| Matthew Yglesias links to Factcheck.org's report on immigration and jobs, which shows that immigrants - legally or illegally entering the country - actually grow the economy, and create jobs and increases wages for the average American worker.
Yglesias:
But of course when you look at the politics of this issue, none of this is reflected. The people clamoring to "control the border" aren't recent low-skill immigrants from Mexico. It's very rarely native born high-school dropouts either. Rather, the people upset about immigration tend to be white high school graduates, a group that has a lot of conservative opinions about many issues but generally benefits from high levels of immigration.
Kevin Drum suggests that immigration opponents' opposition "...is rooted less in economic concerns and more in cultural resentment and language angst." Which isn't really accurate, either, given the number of immigration opponents that proudly point to, say, German, Irish, or Italian immigrant ancestors.
It's racism. Not the overt, old-fashioned segregation and lynching kind...it's the face of a kind of new racism, in which a handful of people, no doubt feeling threatened, confused, or annoyed by the myriad and rapidity of change - economic, cultural, moral, or technological, and not all of it positive - cling for self-identity to a highly politicized vision of the mythic American past, which, at its center, includes a racial and ethnic identity. Obama does not belong to the mythology, nor, apparently, does the most recent Miss America - a Muslim-American woman who "usurped" the "rightful" owner of the crown, Arizona-immigration-policy-supporting Miss Oklahoma. A "real" American doesn't speak with an accent, drive the wrong car, worship the wrong God, or veer from the views of the conservative punditry.
And I do think there's an economic component to this resentment that's written into the mythology as the "Protestant work ethic," but is probably more about the fear of immigrants slicing off a too-generous helping from the US government's budget pie. It's no coincidence that the areas of the country most hostile to civil and immigrant rights are also the most federally subsidized. And it's no coincidence that Reagan's pairing of federal welfare abuse with single black mothers resonated so sharply with many white, middle-class voters.
Whatever. Let's just say that distrust of immigrant populations runs deep, and all the evidence in the world that new Americans actually benefit the US economy will change neither the canard associating immigrants with job loss nor any anti-immigration views. |
