The author discusses how continued immigration is constantly reshaping the demography, economy, and society of the United States. America must respond to three fundamental immigration questions: how many immigrants should be admitted; from where and in what status should they arrive; and how should the rules governing the system be enforced?

Continued immigration constantly reshapes the demography, economy, and society of the United States. As a country of immigrants, America must respond to three fundamental immigration questions: how many immigrants should be admitted; from where and in what status should they arrive; and how should the rules governing the system be enforced?

During the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Congress responded to growing gaps between immigration policy and immigration reality by making major changes in immigration laws and their administration. In 1986, the United States enacted the world’s largest legalization program for unauthorized foreigners and introduced sanctions on employers who knowingly hired illegal foreign workers.

Instead of slowing illegal immigration, however, this program allowed more foreigners to arrive legally and illegally, which prompted another round of reforms in 1996 aimed at ensuring that new arrivals would not receive welfare payments.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished, and its functions of preventing illegal immigration and providing services to foreign visitors and immigrants were separated in the new Department of Homeland Security.

However, anti-terrorism measures have not slowed immigration to the United States. America is poised to remain the world’s major destination for immigrants, and as patterns in U.S. history suggest, most of the newcomers will soon become Americans. However, past success in integrating immigrants does not guarantee that integrating newcomers will be easy or automatic.

As immigrants continue to make and remake the country, the United States must develop an immigration policy for the twenty-first century.

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Peter J. Duignan
Senior Fellow

Expertise: Comparative colonial history, modern European history, Africa, Islam, Hispanics in the United States, immigration, U.S. foreign policy, the European Union

Peter J. Duignan is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He has written extensively on comparative colonial history, modern European history, African documentation and bibliography, Hispanics in the United States, U.S. foreign policy, Africa, immigration to the United States, and the Atlantic Alliance (the U.S. and Europe since 1945). His current research focuses on the role of immigration in the making and remaking of America, Islamic fundamentalism, and Americans and African-Americans in Africa and Africans in America, a study of reciprocal relations.

His most recent publications are Bilingual Education: A Critique (Hoover Essay) and NATO: Its Past, Present and Future (Hoover Press, 2000) and, with Lewis Gann, The Spanish Speakers in the United States: A History (University Press of America, 2000), and Africa and the World (UPA, 2000).

A prolific writer, he has authored, edited, or coauthored over forty-five books on Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and was coeditor of the five volume set Colonialism in Africa and the influential United States in the 1980s (Hoover Press, 1979). He coauthored (with Lewis Gann) Why South Africa Will Survive, The United States and Africa: A History, and Hope for South Africa. He is also a member of the editorial board of Orbis magazine.

Duignan published (with Lewis Gann) an extensive three-volume historical analysis of the Atlantic community since the end of World War II—The Rebirth of the West: The Americanization of the Democratic World, 1945–1958 (Blackwell, 1992), Contemporary Europe and the Atlantic Alliance (Blackwell, 1997), and The United States and the New Europe, 1945–1993 (Blackwell, 1994)—and has a number of monographs in the Hoover Essays in Public Policy series on the same period. He also coedited the influential Politics in Western Europe (Hoover Press, 1988, 1992) and The Debate Over Immigration in the United States (Hoover Press, 1998).

His awards include a Ford foreign area fellowship to Africa (1957–59) and a Rockefeller Foundation international fellowship (1963–64). He also received a Guggenheim fellowship (1973–74), a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1973–75), and was a fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton.

He has been a member of the Stanford University African Studies Committee since 1964 and a member of the European Studies Council at the university since 1985.

Duignan was elected to the board of the African Studies Association and has chaired committees of that organization and the Association of Research Libraries. He is also a member of the American Historical Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, and the American Professors for Peace in the Middle East. Duignan was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London in 1995.

He received his master's and doctoral degrees in history from Stanford University and was a member of Stanford's Western civilization staff in the late 1950s before joining the Hoover Institution in 1960.

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