Aging Societies and the Changing Logic of Immigration (2008)

In the United States, demographic and economic change in the twenty-first century is likely to make immigration ever more necessary-or at least to make it necessary for new reasons-and to lead to immigration policies that involve entirely new dynamics. Aging will be a big part of this change. To understand why aging in America, along with other demographic and economic forces, will necessitate a new logic for immigration, it is important to examine the reasons for earlier waves of U.S. immigration. Often, such rationales are summarized in shorthand, even cryptic, terms. Thus, it has become customary to call the United States a nation of (Handlin, 1973 [1951]). Often, such statements mean simply that the United States is one of only a handful of countries that historically have legally admitted substantial numbers of immigrants. Indeed, no other country takes in more newcomers- nearly 75 million new legal residents since record-keeping began in 1820 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2007)-although some nations have accepted relatively more on a per-capita basis (Brown and Bean, 2005). But the deeper significance of immigration cannot be captured by numbers alone. American immigration, in particular, is often imagined and recalled in concert with the ideals of economic opportunity, social mobility, and national unity. There are several reasons for this connection. First, much of American immigration took place for the purpose of nation-building (Fuchs, 1990). Settlers were for the most part actively sought, if not always warmly welcomed. Second, after its founding, the country adopted a model of small land grants as a way of attracting settlers to its western frontier, thus providing economic opportunity to family farmers rather than large landholders (Zolberg, 2006). Third, much of the country's nonagricultural immigration occurred at the same time as the industrial revolution in the western world was raising living standards several times over (Friedman, 2006), a coincidence that helped create the idea that immigration and prosperity were connected. Fourth, U.S. immigration was unusual in that newcomers came from a large number of source countries, thus contributing to the notion that America offered a form of government that could embrace diversity and transcend difference (Gabaccia, 2002). These themes have manifested themselves to some degree over nearly four centuries, in four major waves of entrants, with the forced migra- tion of slaves constituting a fifth wave (see Fig- ure i). During each of these major surges of voluntary immigration, citizens usually disagreed with one another over how to define the new- comers. Nativists almost inevitably cast immi- grants as labor competition or as ethnic or religious threats and advocated the restriction of admissions as a consequence. Others saw immigrants in more positive or functional terms. Despite nativists' outcries, only occasionally have they been able to impose their will at a national level, although their voices have fre- quently exerted profound influence. Instead, the drum roll of immigration has continued, never entirely abating, with each new stream of immigrants coming to be seen as serving a distinctive economic or nation-building purpose. It is probably not an exaggeration to connect immigration policy directly to national economic development and self-definition. In fact, that most self-defining of documents, the Declaration of Independence, accused King George HI of trying to prevent the population growth of the colonies by hindering naturalization and failing to promote migration (Joppke, 2005; ZoIberg, 2006, p. 24). THE FIRST WAVE: COLONIAL PIONEERS In the earliest period, the colonial era, fragmented streams of Northwestern Europeans, speaking mostly English but also Dutch, German, and Celtic languages, served to populate an Eastern seaboard that had plentiful land but scarce agricultural labor. A mercantilist, trade-oriented Britain sought to establish large plantations to reap the bounties of the southern colonies' nat- ural resources, but to do that, it had to promote settlement by the British and keep out the Spanish, Dutch, and French. …