Daily Archives: November 23, 2011

Immigration Blog

A Thanksgiving Special: Immigration to America in the Days Before H-1Bs, Green Cards and Illegal Immigration

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Immigration policy in America is difficult to understand. But it is a little easier to understand if one knows about the early history of U.S. immigration. To help people comprehend better what the world was like before the days of H-1Bs and Green Cards, below is a brief history of immigration during the decades before and after the first Thanksgiving.

Opposition to Immigration

Opposition to immigration has always existed in America, with the degree of practical obstacles to those immigrating influenced by the country’s economic circumstances and Americans’ perceptions of international events. A political cartoon once showed two Native American (Indians) on a shore watching the Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth Rock. One knowingly says to the other: “Illegal immigrants.”

Although the first settlers to America at Jamestown and Plymouth were immigrants they were not breaking any immigration laws, since none existed. In fact, it would be a long time before those coming to America would face any serious impediments or legal restrictions.

Early History

In 1607, the first immigrant-settlers to America arrived in Jamestown. To say these first settlers experienced hardship would understate the case. “The hard winter of the Starving Time [1608] reduced a population of about 500 to barely sixty . . . Everything from the horses . . . to rats, snakes, mice and roots dug from the forest were consumed, and emaciated survivors took to eating the dead.”

In 1610, the surviving settlers decided to abandon Jamestown but were soon met at sea by ships with supplies and new settlers and chose to return to the colony. The settlement became important as an example of self-government. While King James and later his son, Charles I, retained the authority to enact laws and govern the colony, the settlers had the right, they believed, to decide purely local matters and established an assembly of burgess.

Plymouth Rock

The first immigrants at Plymouth Rock endured many hardships. Unlike the Jamestown settlement, which was organized by the Virginia Company, the Pilgrims sailed to America as a group of like-minded religious individuals and families seeking freedom to worship without interference from governmental authority. “The First Thanksgiving marked the conclusion of a remarkable year. Eleven months earlier the Pilgrims had arrived at the tip of Cape Cod, fearful and uninformed,” writes Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower. “They had spent the next month alienating and angering every Native American they happened to come across. By all rights, none of the Pilgrims should have emerged from the first winter alive . . . ”

The immigrants quickly learned a lesson about food production and private property that three centuries later Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong failed to grasp, resulting in the unfortunate deaths of millions in 20th century China and the Soviet Union. The lesson was simple – people work harder when they own property and can enjoy the fruits of their labor for themselves and their families.

Nathan Philbrick explained: “The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally – the approach first used at Jamestown and other English settlements. But as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the yield. In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before . . . The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism. Although the fortunes of the colony still teetered precariously in the years ahead, the inhabitants never again starved.”

Early Colonial Period

Historian Bernard Bailyn estimates total migration to Colonial America between the founding of the Jamestown colony and 1760 of “at least 700,000,” including slaves forced to America against their will. The scale of immigration from 1630 to 1775 was large given the population size of America and the sending countries. Even in the 1630s and 1640s, concerns about religious persecution sent another 21,000 Puritan immigrants to New England. Between 1630 and 1660, an estimated 210,000 British immigrants came to America. Approximately 75,000 German immigrants arrived between 1727 and 1760, while about 100,000 to 150,000 Scotch-Irish came to the colonies from 1717 to 1760.

The pace of immigration increased after 1760. Bailyn calculates approximately 221,500 arrivals between 1760 and 1775, an average of about 15,000 a year compared to about 5,000 annually in earlier decades. And here is an amazing figure: about 3 percent of Scotland (40,000 people) and 2.3 percent of Ireland (55,000) came to the colonies from 1760 to 1775.

A Correct Prediction of How Immigration Would Transform America Into a World Power

A prescient writer in the London Chronicle in 1773 understood the significance of the large flow of migrants from Britain: “America will, in less than half a century, form a state much more numerous and powerful than their mother-country…”

And this turned out to be true. As we now know, the early immigrants and their descendants became the people who fought for American independence, giving us the country we have today.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

The Real Tragedy of Memogate

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The key lesson of the Memogate controversy is the readiness of the Pakistani political class to exploit the civil-military imbalance for tactical advantage.

On one level, the widening Memogate mystery/conspiracy drama playing out in Pakistan is yet another example of the endemic dysfunctions between the powerful security establishment and their nominal civilian masters that have lead the country throughout its history to the brink of ruin. But the affair also demonstrates the long-running failure of the political class to understand that, even in the throes of competitive politics, it has a common interest – indeed a fiduciary obligation – in upholding the principle of civilian supremacy over the military.

The unfolding saga centers on an unsigned backchannel note delivered to U.S. military authorities following the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. The document, whose authenticity has yet to be ascertained, requests U.S. help in preempting a feared military coup against Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. In exchange, a host of tantalizing, albeit incredible, concessions is offered, including:

 installation of a new national security team in Islamabad filled with pro-American officials;

 transferring to U.S. custody the leaderships of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Haqqani insurgent network;

 giving American forces “carte blanche” to conduct operations on Pakistani territory;

 bringing greater transparency to Pakistan’s swelling nuclear arsenal;

 abandoning support of militant groups in Afghanistan.

Suspicions over the note’s provenance have come to rest with Zardari himself, and Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, a close Zardari ally as well as outspoken critic of the Pakistani military, is alleged to have orchestrated its delivery.  Both men have denied involvement.  But the controversy has now cost Haqqani his job and speculation is rife that army leaders will utilize the uproar to further diminish Zardari, perhaps even ousting him from office.

Nawaz Sharif, the leader of Pakistan’s main opposition party, has now waded into this combustible mix. His remarks this past weekend offer a particularly egregious example of the political class habitually using the issue of civil-military relations for myopic gain. Speaking at a political rally, Sharif blasted Zardari for “bargaining on national sovereignty and people’s self-respect.” He thundered that Haqqani is “asking the U.S. to control the Pakistani military when we should resolve our own problems.” His younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, has likewise charged Zardari with selling out the country’s sovereignty, while Sharif’s political supporters even accuse Zardari of committing treason.

Given how Nawaz once committed the very same acts for which he is now bludgeoning Zardari, he is trafficking in rank hypocrisy. In 1999, during Nawaz’s second stint as prime minister, he was the target of considerable criticism, including accusations of undermining the army’s honor and betraying the Kashmir cause, for cutting a desperate deal with President Bill Clinton to end the Kargil War. (A vivid portrait of Nawaz’s panicky state at the time, which included apprehensions that his life was endangered, is contained in Bruce Riedel’s first-hand account about the deal.) Fearing that the Pakistani army, under the leadership of General Pervez Musharraf, was about to take its revenge by overthrowing him, Nawaz urgently dispatched Shahbaz to Washington to seek the Clinton administration’s intercession.

As British journalist Owen Bennett-Jones relates in his acclaimed book, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, Shahbaz pleaded that Washington had a moral obligation to protect his brother given the political risks he ran on Kargil. But Shahbaz also padded his case by passing along Nawaz’s offer to take a harder line with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and help hunt down Bin Laden. The trip had the desired effect when U.S. officials signaled their opposition to “extra-constitutional actions” against Nawaz.

In the end, the warning shot failed to avert a military take-over and Sharif was expelled from the prime ministership and subsequently exiled to Saudi Arabia. Given his vexatious history with the army chieftains, one might expect Sharif to have a greater sense of solidarity regarding Zardari’s own travails with the military. Yet there he was over the weekend appearing to pander to the generals in Rawalpindi, announcing that his antagonisms with them were a thing of the past and that they would find in him a most suitable partner in the event they grow tired of Zardari.

To be sure, Sharif is only following a well-worn script. Pakistani history is replete with examples of opportunistic politicians who view the imbalance in civil-military relations as something to be exploited for tactical gain rather than rectified for the nation’s good. In an irony that ultimately cost him his life, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto built up ISI’s capabilities in order to suppress his political opponents. As the military constantly rotated them in and out of the prime minister’s office in 1990s, Benazir Bhutto and Sharif took turns celebrating the other’s demise rather than condemning the debasement of the Constitution. And instead of uniting following the Abbottabad raid to claw back decision-making authority from a humbled military, civilian leaders instead equated patriotism with fealty to the army.

The Rawalpindi crowd deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the deep morass that Pakistan has fallen into. But as the Memogate controversy illustrates, the political class is all too often willing to come along for the ride.