Who are the angriest people in the United States?\u00a0 Are they the supporters or opponents of war in Iraq, neocons or neoliberals, the devout or the secular, disrespected homemakers or overworked career mothers?\u00a0 No is the answer to each of the aforementioned inquiries.\u00a0 The most outraged people in the land are those actively opposing illegal immigration.\u00a0 I know.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been writing me many letters.\u00a0 Some are obscene, some semi-literate, but most are reasonably well-written, and all carry the same general tone: since I believe illegal immigration on the whole benefits the United States, I\u2019m a proponent of \u201cunilateral disarmament, a \u201cself-hating intellectual,\u201d a propagandist,\u201d a \u201csorry ass,\u201d and most distressing, a guy who\u2019s only striving for \u201cfive minutes of fame\u201d as a writer.\u00a0 Evidently, I\u2019m to be denied the additional ten Andy Warhol said we\u2019re all entitled to.<\/p>\n
What accounts for such venom and anger?\u00a0 Defenders of the border who want immigration laws literally interpreted \u2013 which the political leaders of the United States clearly do not \u2013 offer a variety of reasons, and indignantly declare none of them has anything to do with race: \u201cThe illegals are trying to create a Little Mexico with excessively high birth rates\u2026 They don\u2019t come here to be Americans\u2026 They never would have a chance to learn our ways\u2026 They consume too much aid\u2026 They commit too many crimes\u2026 They take jobs that our children used to depend on to work their way through college\u2026 They are Mexico\u2019s disposable humans\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not going to try to refute all those points.\u00a0 When a nation has eleven million generally poor illegal immigrants, the crime rate is going to rise and the burden on social services will inevitably increase.\u00a0 However, assertions that immigrants don\u2019t want to be assimilated here and only take from this society are imbecilic and unworthy of further comment.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s instead deal with the essential issue: why have so many people come here?\u00a0 The answer can be found in a beginning English as a Second Language civics text I used this week: \u201cAmerica needed farmers and workers.\u201d\u00a0 That is in reference to immigration a century ago.\u00a0 It is also an unignorable fact today.\u00a0 People come to America, legally or illegally, to work. \u00a0That is how they improve their standard of living.\u00a0 It has been that way a long time.<\/p>\n
Take a look a history.\u00a0 I reviewed \u201cThe National Experience,\u201d a college history text I\u2019d read thirty years ago.\u00a0 People upset about immigration today would have been hysterical in 1890 when a quarter of Philadelphians were foreign born as were one-third of the residents of Boston and Chicago.\u00a0 Eighty percent of those living in New York City were either foreign born or sons and daughters of foreign parents.\u00a0 And those folks were not the traditional Protestant immigrants from England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia.\u00a0 They were primarily Catholics or Jews from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Russia.\u00a0 Their \u201chabits and ways appeared outlandish\u201d to those established here, and there was an \u201cincreasing tendency to stress racial differences.\u201d \u00a0There was also \u201can increasing concern over the ills of urban life,\u201d and \u201cthe new immigrants were blamed for many serious city problems that had little to do with racial or national origin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sounds like a description of contemporary life.\u00a0 And the history text writers, with unanticipated foresight, were just heating up.\u00a0 They noted that organized labor \u201cfeared management would hire unskilled and unorganized immigrants and blacks to replace skilled workers (though in fact skilled workers were competing less with the unskilled than with an advancing technology and mechanization.)\u201d\u00a0 That resulted in \u201cintensifying prejudices\u2026 feeding sentiments to restrict immigration.\u201d\u00a0 In 1902 the Chinese were permanently excluded and in 1907 there was an \u201ceffective exclusion of Japanese.\u201d<\/p>\n
The National Origins Act of 1924 \u201cended all but a trickle of immigration from southern and eastern Europe\u201d by basing \u201cannual immigration quotas temporarily on the proportion of descendents of each nationality resident in the United States in 1890 and limiting immigration after 1927 to a hundred fifty thousand a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would be unfair to imply that limiting immigration is always wrong.\u00a0 In fact, such control is the sovereign duty of every nation.\u00a0 The United States, if it so decided, could attract fifty million new residents every year until the country was crowded and drained to the point of catastrophe.\u00a0 The most important task now is for the political leaders of the nation \u2013 starting with President George W. Bush \u2013 to quit pretending there is a national policy on illegal immigration.\u00a0 There isn\u2019t.\u00a0 The president is in effect saying, \u201cWell, we\u2019ve got eleven thousand Border Patrol agents who\u2019re arresting about a million illegal aliens a year, and about two million others are getting through, and that\u2019s roughly the amount of cheap labor we need to fuel America\u2019s huge economic engine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most strident opponents of illegal immigration \u2013 clearly they\u2019ve conferred on this \u2013 claim precisely eighty percent of Americans want all who came here outside the law to be deported.\u00a0 That\u2019s not going to happen.\u00a0 It would be logistically impossible and morally unthinkable to undertake such a heavy-handed and hypocritical program; after all, many national leaders, with a wink, have effectively invited people here to work and, naturally, settle in.\u00a0 So let\u2019s say it.\u00a0 There\u2019s going to have to be another amnesty.\u00a0 Senators McCain and Kennedy are working on such a bill now.\u00a0 Their opponents will claim the bill invites eternal capitulation, pointing to President Reagan\u2019s amnesty of 1988 as a precedent.\u00a0 But, paradoxically, in order to establish law and order now, we\u2019re going to have to legalize the permanent presence of those who\u2019ve illegally been here a certain number of years.<\/p>\n
Then, in an unequivocal national debate, we need to establish higher quotas, reflecting real market forces, for legal immigration.\u00a0 Then, by enforcement, make sure that tens of thousands of employers in the United States do not continue to hire those who come undocumented.\u00a0 A dramatic reduction in such jobs would correspondingly reduce the attractiveness and feasibility of illegal immigration.\u00a0 Is that what most citizens of the United States want? \u00a0Many may say they want that, but do they really?\u00a0 Those addicted to the services and benefits of inexpensive labor will have to decide.<\/p>\n
There is another issue that needs to be mentioned here.\u00a0 Some U.S. citizens and growing numbers of immigrants have been claiming the Southwest is not really sovereign territory of the United States since it was \u201dstolen\u201d during the Mexican-American War more than a hundred fifty years ago.\u00a0 That claim is preposterous and insulting.\u00a0 Territorial ownership has historically been determined by war.\u00a0 The indigenous people of what is now Mexico did not peacefully hand over their land to the Spaniards, nor did the Spaniards bestow their land on their descendents, the Mexicans.\u00a0 In a related matter, many U.S. citizens along the border are troubled by what they believe is a swelling sense of \u201centitlement\u201d shown by those who tromp through their fields and slaughter their animals en route to a better life.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the problem of two worlds coalescing, and at times colliding.\u00a0 America still needs farmers and workers but hasn\u2019t decided how many and at what price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Who are the angriest people in the United States?\u00a0 Are they the supporters or opponents of war in Iraq, neocons or neoliberals, the devout or the secular, disrespected homemakers or overworked career mothers?\u00a0 No is the answer to each of the aforementioned inquiries.\u00a0 The most outraged people in the land are those actively opposing illegal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,101,33,28],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n