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The United States is currently experiencing a “historic flow of unskilled immigration,”
5
warned Stephen Miller in a bruising news conference last week that saw the White House
senior policy adviser harangue a CNN reporter over the famous Emma Lazarus poem on
the base of the Statue of Liberty. Miller, who is also the chief wordsmith behind President
Donald Trump’s revanchist agenda, speaks with the conviction of a true believer.
Unveiling the administration’s new immigration proposal, Miller suggested a shift in who
does, and who doesn’t, earn a coveted green card. “Does the applicant speak English? Can
they support themselves and their families financially? Do they have a skill that will add to
Redefining America
the U.S. economy? Are they being paid a high wage?”
It’s perfectly reasonable to revisit American immigration policy, which has remained mostly
consistent for over 50 years and favors family reunification over skills-based quotas, unlike
many other Western countries. But to claim that the current flow of “unskilled” immigrants into
the United States is “historic” — or a break from precedent — is to betray history.
The great immigration wave that delivered some 40 million newcomers to the United
States between 1830 and 1940 was comprised largely of unskilled workers with minimal
English-language proficiency. For every third- or fourth-generation white ethnic family,
there is a stunning success story, but in the aggregate, their ancestors experienced little
economic mobility in their own lifetimes. Many of them had little interest in even being
American; they came to earn money and return home.
The proposed shift to a skills-based system might be good for the country; it might be 5
bad. It’s the prevailing system in Canada and Australia, two countries that aren’t known for
their hostility to immigrants. But on one important point, Miller is clearly wrong: Trump’s
plan would signal a dramatic break with American history and tradition.
• • •

Americans often think of their history as uniquely providential. But we have always existed
in a wider global context. The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed a seismic economic
reordering in which people, capital and ideas flowed within and between national borders.
The same forces that drove European and Asian migration to the United States — the rise of
commercial agriculture and the attendant trend of land consolidation, industrialization and
growing international trade — also generated massive waves of internal migration from rural
to urban areas and immigration to magnet countries like Brazil, Britain and Canada. The
United States was a major part of a much larger story.
Migration patterns varied widely both between and within countries, but for the most
part, immigrants to the United States between 1830 and 1940 hailed from areas undergoing
fast economic change. The poorest peasants tended not to embark for America, lacking
the financial wherewithal to make the journey. Instead, it was more often the displaced
landowner or semi-skilled journeyman or artisan — someone who had already made the
intermediary migration from countryside to town, and who had at least a modicum of
exposure to small-city life — who made the journey. Studies of Italian immigrants in early
20th-century Rochester, Utica and Kansas City reveal a population of families that owned
small homesteads in the old country, rather than day laborers or the very destitute. The same
trend was evident in other cities and among other immigrant populations.

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