The Subway Canaries

From the Opinion Journal Reagan on Immigration
GOP nativists lose one for the Gipper.
Sunday, May 21, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

One myth currently popular on the political right is that the immigration debate pits populist conservatives in the Ronald Reagan mold against Big Business “elites” who’ve hijacked the Republican Party. It’s closer to the truth to say that what’s really being hijacked here is the Gipper’s reputation.

One of the Reagan Presidency’s symbolic highlights was the July 3, 1986, celebration of a refurbished Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the gateway for immigrants a century ago. …To Reagan, the conservative optimist, immigration was a vital part of his vision of this country as “a shining city upon a Hill,” in the John Winthrop phrase he quoted so often. … This view was apparent in Reagan’s public statements well before he became President. In one of his radio addresses, in November 1977, he wondered about what he called “the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.” As a Californian, Reagan understood the role of immigrant labor in agriculture.

…”I believe we must resolve the problem at our southern border with full regard to the problems and needs of Mexico. I have suggested legalizing the entry of Mexican labor into this country on much the same basis you proposed, although I have not put it into the sense of restoring the bracero program.” The bracero program was a guest-worker program similar to the one now being proposed by President Bush. It was killed in the mid-1960s, largely due to opposition from unions.

During the same campaign, circa December 1979, the Gipper responded to criticism from conservative columnist Holmes Alexander with the following: “Please believe me when I tell you the idea of a North American accord has been mine for many, many years. I have seen presidents, both Democrat and Republican, approach our neighbors with pre-concocted plans in which their only input is to vote ‘yes.’

“Some months before I declared, I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico. I did not go with a plan. I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas–how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence.” So much for those conservatives who think the Gipper would have endorsed a 2,000-mile Tom Tancredo-Pat Buchanan wall.

It’s true that in November 1986 Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which included more money for border police and employer sanctions. The Gipper was a practical politician who bowed that year to one of the periodic anti-immigration uprisings from the GOP’s nativist wing. But even as he signed that bill, he also insisted on a provision for legalizing immigrants already in the U.S.–that is, he supported “amnesty.”

In his signing statement, Reagan declared: “We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”

 Yes, times change, and it’s impossible to know what precisely the Gipper would do at the current moment. But judging from these quotes and so many others across his long career, we feel confident in asserting that Mr. Bush and those who support more open immigration are far closer to Reagan’s views than today’s restrictionists are.

The current immigration political panic is not unlike many in America’s past, including a couple while Reagan was in public life. He always avoided the temptation to join them, no doubt realizing that they were short-sighted politically, and, more important, inconsistent with his vision of America as the last best hope of mankind.

Remarks at the Opening Ceremonies of the Statue of Liberty Centennial Celebration in New York, New York

July 3, 1986

Thank you. And Lee Iacocca, thank you on behalf of all of America. President and Madame Mitterrand, my fellow Americans: The iron workers from New York and New Jersey who came here to begin restoration work were at first puzzled and a bit put off to see foreign workers, craftsmen from France, arrive. Jean Wiart, the leader of the French workers, said his countrymen understood. After all, he asked, how would Frenchmen feel if Americans showed up to help restore the Eiffel Tower? But as they came to know each other — these Frenchmen and Americans — affections grew; and so, too, did perspectives.

The Americans were reminded that Miss Liberty, like the many millions she’s welcomed to these shores, is of foreign birth, the gift of workers, farmers, and shopkeepers and children who donated hundreds of thousands of francs to send her here. They were the ordinary people of France. This statue came from their pockets and from their hearts. The French workers, too, made discoveries. Monsieur Wiart, for example, normally lives in a 150-year-old cottage in a small French town, but for the last year he’s been riding the subway through Brooklyn. “A study in contrasts,” he said — contrasts indeed. But he has also told the newspapers that he and his countrymen learned something else at Liberty Island. For the first time, they worked in proximity with Americans of Jewish, black, Italian, Irish, Russian, Polish, and Indian backgrounds. “Fascinating,” he said, “to see different ethnic and national types work and live so well together.” Well, it’s how we like to think of America. And it’s good to know that Miss Liberty is still giving life to the dream of a new world where old antagonisms could be cast aside and people of every nation could live together as one.

It’s especially fitting that this lesson should be relived and relearned here by Americans and Frenchmen. President Mitterrand, the French and American people have forged a special friendship over the course of two centuries. Yes, in the 1700′s, France was the midwife of our liberty. In two World Wars, America stood with France as she fought for her life and for civilization. And today, Mr. President, with infinite gentleness, your countrymen tend the final resting places, marked now by rows of white crosses and stars, of more than 60,000 Americans who remain on French soil, a reminder since the days of Lafayette of our mutual struggles and sacrifices for freedom. So, tonight, as we celebrate the friendship of our two nations, we also pray: May it ever be so. God bless America, and vive la France!

And yet, my fellow Americans, it is not only the friendship of two peoples but the friendship of all peoples that brings us here tonight. We celebrate something more than the restoration of this statue’s physical grandeur. Another worker here, Scott Aronsen, a marble restorer, has put it well: “I grew up in Brooklyn and never went to the Statue of Liberty. But when I first walked in there to work, I thought about my grandfathers coming through here.” And which of us does not think of other grandfathers and grandmothers, from so many places around the globe, for whom this statue was the first glimpse of America?

“She was silhouetted very clear,” one of them wrote about standing on deck as their ship entered New York Harbor. “We passed her very slowly. Of course we had to look up. She was beautiful.” Another talked of how all the passengers rushed to one side of the boat for a fast look at their new home and at her. “Everybody was crying. The whole boat bent toward her. She was beautiful with the early morning light.” To millions returning home, especially from foreign wars, she was also special. A young World War I captain of artillery described how, on a troopship returning from France, even the most hard-bitten veteran had trouble blinking back the tears. “I’ve never seen anything that looked so good,” that doughboy, Harry Truman, wrote to his fiance, Bess, back in Independence, Missouri, “as the Liberty Lady in New York Harbor.”

And that is why tonight we celebrate this mother of exiles who lifts her light beside the golden door. Many of us have seen the picture of another worker here, a tool belt around his waist, balanced on a narrow metal rod of scaffolding, leaning over to place a kiss on the forehead of Miss Liberty. Tony Soraci, the grandson of immigrant Italians, said it was something he was proud to do, “something to tell my grandchildren.” Robert Kearney feels the same way. At work on the statue after a serious illness, he gave $10,000 worth of commemorative pins to those who visited here. Part of the reason, he says, was an earlier construction job over in Hoboken and his friend named Blackie. They could see the harbor from the building they were working on, and every morning Blackie would look over the water, give a salute, and say, “That’s my gal!”

Well, the truth is, she’s everybody’s gal. We sometimes forget that even those who came here first to settle the new land were also strangers. I’ve spoken before of the tiny Arabella, a ship at anchor just off the Massachusetts coast. A little group of Puritans huddled on the deck. And then John Winthrop, who would later become the first Governor of Massachusetts, reminded his fellow Puritans there on that tiny deck that they must keep faith with their God, that the eyes of all the world were upon them, and that they must not forsake the mission that God had sent them on, and they must be a light unto the nations of all the world — a shining city upon a hill.

Call it mysticism if you will, I have always believed there was some divine providence that placed this great land here between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world, who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope. Lincoln spoke about hope as he left the hometown he would never see again to take up the duties of the Presidency and bring America through a terrible Civil War. At each stop on his long train ride to Washington, the news grew worse: The Nation was dividing; his own life was in peril. On he pushed, undaunted. In Philadelphia he spoke in Independence Hall, where 85 years earlier the Declaration of Independence had been signed. He noted that much more had been achieved there than just independence from Great Britain. It was, he said, “hope to the world, future for all time.”

Well, that is the common thread that binds us to those Quakers [Puritans] on the tiny deck of the Arabella, to the beleaguered farmers and landowners signing the Declaration in Philadelphia in that hot Philadelphia hall, to Lincoln on a train ready to guide his people through the conflagration, to all the millions crowded in the steerage who passed this lady and wept at the sight of her, and those who’ve worked here in the scaffolding with their hands and with their love — Jean Wiart, Scott Aronsen, Tony Soraci, Robert Kearney, and so many others.

We’re bound together because, like them, we too dare to hope — hope that our children will always find here the land of liberty in a land that is free. We dare to hope too that we’ll understand our work can never be truly done until every man, woman, and child shares in our gift, in our hope, and stands with us in the light of liberty — the light that, tonight, will shortly cast its glow upon her, as it has upon us for two centuries, keeping faith with a dream of long ago and guiding millions still to a future of peace and freedom.

And now we will unveil that gallant lady. Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:28 p.m. on Governors Island. Following his remarks, the Statue of Liberty was illuminated. He then presented Medals of Liberty to Henry A. Kissinger, Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, I.M. Pei, Itzhak Perlman, James B. Reston, Kenneth Clark, Albert B. Sabin, An Wang, Elie Wiesel, Bob Hope, and Hanna Holburn Gray. Lee Iacocca was chairman of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation, which raised the funds for the restoration of the statue.