Must See Video On Immigration....Important!

In his book, The Case Against Immigration, Beck goes astray when he attributes the breakdown of urban infrastructure, including the need to replace Washington's Woodrow Wilson Bridge, to immigration-induced population growth. Holding up Boulder, Colo.'s slow-growth zoning as a model for the nation, Beck doesn't seem to recognize that such upper-middle-class strategies collide with his populism, excluding less affluent native-born Americans, never mind struggling immigrants. Such strained arguments succeed only in reminding us that the environmental and population-control movements (not organized labor or advocates for the poor) have been important spawning grounds for anti-immigration activists.

Similarly, Beck goes too far when he argues for a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants admitted (down to 250,000 annually) and asserts that "legal immigration could be stopped with a simple majority vote of Congress and a stroke of the president's pen." In fact, we have already had a test of this proposition. In 1965 Congress terminated the Bracero Program, under which thousands of contract laborers had been brought here from Mexico. Yet despite that legislative action, Mexican laborers continued to pour across the border, only illegally. The lesson is that immigration is an entrenched economic and social process that cannot be so easily legislated out of existence.

Beck stumbles again when he observes that "high immigration almost always has reflected the values and served the interests of a small elite at the expense of the national interest." Yet the values he refers to pervade this society. Americans esteem individual liberty, which in this context means that we have consistently rejected policies that would provide the secure means of identification necessary for employers as well as public officials to determine an individual's immigration status.

Without such measures we will never get a handle on our immigration problems. But our failure to do so cannot be blamed solely on elite opinion, however reflexive and simple-minded its pro-immigration bias may be. When it comes to immigration, there's plenty of blame to go around.