Set aside for a moment, if you can, issues of Democratic and Republican politics, homeland security, official language, national identity – all the real but ephemeral concerns around which we organize our national debate on immigration reform, and think for a moment about tides.
Humans of every race, religion, skin color, language and political orientation have been migrating, like waves on the sea, across borders, mountains, deserts, oceans and mighty rivers since the beginning of recorded time.
The Roman Empire rearranged the world, Vandals and Goths rearranged the Romans, the Incas subdued much of western South America, the Spanish subdued the Incas, Mexicans kicked out the Spanish and Americans – as Europeans came to be called – kicked out the Mexicans.
Early on, every American was an immigrant – immigrants with superior weapons and more dangerous germs, but immigrants nonetheless. Some of the local, indigenous population welcomed the new arrivals, and some opposed them, tried to stop them. But while anthropological experts disagree on the precise numbers and the accurate formula of deadly influences, few dispute the fact that European arrival in North America had a catastrophic effect on the indigenous population, reducing it by as much as 90 percent in perhaps a century.
The European colonization of the Americas resulted in the deaths of so many people that some scientists speculate it contributed to climatic change and temporary global cooling. Some researchers have described this as the “great dying”.
That fact alone begs for a little humility from the immigrant ancestors of the Europeans who enslaved, infected, attacked and annihilated the indigenous people of North America.
Be that as it may, as with every rise and fall of human tides, the waves of arriving immigrants to the New World brought with them vestiges of the Old World they left behind. And those vestiges contained pieces of what would become an evolving amalgam of creative, cultural, genetic, intellectual, technical, tribal, spiritual, phonetic, linguistic, mythical and organizational qualities. The very qualities woven into the DNA of the emerging American.
It has become a cliché of biological science (but that makes it no less true), that the greatest strength lies in diversity. Diverse ecosystems are stronger, more resilient, less prone to collapse.
Thus we find California, once the domain of indigenous tribes, later controlled by Spain, then by Mexico, then by the United States, a perennially poly-ethnic place where culture and language have always comingled and where names and places richly combine English, Spanish, French, German, Yiddish, Danish and Native American words.
Culture and language, like weather fronts, migrating birds and organic commerce, are tidal – they respond to external influences more powerful and permanent than political platforms. The flood of Latino immigration is such a tide. It can, to some extent, be guided, directed and overseen. But it can’t be stopped, not with 380 million Spanish speakers below our Southern border.
Many Americans view this tide with fear and anger. So be it. That won’t stop the tide. And sending 12 million Spanish-speaking people back to where they came from is not practically, politically, economically or morally possible.
The anti-immigrant myths we are hearing once again in the White House, in the Speaker’s office, and throughout the Maga movement, push emotion, prejudice and fear ahead of fact. Contrary to what the immigration opponents insist – that illegal immigration is a drain on the U.S. economy and undocumented immigrants are responsible for a bloody wave of crime – there is no evidence to support those claims and lots of evidence for the opposite.
Countless economic studies of the fiscal impact of undocumented workers support the conclusion that they not only don’t drain public dollars, they contribute a net gain to the economy because they pay taxes but don’t get public benefits.
Equally untrue is the Trumpian claim that America is wash in homicidal violence from drug-crazed illegals. The murder of Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student, allegedly by Venezuelan illegal immigrant Jose Antonio Ibarra, was a tragedy. It wasn’t evidence of a rapacious crime wave by illegal immigrants.
All the evidence agrees that undocumented immigrants have lower rates of violent crime than do American citizens, primarily because they are here to work, earn money and support their families.
An exhaustive, 24-year, longitudinal study of criminal behavior by undocumented immigrants, published on the National Institutes of Health PubMed Central website, concluded, “Although ardent skeptics may remain unconvinced, the weight of the evidence presented here, and in supporting work, challenges claims that unauthorized immigration endangers the public. At a minimum, the results of our study call into question claims that undocumented immigration increases violent crime. If anything, the data suggest the opposite.”
We are nowhere close to resolving this issue, and uniting the American public around a politically-possible, strategically-smart, and morally-acceptable solution. As long as immigration policy is driven by members of the fanatical fringe, like Stephen Miller and his alt-right allies, we will be stymied from resolving the conflict.
But Miller and his ilk can’t stop the tide. It will overpower them. If they were smart, with even a modicum of humility and benevolence, they would recognize that the immigration tide can be turned in everyone’s favor. With a 2022 U.S. birthrate of 1.66 children-per-woman, this country needs the immigrant workforce. With reasonable border control, and a migrant-worker system like the Bracero program that worked so well during World War II, the immigration problem would become the Immigration Success Story.
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