International Institute St. Louis

National Perspective -Americanization or Pluralism
International Institute St. Louis - History

(The national perspective is excerpted from Out of Many, One - A History of the Immigration and Refugee Services of America * Network, 1998, IRSA, by Margi Dunlap and Nicholas Montalto) As the young International Institutes were becoming established at the beginning of the First World War, the United States imposed a literacy requirement on all immigrants. The test required that immigrants be literate in their own languages – not necessarily English. The imposition of this test marked the beginning of a turning tide in public opinion that would threaten the nature of the work of the Institutes and introduced a necessary advocacy role into the task of the movement. In 1921, the United States set quotas, i.e., caps on allowable immigration based on an immigrant's country of origin. The number of immigrants allowed to enter was cut in half. In 1924, an expanded national origins quota system was imposed, halving again the number of allowable immigrants. The US Border Patrol was created. Immigration to the United States in 1925 was less than a quarter of what it had been every year of the previous decade. A movement began to "Americanize" the newcomers who were already here. Americanization meant everything from speaking only English to eating with knives and forks instead of chopsticks.
International Institutes around the country opposed efforts to strip immigrants of their own cultural and linguistic heritage. Alice Sickels, director of the International Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota, believed that true Americanization was a two-way street, with people learning from one another. Thus, new immigrants and people who had been here longer could work together to develop a new and better vision through sharing strengths and resources in an open, democratic society. Raymond Mohl, a historian who studied the immigrant aid movement, defined this position as "cultural pluralism." Ethnic diversity is good when coupled with a responsibility to build unity in diversity. The Americanization movement of the 1920s and 1930s taught us the price to be paid when immigrants are expected to discard linguistic and cultural identities and assume new ones not yet fully knit together with the old. During this time, many immigrant children were taught to be ashamed of their parents' background. Parents hid their cultural history from their children, leaving a generation with unanswered questions about family origins. We learned that language, culture, and identity are not either/or propositions but complex mosaics. The USCRI network was deeply affected by the economic collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. From 1931 to 1946 there would not be a single year when more than 100,000 people would enter the country as immigrants. The work of the International Institutes continued, becoming an essential community resource in bleak times. As the country struggled to survive the depression, the USCRI network became the meeting ground – the bridge between diverse yet similarly challenged groups. * IRSA changes its name to US Committee for Refugees & Immigrants (USCRI) in 2004
Teaching Democracy & Self-Reliance	A Meeting Ground for all Peoples