Immigration: Historically a challenge for the United States
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
By Carl Braun
Examiner.com
US is on track for 1.182 billion population by 2100
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Illegal Immigration in the United States is definitely not a recent phenomenon. People from all walks have life and from every corner of the globe have trampled these borders and existing laws for more than one hundred years. In the late nineteenth century the Chinese and the Irish emigrated here in massive numbers, many illegally through Mexico, to work on the railroads and in the gold mines. Our government turned a blind eye to them then as well so as to satisfy the big business labor needs of what became known as the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, we reached a breaking point and the government would crack down on illegal human traffic, only to relax the enforcement levels a decade or two later when economies turned around and business once again required cheap labor.The Border Patrol was not even created until 1924 though the Immigration Service began hiring independent border guards to ride the territory starting in 1904. Justice was meted out a little differently then. The primary goal was to prevent Chinese Illegal Immigration and halt the flow of contraband in to the US.
Whether coming through San Francisco, New Orleans, New York or any of the major ports legal immigrants came in great numbers as well. Prior to 1882, some 127 years ago, there were no restrictions. Immigrants simply arrived and went about their business. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contained in it provisions which applied to all immigrants requiring a perfunctory health examination and a screening to prevent “lunatics, idiots and convicts” from entering the country. Anyone suspected of needing government assistance of any kind were also turned away.
Throughout the twentieth century immigration ebbed and flowed and various laws were put in place to restrict admittance to one group or another. In 1917 a literacy test was adopted and in 1922 the Quota Act and National Origins Act, limited the number of European immigrants to 350,00 per year and later adjusted that downward to 165,000 per year. Immigration quotas were based on percentages of existing immigrants from those countries with the number from Asia put at near zero. That latter statistic would stay relatively in place until 1965 when Asians began to be admitted in large numbers.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 changed the course of immigration in the US and the amnesty given to illegal aliens in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act led to record numbers of legal immigrants in the following years, as preference was given to US citizens and permanent resident aliens, which allowed the former illegal aliens an opportunity to bring in their extended families.
If we can look to any two occurrences over the last 100 years that had the most impact on immigration in the US both legal and illegal, they would arguably be the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens and the conclusion of the Bracero Program in 1964. The former Amnesty was given under the conditions of stricter penalties to businesses that hired any future illegal workers. The latter was an initiative started in 1942 to import temporary laborers from Mexico to work on the railroads during WWII and then in the agricultural fields. Initially every state but Texas participated. They had an “open borders” policy and Mexico refused to send them “Braceros’ due to complaints of mistreatment of migrant workers. At its peak the Bracero program allowed some 445,000 temporary workers into the US per year (4.5 million total) to work on the farms through the growing season and then go home. Some never did.
Operation Wetback of 1954 sought to remove 1 million of these illegal workers through strict enforcement and it was quite successful if not sometimes brutal. The economy was in tatters. Political pressure from Mexico and big business as well as human rights violations caused the programs demise.
In 1964, with the end of the Bracero program, we began seeing the increases in illegal workers crossing the border fueled by the needs of agriculture. When American business realized the government wasn’t going to do much about the illegal traffic despite the 1986 “crackdown”, they too began hiring illegal workers and the demand began to spiral out of control. Today some 1 million illegal aliens cross the border each year into the US. Where previously the jobs were limited to mostly agriculture, today they encompass most unskilled and some skilled categories like construction, factory workers, hospitality, and transportation. Wage rates in some of these fields have plummeted or remained stuck on 1980's levels. Since 1986 we have amassed somewhere between twelve and twenty million illegal aliens with some estimates as high as thirty million. Our current level of legal immigrants amount to about 1.5 million people per year when you factor in all the diversity and other lotteries. This is the highest in history. At this rate with both legal and illegal immigration we are on track to hit 1.182 billion people in the United States by the turn of the next century meaning that our population will more than triple in the next 90 years.
They say those who do not learn from history are deemed to repeat it. Any effort to legalize even 12 million illegal aliens regardless of the fines they pay or taxes collected will result in three to four times that many family members becoming citizens over the next ten years. The impact on infrastructure, wages and quality of life will be forever changed in the future as it has been in the past. Continued legal immigration at the current levels will put us on par population-wise with China and India in this century.
The United States has experimented with immigration for 127 years. Maybe it is time we got it right. We should take extra care to ensure that the needs of the COUNTRY and its citizens are served this time around. Having immigration for immigration sake without regard to its impact on all of us is something that should be reserved to the past.
Carl Braun is an analyst for the Homeland Security Policy Institute Group and he's logged 5,000-plus hours on the border. He has written several books including his most recent on Border Insecurity, “Above All Else”
. Contact Carl at Carl.Braun@BPAUX.org.
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