An Immigration Question From The SAT

With obviously too much time on my hands, I decided to answer the sample questions of the SAT subject test in U.S. history and posted on the College Board website. And, lo and behold, this is the third question that pops up:

Which of the following statements best represents a nativist attitude toward the influx of immigrants around 1900?

    (A)     Slavs and Italians will be assimilated as easily into the American way of life as were earlier immigrant groups.
    (B)     Ellis Island should be enlarged to accommodate the huge influx of immigrants.
    (C)    Immigrants will work for low wages and break strikes, thereby hurting all American workers.
    (D)    Native-born Americans should organize to help find jobs and homes for new immigrants so that they can become citizens as quickly as possible.
    (E)    Political machines in the large cities should be responsible for providing immigrants with food, shelter, and jobs in return for their votes.

Admittedly, these are all pretty extreme, strawman-type claims. Nevertheless, it's interesting to work through the logic in (C):

It is conceptually possible that immigrants will work for lower wages than native-born workers--and there's probably nothing judgmental or "nativist" in saying that. It is, after all, a positive economic question. It is also possible for those low-wage immigrants to have been instrumental in helping to break strikes in the pre-New Deal days. Again, a positive economic question that is, in principle, answerable with data. Surely those events would then hurt some American workers--and "some" could be a pretty large number. In fact, Claudia Goldin's work suggests that workers in the cities most affected by immigration were paid lower wages. Would it then be correct to accuse someone of having a nativist attitude if all they were doing was pointing out some of the possible wage effects of immigration?

What's a poor college-bound nervous SAT test-taker to do? Why isn't there a better choice (F)?

Or, he might wonder, could it be that the SAT is looking for the right ideological answer?....Nah. Those enlightened liberal academics that (over)populate our universities' history departments and write up the SAT questions would never stoop to something like that.

Comments

[Mark Seecof]

Try the World History test next, you could hardly ask for more leftist bias.

[alex]

Your comments here are interesting, but irrelevant to the question at hand and say nothing about the SAT history test in general. The question asks you about the attitude of nativists around 1900; it doesn't ask you to evaluate this attitude as right or wrong, and it certainly does not ask you to decide whether this attitude is more consistent with empirical inquiry rather than nativism as a political movement. Its a historical question, and the only thing you need to answer it is knowledge of American history.

Note also that "nativism" in this context refers not to a general preference for natives over immigrants, but to a specific political movement.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Steve Sailer over at isteve.com posted a letter from a reader that makes a closely related point.

"On the SAT (at least when I was coaching it in the late 1980s for The Princeton Review), there were six reading comprehension passages. One of these was the "diversity" passage -- always about a woman or minority. Without even reading the passage itself, a smart person who understood how the test is designed and understood that the answers would never suggest anything derogatory about women/minorities, could get most of the questions correct. I used to amuse my father and older brothers by demonstrating how this worked. The principles I learned at TPR work, more or less, on any standardized college/professional school entrance test."

See http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-to-score-higher-on-sat.html