Penguin.com (usa)

In a 1977 radio address, Reagan discussed what he called "the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters." The next time you tune into Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager, contrast their take immigration with radio Reagan's.

Reagan understood that immigrants are coming here to work, no live on the dole. He also grasped that natives and immigrants don't compete with one another for jobs in a zero-sum labor market and that our policy makers would do better to focus less on protecting U.S. workers from immigrant competition and more on expanding the economic pie. In his November 1979 speech announcing his candidacy for president, Reagan called for free labor flows throughout North America. Reagan knew that immigration, like free trade, which he also supported, benefits everyone in the long run.

Later in the campaign, in December of 19179, Reagan responded to criticism from conservative columnist Holmes Alexander. "Please believe me when I tell you the idea of a North American accord has been mine for many, many years," said the future president. And conservatives calling today for a well along the entire United States-Mexico border should know that Reagan was not a big fan of that prospect. "Some months before I declared," he continued in his response to Alexander, "I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico… I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas—how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence."

At the end of his presidency, Reagan was still invoking Winthrop. "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it," he remarked in his 1989 farewell address to the nation. "But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if they had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here."

It's true that in 1986 Reagan signed the Immigration Control and Reform Act, which included employer sanctions and more border security, but he also insisted on a provision for legalizing immigrants already in the United States. Which is to say, he supported "amnesty." In his signing statement, he said, "We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who must now hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight, and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans."

Same Old, Same Old

Most every anti-immigrant argument rolled out today is a retread. Benjamin Franklin was complaining about bilingual sign posts and "swarms" of inassimilable Germans migrating to Pennsylvania 250 years ago. Later, in the nineteenth century, people like Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and a leading nativist in his day, would pick up Franklin's banner. Morse was a founder and generous financier of the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing movement, and in lieu of Germans he railed against Irish immigration in the antebellum decades. In his 1835 treatise against the political influence of Catholicism, Morse argued that poor, uneducated Irish Catholics were subverting the values and ideals of Anglo-America and should therefore be kept out of the country.

Opposition to Asian immigration came next. By the later part of the nineteenth century, "Yellow Peril" was all the rage, stoked by increased Chinese migration to the American-West. A famous 1881 illustration first published in The Wasp, a San Franciscan-based literary magazine edited by Ambrose Bierce, depicts Lady Liberty as a Chinese coolie gripping an opium pipe. The rays of light emanating from the statue's head are labeled "Immorality," "Filth," "Disease," and "Ruin to White Labor."