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TI: Yesterday when we had dinner we talked about, first, and I thought of your work as these two distinct areas: about immigration history as well as a lot to do with the Japanese American incarceration, two large bodies of work. I first obviously learned more about the incarceration, and then sort of discovered later on this immigration history, and I've always thought of them as two distinct areas. And last night you were talking about in some ways how you've come to think of them as being more closely associated. Can you talk about that?

RD: Well, of course, these were immigrant communities, and in some ways they were one stream in my work, but in another very distinct way they were not. The first big book that I wrote about immigration, Coming to America, which I wrote in 1989/'90, of course includes Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans. But it doesn't include them very much. The second book of any size that I wrote about immigration, Guarding the Golden Door, which I wrote and published in 2004, was really devoted to immigrants, but essentially to immigration restriction legislation. And any book that talks about immigration restrictive legislation has to talk about Asians. As a matter of fact, the first sentence... the woman who was editing the book then, she didn't finish editing it because she retired, but she said, "This is a good book, Roger, but you need to open it with a bang, and you sort of open with a whimper." I don't think she said whimper. I'm thinking of the T.S. Eliot line, "not with a bang, but a whimper." So I rewrote the book, and it begins, "In the beginning," which is the way the Bible starts, "In the beginning, the Chinese Exclusion Act." And I went on to talk about its origin. And it was the hinge on which all immigration history, all American immigration history changed, which means that it's a lot more important than most history. I don't say this there, but what that's saying is that unlike most immigration history groups just allude to this, history of immigration allude to this, this is, in terms of immigration policy, the most significant single thing that happened. It's kind of an anti Emancipation Proclamation type of thing, although it's not a proclamation, it's a simple congressional act, which is included and talked about. And the whole Immigration Service was largely created to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act, and later other kinds of exclusion, so that whereas most of the specialized parts of the American government, the Labor Department, for instance, is interested in improving the condition of American laborers; the Agriculture Department is interested in improving American farmers, but the Immigration Department, or what passes for the Immigration Department, was organized basically to keep certain immigrants out. And the reasons for keeping immigrants out, the first of which is originally race and begins to include all sorts of things: education, health, where you came from, how much money you had, all kinds of things. Your political proclivities, your sexual proclivities, all of these things were monitored by the Immigration Service. So starting with excluding Chinese, it winds up finding reasons to exclude and/or deport all kinds of other people.

TI: So that beginning line is so apt: "In the beginning, the Chinese Exclusion Act."

RD: My notion of immigration reform is very different from almost everybody else's, and that I have argued that the first thing we need to do is to separate admission from everything else. In other words, have a legal division or department, Homeland Security for god sakes, deal with that. But then have a whole Department of Immigration or Department of Immigrants whose duty is to help integrate immigrants into American life. Isn't that a simply logical, expedient, that nobody's ever thought of doing or even trying to do?

TI: Versus just trying to determine who comes in?

RD: We won't even spend money on teaching them how to speak English. I mean, individual school districts might, but the federal government doesn't. It isn't the federal government's concern. I also think we ought to recruit immigrants. And to do that we'd have to have a way of somehow deciding what kind and how many immigrants we really needed. Not on the basis of who they were related to, or who they weren't, but this is the way we select immigrants these days. Who they're related to, if somebody wants to hire them, but not on who they are and who they're likely to become. It's a complicated problem.

TI: Does any country do it this way?

RD: Oh, yes, in ways. And as a matter of fact, there was a time when the American states did it. Many states had commissions to get more people to come to them because these were empty places. And the reason why American immigration policy at the beginning was just to let anybody come who could get here was that we had a big, empty country, and we needed to fill it up with people, with immigrants. There were people in it, but they weren't the people we wanted in it. Because if we didn't, somebody was going to take it away from us. And that was a very, very great fear in the early republic, of the country being cut up.

TI: Well, we're seeing it a little bit now. This morning as I was driving to pick you up, I was listening to the radio and they were talking about Pittsburgh and how their resurgence is based on recruiting immigrants to come to Pittsburgh. That they found that the sort of multiple generation families in Pittsburgh, people were moving out. And their recruiting was within the United States, people who were immigrants living in other places, they were recruiting them to come to Pittsburgh. Because the person was asked, "Why are you doing this?" I think was the mayor or a candidate for mayor, he says, "Survival. We need to do this."

RD: Detroit needs to do it.

TI: Interesting. So maybe it'll shift because of the down...

RD: Try to sell that to the House.

TI: [Laughs] But the cities are pushing ahead with this.

RD: Well, yes, but the House is largely dominated by rural America. Because we have an inappropriate mechanism for allocating seats in the House.

TI: Well, we won't go into this one; this is another conversation.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.