Are Immigrants “Indigestible Blocs”?

In the coming days, we will hear the Trump administration explain why legal immigration should be cut in half.

Expect to hear some version of assimilation. Talking to Fox’s Tucker Carlson on January 8, Stephen Miller—the apparent architect of Trump’s immigration policy-- said: “We can have an immigration system that 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now produces more assimilation, higher wages, more economic opportunity and better prospects for immigrants and U.S.-born alike.”

What this means is that Miller wants an updated version of our 1952 immigration law, called the McCarran-Walter Act. Under the law, family unification was discarded as a criterion. Asians and Africans were not excluded, but their quota was set to reflect a tiny percentage of people from their nations who were already here. So, for example, if the U.S. census had shown 20,000 immigrants from China, new Chinese immigrants would receive a tiny fraction— just several hundred— slots each year.

Now listen to Sen. Pat McCarran, sponsor of the bill that bears his name in 1953. For some, this statement is true; for others, it violates core American values. However you think about, we are back to reconsidering the following ideas from Sen. McCarran:

However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States. ... I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation’s downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.

The photo above? It’s my Dad, an illegal immigrant, in 1949 or 1950. The Jewish quota kept him out of the U.S. He came here on false papers. In the picture above, he was a low-skilled baker’s assistant. He spoke no English—exactly the kind of “indigestible” person that we are considering blocking for admission to the U.S.

The second photo below? It’s a picture of the 78 acre farm in the northwest suburbs in Chicago that my father bought and developed with my Mom, his American wife. They ran a successful construction company that employed hundreds of Americans over 40-plus years. That’s assimilation.

My Dad was not unique. He came from Hungary in 1949. He died in 2005 as an American.