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Roanoke, a seven-time winner of the All-America City designation, recently won another title.
The Star City was named a “Certified Welcoming” city by Welcoming America, a nonprofit dedicated to welcoming immigrants.
Roanoke is the first locality in Virginia to earn this distinction and one of just 24 across the country. It’s also the fifth smallest community on that list, which is otherwise dominated by major metros.
Given the tenor of the national conversation about immigration, you would not expect to find a small city on the edge of Appalachia to be an officially “welcoming” city for immigrants, yet there Roanoke is. This is just one of many data points about Roanoke that show how it’s different.
The designation does not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Roanoke. For decades now, the city has welcomed and encouraged refugees, from the arrival of the Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s to more recent waves of people fleeing horrors in Afghanistan and Somalia. Two years ago, Cardinal published a story about Blue Ridge Literacy, which began years ago with the goal of teaching unschooled Americans how to read and now has transitioned into a tutoring service for immigrants learning English. That story mentioned immigrants from Afghanistan, China, Egypt, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Liberia, Nicaragua, India, Myanmar and Pakistan. Blue Ridge Literacy’s director is an immigrant from Iran. You can see Roanoke’s diverse culture by checking out all the ethnic groceries on Williamson Road, or by visiting the city’s annual Local Colors festival in May, where more than 50 nationalities in the Roanoke Valley are celebrated. (I’ve always been partial to the roasted corn at the Colombian booth.)
What’s also notable about Roanoke’s new designation is that it comes both amidst a growing anti-immigration backlash today, and 100 years after one of the nation’s most concerted efforts to reduce immigration in general — and the immigration of anything other than white northern Europeans in particular.
Let’s open up the history books and see what the past can tell us about the present.
First, it’s important to remember that for much of our history there were no restrictions on immigration. People simply showed up and got off the boat. Those who say that their ancestors “came here the right way” forget that their forefathers and foremothers didn’t get any permission to be here. Our founders were enthusiastically pro-immigration. Thomas Jefferson declared: “The present desire of America is to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible.” In the first Congress that convened in 1789, 10% of the members of the House of Representatives were foreign-born; today that figure is 3%. One of the first things that very first Congress did was to pass a citizenship law that was remarkable for its generous provisions: to become an American citizen, all you had to do was live here for two years and swear an oath of allegiance. Of course, you also had to be white, but the point is that in those days, loyalty trumped length of residency as a requirement for citizenship. In Jefferson’s first State of the Union address, he encouraged Congress to welcome refugees: “Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?”
Later on, when the question arose about whether noncitizens held rights under the U.S. Constitution, James Madison — who knew a few things about that document — insisted they did. Today, people on all sides like to cherry-pick what they like from the founders. Those on the side of reducing immigration won’t like to hear too much about Jefferson and Madison.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln set in motion another pro-immigration measure. He appointed Anson Burlingame as U.S. Minister to China. Lincoln died, but Burlingame stayed on his post. In 1868, he negotiated a trade treaty with China that required China to allow its citizens to immigrate to the United States if they wanted. Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union; he also indirectly helped set in motion Asian immigration to a United States that was previously just white and Black. In modern lingo, Lincoln was woke. He also indirectly set in motion the first real restrictions on immigration; those came as a backlash to the treaty Burlingame negotiated.
It wasn’t until Asians — primarily Chinese — started immigrating to the United States that the country seriously thought about imposing restrictions on who could come here. Those first came in the form of the Page Act of 1875, which effectively banned the entry of Chinese women, followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all Chinese immigration for 10 years (although it wound up staying in force for 61 years). That ban on Chinese immigration had the effect of creating a migrant crisis on our northern border. Chinese immigrants simply sailed into Vancouver and sneaked across the Canadian border into the United States, then claimed they’d been here all along. In his 1891 State of the Union address, President Benjamin Harrison blamed the Canadians, blamed lax American judges, blamed “organized” groups for promoting Chinese immigration. Few things are truly new.
Immigration of all kinds surged after the Civil War — political unrest in Europe drove some out, the industrial age drew many others here. Those waves of immigrants also coincided with a growing racist backlash in the United States. After Reconstruction, there was a brief period in which racial conciliation seemed possible. In Virginia, the Readjuster Party took power in the early 1880s and made a number of moves considered progressive for the time: The state founded a Black university (Virginia State), it abolished the poll tax and the whipping post, it invested in Black schools. The Readjusters were eventually swept from power, and Virginia — along with the rest of the South — moved toward Jim Crow. World War I helped accelerate the Great Migration, which also provoked a racial backlash in many places — the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
The 1920s saw all these trends convert themselves into legislation. For most of our history, the United States really did have “open borders.” Even after the restrictions on Chinese immigration, the legal presumption was that everyone was allowed in unless there was some specific reason to exclude them. In 1921, Congress passed a law changing that — from that point on, everyone was considered excluded unless the government found a reason to let someone in. In Richmond, the General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which was used to enforce segregation, and the Sterilization Act, which was used to practice eugenics. In Washington, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which was intended to stop “a stream of alien blood.” The act set quotas for the number of southern and eastern Europeans who were allowed in; Asians were banned entirely. Within a year, the number of Italians moving to the United States fell by 90%; more Asian immigrants moved out than moved in, which no doubt pleased the bill’s authors.
The Immigration Act of 1924 had implications that, in some ways, have lasted a century. Some economists believe that the sudden drop in immigration helped exacerbate the Great Depression because the economy could have used more consumer spending but there were simply few immigrants as consumers. Japan was outraged that its people were no longer welcome in the United States. Japan considered the law a “Japanese exclusion act.” Historian David Atkinson says the protests in Japan caused Japanese attitudes toward the U.S. to harden, setting relations on a hostile path toward Pearl Harbor. The immigration restrictions meant many European Jews were denied entry to the U.S. when the Nazis came to power in Germany.
The repercussions of the Immigration Act of 1924 continued into our own time. The United States had been accustomed to its population being about 13% to 14% foreign-born (it was 13.2% before the Civil War, peaked at 14.8% in 1890, and was 13.2% again in 1920). Between the new law, the war and the Cold War, immigration fell precipitously. By 1970, just 4.7% of the U.S. population was foreign-born. That means those reading this column have grown up during an abnormal period of American history. We think today’s figure for the foreign-born population — estimated at 13.9% — is unusual. It’s actually quite typical of the American experience. We may think it’s unusual to hear Spanish or some other language being spoken but that’s only because we’ve grown up hearing fewer foreign languages spoken in this country than previous generations of Americans did.
Our immigration debates today have been complicated by what’s happening on the southern border. That’s a mess, to be sure, although conceptually not that much different from what President Harrison dealt with on the northwestern border in the 19th century. The worst part is that we’ve come to conflate border security with immigration, when the two are not the same. They overlap, of course, but the passions over the one make it difficult to have a rational conversation about the other. Mathematically speaking, the United States needs more immigrants, not fewer — that’s how we overcome a declining birth rate that has brought us worker shortages and, in some places, school closures (Franklin County and Russell County) or potential school closures (Bedford County and Lynchburg.) We also need to have control over who’s walking across the border. Those two things shouldn’t be at odds, but somehow they’ve gotten that way.
That brings us back to Roanoke being named a “welcoming city.” We think of Virginia as a growing state and it is — although that population isn’t growing as fast as it once did, mostly due to a slowing birth rate and more people moving out of state than into the state. In some recent years, the only reason Virginia’s population has grown has been because of immigration. The latest population estimates say that Roanoke’s population is dropping again. Reality check: If it weren’t for immigration, the city’s population would be dropping faster. Welcoming America says that Roanoke welcomed 131 immigrants in 2023. That’s great, but that’s not enough to overcome the twin deficits of deaths outnumbering births and net out-migration. To get back even to its 2020 population, Roanoke needs at least 966 new residents. Whether they come from the maternity ward or Massachusetts or Mumbai doesn’t really matter. They should all be welcome.
In this week’s newsletter: Should Rasoul run for lieutenant governor?
I write a free weekly political newsletter that goes out each Friday at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters.
Here’s what’s in this week’s newsletter:
- Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, is contemplating whether to enter the race for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 2025. I look at the 2021 race, where he finished second, to see what those numbers tell us.
- Washington Post columnist says Trump campaign is thinking about a Trump-Youngkin ticket.
- Former Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) says Democrat Abigail Spanberger would beat his party’s most likely candidates for governor.
- How Virginia’s congressional delegation voted on aid to Ukraine.
- Attorney General Jason Miyares had strong words for anti-Israel protestors.