"The Dangers of Our United States Immigration Policies"
Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado, writes this article on immigration, in which he lists five grave concerns about the United States continuing it present immigration trend. Lamm is director of the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver. The article appeared on the website of the Rocky Mountain News.
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On Immigration
Should illegal aliens have driver's licenses, amnesty, welfare, and the right to move their families to the U.S.? Illegal aliens are, as is often pointed out, ''good, hard-working people who just want the American dream.'' But is that the end of the argument?
The trouble with that level of analysis is that there are billions of ''good, hard-working people'' and their dependents in the world who would love to come here, and obviously we can't take them all. We are also a nation of laws, with our own unemployed and underemployed, and our nation needs to come to some enforceable consensus on what our policy should be on people entering the country illegally.
Polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans object to illegal immigration, and we run a serious risk of a backlash against all immigrants if we don't reach some consensus on this issue. Polls also show that there is no issue in America where there is a bigger gap between public opinion and opinions of the media and other ''elites.''
Reasoned dialogue is rare and issues of immense importance to America's future are not being discussed or even debated.
Public policy requires us to be wise enough to appreciate cumulative effects. We already have approximately 10 percent of all Mexico living in the U.S. either legally or illegally. We owe it to the future to have a candid debate on the demographic impact of a mass migration of this magnitude. Consider:
1. We are a nation built on law. It almost sounds old-fashioned in contemporary America to ask that people obey the law. But when we start deciding which laws to obey and which to ignore, we start down a dangerous path. There are millions of potential immigrants patiently waiting in their home countries to immigrate here, playing by our rules. Illegal immigrants ''jump the line.''
2. As every house needs a door, every country needs a border. By turning a blind eye toward illegal immigration, we are encouraging countless numbers of these people to attempt to sneak into America. I spent a night with the Border Patrol in California, and was amazed to find people from India, Bangladesh, Iran, Egypt, Africa and China among the people detained.
3. Illegal immigration hurts America's poor. Illegal immigrants compete for the jobs our own poor need to start to move up the economic ladder. A study by The Center for Immigration Studies finds: ''Mexican immigration is overwhelmingly unskilled, and it is hard to find an economic argument for unskilled immigration, because it tends to reduce wages for (U.S.) workers.'' The study goes on: ''Because the American economy offers very limited opportunities for workers with little education, continued unskilled immigration can't help but to significantly increase the size of the poor and uninsured populations, as well as the number of people on welfare.''
4. We are told that illegal immigration is ''cheap labor,'' but it is not ''cheap labor,'' it is subsidized labor. The National Academy of Sciences has found that there is a significant fiscal drain on U.S. taxpayers for each adult immigrant without a high school education. Illegal immigration is something that benefits a few employers, but the rest of us subsidize that labor through the school system, the health-care system, the courts and in other ways that this form of labor imposes. With school spending of more than $7,000 per student per year, even a small family costs far more than a low-wage family pays in taxes.
5. America is increasingly becoming, day by day, a bilingual country, yet there is not a bilingual country in the world that lives in peace with itself. No nation should blindly allow itself to become a bilingual-bicultural country. If it does, it invites generations of conflict, tension and antagonism. America has historically demanded that its immigrants be self-supporting and English-speaking to join our polity. We vary from that rule that made us '''one nation, indivisible''' at great risk to America's future. Today, when over 40 percent of today's massive wave of immigrants is from Spanish-speaking nations, people can move to America and keep their language, their culture and their old loyalties. If the melting pot doesn't melt, immigrants become ''foreigners'' living in America rather than assimilated Americans.
6. Our social fabric risks becoming undone. It is important to America's future that we look at how Mexican immigrants are doing. Too many of our Hispanic immigrants live in ethnic ghettos. Too many are unskilled laborers, too many are uneducated, too many live in poverty, too many are exploited, too many haven't finished ninth grade, too many drop out of school. The Center for Immigration Studies issued a report last year, which found: ''Almost two-thirds of adult Mexican immigrants have not completed high school, compared to fewer than one in 10 natives not completing high school. Mexican immigrants now account for 22 percent of all high school dropouts in the labor force.''
But what is most disturbing is that second and third generations don't do much better. Again, the study from The Center for Immigration Studies: ''The lower educational attainment of Mexican immigrants appears to persist across the generations.'' A recent report from the center shows that two-thirds of Mexican immigrant workers lack even a high school education; as a consequence, two-thirds of Mexican immigrant families live in or near poverty. The question has to be asked: By tolerating illegal immigration are we laying the foundations for a new Hispanic underclass? A Hispanic Quebec?
