Border Crossing

From the OAH President
Richard White

White

My grandfather was an illegal immigrant, although no one in my family ever thought of him as that. He was from Ireland and came over the border at Detroit in the 1920s. He got caught (a piece of ineptitude that startles me still), and was deported back into Canada. His brother, a Chicago cop, came to Detroit, crossed over to Windsor, and escorted my grandfather through customs. Eventually, he filed for legal immigration and brought my mother over. This is the family story.

My other grandfather nearly got deported back to Russia, where he was born, for crimes of "moral turpitude," until he became, as my father liked to say, the only Democrat ever pardoned by Herbert Hoover. My wife's father spent his last demented year in Arizona trying to persuade his wife to rent a jackhammer to cut into their slab foundation and hide the money from the Mexicans, whom he thought were about cross the border en masse. My brother-in-law was born in Mexico, and became a citizen in the last amnesty.

I consider myself part of a pretty normal American family.

It is spring of 2006 as I am writing this, and the immigration debate is raging, and I have been thinking about this personal past--an agglomeration of stories, memories, and a history that I have tracked down--and trying to figure out what difference it makes.

What is most obvious to me is that when I think about the present, I nearly automatically think about the past. These stories are not all history, although some of them are. Virtually all of them, however, at least as told within the family before they are sanitized for public consumption, are ironic, funny, full of unintended consequences, and surprisingly nonjudgmental and nonnationalistic. My grandfather, for the trouble he eventually endured to get American citizenship gave it up and went back to County Kerry. There he pined for the Chicago White Sox and was for the rest of his life known as the Yank. I remember asking my brother-in-law if he was going to use the amnesty to get citizenship. "Why?" he replied. But he did.

Except for the immigrants themselves, the current public discussion usually involves the usual suspects and is idiotically simple. It is about principles: secure borders and punishing lawbreakers on one side and economic justice and the rights to citizenship on the other. Or, alternatively, it is about economic calculations: immigrants do or do not help the economy. If these discussions were part of my family stories, they would be the blustering uncles, growing red in the face. Everyone else in the room would ignore them.

My being a historian earns me as much derision as respect from my family--"the professor" my mother calls me with both disdain and pride--but for all their differences, there is one place where family stories and academic history resemble each other. They both evoke a nuanced and complex world, and they both appeal to practice more than principles.

A public debate more informed by the complexity of family stories and actual practices of our past would be a better debate, but settling for that is a cliché. If I thought that the take home lesson for historians was that we should be presenting the public with the facts about past immigration laws and the experiences of past immigrants because this would lead to more informed and better decisions, then I would come perilously close to what I have come to think of as the Millard Fillmore fallacy. Whenever I hear someone complaining about Americans' ignorance of history, I think of Millard Fillmore. Would this be a better country if every American knew about Millard Fillmore? I may be going out on a limb here, but I don't think so.

But we might be a better country, and better citizens, if we spent less time thinking about easy principles and more time thinking about complicated practices. The best source of complicated practices is the past. History is a habit of mind and not a collection of facts. Most historians know that, just as their families know that families are not run on principles. The hard part is figuring out how to put this knowledge into collective public practice.

Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, is president of the Organization of American Historians.