Video 1: American immigration history

Immigration.
00:03
It’s been the defining characteristic of America since before our country even began, so it’s
important to remind ourselves of our rich history...of where we all came from to create this one-of-
a-kind melting pot of people that is the United States in the 21st century.
00:19
The first successful colony in America was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia by English
settlers. But, these first Europeans arrived in a land that was already home to other people. To
indigenous, Native Americans who thousands of years before had crossed over a land bridge from
Siberia into what’s now the state of Alaska. They were the first explorers of this beautiful land, and
they would spread throughout the entire continent and throughout central and southern America
too. Native Americans thrived by harnessing the power of nature, and over time, they formed into
many distinct groups, each with their own languages and cultures. Then, in 1492, as legend has it,
Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and arrived in the Bahamas and immediately
encountered a group of these indigenous people called the Arawak. The Arawak were curious and
friendly, but Columbus was filled with greed, and took some of them prisoner, demanding they
show him where the gold they were wearing came from. Now, the Native Americans were so easy
going and poorly armed compared to these Europeans - who had modern weaponry like metal-
forged swords and armor, and even guns - that Columbus said “I could conquer the whole of them
with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.” And that’s exactly what he, and other Spanish
conquistadors who came after him, did. They vanquished indigenous group after indigenous group
with cunning and sheer brutality, and got a lot of help from diseases like smallpox that moved
ahead of them and just wiped the natives out.
01:51
“When smallpox was taken to the new world nobody in the new world had every seen a disease
like this before. So the number of people who were susceptible was much greater. There was no
natural immunity, so the number of people who could contract the disease and then spread, and
the number of people to receive it once it’s been spread, was much higher.”
02:08
“Some scholars think there may have been a population of 20 million native Americans and the
vast majority, perhaps 95%, were killed by old world diseases. A continent virtually emptied of its
people.
02:27
Once word of the discovery of the New World spread throughout the Old World - the kingdoms
and empires of Europe - many people began to plan journeys of their own across the Atlantic
Ocean. Starting around 1620, tens of thousands of British, German and Dutch - but mostly British
Puritans - came to North America to escape religious persecution, or to search for better
opportunity, or simply for an adventure. The Puritans spread throughout New England in the
northeast, the Dutch settled along the Hudson River in New York and established rich, successful
trading posts and cities like New Amsterdam (which we now call New York City).
03:06
English Quakers established the Pennsylvania colony and its commercial center, Philadelphia. More
than 90% of these early colonists became farmers. And, because they were living in small,
widespread villages, disease didn’t spread as easily as it could back in Europe, which kept the
death rate among settlers in America low. All these farmers needed large families to help them
farm, which caused the population to boom, especially in the New England colonies.
03:33
As land became harder to come by along the coasts, the roughly 350,000 Scottish and Northern
Irish who arrived throughout the 1700’s settled inland in western Pennsylvania and along the
Appalachians deep into the south. The British sent 60,000 prisoners across the ocean to Georgia,
although the only thing many of these men were guilty of was being poor and out of work.
Tobacco was a highly profitable cash crop in the southern colonies, so many British settled there
and began to take advantage of the thriving slave trade.
04:05
“Those of us who study immigration history think in terms of why people leave their homelands
and why they come here. And those are generally encapsulated in two words: push and pull.
Something pushes them out of their homeland and something pulls them to the United States.
04:24
Now obviously in the earliest cases of slavery they were not necessarily pushed from their
homeland, but they were taken from their homeland. But the reason why they were taken was
because there was labor to be done here in the United States. It was a global force, the slave trade
was fairly global - at least in the Atlantic - and later Asia would become involved in it as well. So
here you have a forced migration.”
04:50
Hundreds of thousands of Africans were mercilessly captured and taken prisoner in their own
lands, then put on ships bound for America, where they were sold into a life of hard labor for no
pay, and no chance at freedom.
05:05
[Graph] This is the population breakdown of the country around 1790, shortly after the colonies’
hard-won war of independence with the British and the adoption of the American constitution,
which made the country of the United States official. The Native American population was so
decimated by disease, war, and migration to the west, that only about 100,000 were left inside the
territorial United States.
05:30
Out west, many Spaniards moved north from Mexico across the Rio Grande to settle in California,
Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Not all of these settlers were of European descent. They all could
speak Spanish, but ethnically, they were a melting pot of whites, Indians and mestizos, or people of
mixed race.
05:50
French settlers established footholds mainly along the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes,
along the Mississippi River, and along the Gulf Coast, establishing the city of New Orleans. Their
descendants are known as Cajuns. These French and Spanish populations would be incorporated
into the United States in the coming decades through the Louisiana Purchase and the granting of
statehood to the western territories.
06:15
After more than four decades of relatively little immigration into America after its founding, in the
1830’s, tens of thousands of immigrants began arriving on her eastern shores, again, mainly from
Britain, Ireland and Germany. Some were attracted to the cheap farmland that was made available
by westward expansion, while others took advantage of the manufacturing boom in the cities
sparked by the industrial revolution.
06:40
The Irish were mainly unskilled laborers who built most of the railroads and canals, took jobs in the
emerging textile mill towns in the Northeast, or worked in the ports. About half of the Germans
became farmers, mainly in the midwest, and the other half became craftsman in urban areas.
Asian immigrants - mainly from China - began crossing the Pacific to work as laborers, particularly
on the transcontinental railroad or in the mines.
07:06
[History Professor Scott Wong] “Immigration also during the 19th century was usually male
dominated—males in their prime working years between the years of 18-25. The Irish being the
one exception. Eventually there would be more Irish women who immigrated than Irish men.
Immigrants to this day often follow established patterns. They leave on village or one city and go to
another city in the United States because someone has already established that pattern for them.
People go to where they know people. And those people here can often arrange for jobs and
places to live and so on. It was often said that your first job coming off the boat was whoever
picked you up at the docks. Now people say your first job is whoever picked you up at the airport.
07:53
[Show graph] After tripling from the decade before, in just two more decades, from the 1830s to
the 1850s, the amount of immigrants arriving in the US each year tripled again, to about 170,000.
By the 1850s, when the total population of the country passed 20 million and things began to get a
bit crowded, America’s first measurable anti-immigrant feelings began to take root, mainly
targeting Irish-catholic immigrants who were arriving in large numbers to escape the poverty and
death of the potato famine that was hitting them hard at home. But with a huge boom on the
horizon, this early xenophobia was nothing compared to what would come later.
08:36
Large, steam-powered ships took to the seas after 1880, replacing the older, slower sailing ships,
which meant it was suddenly much faster - and cheaper - to cross the ocean, making the dream of
a journey to America more accessible to many around the world.
08:53
“Processed and ticketed, they waited for their ship. They boarded in many parts of Europe and in
many kinds of vessels. Most to New York and some to other ports. But they had one thing in
common—they were traveling steerage, and the steamship companies understood the profit in
numbers.”
09:21
[Chart] Before long, millions of immigrants were arriving on America’s shores. They passed through
immigration processing stations like Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.
This wave was much more diverse than before. Coming mainly from Southern Europe, it was led by
Italians, Poles, Greeks, Swedes, Norwegians, Hungarians, Jews, Lebanese, and Syrians.
09:41
“It was as if god’s great promise had been fulfilled. I’m going into a free land. I don’t think I ever
can explain the feeling I had that time.
09:57
It’s not my native land, but it means more to me than my native land—it means more to me than
my native land…Any country on earth this never happen. And become a human being again--it’s a
miracle...everybody had hopes.
10:25
And one thing I was sure, and thousands like me: that the degradation, and the abuse, and the
piration that we had in Europe, we wouldn’t have here.”
10:43
This group was young, most were under 30 years old, mainly because an entire generation of the
children of farmers and factory workers in Europe and the Russian empire couldn’t find work
because the owners of the farms and factories preferred to have an efficient machine - that they
didn’t have to pay - do the work instead of a human being. Well, this was fine by America, whose
steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment production industries were booming. It happily took in
this pool of eager, hard workers and put them to work in its growing industrial cities.
11:17
“As mills and factories sprouted across the land, cities grew up around them. In turn, the cities
beckoned to workers by the millions from the American countryside and from overseas to fuel the
burgeoning industrialization. What was once a rural nation was rapidly becoming an urban state.
Between 1860 to 1910, the urban population grew from over 6 million to over 44 million.”
11:45
The United States also took full advantage of Europe’s paralyzation during the first World War.
With millions dying in the midst of the bloodiest struggle the European continent had ever seen,
every country there had to completely focus its industries on producing all the supplies - the guns,
the uniforms, the tanks, the boats, the bullets - all the stuff needed to carry on and win the fight.
But with many of its working-aged men on the front lines, in hospitals or at home after horrific
injuries - or dead - the factories of Europe couldn’t meet all the demand, so US factories made up
for the shortfall in production.
12:23
Before long, the United States had leapt to the front ranks of the world’s economic giants. And
when the Americans entered the conflict themselves in 1917, US industry was now tasked with
supplying its own soldiers too. It was during this 50-year immigration wave, from about 1870-1920,
when many well-off, white, native-born Americans began to consider mass immigration a danger
to the health and security of the country. They started actively organizing to exert political power
to slow it down.
12:55
The first immigration law in American history was known as the Asian Exclusion Act. It was passed
in 1875 and - you guessed it - outlawed Asians, specifically Asian contract laborers, from stepping
foot on American soil, plus any other people considered convicts in their own countries.
13:14
In 1921, Congress pushed through a law that marked a turning-point in American immigration
policy--a law that passed the Senate 78-1. The Emergency Quota Act set strict limits on the amount
of immigrants who would be allowed into the country each year. It was very effective. The number
of new immigrants let in fell from over 800,000 in 1920 to just over 300,000 admitted in 1921.
13:38
[CHART] If the pace of immigration had been like a raging river, this law acted like a dam. But that
drop off in the flow of persons into America still didn’t satisfy the anti-immigration crowd who, just
three years later in 1924, forced congress to tighten the quota even more, established the border
patrol, and stated that any undocumented immigrants who entered the country were subject to
deportation.
14:03
It’s during this time that the definition of “illegal alien” was born, a term that would be used to
stigmatize the next group the anti-immigration community’s crosshairs became fixed on: latin-
american migrants living and working in the US Southwest.
14:20
After the quota laws passed by the US Congress in the 1920’s, immigration was capped for the first
time in American history. One of the exceptions to the strict quotas were documented contract
workers from the western hemisphere who could come into and out of the US freely. The other
major exception were the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were allowed in, mainly Jews
escaping the horrors of the Holocaust during and after World War II, and the roughly 400,000
families who fled Cuba after the Castro-led revolution of 1959.
14:52
The US entrance into World War II also meant many more Mexican workers were needed to fill in
for all the young American men who were off fighting the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in
the Pacific. At the end of this period, between 1944 and 1954, the number of immigrants coming
from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent, as many Latin American workers were offered low wage
agricultural jobs in the American Southwest as part of the bracero program. But large numbers of
Mexicans without the necessary paperwork came in search of the American dream too, and what
followed is one of the ugliest periods in US immigration history.
15:31
With pressure mounting to do something about the thousands of immigrants easily crossing the
southern border each year, President Eisenhower turned to Gen. Joseph Swing, who launched
“Operation Wetback” in 1954. That derogatory name reveals the insensitivity of the policy, which
directed hundreds of federal officials to lead thousands of local police officers on sweeps through
neighborhoods throughout the American southwest, stopping any “Mexican looking” person and
demanding to see their papers. If they didn’t have their papers, they were arrested and deported.
Some estimates put the amount of illegal immigrants thrown out of the country above one million,
leading to countless families being torn apart. In some cases, their American-born children were
even sent away. Obviously, this program angered many Mexican-American citizens, and anyone
else who saw it as a blatant violation of human rights on a massive scale.
16:25
[History professor Miguel Levario] “What we have here is an aggressive and sort of paramilitary
approach to deportation and mass deportation and of course the use of propaganda to address
the issue of unauthorized Mexican workers in the United States. Because the Border Patrol agency
was so small - I mean, they’re using local law enforcement - so while they’re out there trying to
look for undocumented immigrants what aren’t they doing? Their own basic responsibilities of
keeping neighborhoods safe, addressing burglaries, murders, whatever it could be. Operation
Wetback was terminated in large part because of cost, in large part because it just became too
taxing on local resources. We also found out that regardless of how far you sent them into the
interior, within days,
sometimes weeks, they were right back in there.
17:13
The final era of immigration to America is the one we’re still currently in, which began in 1965 with
the passage of the Hart-Celler Act. This law finally replaced the unfair quota system with a policy
that gives preference to immigrants who have relatives already in the United States, or people with
job skills that are highly sought after. All other past restrictions targeting specific groups were
thrown out. This was one of the crown jewels in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program
and it fundamentally shifted who was allowed in.
17:46
In 1970, 60% of immigrants came from Europe, this number just fell off a cliff by the year 2000,
when only 15% were from Europe. The one thing that didn’t change were the many
undocumented immigrants from Latin America who continued to come across the border in search
of a better life. So, in an effort to address this, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the
Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave green cards to about 2.7 million immigrants. It
was the largest single moment of legalization in American history. As a conservative from the anti-
immigration party in modern America, the Republican Reagan compromised in exchange for more
restrictions on employers who hire illegal immigrants, and tighter border security.
18:31
But it was a flawed law in a number of ways, mainly, it didn’t effectively fix the broken system that
was allowing businesses to hire illegal immigrants in the first place. So since the businesses could
still break the rules, many low paying jobs remained for the millions of undocumented immigrants
in America that the law didn’t legalize. The bill also didn’t adequately fund and equip the border
patrol, which meant there was still a fairly consistent flow of people coming across the border.
19:02
To fix some of these problems, Sen. Ted Kennedy introduced, and Congress passed, the
Immigration Act of 1990, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law. This increased the
number of legal immigrants entering the United States from around 500,000 per year to 700,000--
an increase of 40%. This bill is also noteworthy because it was bipartisan, with a democratically-
controlled congress working with a Republican president to pass major, common-sense
immigration reform. Since the passage of that 1990 bill, about 1,000,000 immigrants on average
legally achieve residence in the United States each year.
19:42
These are the top ten countries ranked by the number of legal immigrants from these countries
who came to the United States in 2013 according to the Department of Homeland Security.
19:51
[Chart]
19:52
According to the 2010 Census, these are the countries from which all immigrants currently in the
United States came from, ranked by the total number of people in America who say they were
born in each country.
20:03
Today, 14.3 percent of the total American population is foreign born. That’s more than 45,000,000
people. The United States is home to nearly 20% of all the immigrants in the world. It’s estimated
that more than 10 million of the immigrants in the United States are here illegally, living in the
shadows.
20:22
Thank you for watching, I hope you gained a greater appreciation for who we are as a nation and
how immigration has allowed us to attract people from all over the rest of the world, how that is
the single-most important factor in binding us together and making us such a dynamic country.
20:38
This video was proudly created by the two-brother team that is the daily conversation, the video
editor Brendan Plank and myself. Until next time, for TDC, I’m Bryce Plank.

Video 2: Illegal immigration documentary

0:28: People to risk their lives to come to America, have one thing in common. And it's important.
They are all irreducibly founded on respect for the law. You see, it's the lawlessness and corruption
of Mexico that causes people to flee. It's the extralegal arrests and the property confiscation in
Cuba, the murdering death squads throughout South America, the grinding poverty of Africa, the
gloom and despondency of Russia and Eastern Europe, all of which is a result of lawlessness.
0:58: But you do not flee from something only to bring it with you. Are you fleeing from a country
where your property has been trespassed upon? And yet your first actions here are to trespass
upon someone else's? Do you naturally enough flee from corruption and yet use corrupt people
using corrupt measures to bring you into this new sanctuary? In order to help you escape. You do
not have a moral right to flee lawlessness. If your first actions in your new home are to break the
law and to continue breaking it on a daily basis.
1:40: We got a hodgepodge. Hurry back out here. Sixteen two Asian girls, Chinese. They both
spoke English. They both have paid fifty thousand each to come in here. Oh, yeah. Then we had
that same group, we had at least three or four Indians and a couple of Pakistani….
2:08:
A: Wrong in saying that the president's number one job is to keep Americans safe.
B: Everything else is secondary to that. Clearly, it's not even the main. It's almost it's reason to
mourn two and three. Everything else matter how important anything else is. Health, education.
Nothing. None of that matters if we're dead.
A: How would you describe President Obama's attitude toward the war on terror?
B: Which is very schizophrenic, damaging, and it's been very frustrating.
Obama: It's long past time to fix our broken immigration system
2:45: In the months ahead, I will continue to engage Congress to ensure not only that, our
targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of
checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and
to the world. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of
real threats to our security and our economy.
3:10: In the early 90s, hundreds, about 300000 people, maybe some of your ancestors passed
through on their way to a new life in America. And for many, it represented the end of a long and
arduous journey that finally arrived in a place where they believed anything was possible. For
some, it also represented the beginning of a new struggle against prejudice in a country that didn't
always treat its immigrants fairly or afford them the same rights as everybody else. Obviously,
Asians faced this, but so did the Irish. So did Italians. So did Jews. And many groups still do today.
That didn't stop those brave men and women from coming. They were drawn by a belief in the
power of opportunity. A belief that says maybe I never had a chance at a good education, but
there's a place where my daughter can go to college. Maybe I start up washing dishes, but this is a
place where my son can become mayor of San Francisco.
Maybe I have to make sacrifices today, but those sacrifices are worth it if it means a better life for
my family. And that's a family story that will be shared.
5:02: Mexican racist groups like La Raza, which means the race, La Raza is racism defined, assert
that Mexicans have the legal right to all of the southwestern United States because it was taken by
force and is therefore illegally obtained. Let's examine this argument just a little more fully. LaRaza
claims that all of Texas is in that category. Mexicans should be free to go into Texas with impunity
because Texas really still belongs to them, to Mexico. Well, let's stand well north of the current
border.
Let's stand outside of Lubbock, Texas, and see who we need to give this land back to. You see,
America wouldn't return Texas to Mexico. We would return it to the Confederacy. We took it by
force and therefore, legally, according to this logic. But obviously, the Confederacy is gone. So we
should then have to return it to its rightful owners, which is the Republic of Texas. The Texans
would then have to give it back to Mexico since they took it from them by force.
So Mexico has it. But then, of course, La Raza being people of integrity, will demonstrate in the
streets in order to give Texas back to Spain since the Mexicans took it from them by force. Spain
will then have to give it back to France. Naturally enough, since Spain took it from France by force
and the French can just hand it right back since they took it from Spain by force to begin with. So
(a name) belongs to Spain, took it by force from the Comanches, give Texas to the Comanches,
then we've got it solved only the Comanches took it by force from the Apaches. The Providence of
Texas gets a little dicey here, since no one knew how to write before that time. But we do know
that the Apaches pinched this land from the ancient Pueblo people who hijacked it from the first
few people, who captured it from the plain view people, who conquered it from the first people,
who snatched it from Clovis man, who arrived on what is now downtown Lubbock, Texas, USA
about 11000 years ago.
5:51: Now, since all of these owners took that patch of land more or less by force, no one owner is
in any position of moral superiority. Yes, it was taken from them, but they took it from someone
else.
7:28:
A: November 6, 2012 was Election Day, one of the hot button issues is voter fraud, voter I.D. We're
gonna see if we can go get that non-citizen to go vote. We'll see what happens. I think it's you guys
start right now. We can go get try to vote for us. You see him over there? Right over there. My
friend. OK. Happening. We will make a couple bucks?
B: No no to be
A: A couple beers? Yeah. All right.
B: All right. But I won't do it. Hey, I got some more. What? I'll tell you about it.
A: We gonna see if you can vote for me.
10:52: This is a California voter registration form in Los Angeles County. It asks for your name, your
last name, middle name, your home address or city is the county you live in, your date of birth.
The U.S. state or foreign country of birth, your California driver's license. And it says here, this is
the interesting part that I think is kind of screwed up. It says if you do not have a California driver's
license or ID card, list the last four numbers of your Social Security number, if you have one.
11:26: That state Sheppard is Arizona. They are the only state in the nation that requires proof of
citizenship. In other words, to prove that you actually, yes, are an American citizen before you
register to vote. Arizona has been doing it since 2004 and Shep's since that time. They have
removed two thousand non-citizens from the voting rolls and estimates say almost forty thousand
forty thousand new registrations not met the standard of this law. That's a lot of people.
12:11:
A: Chinese coming over the border from Mexico.
B: I don't know, I'm not certain that is where we made it. We haven't started certain how fact how
much we have to fear Chinese coming across the border.
12:14: In this part of the world, we don't have a lot of tourist attractions, but this is one of them.
This is a emergency distress beacon. And most people find it curious that it's in three languages,
English, Spanish and Chinese. And since the last time we were out here, they've even been so nice
as to add a five gallon bucket of water. Courtesy the United States government. This has been here
at least a couple of years. They put it here for a specific reason because this is the this is the point
that they travel quite a bit, though. Eight of them along the Texas border.
12:51:
A: I have a question for you. Why do you think that sign? Why do you think that sign should be
down along the border in Texas, written in English, written in Spanish and in Chinese? The
government may that Congressman.
B: Our government. Yes.
A: I mean, you've been in Congress for 22 years, right? Right. OK. Has anybody ever showed you
that picture before?
B: No.
A: Nobody ever. Nobody. And nobody's ever got 20 hearings that said, look at this picture.
Marketing one to one make your advertisements the people are going to read them.
11:39: Well, there are five reasons, one is that it would split his own party. That's one reason for
plunging. The other four. As Speaker said, Republicans are convinced that the president will not do
his constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Therefore, any law they write
will be written in smoke and disappear. Secondly, they are convinced that the Democrats are most
interested in getting as many new voters possible on the voting rolls. And that's not in their
interest. They also think they can run on Obamacare right through November. There I think they're
probably mistaken. But that's what they think. The problem is here is that Republican political
imperatives are pretty clear. In my judgment, this will horrify Laura, diametrically opposed to the
national interest, which is considerable large number.
14:32: We believe this will be the year Congress finally gets it done. The politics on this issue have
been turned upside down for the first time ever. There's more political risk in opposing
immigration reform than in supporting it.
14: 49: It was a news conference for our times.
14:52: In our case, there's so much importance here, but not enough with senators breaking into
Spanish at the first language of a growing number of voters.
14:59: First, let me just say, John, I don't agree with anything you just said about you in Spanish.
There are 11 million human beings in this country today that are undocumented. That's not
something that anyone is happy about. That's not something anyone wanted to see happen. But it
is what has happened. And we have an obligation and the need to address the reality of the
situation that we face.
15:19: Some illegal immigrants are already being allowed to stay. The Obama administration has
ended deportations for those who were brought here as children.
15:32: South Carolina's immigration law is patterned after those in Arizona and Alabama. Senator
Larry Grooms says he sponsored the bill because of what he says is a growing illegal population.
15:43: We welcome those who were here legally, but those who want to come to this nation
illegally do not come to South Carolina. And we hope that this law will send a strong signal. This is
not the place to be if you choose to come into this country illegally.
15:59: According to some estimates, 55000 undocumented immigrants live in the state. The new
law says in part, if police stop anyone for any crime like a traffic ticket, they can question and
detain them if they suspect they're in the country illegally, but residents.
16:19: I guess it makes it easy for any reason or they can find the minimum excuse to just stop
you. And then, all, by the way, you see me. Let me see your document.
16:30: De Armas says many who feel threatened are trying to figure out what to do.