Silence is consent.
By D.A. King
“The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.” Democrat Ted Kennedy on the promised effects of the 1965 change to U.S. immigration law.
When Americans are allowed to talk about legal immigration at all, straying outside the parameters of “legal immigration good, illegal immigration bad” is often deemed to be “anti-immigration.” The politically correct “solution” to illegal immigration is usually to increase legal immigration. Most other reactions are often deemed “anti-immigrant hate” by the arbiters of permitted speech. That includes any talk of enforcing immigration laws.
In the endless push for “immigration reform,” – meaning a repeat of the failed amnesty of 1986 and increased legal immigration levels – a long list of politicians of both parties assure us that even now, the U.S. somehow has a shortage of immigrants. We don’t.
The USA imports more legal immigrants than any nation in the world. We take in more than a million legal immigrants each year. My adopted sister is one of them. So are several of the members of the board of the Dustin Inman Society of which this writer is founder. It is not somehow “anti-immigrant” to believe that immigration should benefit Americans and America. And it is not “anti-immigration” to have a serious conversation about reducing legal immigration and enforcing our immigration laws.
We also import more than 750,000 guest workers each year, many of whom refuse to leave when their temporary visa expires.
The assimilation process of the fabled “great wave” of immigration from the beginning of the last century came about due to a sharp reduction in immigration from 1924 to the mid-sixties. The numbers went from about 700,000 immigrants per year to about 200,000 due to the 1924 law passed by congress. Because of the laws of supply and demand, this reduction not only allowed American wages to rise — thereby creating the now vanishing middle class — but also created an atmosphere of common culture, language and patriotic unity in our Republic.