Immigration Restriction and the Victorian Virtues
Is U.S. immigration policy an echo of American Victorianism?
Hi, I’m Alison Peck and this is How We Got Here, a journey through the history of United States immigration law with bulletins from the front lines of today, by a law professor and immigration lawyer.
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One idea that I’ve been exploring lately is whether the immigration system we know today is the product of Victorian morality. Restrictive immigration laws in the United States began during the late Victorian period with the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act and the first general categories of inadmissibility, both in 1882. There had been passenger laws aimed largely at regulating immigration before that, and in 1891 there was a procedural reform of the new immigration inspection system, but after that things stayed relatively stable for a couple of decades.
The next major immigration restriction was the interwar creation of a quota system, which limited total immigration by country and tied the quota levels to the number of persons of a certain nationality in the country as of 1910, later amended to 1890. This was a clear response to the numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans who immigrated around the turn of the century, whom the Dillingham Commission judged to be less easily assimilated than earlier immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.
This interwar reform provides the backbone of immigration restriction today – not through strict overall country quotas, but through category-by-category quotas by country or region. Moreover, the 1921 and 1924 quota laws erected an edifice of restriction on the foundation of the first categories of inadmissibility in the 1882 law. Prior to the quota laws, immigrants could arrive at a port and be admitted unless found on inspection to fall into one of the inadmissibility categories (including “idiots,” “lunatics,” convicts, and persons likely to become a public charge). Today, entry into the country is unlawful without a visa or passing a threshold showing for asylum – a sort of excluded-until-proven-admissible approach.
The Historical Connection
Granted, this system arose decades after the end of Victoria’s reign (and on a different continent to boot). Perhaps that’s why, at least so far, I’ve found few historians who have explored potential connections between restrictive immigration policy and Victorian moral thinking. (One place where I have seen historians explore this connection is in the history of eugenics itself, which was popularized in the book Hereditary Genius by Sir Frances Galton (cousin of Charles Darwin) in 1869. I’m sure there are others that I just haven’t tapped into yet.)
The connection between Victorian morality and immigration restriction often seems, however, to be one that historians feel the need to explain away, since Victorian morality has been widely linked to the Progressive reform era and the immigration restrictions of the interwar period at least facially seem to contradict the liberal reform efforts to protect and provide greater opportunity for vulnerable groups like wage workers, children, and women. Studies of nativism in the 1920s usually point to an amalgamation of economic, political, and cultural forces like the economic protectionism of organized labor, postwar isolationism, and the pseudo-scientific racial essentialism of eugenics that gained favor at the time. These factors are usually described as in tension with and overpowering of Progressive ideals when it came to immigrants.
Restrictionists as Victorians
I’m curious whether these explanations – explaining ideological incoherence by rejecting ideology as a factor – overlook the dominant morality during the formative years of immigration policymakers in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although the reports of the U.S. Commission on Immigration was created in 1907 and published its influential report in 1911, its chair, William P. Dillingham, was born in 1843, just five years into the reign of Queen Victoria. The major architect of the act in the House, Albert Johnson, was born in 1869; David Reed, its Senate sponsor, was a relative youngster who was just 21 when Victoria’s reign ended. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an earlier advocate for immigration restrictions, was born in 1850.
Of course, spending one’s formative years imbibing a certain culture doesn’t guarantee that anyone, let alone a politically dominant group, will have internalized those norms to the extent that they color their views on political issues later in life. But they might. It seems to me worth exploring, then, what was the nature of those Victorian values?
First of all, as conservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb argued, it seems anathema to talk about Victorian moral ideals as “values” at all. To Victorians, morality was not cloaked with the relativism often implicit in a modern characterization of “values.” Rather, to Victorians, morality consisted of “virtues” – attributes that were always good, even if they were not always (or even often) obtained.
Himmelfarb relies on no less an authority on British moral history than Margaret Thatcher to define Victorian virtues. Thatcher expressed gratitude for the virtues imbued in her by her Victorian grandmother: hard work, self-reliance, self-respect, cleanliness, neighborliness, and patriotism. (Thatcher, it might be noted, absorbed these values from her relatives even though she was not born until 1925.)
American Victorianism, Himmelfarb thought, was not that different. Other historians tend to agree on that essential continuity, validating American “Victorianism” as a coherent concept, although of course with certain distinctions. (David Walker Howe, for instance, perhaps steered near the immigration conundrum when he noted in that “the presence of so many ethnic minority groups gave the United States a cultural diversity wider than anything known in Great Britian” and that “the relationship of these groups to the dominant Victorian culture forms an important and still [in 1975] little understood chapter of American history.”
Prioritizing certain values does not mean that all others are necessarily disparaged. Himmelfarb argued that the Victorians did not spurn classical virtues like courage, justice, and wisdom, nor the Judeo-Christian values of faith, hope, and charity, but they did not think them the most important virtues needed in their age.
Today’s pro-immigration lobby certainly champions classical and Judeo-Christian values – principally justice and charity – over Victorian virtues like self-reliance and patriotism. In fact, to suggest that cleanliness (perhaps translated as purity) and hard work should be prioritized over charity (in the sense of Christian love) or justice (in the sense of equal treatment of human beings) is to utter fighting words to most pro-immigrant advocates. But to the lawmakers of the early (and, in some cases, late) 20th century, Victorian virtues deserve priority.
A Picture of American Victorianism
So what did Victorian virtues look and sound like to those Americans (white males, almost exclusively) who would make immigration policy in the early 20th century?
Reading Ohio newspapers from the 1870s and 1880s, as I’ve been doing in my research lately, has provided a wealth of examples. The audience for these papers were largely farmers, but some were city dwellers. The editors dispensed advice on “virtues” freely, for readers of all ages, and themes of hard work, thrift, cleanliness, and self-reliance were stressed. For example, the “Farm and Household” section of Highland Weekly News in 1870 inveighed against “Lazy Farmers.” “Laziness,” the editors wrote, “is the right and proper name for nine-tenths of the excuses given for bad farming.” These virtues were generalized to all matters of daily life. An article on the first page advised, “Make clean work as you go. Have system, order, regularity; a place for everything and everything in its place.”
These virtues had perhaps been taken too far on the farm, the Ohio Practical Farmer warned in 1877, which might explain why boys were leaving the farm in droves: “Some parents seem to have an idea that everything that goes to adorn and beautify, or in any way to add to the attractions and pleasure of home, is not only money thrown away, but is a sign of effeminacy and weakness.” (I’m tempted to suspect that Thatcher’s grandmother would have applauded such parents.)
The Victorian Impact
I’m still exploring Victorian virtues, and their inculcation in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the young white men who would be making immigration policy half a century later. But it seems that some of these lessons – which did tend to support in upward mobility for many in that demographic group during that era – might easily be distorted into xenophobia and sympathy toward noxious eugenic theories. Cleanliness, for example, can be extended to a fixation on purity, moral purity, and from there to racial purity (as a means of maintaining moral purity). And the danger of prioritizing hard work and self-reliance unbalanced by virtues like Christian charity and Aristotelian justice can lend itself to ignoring (as the Dillingham Commission did in it study of assimilation) material differences in opportunity. Perhaps the horrors of World War II and the Nazi regime raised the profile of (what we would call) “values” like equality and charity in time to contest Victorian morality as the priority in U.S. immigration policy, but not in time to defeat it.