Todays Immigration Policy Debates Do We Need a Little History今天的移民政策辩论，我们需要一点历史.doc

Todays Immigration Policy Debates: Do We Need a Little History? By Donna R. Gabaccia Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota November 1, 2006 In their everyday life, most Americans seem to agree with Henry Ford who once said, History is more or less bunk... We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinkers damn is the history we make today. Certainly a great - but now also deadlocked - debate on immigration figures prominently in the history being made today in the United States and around the world. What is surprising is how often the debaters evoke the past through references to history. Some insist that the United States has always been a nation of immigrants. Others respond by insisting that todays immigration problems - illegal entry, globalization of labor, and threats to national security - are unprecedented. Assertions of continuity, of change, or of deep rupture between past and present are all temporal claims, familiar to specialists in my home discipline - commonly called history. As an historian, Im fascinated by Americans sudden interest in the past. What do debaters seek from the past when they argue policy alternatives? Does history, as a discipline, have special authority in interpreting the past or is every man his own historian, as Carl Becker, himself an historian, once insisted? What is History? Historians do study the past, of course. Their concern with the past often makes them generalists who write about politics, society, culture, economy, and law, or about how some or all of these dimensions of human life entwine to define each moment in time as distinctive. What scholarship on the present typically divides into separate disciplines (giving the analysis of politics to political science and of society to sociology) historians contentedly unite. Historians are concerned with causation. but their methods differ from those of the natural sciences. Like social scientists, historia