Anti-Immigration Candidates Deported From Primaries

What a difference a few months makes. Last fall, Republican candidates were lining up to see who could be the most hostile to immigrants, the Spanish language and foreign culture. Representatives Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter both made nativist fervor the cornerstone of their campaigns, while Rudy Giuiliani and Mitt Romney both lashed out at the other for being lax on illegals (remember the silliness about Giuliani running a "sanctuary mansion" because some illegal workers did landscaping there?). Gov. Mike Huckabee was forced to make an about face after expressing compassion for the children of immigrants, while the campaign of pro-immigrant Sen. John McCain appeared to be going down in flames. Now, the anti-immigrant candidates have all fallen by the wayside. Sens. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all committed to some form of immigration reform and have rejected the notion that 20 million undocumented workers could be rounded up and sent packing.

What accounts for this change? A cynical view would be that in a close election cycle neither party wants to write off an important voter bloc. However, a more generous view may be that we are being true to our own nature as a nation of immigrants and more realistic about the issue.

For much of our history, almost anyone could become an American just by showing up. The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that,"any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States." The first anti-immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. However, the current limits on immigration did not become law until the 20th Century. A series of laws passed between 1917-1924 and 1952 established a quota system where only a limited number of people from each country would be allowed to immigrate per year. Unfortunately, the quotas had nothing to do with the actual demand for immigration so that potential immigrants from some countries were automatically admitted, while others had no chance of legal immigration.

The current system is broken. Whenever government tries to place artificial limits on anything, the result is evasion of the limits. We saw this with both Prohibition and the wage and price controls of the 1970s. As a result of artificial limits on immigration, we now have millions of undocumented workers in this country. While some people ask what part of illegal don't you understand, no government is able to overcome the laws of supply and demand. As long as there is a demand for hard-working, low-wage workers in this country and a supply of workers who would benefit from those low-wage jobs just across the border, there will be migration to this country. The choice is whether to accept reality and try to regulate it or to ignore reality and believe that immigration can be stopped.

The biggest objections that are raised to immigration are that the current immigration from Mexico and Latin America is different from prior immigration to this country and that immigration is a threat to our security. I think that both arguments are flawed.

On one level, it is true that the current Hispanic immmigration is "different" from prior immigrations in our history. However, different is not necessarily bad. The mass immigrations from Ireland, Italy and Poland during the 19th and 20th centuries were different from the prior immigrations from England, France,Scotland, Holland and Germany. While this was considered to be a threat at the time, these immigrants are now part of the fabric of our country. The immigrations from Cuba in the 1960s and Vietnam in the 1970s were also "different" from prior immigration and certainly changed the face of the country, but once again, change was not harmful.

There is the argument that today's immigrants refuse to assimilate. To a certain extent, this is true of all immigrant groups. My father-in-law did not learn to speak English until he started public school. However, his native language was German, not Spanish. This was true despite the fact that the German immigration to Texas had occurred nearly 90 years earlier. You can still hear Czech spoken in Zabcikille, Texas and Norwegian in Clifton, Texas. Of course, we find these expressions from the old country quaint and they are used by the Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism. However, we feel threatened when we hear Spanish being spoken in our country. While parts of El Paso or San Antonio may feel like they belong on the other side of the border, the evidence shows that first generation immigrants who come here as children pick up English easily, second generation immigrants are fluent in both English and Spanish and third generation immigrants are usually fluent in English only.

There is also the wide-spread belief that Latin immigrants come to this country so that they can sponge off of welfare without paying taxes. One hint that this might not be true is the fact that Mexico's third largest source of income is money saved by expatriates working in the United States and sent back to their families in Mexico. It is hard to see the threat to this country from immigrants who are willing to work hard, save their money and try to make a better life for their families. Most immigrants don't earn enough money to pay federal income tax (nearly half of all Americans don't pay any federal taxes), but they do pay sales tax, gasoline taxes and property tax merely by virtue of buying things and living somewhere.

The border security issue actually cuts in favor of liberalized immigration laws. Currently, there are so many people crossing over such a large border that it is physically impossible to stop them all. The border fence won't change that. However, if we adopted a guest worker program and gave papers to people willing to work in this country, we could re-direct much of the border traffic into legal channels. If the Border Patrol did not have to direct its resources to keeping millions of would-be workers from crossing the border, it could focus on keeping out drug traffickers and potential terrorists and actually secure the border.

I don't know enough Spanish to sum this up in that language, so let me conclude with one of the languages of my heritage: "Ich bin ein Einwanderer."