Who remembers Tammany Hall?

Last updated on: March 31, 2014 at 9:48 pm by Jane the Actuary

Who remembers Tammany Hall? 2014-03-31T21:48:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Last of the rough drafts to finish up for tonight!

The pro-immigration lobby, and pro-immigration* researchers, tell us that there’s no reason to fear large-scale immigration from Mexico because their children will assimilate just as seamlessly as generations past. Anti-immigration types will dispute this, and say that there are a number of factors that make the current situation different than the past: the proximity to Mexico reinforcing ties; the prevalence of Spanish, both in government services and day-to-day interactions (“press 2 for Spanish”); the welfare system, affirmative action, and the grievance industry reinforcing the ethnic identity, and so on.

(* Note that “pro-immigration” and “anti-immigration” aren’t really the right words, but “supporters of large scale immigration of unskilled workers from Mexico” is a mouthful.)

But what I was thinking of the other day is this: To say “immigrants will assimilate just as easily as in the past” is very rosy in another way: the large waves of immigration in the past were not as simple as downtrodden people finding a better life in America.

To be sure, some immigrants made their way directly from the steamer to the homestead, but these were people who already had the resources to travel West and equip a covered wagon full of household goods. They were, basically, already middle-class.

But the “huddled masses” went from wrenching poverty in Europe to almost-as-wrenching poverty in the U.S. Remember tenements? Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives? Child labor? Tammany Hall? (My Irish ancestors? They arrived in Quebec first, and only later immigrated to the U.S. as a reasonably middle-class family.)

What was the impact of the post-industrialization waves of poor immigrants on those already in the country? Machine politics and graft were not victimless. The non-immigrants of the time were not just a bunch of middle-class people who lived in isolation from the immigrants, or perhaps benefitted from them as servants.
So I went down to the basement to see what books I could unearth, and couldn’t really find anything. And I don’t recall having read anything in the past about the non-immigrant poor and how new waves of immigrants affected them. Maybe there’ll be something at the library, but I doubt it; I’d really need a university library for that.

But my point is that I’m skeptical of the presumptions underlying the idea of “immigration in the past was harmless, therefore future immigration will be, too.” In any event, the assimilation and middle-class-ization of today’s unskilled immigrants is a long way into the future, and our economic problems are in the present.

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