From a recent “QuickVote” on CNN.com, I participated and obtained the following result:
| Do you think the United States allows enough legal immigrants to live in the country? | |||
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| Yes |    |
86% | 20962 votes |
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| No |   |
14% | 3533 votes |
| Total: 24495 votes | |||
This informal, thoroughly unscientific poll reveals that the overwhelming number of self-selected participants believe that the United States does allow enough legal immigrants to live in the country.
There’s just a few problems most of the “Yes” votes haven’t considered:
1) applying the standards for immigration they implicitly approve of, most of their ancestors would have been denied legal entry into this country;
2) if legal immigration is adequate to fill U.S. manpower needs, then why is illegal immigration at such sustained high levels?
My own family history is instructive. Before the Civil War, a certain Miss Hannah Thorpe, and her four children, were given a one-way ticket to America. Although she had several children, Miss Thorpe was unmarried. Her employment history consisted of being a household servant and mistress–not necessarily in that order. About the only things she would have going for her were:
1) she was not a carrier of a contagious disease;
2) she was Caucasian;
3) she was from the United Kingdom;
4) she spoke English.
Counting against her, she was:
1) obviously “immoral” since she had four children out of wedlock (“bastards” was the term at the time);
2) she had no obvious means of supporting herself (can you say “welfare queen”?);
3) she had minimal education and skills (what “use” is she).
Many of the “Yes” votes, if they were honest about their pasts would have even a more difficult time justifying entry.
Too much and too often, the immigration debate boils down to: “I got here first, you don’t look like me, you don’t worship my God, and I can exploit you better if I just make you into a criminal first.”
Wow, we’re certainly justified in excluding all those non-Caucasian, non-W.A.S.P., blue-collar-workers-we-want-to-pay less-than-minimum-wage to . . .
Your conclusion is so very true – but no one would admit it. We justify our own racism in a variety of ways – including cloaking ourselves as upholding the rule of law. We are threatened by people who don’t look, speak or act like “US”. It is a typical in-group/out-group conflict.
Santyana, even as a conservative, was very correct when he pronounced: “Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.” The oppression, discrimination, and vile hatred exhibited by WASPs for the succeeding waves of: Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and now Hispanic is a historic fact. That each generation repeats the same stupid mistakes over-and-over again sometimes leads me to feel that Nietzsche may not have been so far off when he pronounced the existence of the “Eternal Re-occurrence” of things. Are we really that stuck in a loop?
Yes – but only because people think sociology is stupid and because we fail to believe that we have any power to change. We fear change. We fear metamorphosis. We fear loss of status. We fear.
If we do not act to change, Mao’s statement that “Power flows from the mouth of a gun” will be apt. If nothing else, the birth rates of non-Protestant, non-Caucasian people is accelerating while the birth rates of the affluent are shrinking. The Conservative approach of either walling them off (do any of them have any true idea of how many thousands of miles of borders the United States has?), deporting them back (at a return rate of maybe 5%?), or shooting them (East German style–we all should remember what a stunning success the DDR was!) will keep fill-in-the-blank racial/ethnic group(s) out. Insanity! Big chunks of the world would exchange the poverty of our lowest for the desparation of their current lives in a millisecond. They vote with their legs every day.