Nationalization ceremony for new citizens

Immigration

 

 

We need workers. Immigrants want jobs. We have jobs. It’s a match.

As in nearly all developed countries, the U.S. birthrate is too low to produce enough new workers to replace retirees. We need electricians, plumbers, physicians, nurses, teachers, auto mechanics, food service workers, school bus drivers, carpenters, and on and on. 

Fortunately, immigrants are the answer. Unfortunately, America has an ugly history of bigoted immigration policies. In 1884, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigration less than 20 years after Chinese were recruited and shipped here to help build the transcontinental railroad, including the most difficult part over the Sierras, where they were found to be reliable and hard workers who didn’t drink. Other Asian immigrants were severely restricted during the early 20^th century.

In 1921, a quota system was introduced to deny entry to most southern and eastern Europeans—Italians, Poles, Jews, and others—who wanted to escape conflict and poverty at home. It was a time when a popular belief in eugenics claimed these “separate and inferior races” would lower the quality and dilute the blood of an America populated mostly by those of supposedly “superior” western European ancestry. Hitler used America’s policies as models and made eugenics part of Nazi ideology. Here, white supremacists used eugenics-based immigration policies to largely freeze America’s racial and ethnic makeup until Congress and President Johnson ended the bigoted quota system with the Nationality Act of 1965.

The Vietnam War led to a wave of Southeast Asians emigrating to the U.S., and the 1980 Refugee Act created a legal process for accepting refugees. The Immigration Act of 1990 allowed for 675,000 migrants annually and, along with the Nationality Act, form the basis of today’s system. 

Currently, our immigration system works slowly, overwhelmed by the number of refugees, many from South and Central America, fleeing violence and/or poverty in their home countries. Courts that rule on asylum status are understaffed and years behind. Still, we’re having some success: Legal immigration is now higher than eight years ago, and more refugees will be resettled this year than any year in the last thirty.

A bipartisan immigration reform bill passed the Senate in 2013 but failed in the Republican-led House. Last month, another bipartisan reform bill with largely Republican policies clearly had enough votes to pass both Houses and have the President sign it, but the GOP presidential candidate in Florida ordered Republicans to block it so he can run on immigration as a campaign issue. Meanwhile, many migrants and their families remain in limbo, their future uncertain and their present anxious. 

Our immigration system needs fixing with a clear path to citizenship including for Dreamers—young people who came here as children, attended our schools, and are, in effect, Americans. We also need a support system so that immigrants can get the education and training to enable them to become the workers we need. (Immigration is not border security, an associated issue which attempts to prevent undesirable people and materials—criminals, drugs, non-native plants, etc.—from entering the country. The bipartisan reform bill currently blocked by Republicans would add thousands of personnel and other measures to improve border security.)

A commission summarized the 1990 Immigration Act’s purposes: “A well-regulated system sets priorities for admission; facilitates nuclear family reunification; gives employers access to a global labor market while protecting U.S. workers; helps to generate jobs and economic growth; and fulfills our commitment to resettle refugees as one of several elements of humanitarian protection of the persecuted.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, immigrants will add $7 trillion to our economy and pay $1 trillion in taxes because of increased productivity and higher demand. Let’s welcome them to our communities.