et me begin with a story: In 1979, Deng Xiaoping
arrived here on an official visit. China was emerging
from the Cultural Revolution, and poised to embark
on the capitalist road. When President Carter sat
down with Mr. Deng, he told him he was
concerned over the right of the Chinese people to
emigrate. The Jackson-Vanik amendment, Mr.
Carter said, prohibited granting most favored nation
trade status to regimes that did not allow their
people to emigrate.
"Well, Mr. President," Deng cheerfully replied, "Just
how many Chinese do you want? Ten million.
Twenty million. Thirty million?" Deng's answer
stopped Carter cold. In a few words, the Chinese
leader had driven home a point Mr. Carter seemed
not to have grasped: Hundreds of millions of people
would emigrate to America in a eyelash, far more
than we could take in, far more than our existing
population of 270 million, if we threw open our
borders. And though the U.S. takes in more people
than any other nation, it still restricts immigration to
about one million a year, with three or four hundred
thousand managing to enter every year illegally.
There is more to be gleaned from this encounter.
Mr. Carter's response was a patriotic, or, if you
will, a nationalistic response. Many might even label
it xenophobic. The President did not ask whether
bringing in 10 million Chinese would be good for
them. He had suddenly grasped that the real issue
was how many would be good for America? Mr.
Carter could have asked another question: Which
Chinese immigrants would be best for America? It
would make a world of difference whether China
sent over 10 million college graduates or 10 million
illiterate peasants, would it not?
Since the Carter-Deng meeting, America has taken
in 20 million immigrants, many from China and Asia,
many more from Mexico, Central America and the
Caribbean, and a few from Europe. Social scientists
now know a great deal about the impact of this
immigration.
Like all of you, I am awed by the achievements of
many recent immigrants. Their contributions to
Silicon Valley are extraordinary. The
over-representation of Asian-born kids in advanced
high school math and science classes is awesome,
and, to the extent that it is achieved by a superior
work ethic, these kids are setting an example for all
of us. The contributions that immigrants make in
small businesses and hard work in tough jobs that
don't pay well merits our admiration and deepest
respect. And, many new immigrants show a visible
love of this country and an appreciation of freedom
that makes you proud to be an American.
Northern Virginia, where I live, has experienced a
huge and sudden surge in immigration. It has
become a better place, in some ways, but nearly
unrecognizable in others, and no doubt worse in
some realms, a complicated picture over all. But it
is clear to anyone living in a state like California or
Virginia that the great immigration wave, set in
motion by the Immigration Act of 1965, has put an
indelible mark upon America.
We are no longer a biracial society; we are now a
multi-racial society. We no longer struggle simply to
end the divisions and close the gaps between black
and white Americans; we now grapple, often
awkwardly, with an unprecedented ethnic diversity.
We also see the troubling signs of a national turning
away from the idea that we are one people, and the
emergence of a radically different idea, that we are
separate ethnic nations within a nation.
Al Gore caught the change in a revealing
malapropism. Mr. Gore translated the national
slogan, "E Pluribus Unum," which means "Out of
many, one," into "Out of one, many." Behind it, an
inadvertent truth: America is Balkanizing as never
before.
Five years ago, a bipartisan presidential
commission, chaired by Barbara Jordan, presented
its plans for immigration reform. The commission
called for tighter border controls, tougher penalties
on businesses that hire illegal aliens, a new system
for selecting legal immigrants, and a lowering of the
annual number to half a million. President Clinton
endorsed the recommendations. But after ethnic
groups and corporate lobbies for foreign labor
turned up the heat, he backed away.
The data that support the Jordan recommendations
are more refined today. We have a National
Academy of Sciences report on the economic
consequences of immigration, a Rand study, and
work by Harvard's George Borjas and other
scholars. All agree that new immigration to the
United States is heavily skewed to admitting the less
skilled. Unlike other industrialized democracies, the
U.S. allots the vast majority of its visas on the basis
of whether new immigrants are related to recent
immigrants, rather than whether they have the skills
or education America needs. This is why it is so
difficult for Western and Eastern Europeans to
come here, while almost entire villages from El
Salvador have come in.
Major consequences flow from having an
immigration stream that ignores education or skills.
Immigrants are now more likely than native-born
Americans to lack a high school education. More
than a quarter of our immigrant population receives
some kind of welfare, compared to 15 percent of
native-born. Before the 1965 bill, immigrants were
less likely to receive welfare. In states with many
immigrants, the fiscal impact is dramatic. The
National Academy of Sciences contends that
immigration has raised the annual taxes of each
native household in California by $1,200 a year.
But the real burden is felt by native-born workers,
for whom mass immigration means stagnant or
falling wages, especially for America's least skilled.
There are countervailing advantages. Businesses
can hire new immigrants at lower pay; and
consumers gain because reduced labor costs
produce cheaper goods and services. But, generally
speaking, the gains from high immigration go to
those who use the services provided by new
immigrants.
If you are likely to employ a gardener or
housekeeper, you may be financially better off. If
you work as a gardener or housekeeper, or at a
factory job in which unskilled immigrants are rapidly
joining the labor force, you lose. The last twenty
years of immigration have thus brought about a
redistribution of wealth in America, from less-skilled
workers and toward employers. Mr. Borjas
estimates that one half of the relative fall in the
wages of high school graduates since the 1980s can
be traced directly to mass immigration.
At some point, this kind of wealth redistribution,
from the less well off to the affluent, becomes
malignant. In the 1950s and '60s, Americans with
low reading and math scores could aspire to and
achieve the American Dream of a middle class
lifestyle. That is less realistic today. Americans
today who do poorly in high school are increasingly
condemned to a low-wage existence; and mass
immigration is a major reason why.
There is another drawback to mass immigration: a
delay in the assimilation of immigrants that can
deepen our racial and ethnic divisions. As in Al
Gore's "Out of One, Many."
Concerns of this sort are even older than the
Republic itself. In 1751, Ben Franklin asked: "Why
should Pennsylvania, founded by the English,
become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so
numerous as to Germanize us instead of our
Anglifying them?" Franklin would never find out if
his fears were justified. German immigration was
halted by the Seven Years War; then slowed by the
Great Lull in immigration that followed the
American Revolution. A century and half later,
during what is called the Great Wave, the same
worries were in the air.
In 1915 Theodore Roosevelt told the Knights of
Columbus: "There is no room in this country for
hyphenated Americanism….The one absolutely
certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of
preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a
nation at all, would be to permit it to become a
tangle of squabbling nationalities." Congress soon
responded by enacting an immigration law that
brought about a virtual forty-year pause to digest,
assimilate, and Americanize the diverse immigrant
wave that had rolled in between 1890 and 1920.
Today, once again, it is impossible not to notice the
conflicts generated by a new "hyphenated
Americanism." In Los Angeles, two years ago,
there was an anguishing afternoon in the Coliseum
where the U.S. soccer team was playing Mexico.
The Mexican-American crowd showered the U.S.
team with water bombs, beer bottles and trash. The
Star Spangled Banner was hooted and jeered. A
small contingent of fans of the American team had
garbage hurled at them. The American players later
said that they were better received in Mexico City
than in their own country.
Last summer, El Cenizo, a small town in south
Texas, adopted Spanish as its official language. All
town documents are now to be written, and all
town business conducted, in Spanish. Any official
who cooperates with U.S. immigration authorities
was warned he or she would be fired. To this day,
Governor Bush is reluctant to speak out on this de
facto secession of a tiny Texas town to Mexico.
Voting in referendums that play a growing part in
the politics of California is now breaking down
sharply on ethnic lines. Hispanic voters opposed
Proposition 187 to cut off welfare to illegal aliens,
and they rallied against it under Mexican flags. They
voted heavily in favor of quotas and ethnic
preferences in the 1996 California Civil Rights
Initiative, and, again, to keep bilingual education in
1998. These votes suggest that in the California of
the future, when Mexican-American voting power
catches up with Mexican-American population, any
bid to end racial quotas by referendum will fail. A
majority of the state's most populous immigrant
group now appears to favor set-asides and
separate language programs, rather than to be
assimilated into the American mainstream.
The list of troubling signs can be extended. One
may see them in the Wen Ho Lee nuclear secrets
case, as many Chinese-Americans immediately
concluded the United States was prosecuting Mr.
Lee for racist reasons.
Regrettably, a cultural Marxism called political
correctness is taking root that makes it impossible
to discuss immigration in any but the most glowing
terms. In New York City billboards that made the
simple point that immigration increases crowding
and that polls show most Americans want
immigration rates reduced were forced down under
circumstances that came very close to
government-sponsored censorship. The land of the
free is becoming intolerant of some kinds of political
dissent.
Sociologist William Frey has documented an
out-migration of black and white Americans from
California, some of them seeking better labor
market conditions, others in search of a society like
the one they grew up in. In California and other high
immigration states, one also sees the rise of gated
communities where the rich close themselves off
from the society their own policies produce.
I don't want to overstate the negatives. But in too
many cases the American Melting Pot has been
reduced to a simmer. At present rates, mass
immigration reinforces ethnic subcultures, reduces
the incentives of newcomers to learn English; and
extends the life of linguistic ghettos that might
otherwise be melded into the great American
mainstream. If we want to assimilate new
immigrants-and we have no choice if we are remain
one nation-we must slow down the pace of
immigration.
Whatever its shortcomings, the United States has
done far better at alleviating poverty than most
countries. But an America that begins to think of
itself as made up of disparate peoples will find
social progress far more difficult. It is far easier to
look the other way when the person who needs
help does not speak the same language, or share a
common culture or common history.
Americans who feel it natural and right that their
taxes support the generation that fought World War
II -- will they feel the same way about those from
Fukien Province or Zanzibar? If America continues
on its present course, it could rapidly become a
country with no common language, no common
culture, no common memory and no common
identity. And that country will find itself very short
of the social cohesion that makes compassion
possible.
None of us are true universalists: we feel
responsibility for others because we share with
them common bonds -- common history and a
common fate. When these are gone, this country
will be a far harsher place.
That is why I am proposing immigration reform to
make it possible to fully assimilate the 30 million
immigrants who have arrived in the last thirty years.
As President, I will ask Congress to reduce new
entry visas to 300,000 a year, which is enough to
admit immediate family members of new citizens,
with plenty of room for many thousands with the
special talents or skills our society needs. If after
several years, it becomes plain that the United
States needs more immigrants because of labor
shortages, it should implement a point system similar
to that of Canada and Australia, and allocate visas
on a scale which takes into account education,
knowledge of English, job skills, age, and relatives
in the United States.
I will also make the control of illegal immigration a
national priority. Recent reports of thousands of
illegals streaming across the border into Arizona,
and the sinister and cruel methods used to smuggle
people by ship into the United States, demand that
we regain control of our borders. For a country that
cannot control its borders isn't fully sovereign;
indeed, it is not even a country anymore.
Without these reforms, America will begin a rapid
drift into uncharted waters. We shall become a
country with a dying culture and deepening divisions
along the lines of race, class, income and language.
We shall lose for our children and for the children of
the 30 million who have come here since 1970 the
last best hope of earth. We will betray them all-by
denying them the great and good country we were
privileged to grow in. We just can't do that.
With immigration at the reduced rate I recommend,
America will still be a nation of immigrants. We will
still have the benefit of a large, steady stream of
people from all over the world whose life dream is
to be like us - Americans. But, with this reform,
America will become again a country engaged in the
mighty work of assimilation, of shaping new
Americans, a proud land where newcomers give up
their hyphens, the great American melting pot does
its work again, and scores of thousands of
immigrant families annually ascend from poverty into
the bosom of Middle America to live the American
dream.
