Even though attitudes in the Jewish community towards illegal immigration appear to have hardened, a February report published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suggests that the Jewish immigration experience over the past century has more in common with present-day migrants than many Jews recognize or fully appreciate.
Each year, the DHS' Office of Immigration Statistics gamely puts out "Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States." Even the government statisticians acknowledge the limitations of their data collection: keeping an accurate count of immigrants, particularly those here illegally, is far from an exact science. The experts assume that their estimate of illegal immigrants may be 10 percent lower than the actual numbers. Nonetheless, using the same methodology from year to year provides at the very least a good indication of trends. They show that between 2007 and 2009, the U.S. illegal immigrant population dropped by 8.5 percent--from 11.8 million to 10.8 million.
In short, the numbers show what anyone who is basically sentient could guess. American jobs started drying up in 2007 when the housing bubble burst and the construction industry fell apart. As the Great Recession hit and employment prospects plunged, the population of illegal immigrants, most of whom come here to work, naturally shrank. The contraction reversed a trend. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of illegal immigrants had climbed by nearly 39 percent, virtually tracking the growth rate of the U.S. economy, and defying the massive buildup of the nation's immigration and border enforcement.
What's all that got to do with the Jewish experience? Most American Jews are Ashkenazi descendants of Eastern Europeans who immigrated between 1881 and 1914, the beginning of World War I. Jews in the Russian Empire had been forced to live inside the Pale of Settlement, which included parts of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. They were forbidden from living in certain cities within the Pale and from holding certain occupations. Pogroms, anti-Jewish riots that occurred during the period, raged in hundreds of towns. Mobs killed more than 2,000 people, destroyed homes, and injured scores. The three decades saw a mass departure of Russian Jews. Two million of them--nearly one in two residents of the Pale--went abroad, 1.5 million to the United States.
And that's where, in the minds of many Jews, the modern day exodus story often ends. The common wisdom engrained in popular Jewish consciousness is that Eastern European Jews immigrated because of persecution. This Twitter version of history is summarized, for instance, in the online Beginner's Guide to Jewish Genealogy: "The majority of these Jewish immigrants were from Russia and Russian-held portions of Poland, escaping discrimination and pogroms (extreme persecutions)."
The reality is more complicated. As the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg put it in The Jews in America, "In fact, pogroms (physical attacks on Jews) played a minor role as a cause of the emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. The dominant cause of mass migration was poverty." Hertzberg suggested that the widely accepted persecution explanation is a sort of mythologized vision of the past. "[I]t is much better to imagine that one's grandparents were already the 'better people' in Russia and that America was the haven of refuge from anti-Semitism," he wrote. "The truth is starker and more heroic. The Jews from Russia arrived in the United States penniless and largely uneducated..."
In a 2007 book chapter, "Were Jews Political Refugees or Economic Migrants?," UCLA economics professor Leah Platt Boustan provides a painstakingly thorough debunking of the "common belief that the exodus from Russia was a uniquely Jewish event and thus cannot be incorporated into a general model of migration." Boustan compares migration flows of Russian Jews and of Austro-Hungarians and Italians during the same period, showing that the "timing of Jewish migration, like that of other migrations to the New World, responded to economic conditions." Boustan doesn't discount the push of anti-Semitism and political hardship, but does make the case that persecution along with the combination of economic adversity in Russia and promise in the United States spurred the move to what the predominantly Yiddish-speaking immigrants called die goldene medina, the "golden land."
That view directly contradicts the perspective of Stephen Steinlight, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, D.C., who has emerged as a leading Jewish voice in favor of more restrictionist immigration policies. "Jews during the Great Wave fled pogroms, oppression, and discrimination," he wrote recently. "There's no commonality between the Jewish refugees of that era and today's economic migrants." He concluded, "[A] growing majority of American Jews opposes illegal immigration because a confident American identity makes them empathize with fellow Americans first, not immigrants."
It's a potent argument, one that essentially calls on assimilated American Jews, blinded by the fog of historical memory, to disregard their own ancestral experiences and draw an artificial line between us and them. Steinlight rightly assumes that identity breeds empathy. If we can somehow disassociate our own experiences from those of more recent border crossers, we can try to convince ourselves that those people are not like us. Empathy does loom large in the Jewish experience, and public opinion surveys show that Jews tend to be comparatively tolerant of illegal immigrants. But attitudes may be changing. A 2007 poll by the American Jewish Committee showed that 67 percent of Jews backed some form of legalization program for illegal immigrants. By December 2009, according to a CIS survey, the percentage of Jews supporting a path to legalization was down to 60 percent.
In this regard, the changing Jewish opinion is in line with historic patterns of attitudes towards immigration. Namely, depressed economies are often accompanied by anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. But Jews would do well to draw a lesson from our own history and resist the temptation to scapegoat and demonize those whose crimes consist mainly of crossing political boundaries in search of better lives. Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were viewed not only as "hereditary defectives," they were considered dirty, depraved, disease ridden, crime prone, a burden on society, and incapable of assimilation. If anything, the Jewish experience points to the need to address root causes of immigration, and to avoid the folly of treating immigrants as occupying invaders. And if the lessons of the last century aren't sufficient, in dealing with illegal immigrants, Jews of conscience can benefit from the guidance of Hillel some 2,000 years ago: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor."
Jeffrey Kaye is a veteran journalist and author. His book, Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration (Wiley & Sons) will be available in April 2010.
Unless we wake up and realize that America wants, needs and will continue to need for many years to come, the entreprenuers and risk takers who are willing to brave the gauntlet of difficulties to come work in our country, then we will deprive our children and grand children of the prosperity and cultural richness that has made America the nation it is. I fear that our security walls and 20,000 + armed border guards are the beginning of the end of the America we have inherited. God forgive us our selfishness.
It is also troubling that many folks whose grandparents were so poor that they had to depend on souplines for food and subsidies for housing now remember their forebears as proto-capitalist dynamos who never needed a handout from anybody, and thus happily would deny such things to the presently impoverished. Or worse, remember that Grandpa had to make use of such government social services as were around in his day so as to feed his family, all of which were brought into being by Democrats, yet nonetheless making a political career with Republicans intent on curtailing such services today. (see Alfonse D'Amato).
What complicates the Mexican case (which seems to be the sore spot nowadays) is the fact that Texas, California, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona were taken from Mexico in a war we started at a time when we believed our “manifest destiny" was to wrest away lands from brown people for use by superior white people. Hard to get mad at Mexicans for seeing the border a bit differently than we tend to here. Perhaps they are merely attempting to exercise their right of return.
It is a fact that the Knesset recently passed an amendment to deny the Bedouin of the Negev the right to vote for their mayor and councillors.
The housing developments the Zionist state is building on Palestinian land are not just illegal; they are racist. They are housing developments for Jews only. It doesn't get anymore racist or undemocratic.
The Zionist state builds roads for Jews only - with money from American taxpayers who would be appalled by such a thing in their own country. Imagine a road for use by just one religous group in America.
The Zionist state conducts anti-miscegenation programs designed to keep young Jewish girls from intermarrying with Arabs. Imagine if in America there were government programs today that were designed to keep Christians from marrying Jews. Ugly thought!
Read the words of Zionism's important leaders and founders, and it will be easy to understand how what really goes on in the Zionist state can be so.
Read the grotesque words of Zionism's leaders and founders:
Moses Hess: "It is a fact that the Jewish religion is above all Jewish nationalism...One must be a Jew first and human being second."
Theodore Herzl: "It is essential that Jewish suffering...becomes worse..This will assist in the realization of our plans..."
Koenig Report: "We must use terror, assasination, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid Galilee of its Arab population."
Joseph Weitz: "Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country."
Chairman Heilbrun (Shlomo for Mayor): "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live as slaves."
Raphael Eltan, IDF: "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel."
David Ben Gurion in 1937: "We must expel the Arabs adn take their place...."
1950 Law of Return: "Every Jew hs the right to immigrate to this country."
Interestingly, I dont think most Americans view illegal immigrants (many of whom are hispanic) as hereditary defectives,"dirty, depraved, disease ridden, crime prone, a burden on society, or incapable of assimilation. I suspect they are viewed as an economic drain our our society, taking jobs from americans, not paying taxes or contributing to the fabric of our society. The "discrimination" today is largely, if not entirely, economic based - and not nearly as ad hominum as in the past.
Im sure that almost every Jew who emigrated to the US likely arrived through legal means. I dont think Jews begrudge anyone legal immigration as their parents, grandparents and greatgrandparents have it but you yourself identified the target of hostility (which Im not aware of) as "illegal" immigrants. Perhaps you could foster a discussion on the impediments to legal immigration that exist now that didnt 100 years ago. Also, how does that 60% of Jews surveyed compare to the larger populace? What about other ethnic groups who also faced discrimination as part of their american story?
Zionism is racism. All you have to do is read the words of Zionism's founders and leaders to know that it is nothing but reverse racism. The Zionist State is a racist, monoethinic, apartheid state founded by a racist movement led by racists. I don't hear you faulting the Zionist State for its racist immigration policies like the notion of giving the right of return to Jews, but not non-Jews. You mentioned in your article the origins of Ashkenazi Jews, who also made up the vast majority of Jews in the Zionist State, but fail to understand that Ashkenazi Jews have no historical, ancestoral, or genetic ties to the Israelites of the Bible. The idea that they would be granted the right of return over non-Jewish Palestinians whose ancestors have lived there for thousands of years just because they are Jewish is ridiculous
But that is Zionism for you.