Page 94 - 2021-bfw-aufses-alr-1e

roughly ne-quarter spoke only German. In Chicago in the 1920s, most movie theaters in ethnic
5
neighborhoods deployed subtitles, as large numbers of first-generation residents could not
understand English. . . .
“I spoke not a word of English when I started school,” remembered Jerry Della Femina,
who later became an advertising executive in Manhattan. “But then why should I have?
Italian was spoken at home. I lived in a claustrophobically Italian neighborhood, everyone I
knew spoke only Italian, so it was natural that I didn’t know English.” Della Femina grew up
in Brooklyn — not in the 1920s, but in the 1940s and 1950s.
Redefining America
So Stephen Miller got that wrong, too. 15
• • •
In 1924, Congress passed — and Calvin Coolidge signed — the Johnson-Reed Act,
which swung the doors closed to most immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.
(Ironically, this legislative act, cruel as it was, went a long way in driving acculturation;
without a steady stream of newcomers clad in Old World clothes and speaking foreign
tongues, a second generation of accentless English speakers — crazy about baseball and
Hollywood — became the new face of ethnic America.) It wasn’t until 1965, at the high
water-mark of the Great Society, that Lyndon Johnson and his congressional allies revised
the statute. It was the realization of a decades-long dream on the part of urban Democratic
congressmen whose constituents — Jews, Poles, Italians, Russians, Greeks, Serbs and other
Southern and Eastern European ethnics — had been explicit targets of the 1924 law.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated hard quotas on countries
previously considered undesirable and ushered in a new era of ethnic, racial and religious
diversity. Though in its first iteration, the law privileged skilled and educated workers; in its
final iteration, it biased family unification. The children, spouses and siblings of legal residents
took precedence, along with scientists, artists, professionals and skilled manual workers.
In the first years of its enactment, the new law opened the door to large numbers of
professionals, particularly from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. Whereas fewer than
2 percent of immigrants in 1900 qualified as skilled workers, by 1973 roughly 10 percent met
that qualification. More than 50,000 physicians and nurses emigrated to the U.S. between
1969 and 1973 alone, most of them from countries like the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan
and China. Within two decades, upward of 80 percent of staff physicians at some New York
hospitals were Asian immigrants. The same pattern was on display in other professions,
particularly in the STEM fields.
But the law’s emphasis on family unification also meant that large numbers of unskilled
workers benefited as well, including many siblings and parents of skilled professionals. Of
Chinese residents who arrived in the U.S. before 1970, fewer than 3 percent lived below
the poverty line in their home country. Of those who came after 1975, roughly one-quarter
had been poor. Roger Daniels, a prominent historian of immigration, wrote of a “greater
tendency for recent immigrants to be poorly educated, deficient in English, and to work in
the low-paid service trades, such as laundries, restaurants, and the sweatshop enterprises
typical of the inner city.”
In other words, the immigrants who arrived in 2000 came to resemble more closely the 20
immigrants of 1900 — not the poorest of the poor, who can’t afford to make the journey to the

74
Copyright © 2021 by Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample chapter.
Distributed by by Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.

AufsesALR1e_24889_ch05_002_097.indd 74 5/4/2020 3:58:20 PM