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United States; not highly skilled or educated workers, but often possessed of some exposure 5
to industry or agriculture.
• • •
Stephen Miller isn’t necessarily posing the wrong question. (I suspect he’s posing it for the wrong Joshua Zeitz
reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.) The United States 100 years ago was a nation
undergoing rapid industrial and urban growth. It didn’t need immigrants prepared to staff a
knowledge economy. It needed a surfeit of hard-working people who could operate a sewing
machine, mine coal, produce rubber and steel, dig ditches and build cars — and cheaply.
That’s not the America of 2017, and it’s worth having a discussion about how our
economy and immigration policy should align. Part of that conversation must surely
include acknowledgment that our service economy may require the contribution of unskilled
workers, and people willing to undertake unskilled jobs on, say, farms or in fast-food
restaurants, to build a better future for their children. It should be compassionate and
pro-family — and being pro-family means helping families reunite and stay together. And
it should recognize that today’s immigrant begets tomorrow’s all-American kid — and that all-
American kid might go on to develop the next broad-spectrum antibiotic or self-driving car.
Fifty years ago, the historian Oscar Handlin described early American immigrants as
“uprooted” — poor, dispossessed, dazed and ill-prepared to succeed in urban, industrial
America. Damaged goods. Later generations of historians challenged this idea. They mined
a treasure-trove of primary sources and discovered that immigrants were often savvy and
industrious. It took ambition, drive and a high tolerance for risk to transplant one’s self,
whether from the Irish countryside to Liverpool or from Minsk to Philadelphia. They were
strivers whose children fought world wars and built great companies. You can see their
legacy today in the faces of so many millions of hard-working newcomers.
If we’re going to have a discussion about immigration, we should be honest about our
collective history. Today’s immigrants look a lot like yesterday’s. They resemble my great-
grandparents, who came to the United States without a word of English or a practical skill,
but full of grit, ambition and pragmatic hope. That’s very much an American story, and it has
to be part of the current conversation.
2017

questions

1. According to Zeitz, what were the characteristics and motivation of immigrants to the U.S.
between 1830 and 1940?
2. How does Zeitz challenge the idea that the “unskilled but industrious newcomer” (para. 9)
could become economically prosperous within a short period of time?
3. How did the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) reverse many of the provisions of the
Johnson-Reed Act (1924)?
4. What does Zeitz mean when he asserts that “it is worth having a discussion about how our
economy and immigration policy should align” (para. 22)?
5. In what ways were the immigrants arriving in the U.S. in 2000 similar to those who arrived a
century earlier?
6. What is the great virtue of immigrants in both the past and the present, according to Zeitz?
Immigration and the American Dream CONVERSATION
75
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