This is The Atlantic...THE ATLANTIC, confirming every conservative criticism of Hart-Celler Immigration Act and our immigration policy in general for the past 50 years. THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION ...Edward Kennedy, the 33-year-old senator who had shepherded the bill through the Senate, went even further in promising that its effects would be modest. Some opponents argued that the bill would lead to a large increase in immigration, but those claims were false, Kennedy said. They were “highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact,” he announced in a Senate hearing, and “out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” Emanuel Celler, the bill’s champion in the House, made the same promises. “Do we appreciably increase our population, as it were, by the passage of this bill?” Celler said. “The answer is emphatically no.” Johnson, Kennedy, Celler and the new law’s other advocates turned out to be entirely wrong about this. The 1965 bill sparked a decades-long immigration wave. As a percentage of the United States population, this modern wave has been similar in size to the immigration wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of the sheer number of people moving to a single country, the modern American immigration wave may be the largest in history. The year Johnson signed the immigration bill, 297,000 immigrants legally entered the United States. Two years later, the number reached 362,000. It continued rising in subsequent decades, and by 1989 exceeded 1 million.
The article makes an accurate assessment: "Many opponents of immigration are xenophobes. In the 21st century, the contours of the immigration debate can seem binary: Somebody is either in favor of immigration or opposed to it." I suggest that the right are those xenophobes. They are trying to delay the inevitable fact that the day will come when white people are the minority. This is their greatest fear. And they fear this for three reasons: 1. Brown power will increase. 2. The right's power will decrease. 3. America will look less and less like the right. Let's face it, this change is inevitable, so you might as well get over it. There is a labor shortage in several key industries, hospitality, blue collar industries and construction, restaurants and food, agriculture and farming, engineering. We need to streamline immigration so we can fill these jobs. We need more, not less, immigration and the right is preventing this. And the reason that immigrants tend to vote for Democrats is that Democrats favor more immigration, we are not xenophobes, and Republicans tend to disfavor it, they are the xenophobes.
I've noticed that you've tossed that xenophobia charge out before in relation to immigration, but to what end? It doesn't have anything to do with the many policy and cultural issues that immigration brings up. Simply insulting your opponents doesn't win you the argument. I view it as a tactic by someone who has no arguments.
