|
|
|
Book Review
| Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 378. $65 cloth (ISBN 0-691-08804-7); $22.95 paper (ISBN 0-691-08805-5).
|
| The political scientist Daniel Tichenor sets himself the following question: "[H]ow do we explain why the U.S. national state has been quite receptive to immigrants during long stretches of its history, while it has pursued decisive restrictions on the number and characteristics of newcomers in other periods?" (2). Instead of focusing upon the uniqueness of different historical situations, which is something that historians tend to do, Tichenor attempts to cull relatively stable variables from the longue durée of U.S. immigration history. |
1
|
|
Tichenor's approach is one that he labels "historical institutionalist," an approach many U.S. historians will readily associate with the work of the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol. In a number of books and articles, Skocpol has sought to "bring the state back in," in other words, to refine or complicate a variety of existing social theories by drawing attention to the role of contingent, specific, and relatively stable state structures in the shaping of public policy. |
2
|
|
Tichenor begins with a critique of existing theories of the politics of American immigration restriction that attach special causal significance to economic conditions, social interests, national values, public opinions, or electoral realignments. He states: "Each of these rubrics has some merit as an explanatory variable, but none adequately accounts for the evolution of American immigration policies" (7–8). He is undoubtedly correct. For example, the late twentieth-century United States has been characterized by high levels of immigration that would appear to be curiously at odds with economic fluctuations, public opinions, electoral realignments, and so on. How, Tichenor asks, can we account for this? |
3
|
|
Tichenor proposes four variables: (a) the fragmentation of power in the American governmental system that continually presents groups with changing structural opportunities and constraints; (b) the making and remaking of political coalitions that cut across familiar ideological divisions; (c) the emergence of professional expertise in the shaping of immigration policy since the Progressive Era; and (d) international developments that have served as a catalyst for immigration reform. On one level, these variables—particularly the first, second, and fourth—might strike the reader as thoroughly banal. However, when Tichenor puts all four of these variables together, he is able to show convincingly how certain kinds of political decision making might come at certain historical moments to be relatively insulated from, or only indirectly related to, broader economic and social forces. This is Tichenor's basic point about modern immigration restriction. |
4
|
|
In terms of its contribution to "brute knowledge" of the history of American immigration restriction, Tichenor's account of American immigration policy in the post-World War II period is by far the most original, interesting, and valuable part of the book. To date, historians have not devoted sufficient attention to the enormous changes in American immigration policy after 1950. As they do so, and particularly as they veer towards the 1980s and 1990s, they will have to confront the difficult question of distinguishing their disciplinary approach from the disciplinary approaches of political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars and the like, who have focused on this "recent history" with entirely different aims. But at the same time, historians will have to take account of the work of scholars such as Tichenor who have preceded them in covering the same materials. |
5
|
|
Tichenor's account is undoubtedly valuable so long as it is restricted to the narrow confines of his question, namely, that of why and how the U.S. government has elected to open or close its borders at different historical moments. One wishes, however, that Tichenor were more cognizant of the limited nature of his question, and hence of the account he advances to answer it. Viewed from the perspective of the contemporary historiography of U.S. immigration restriction, Tichenor's understanding of "immigration" appears rather truncated. |
6
|
|
Tichenor understands immigration principally in terms of the admission of aliens into the territory and polity of the United States. But to construct immigration in these terms is to erase a much more complicated history through which the category of "alien" has emerged—and continues to flourish—as a meaningful category in American legal, political, social, and cultural history. In late eighteenth-century New England, for purposes of local territorial restriction, a "foreigner" might be someone from a neighboring town, a neighboring state, or a foreign country. In the slave-holding south of the 1850s, a free black might be considered an "alien." Until the 1920s, the idea of the "illegal alien" had little currency; it simply did not make sense to speak of someone as "illegal" as we do so routinely today. In our own time, at the national, state, and local levels, immigration is made and remade in a range of different contexts, from prisons to schools to workplaces to elections to the media. Certain minority groups such as Asians and Latinos continue to have the experience of being constructed as "alien" regardless of their formal citizenship and birthplace. The question "How many and which aliens to admit?"—which Tichenor generally takes to stand for immigration—helps us very little in dealing with immigration understood in these wider senses. When one expands the range of questions one asks, it turns out, it proves much more difficult to reduce the history of U.S. immigration restriction to a set of four variables. |
7
|
| Kunal M. Parker
|
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law,
Cleveland State University |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|