Tuesday, August 4, 2009

FIGURES ON MASS IMMIGRATION

Our National Tradition, Until the 1965 Congress Drastically Changed the Rules


1776-1965: 230,000 per year average
We became a nation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, so that
makes a legitimate starting point. And because the 1965 Act so radically changed
the numbers, it is fair to talk about what went before as being our traditions
-- especially since the promoters of the Act promised that it would not raise
immigration numbers.

OUR FIRST 200 YEARS TRADITION:
1776-1976: 250,000 per year average

This provides a nice rounded period to claim for our tradition from the founding
of our nation to its bicentennial 200 years later. It encompasses the 1972 year
in which American women adopted a replacement-level fertility rate that would on
its own ensure that the country's population would stop growing and stabilize
(if immigration were in balance).


OUR NEW NATION TRADITION:
1776-1819: 6,500 per year average

This was the flow of immigrants when the new nation was trying to
populate Eastern frontiers to push back the indigenous peoples.

OUR CONTINENTAL EXPANSION TRADITION:
1820-1879: 162,000 per year average


This marked the first period for which there are official government records. Immigration was used to try to settle all the frontiers of the now continental nation. It was this level of immigration that succeeded in sectioning off the land of virtually the entire country, driving the Indians into reservations, decimating the buffalo, plowing under the prairies. Just
after this period after the 1890 Census, demographers declared that the population had grown and spread out so much that there no longer was any frontier in the U.S. Never in history had such a sustained numerical level of immigration filled one country.

OUR GREAT WAVE/INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TRADITION
1880-1924: 584,000 per year average

Based on faster and safer transportation and a virtually
insatiable appetite for cheap foreign labor to expand their industries, the
Robber Barons of the Guilded Age more than tripled the level of immigration,
using it to keep wages for all American workers low, to bust unions and to keep
freed slaves from moving off the South's plantations to take jobs in the North.
The industrialists ships were in perpetual motion bringing new workers from
other lands. The net immigration during this period was considerably lower,
though, than the nearly 600,000 average because scores of thousands of
immigrants went back home every year, unable to handle the living and working
conditions of America during that time.

OUR RISE-OF-THE-MIDDLE-CLASS, END-OF-MASS-IMMIGRATION TRADITION
1925-1965: 178,000 per year average

Based on the excesses of the Great Wave, Congress severely limited
the numerical levels of immigration and declared finished the ages of using
immigration to fill frontiers or to provide masses of unskilled labor to
factories and farms. It was during these 40 years that most Americans -- aided
by tighter labor markets -- moved into the middle class for the first time.

These statistics come from the work of Prof. Vernon Briggs, labor
economist and historian from Cornell University. He has done more than
any scholar to estimate the level of immigration during the emerging
nation period before records were kept. All of the Immigration totals
from 1820 through the present are from federal immigration records that
were provided by the Immigration and National Service (now the
Department of Homeland Security).

No comments: