Public Agenda Issue Guide: Immigration

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The guest list for a community conversation in Coolidge, Arizona two weeks ago included small business owners, faculty and administration of colleges and universities, students, K-12 teachers and principals, representatives from local community-based organizations and even the chief of police. It was an impressively diverse group gathering to talk to about how to improve the success and completion rates of college and university students in their community.

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OVERVIEW

Immigration

Americans have always been ambivalent about immigration, with realistic concerns bumping into altruistic, even romantic notions. The romance is summed up in the famous 1886 inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, proclaiming ''give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'' The ambivalence was expressed a mere four years earlier, when Congress enacted the first immigration restrictions, specifically excluding "paupers, ex-convicts, mental defectives and Chinese." That was at the beginning of the greatest wave of immigration in American history, which brought in 18 million new citizens, diversified U.S. society and gave us the enduring analogy of the ''melting pot.''

Now the United States is in the midst of another great wave of immigration, which brings in roughly one million new residents a year, but has yet to give us a new analogy. More than one in 10 U.S. residents are immigrants, and while that's the highest share of the overall American population since the 1930s, it's still below the high of 15 percent recorded in 1890 and 1910, according to the Census Bureau. Most of the new immigrants come from Latin America and Asia. Like the earlier wave, the influx is likely to fundamentally change America, but Americans have yet to work through how they feel about it. Immigration
policy is about deciding what kind of country the United States is going to be.

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CONSIDER THE CHOICES

Honoring our commitment to newcomers

Cutting back to preserve our security and culture

Cutting back in response to economic realities

The United States is a nation of immigrants, and we've never had cause to regret that. It's part of what makes us different from so many more narrow, authoritarian societies, and it's what makes us strong. So we have a special obligation to welcome newcomers. U. S. immigration policy must reflect our ideals, our humanitarian concern and our commitment to the plight of refugees worldwide. Besides, the United States benefits from immigration. Hard-working immigrants start businesses, create jobs, and help the economy grow. Culturally, immigrants enrich America with their arts, traditions, and languages. The U.S. has always gained more by immigration than we've lost and there's no reason to think that will change.
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We need to control immigration to secure our borders and protect our unity. September 11th showed how our immigration policies have failed to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country. Millions of people have evaded our immigration laws and the government has no idea whether any of them pose a threat to us. In addition, the recent wave of immigration has brought increasing pressure to accommodate immigrants by accepting bilingualism. We should honor diversity, but not at the cost of breaking the bonds of cohesion: common ideals, a common language, and common political institutions that hold the nation together.
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The first concern should be theeconomic cost imposed by the huge influx of immigrants and their effects on wages and jobs. The fact is that we need to educateand employ the people already here before we can worry about paying for the education, welfare,and health care of hundreds of thousands of newcomers each year. Plus, the burden isn't spread evenly; most immigrants settle in big cities and Sun Belt states. We should restrict the number of newcomers and look more closely at how their arrival affects us. The immigrants we do accept should either have jobs waiting here or have the skills to support themselves.The nations first obligation is to protect the welfare and well being of those who are already American citizens.
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