When a local second-hand bookstore was closing last summer, I mentioned to my father I’d been eyeing a set of books on a shelf just inside the door called The Annals of America. I had no idea what they were but liked the way they looked–they reminded me of the hours I spent lost in our encyclopedia as a child. I thought there must be wonderful hours of aimless investigation, like a random Google search, taking me to knowledge as yet undiscovered. A few days later the 20 leather bound volumes showed up in my living room, another gift of knowledge from my father.

Fast-forward six months…last night for some reason I picked up a volume of The Annals of America and discovered they are a collection of  “speeches, essays, biographies, landmark court decisions, editorials, and more that bring history to life”.  The first volume I picked up was from the 1870s called Reconstructionist era. Interesting, I thought, but too depressing right now so I switched to the final volume in the series. Volume 20 was a little thinner than the rest since it was the last and the dialog was still in the making.

As I flipped through the pages I found an article that was originally published in the New York Times entitled “Paving Streets With His Life”. The first two paragraphs said this:

This is still a nation of immigrants.  Immigration, now as in the past, is a permanent fixture.   But the situation today requires a fresh look and critical analysis, since immigration has been on the rise precisely at a time of high unemployment.

Immigration has been increasingly associated with unemployment so simplistically as to imply that closing the doors on foreign labor will solve the unemployment problem.  On the contrary, both immigration and unemployment are established pillars of American socioeconomic life and are not merely the products of current economic trends.

What struck me was the publication date, November 6, 1976.  It seems immigration and its perceived relationship to unemployment for those of us already here, we’ll call them the ‘previously-migrated’ has been in the national dialog for a long time.  The controversy continues today much as it did forty years ago and may well have been the decisive factor in our presidential election.

The article goes on to say we accept sub-standard pay and treatment of immigrants as the cost of doing business in our economic system.  We know immigration, legally or illegally, is not new and in fact is a cornerstone of our economy.  Rather than spend our energy trying to stop immigration we need to focus on a different problem.  Maybe the  problem worth solving is creating a real possibility of upward mobility for everyone– previously-migrated and recently-immigrated alike.  A path that makes more room for living-wage workers while allowing adequate protections for those at the bottom of the income ladder.

Creating a path of upward mobility is akin to wealth redistribution.  And, as my son reminds me, no one wants to give up their place or their comfort for the future possibility of ‘better for all’. Instead, it is easier to rekindle an old argument that resonates with those seeing their ‘American Dream’ slip away.