ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, November 28, 1996 TAG: 9611290017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A31 EDITION: HOLIDAY
COLUMN: RAY L. GARLAND
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
IT WAS little noted that E. Digby Baltzell recently departed this life. But not before leaving an enduring monument in that useful acronym WASP as short for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant - the long-dominant American caste now fighting a rear-guard action to uphold its view of our culture and its accustomed place at the head of the table.
Many will resent calling Thanksgiving the WASP holiday. But bound up as it is in the legend of Jamestown, Plymouth Rock and the Puritan Fathers, that seems a fair statement. It isn't wrong to say WASPs mainly gave us the American Revolution and the Constitution. Their belief in free markets broke down all commercial barriers among the states and gave America the largest and least-fettered marketplace. Not a bad run, though WASPs are loath to admit the extent to which they have been - are being - carried by the brain and brawn of non-WASPs.
While Baltzell the sociologist praised WASPs for a dedication to civic virtue that did so much to shape the nation's destiny, he warned they were losing power because their racial pride stood in the way of welcoming minorities into their class. Thirty years later, few minorities would much care to join a fraternity whose claim to cultural superiority and unique political insight can now be whispered only among friends at the country club.
Despite the fact almost all of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, our history has been characterized by a never-ending debate over just how open our nation's door should be. In fact, it was open to all comers for the first 275 years, and real restrictions weren't applied until the 1920s.
One who took the lead in closing the door was that ultimate WASP, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. "If a man is going to be an American," he said in 1888, "let him be so without any qualifying adjective; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description." His namesake lost a Senate seat to an Irish-American by the name of John Kennedy in 1952.
In one of his last public statements, Theodore Roosevelt told the All-American Festival in 1919, when anti-immigrant fervor was at its height, "We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language." There will be debate in the new Congress - as there has been in numerous states - about amending the Constitution to specify English as our official language. It's doubtful a two-thirds vote will be found in both houses to transmit such an amendment to the states.
For years, Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., championed greater restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration. He got half a loaf or less in the last Congress. A compromise was enacted doubling the number of Border Patrol agents to 10,000, restricting claims of refugee status and making deportation easier. The law also makes it more difficult for noncitizens to collect welfare and for citizens to bring in their relations. The problem with all such notions, of course, is the complexity of enforcement.
But Simpson is leaving and no one of his stature seems inclined to take up the fight to limit legal immigration, now running just over 1 million a year. It is estimated that about 300,000 arrive illegally.
The cost/benefit ratio of newcomers has long been debated. Looking only at government benefit payments, the best data indicate immigrants under 64 are less likely to be on welfare than the native-born. But between 1982 and 1993, the number of elderly noncitizens collecting SSI benefits rose from 92,000 to 416,000, suggesting that many were brought here by relatives promising to provide support but who knew (or learned) how easy it was to qualify them for welfare payments.
A study by the Urban Institute in 1994 found 641,000 undocumented aliens enrolled in public schools in the seven states that receive the most illegal immigrants. The annual cost to taxpayers was estimated at $3 billion. Those seven states also claimed they spent $445 million on Medicaid in 1993 for illegals.
Of course, most of those illegals were gainfully employed and paying taxes. The most dispassionate and scholarly critique of U.S. immigration policy reaches a conclusion that runs counter to the dominant sentimentality of our culture: America hasn't been choosy enough in the new residents it accepts. That is, our policy should favor those most likely to add to our national wealth and not be dependent upon it.
But most of this is academic. A country as big and open as our own, defining world cultural and economic aspirations as it does, will never find any good way to keep most of those who want to come here from doing so. Nor will our current politics permit it.
The government reports that in 1993 more than 21 million legally entered the country - twice the number that came as recently as 1985! The vast majority, of course, came for business or pleasure and promptly went home. But if they decide not to go home, finding and evicting them is an awesome task. The Census Bureau estimates that 4 million are now living here illegally.
Government demographers have a pretty good idea of what our population will be like 25 or 50 years hence. For 1994, they broke the estimated population of 260 million into 193 million white, 31 million black, 8.4 million Asian and 26 million Hispanic. Their "middle" estimate of U.S. population in 2050 is 392 million, breaking down to 206 million white, 56 million black, 38 million Asian and 88 million Hispanic. There are no estimates for a hundred years hence, but it seems clear that if not exactly extinct, the great American WASP will be a minority presence.
The great unanswered question is not whether our descendants will gather on Thanksgiving 2046 or 2096 to a meal of turkey and cranberries, as opposed to one of beans and rice, but whether they will preserve the engine of democratic capitalism that gave us the means to enjoy that feast in the first place.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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