* The last time America restricted immigration, it also had the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Great Society. But for some reason, progressives are unable to see the connection between ethnic homogeneity and the feasibility of progressive projects, or of any national projects really.
But Sanders is on sound historical ground when he asserts that a permanent policy of open borders would have consequences that progressives would come to regret. It is a sad constant of human, and American, history that the solidarity needed to build workers’ organizations and social benefits waxes when people can overcome the divisions of ethnicity and tradition and wanes when they can’t. As Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen documents in “Making a New Deal,” her study of Chicago workers in the decades between the world wars, those workers’ efforts to form industrial unions in 1919 failed in large degree due to divisions between the various immigrant communities, and between them and the native-born. Their efforts succeeded, however, in the late 1930s, once those immigrants and their children had been in the United States long enough to forge a more common culture with other immigrant and native-born groups. It’s not that those groups had abandoned their traditional identities, but, with the federal government all but shutting down immigration in 1924, the pull of tradition and the effects of ethnic insulation were no longer continually renewed. Indeed, one of the most sobering facts of U.S. history is that the great social legislation of the New Deal and its successors came forth during the 40-year period (1924-65) when a federal ban on most immigration reduced the percentage of foreign-born Americans to an all-time low.
It’s also true that the nations with the most extensive social rights and benefits, and the highest levels of social and economic equality, have been the Scandinavian social democracies — and that, as these nations have become home to immigrants from developing nations and refugees from the world’s war zones in recent years, they’ve each seen right-wing nativist parties spring up and claim between 15 and 20 percent of the vote.
* Before the first real non-British immigration of 1850, this country had already worked out the first high-speed transportation (the train) and high-speed communication (the telegraph). We had defeated a world power twice, settled half a continent, and were heading to Japan’s shores. Not bad for a lack of vibrancy.
