform. Yet my ground for this argument concerned less the effects of immigration than the behavior of the federal government. In failing to put into effect the enforcement mechanisms that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act mandated, Reagan would have seen, the federal government has engaged in a protracted and utter dereliction of duty. Reagan would have been beside himself.
So the question remains: On immigration itself, where would Reagan have stood? Would he have argued that immigration of the kind that has taken place since 1986 has benefitted California and the nation? And that we could use still more? Or perhaps that despite the benefits of this last wave of immigration we now need time to assimilate these new millions among us? And that we ought accordingly to reduce immigration by a half? Or two-thirds? Or—yet another alternative--that the massive immigration of these last couple of decades represented a terrible mistake? And that we therefore ought to cut immigration by four-fifths? Or six-sevenths? I just don’t know how Reagan would have sorted all of this out. The record permits too few clear inferences. The context, as Mark argues, has changed too dramatically. There is a limit, in the end, to the guidance we can derive even from as great and good a man as Ronald Reagan. We’re on our own.
And yet we still have this. “Let us resolve,” Reagan said when he returned from the 1988 Moscow summit,
to continue one nation, one people…to keep America a shining city, a light unto the nations.
America, the shining city. Our generation must decide how best to live up to that ideal, but Reagan offers us principles to draw upon. We must be as generous as we can toward those who wish to join us, setting an example for all the world. Yet we must recognize the need always to remain one nation and one people.
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May '10
Re: Reply to Mark Krikorian
Maybe Reagan's "trust-but-verify" dealings with the Soviets provide a better guide to how he would approach immigration reform today, given, as Peter says, the outrage he would feel at the feds' failure to implement the enforcement mechanisms of the 1986 act. Such an attitude would lead to, I suspect, positions pretty much the same as the fence-first-then-we'll-talk McCain proposals, albeit without the ill-advised us-vs-them vibe of McCain's ad (which, I bet anything, McCain himself now finds cringe-inducing).