Gary Gerstle, the James Stahlman Professor of History and a leading scholar on the integration of immigrants into American society, was one of four experts to testify at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Immigration May 16.

_{by Jeff Vincent}

In his address to lawmakers on Capitol Hill May 16, Vanderbilt professor Gary Gerstle drew on lessons from U.S. history to offer an optimistic view of the prospects for today’s immigrants. However, he cautioned that successful integration of today’s immigrants into society may take up to two generations and will require giving them realistic chances to participate in the economy and the democratic process.

“Engaging immigrants in American democracy and broadening the access of the immigrant poor to economic opportunity and security will, in the short term, yield as much contention as comity,” Gerstle told a panel of the House Judiciary Committee.

“But if done right, it will work to bind together the foreign-born and immigrant-born into one American nation and demonstrate yet again the remarkable ability of America to take in people from very different parts of the world, to make them into Americans, and, in the process, to reinvigorate the power of American ideals and the promise of American life for all who have had the good fortune to make themselves a home on U.S. soil.”

Gerstle is the James Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt and a leading scholar on the integration of immigrants into American society. He was one of four experts who testified at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Immigration. The U.S. Congress appears to be nearing the end of long, contentious debate on legislation to reform national immigration policy, and the hearing was intended to give lawmakers additional insight into questions surrounding the “Americanization” of today’s immigrant population.

In his prepared statement, Gerstle looked back in time to describe “the so-called ‘new immigrants’ who came by the millions to the United States 100 years ago, and who were widely regarded as lacking the desire and ability to integrate themselves into American society.” He told the subcommittee that “these immigrants and their children confounded their critics by becoming deeply and proudly American.”

Gerstle suggested that today’s immigration debate is flavored by a widely held view that current immigrants are “different from us.” While most of those in the immigrant wave of the 1880s and 1920s were from Southern and Eastern Europe, the largest sources of today’s immigrants are Latin America, Asia and Africa. A majority of them are nonwhite.

“What distinguishes today’s immigrant poor is that they are non-European,” he said. “They are sometimes thought by their critics to lack the cultural attributes … that allowed earlier waves of poor immigrants to climb out of their poverty. The irony of this critique is that the ‘Europeans’ held up as model immigrants of yesteryear were, at the time of their immigration, depicted much as poor nonwhite immigrants are today – as so racially and culturally different from Americans, as so different from the earlier waves of immigrants who had come from Western and Northern Europe, that they could never close the gap between who they were and what ‘we,’ America, wanted them to be,” Gerstle said.

Gerstle fielded several questions and comments – some supportive, others more challenging – from the 10 lawmakers at the hearing. After the hearing, he was sought out for additional discussion by Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, chairman of the full Judiciary Committee; and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, chairwoman of the Immigration Subcommittee. Lofgren cited Gerstle’s written testimony several times in her opening remarks at the hearing.

Read a transcript of Gerstle's address.

_{Posted 05/17/07}