Laissez-faire and its discontents: US naturalization and integration policy in comparative perspective

Abstract

In the 1990s and early 2000s, conflicts over citizenship and nationhood erupted in US naturalization policy, part of a recurring pattern since the eighteenth century. Since these most recent controversies, major immigrant-receiving countries in Western Europe, as well as Australia and Canada, have introduced or revised naturalization requirements, preparatory courses, and formal ceremonies for prospective citizens. The USA's approach to naturalization is, by comparison, less demanding. The US approach is undergirded by an essentially laissez-faire philosophy in which the nation admits large numbers of immigrants without much attention to skills, values, or English-language ability and who are expected to integrate without significant government assistance. While this laissez-faire philosophy represents a gain for core liberal principles, I argue that it may also reflect reduced social solidarity and contribute to the vitriolic conflicts over immigration that are now waged regularly at the local, state, and federal level. The essay concludes by considering several efforts in the USA to clarify the bargain of mutual expectations and obligations on the part of newcomers and citizens.

Keywords::

• naturalization
• integration
• citizenship
• laissez-faire
• Brookings-Duke Roundtable

Notes

^1. The Hudson Institute's John Fonte helped establish a new Office of Citizenship (Department of Homeland Security 2007; Laglagaron and Devani 2008).

^2. For discussion of the naturalization process in the Progressive Era and of the Jordan Commission, see Pickus (2005, 90–100, 166–167).

^3. Wolfe's analysis may overstate how deep and wide this tolerance runs, but he has identified a significant driving force in contemporary American politics. See Brooks (2001).

^4. Myers (2007) lays out the case for older, largely white citizens to invest more in immigrants and their children, but those older citizens do not seem convinced.

^5. It is interesting to consider as well the differences among US states on the costs citizens expect to bear and the treatment of immigrants (legal and illegal). To speculate, in Texas social provisions are generally lower and a rough and ready expectation seems to prevail that immigrants who find work are acceptable. Immigrants in Texas may have fewer state-provided resources to fall back on, but they have also not been subject to the more extreme exclusionary efforts of other states. By contrast, California is relatively more generous in providing social benefits and it has been a flashpoint for much of the local- and state-level conflicts over immigration that have had a national impact.

^6. A different interpretation of the proliferation of various local- and state-level policies regarding immigrants is to see them as de facto experiments with integration – a kind of Brandesian ‘laboratories of democracy’ at work. (I thank Jennifer Hochschild for this point.) Of course, many of the most controversial policies – Proposition 187 in California and SB 1070 in Arizona – are not designed to foster integration; they are designed to reduce illegal immigration. Still, to the degree that some policies make it harder or easier for immigrants to stay in a particular state, say by limiting state benefits or by topping up federal benefits, there is a kind of integration experimentalism taking place.

^7. Personal communication, 24 March 2011.

^8. Peter Skerry and I articulated this perspective in a 2006 op-ed, a 2007 article, and a 2009 policy report, all of which I draw on here. See Pickus and Skerry (2006, 2007) and Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable (2009) (William Galston served as our co-convenor of the Roundtable). See also Skerry and Fernandes (2006).

^9. Liav Orgad rightfully questions the ways in which programs to bolster civic knowledge make a difference: ‘Does a list of disconnected events and values really foster social cohesion or create a sense of belonging?’ That, of course, is one reason why it is important to tell the story of America in ways that connect ideas and symbols and that invites newcomers to see themselves as part of a specific nation. Further, as indicated above, the evidence is clear that civic knowledge does reduce alienation and promote engagement. It is true that setting higher expectations for newcomers may not necessarily lead to greater involvement in the process on the part of citizens in a sustained way. But it does undermine the notion that newcomers do not want to belong. The risk, of course, is that requiring greater demonstrations of the desire to belong will become illiberal. In this regard, Orgad offers a suggestive proposal that the standard expected should be more than mere knowledge that may become rote memorization but less than the kind of attachment that opens the door to exclusion. Instead, he expands on language proposed by Barbara Jordan's US Commission on Immigration Reform, and suggests that the focus should be on commitment to the US form of government and values, which ‘leaves room for private disagreement as long as one pledges to act or refrain from acting in a specific way ….’ As the Commission put it, a pledge that ‘commits[s] to serve the best interests of the United States … [and respects] freedom of speech and religion; and … commit[s] not to discriminate again others on the basis of nationality, race, sex, or religion.’ See Orgad (2011, 1292).

^10. Some analyses suggest that such integration policies increase immigrants' naturalization rates, political influence, and a general sense of inclusion in the political system. These policies have also come under intense scrutiny for promoting a separatist rather than a shared national identity and for fostering welfare state dependency rather than individual responsibility. See, for instance, Bloemraad (2006) and Malik (2011).

^11. The Roundtable focused enforcement efforts at the workplace rather than the border and it rejected open-ended guest worker programs.

^12. On local relations between citizens and legal and illegal immigrants, see Skerry (2006).