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The Bush Immigration Plan: A step in the right direction (Anthony B. Bradley, 1/21/04, Acton Institute)

The United States is the most prosperous nation in the world with a long history of both legal and illegal immigration. For centuries, immigrants have risked their lives to find ways to use their gifts and provide for their families, often taking jobs that others do not want. In fact, massive group immigration is an ongoing fact of human history. Thomas Sowell’s grand study, Migration and Cultures: A World View, reminds us of the scope of that movement. In the past three centuries, 70 million people emigrated from Europe, with nearly 50 million coming to the United States (35 million between 1830 and 1930). With migrants often come resentment and suspicion, another phenomenon of long standing.

Nearly 4 million people emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. during the nineteenth century. The Irish were stereotyped as a lazy band of drunken brawlers and they worked primarily in the low-skilled labor market. During the massive Irish immigration of the 1840s and 1850s immigrants were greeted with signs that read “Irish Need Not Apply.”

In the same century, five million Germans migrated to the United States. Large numbers became farmers and day laborers. These Germans were often criticized for isolating themselves from the American mainstream with church services conducted, business transacted, and newspapers printed exclusively in their native tongue.

Almost 26 million people emigrated from Italy between 1876 and 1976. The early Italian immigrants took jobs that others despised at the bottom of the occupational ladder, such as sewer and sanitation workers. Italians also cordoned themselves into enclaves, their neighborhoods of 1880 to 1910 often more segregated than those of blacks.

The story is much the same for the Jewish, African, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Puerto Rican immigrants over the past century. In every case, immigrants fill economic needs in their new society.

Some Americans have an artificially inflated expectation of wages for jobs requiring few skills. So-called menial jobs like landscaping, food service, unskilled construction jobs, sanitation, housekeeping, retail, and farming rejected by many in our unskilled labor force. Many immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to work these jobs in an attempt to begin to build capital for a better life.

The anti-immigrationist creed can be summed up in one simple phrase: people were wrong to try and keep my grandparents out but I'm right to try and block you.

MORE:
-The Great Mexico Brain Drain: The other face of Mexican immigration (Hector Carreon, January 23, 2004, ACN)

The images that most Americans have of Mexican immigrants are principally those created by the media and certain immigration reform groups. These images are of Mexicans swimming across the Rio Grande, jumping the iron fence at San Ysidro, dying in enclosed railroad box cars or of those meeting death in the hot and arid Arizona desert. For many years, however, there has been a constant flood of other types of Mexican immigrants. These are wealthy and well educated Mexican immigrants that fly here in Mexicana and Areomexico airlines as students and tourists and decide to stay here.

Americans, especially those in the border states of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico have suddenly become conscious of the vast number of Mexican immigrants that now reside here. To the typical Anglo mind, spotting Mexican immigrants is easy, or so they think. Their criteria for identifying a Mexican immigrant, legal or undocumented, is that they must first have brown skin, be wearing a sombrero and be standing at a bus stop. It is a rare "gringo" that can spot a Mexican immigrant at a trendy store in La Jolla, Rodeo Drive, Fashion Island, Santa Barbara or other exclusive shopping areas in California.

The immigration of middle and upper class Mexicans to the USA is increasing exponentially. Most of these well to do Mexicans have bachelor, master and doctorate degrees. The disturbing phenomena of the best-and-the brightest Mexicans emigrating to the USA is caused by the present and worsening economic crisis in Mexico. Yesterday, the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Geografia e Informatica (INEGI) released a study that found that 684, 000 Mexicans with university degrees are presently unemployed. The IMEGI study found that Mexico is not producing enough employment opportunities for the highly skilled and educated sectors of Mexico.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2004 2:09 PM