America and Immigrants: A Fraught History | Big Think

America and Immigrants: A Fraught History

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Immigration expert Lenni Benson says the notion that America once welcomed foreigners with open arms is a serious misconception. The ongoing debate over immigration has been a constant of the American experience

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Lenni Benson:

Professor Lenni Benson specializes in immigration law and political asylum and is nationally recognized in the field. In 2008 she was honored with other members of the Safe Passage Project and received the State Bar President’s Award for Pro Bono Law School Project. 1999, the American Immigration Lawyers Association named Professor Benson the outstanding professor in immigration law based on her contributions to the professional and scholarly development of the field and her role as a mentor of students and young attorneys.

Professor Benson was partner in the international law firm Bryan Cave LLP, where her twelve years of practice focused on immigration. She is an active participant in immigrant rights projects coordinated by the National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union, and she serves on the board of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law Foundation and is a trustee emeritus for the American Immigration Law Foundation. She is currently the Chair of the Immigration Committee of the Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association and is the President-Elect of the Immigration Section of the American Association of Law Schools.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How have American attitudes towards immigration changed over history?

Lenni Benson: A few years ago there was a great cartoon, I think in the New Yorker, where you see some native people on the shore and out in the harbor come the big tall ships. One Native American says to the other, "I knew that immigration policy was something we had to work on." That's a little bit of a humorous approach but my first year in teaching in Arizona where I grew up—I was teaching at Arizona State, the course “Immigration Law.” There were Native American students in the class, and they seriously asked all of us and taught me to re-evaluate what we tell ourselves about immigration law.

We often talk about the United States being this open territory where everyone was free to come, where the land was ours for developing, and we forget that—even at the time of the founding of our country and the first western Europeans coming to the United States—there were negotiations with existing people and there were bilateral treaties, in negotiation about who could live here and who couldn’t.

I think another aspect of it is: we often think of our immigration history as two or three paragraphs in our eighth grade civics book. First came Columbus in the ships, then came the Pilgrims, and each story of the first European settlers in the United States has with it aspects of immigration limitation. So, for example, people coming [to live] with the Puritans were not anyone who wanted to come. There was an application process, people had to qualify, they had to be selected through the theocratic leaders of the puritans and their religious community, and if you didn’t come with the original puritan group and you wanted to join later—perhaps you were living in Rhode Island and you wanted to become part of the Puritan communities and Massachusetts, you had to apply and be vetted and be qualified much as we do with immigrants today.

So tensions quickly rose in those early religious communities about people who were maybe the second generation, not quite as committed to the Puritan way of life, or the mercantilism that was growing in the Boston area and other part of New England that was changing the migration patterns. So there’s always been debates about who we going to live next door, who qualifies to come.

Question: How did the Industrial Revolution affect U.S. immigration policy?

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