When confronting recent debates, historians of migration often muse over similarities between past and present. Certainly there are so many continuities in the positive and negative qualities attributed to foreigners a century ago and today that one wonders whether any new data could ever possibly resolve such long-standing disagreements.
Here, however, I want to focus not on the persisting stereotypes of foreigners but on striking discontinuities among those persons—almost all of them natives and citizens—who debate public policy. Today’s debates feature two key phrases—“illegal immigrants” and “nation of immigrants”—that especially divide the debaters. Neither phrase figured in the passionate debates of the past. Today, whether they worry over illegal immigrants or celebrate a nation of immigrants, North Americans agree they are debating about “immigrants.” That consensus is so fundamental that few realize how new such terminology is. By acknowledging the newness of “immigration” and “immigrants” as keywords we can see what policy debates reveal about the debaters. Historical analysis provides a mirror into which North Americans can peer in order to better understand themselves and their own attitudes toward foreigners.
The study of language and meaning has been dominated recently by post-modern philosophers. Now the availability of searchable, digitized, online collections of texts opens up new methodological options. Using digitized sources, scholars can more easily identify and more effectively contextualize the invention, use and spatial or temporal diffusion of key words and phrases through systematic analysis of vast collections of texts. Boolean searches (e.g., of immigr* and “x,” where “immigr*” covers all variations of the root word and “x” is a second term or a qualifier) facilitate analysis of the webs of association—between and among words—that help produce meaning. Specialized online collections (of digitized newspapers, government documents, periodicals, books, library catalogues, and personal narratives) document linguistic practices among diverse social groups—the urban and political elites of New York and Washington, African-Americans, feminists, southerners. (Tellingly, digitized texts written by immigrants are still rare. But see
http://www.alexanderstreet.com/products/imld.htm.)
Historical analysis of policy debates is scarcely new (see Zolberg 2006). Still, analysis of digitized texts provides new insights. For example, in the 1850s, the supporters of the nativist American Party (also known as the “Know-Nothings”) complained mainly about “foreigners” and about “foreign” influences (especially in the Catholic Church) at a time when most of their contemporaries wrote instead about “emigrants” and “emigration.” Searching the vast “Making of America” digitized collection of nineteenth-century books and periodicals (http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/) generates 51,570 references to emigr* but only 16,000 for immigr*.