Immigration, Building a Wall, and Hispanic Crime
Ron Unz • January 14, 2019
Back in November I published
a long column discussing the results of the 2018 midterm elections and then a couple of weeks ago I also released
a private letter I’d distributed to prominent figures in the Alt-Right movement back in 2017, suggesting some of the ways that their public positions had severely damaged their credibility and injured their nascent political movement.
Immigration and the closely-related issue of Hispanic crime were important elements of both my pieces, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that I provoked such an enormous outpouring of (mostly hostile) responses, now totaling well over 3,000 comments and nearly 500,000(!) words. The bitter immigration dispute between President Donald Trump and the new Democratic Congress has already produced the longest federal government shut-down in American history, so this controversial subject has certainly reached the absolute center of the American political stage.
Unfortunately, I believe that there are few other topics in which such severe misinformation, often of an emotionally charged nature, has so totally contaminated the political debate, sometimes on both sides of the controversy. Given this situation, I’ve decided to provide a general summary of what I see as some of the crucial facts together with my analysis.
The dismal state of factual misinformation widespread within the anti-immigration community is best illustrated by a single striking example. Among such individuals, no piece of American legislation is as fiercely condemned as the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, routinely denounced as the law that destroyed our country by opening the floodgates to the influx of countless millions of non-white Third Worlders, thereby dooming America to eventual white-minority status. These critics often single out Ted Kennedy as the particular villain behind this policy, even though he had only just reached the Senate a couple of years earlier, and as a very junior member played only a relatively minor role in enacting this statute.
This supposed impact of the 1965 Act certainly possesses superficial plausibility. The measure was widely advertised as a loosening of our strict immigration quotas of the 1920s and non-white immigration did enormously increase in the decades that followed. Largely as a consequence of the latter, America’s white population declined from 84% to just 62% between 1965 and 2015, with our rapidly-growing Latino population now reaching 18% of the total. Today more than half of young American children are non-white, and within a couple of decades whites will have become a minority of our entire population, a situation that would have been absolutely unimaginable back in 1965. Indeed, the careful demographers of the Pew Research Center
have determined that the overwhelming majority of these racial changes have been due to post-1965 immigration, without which America would still be 75% white today. Since 1965 our non-white population has grown by 86 million, but 60 million of that increase has been due to immigration, overwhelmingly from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Adios [/i]America! is filled with ferocious attacks against the 1965 Act and Sen. Ted Kennedy on exactly these grounds.
Unfortunately, all these individuals have the facts exactly backwards and upside-down. The 1965 Act didn’t OPEN America’s borders, instead it largely CLOSED America’s borders.
The history is very simple. Prior to the 1920s, America allowed unlimited immigration from Europe and Latin America. Then [url=https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act]the 1924 Immigration Act sharply restricted European immigration, but retained an “open borders” policy toward Latin America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, largely because Southwestern business interests desired an unrestricted supply of Mexican labor. This only changed with the 1965 Act, which for the first time imposed strict quotas upon immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean even as it loosened restrictions upon European and Asian immigration. Prior to 1965, any Latin American who paid a small fee at the border, generally in the range of $18, could legally immigrate to America with almost no waiting period. Immigration had remained low merely because Mexico and most of Latin America had traditionally been under-populated.
The huge rise in Latin American immigration after 1965 was due to the enormous population growth in that region and came
in spite of the 1965 Act rather because of it.
If Congress had never passed the 1965 Act, illegal immigration would never have become an issue because
legal immigration from Latin America would have remained entirely unlimited. I suspect that the influx of legal Hispanics might have reached 5 million per year by the 1990s, and perhaps the entire impoverished population of Haiti would have relocated to our shores. Immigration over the last fifty years has increased our non-white population by some 60 million, but without the sharp restrictions of the 1965 Act, the figure would surely have been 120 million or perhaps even 180 million. Such a scenario can hardly be viewed with favor by racially-focused immigration-restrictionists.
This gigantic factual error at the core of the anti-immigration movement was almost certainly unintentional. Presumably, some early activist 25 or 30 years ago was careless and made an honest mistake regarding the legal details of the 1965 Act, a mistake that soon got into widespread circulation. Since that time, many thousands of other immigration-activists have quoted and requoted that initial blunder across the Internet, until almost everyone in this insular ideological community has come to believe it.
Anyone can make a mistake, but the fact that this misinformation has remained so widespread for so many years suggests the rather unreliable quality of most anti-immigration sources across the Internet.
Indeed, for the last dozen years or so, I’ve periodically brought this serious error to the attention of various anti-immigration websites. They’ve checked the facts, said Oops!, and immediately discontinued their incessant attacks against the 1965 Act and Teddy Kennedy. But they obviously couldn’t take down the hundreds of pieces they had already published on the subject, nor could they publicly admit their longstanding error without looking ridiculous, so almost none of their readers or peers become aware of the correction, and the denunciations of the 1965 Act in their community continue almost unabated. Sometimes after a few years, these websites even return to attacking the 1965 Act themselves, as less well-informed contributors join or the peer-pressure simply becomes too strong.
When we recognize that almost all of today’s anti-immigration activists have spent decades looking at our central immigration legislation of the last half-century upside-down, we should not be surprised to discover that other erroneous beliefs are also widespread in that community, and some of these have far greater practical political significance. The enormous support for “building a wall” to stop illegal immigration is perhaps the best example.
First, if we exclude a relatively small portion of the most highly-skilled legal immigrants, the remainder are probably not all that different in their characteristics from their undocuмented counterparts, and indeed individuals may often shift back and forth between these two categories over time, as illegals gain green cards or legals remain here after their temporary visas expire. The ubiquitous rhetorical focus on illegal immigrants seems mostly due to a mixture of “political correctness” and political demagoguery, supplemented by sheer ignorance.
According to most estimates, the size of America’s undocuмented population has been almost entirely stagnant since the 2008 Housing Meltdown wrecked employment in the construction industry, while net legal immigration has still regularly been running at a million or more a year. Therefore, it seems likely that nearly all net immigration over the last decade or so has been of the legal variety.
Now there are numerous plausible reasons to argue that immigration levels are far too high and should be substantially reduced, but if nearly all the flow is legal, the near-exclusive focus on the sliver of illegals makes absolutely no sense.
The signature issue of Trump’s populist campaign was building a wall across our border to block illegal immigration, and America has now endured our longest federal government shut-down over funding this proposal. But as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, even if we built such a wall 700 feet tall and fronted with self-firing machine-guns, I fail to see how it would have any impact whatsoever on
legal immigration, which is probably over 95% of the total. Government policies based upon sheer ignorance and stupidity are hardly likely to be successful.
When I’ve periodically raised some of these points in the past, agitated rightwingers have sometimes angrily denounced me, though without offering any logical counter-argument. But under the circuмstances, perhaps I should provide an additional source that may possess greater credibility in such ideological circles.
Despite having been totally “deplatformed” from all normal Internet services, the neo-nαzι
Daily Stormer still apparently gets more traffic than all the other Alt-Right websites in the world combined, and its editor, Andrew Anglin, is an ardent Trump supporter. Nevertheless, he recently ran
a lead editorial in which he ridiculed the whole “Build the Wall” nonsense, and correctly suggested that all the talk about it was largely due to the totally brainwashed stupidity of most anti-immigration rightwingers:
We currently have a million people coming in every year through the various “legal” methods who do not leave and are often given citizenship…People are stupid in general, and most simply do not understand that the real threat to America is legal immigration…
The wall is largely a symbolic gesture in the larger scheme of things, and speaks to the absolutely brainwashed nature of the mass of conservatives who believe that legal immigration is “okay.”
I remember before Trump having these conversations in Columbus, Ohio, and hearing people say “it’s the illegals that’s the problem” and replying “well what about all these Somalians?” People would look confused for a minute and then say “aren’t they illegal?”
Hearing them talk about “I just want it to be legal” is infuriating, as they do not have any clear explanation as to why they believe this, and the fact that there is virtually no difference between the two allows liberals to exploit their inability to explain a difference and make them look stupid.
Major political struggles are often decided by a battle of “competing incompetence” and if our anti-immigration movement is handicapped by being woefully ignorant and innumerate, it possesses the distinct advantage that many of its leading opponents—whose ideas permeate our ruling elites—are downright insane.
This unfortunate fact was brought home to me a few years ago when I was invited to participate in a televised
Intelligence Squared immigration debate held in New York City. For two decades my writings and political activity had established me as one of the foremost pro-immigrant voices in public policy circles, but the contours of the elite ideological landscape had so radically shifted that I was actually enlisted to take the
anti-immigration side of the question, joined by the co-founder of the eminently pro-immigrant Migration Policy Institute.
The proposition under debate was that “Anyone Should be Able to Take a Job Anywhere,” namely that America and the rest of the world should adopt the extreme libertarian doctrine of eliminating all restrictions on the free movement of workers.
When I was first approached about participating, I thought the whole proposal so ridiculous that the organizers would have a very difficult time locating anyone to take the other side, but I was entirely mistaken. Not only had they easily located prominent advocates, but the introductory remarks of the chairman of the forum suggested that he was surprised that anyone could seriously oppose such an “Open Borders” proposal. Indeed, the initial polling of the New York City audience showed a wide margin in favor.
However, ninety minutes later the situation had entirely changed. Once I and my equally pro-immigrant debate partner had pointed out the obvious lunacy in opening our borders to the unlimited influx of foreign workers,
the proposition was soundly defeated, with the swing in votes being the largest of any ever seen in the history of that longstanding public debate series.
http://www.unz.com/runz/immigration-building-a-wall-and-hispanic-crime/
Topic: Immigration, Building a Wall, and Hispanic Crime. (Read 770 times)