The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
Lauren Villagram:
“You’ve got a book coming out in a couple of months, an oral history based on interviews you did with, ‘New Americans.’ It’s called We Are Home. You write about how Americans are questioning the most basic tenants of our nation of immigrants, whether people born in the U.S. should automatically be U.S. citizens or whether we should encourage migration from richer, whiter countries and discourage it from poorer non-white ones. You say the questions are. “At once contemporary and very old.” What do you mean by that? You’re a historian, Ray, tell us a little bit about the history of this issue.”
Ray Suarez:
“Well, if you look at the foreign-born in the United States in let’s say 1850, all 10 countries they came from were sending white immigrants to the United States. If you look at a similar list extrapolated from the 2022 census, nine of the 10 countries ae basically sending non-white immigrants to the United States. So we’re getting to have this sort of family argument, this rendering if garments and gnashing of teeth all over again as if we have never been there before, but now with the added element of race.” – Can We Please Learn to Talk About Immigration with Generosity?, Lauren Villagran, USA Today. [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: Ray Suarez says we need to talk about immigration with “generosity.” He implies that our country, somehow, has been ungenerous toward immigration. The truth is that we’ve been grossly overgenerous for quite some time. The statistics tell the story. Today nearly 50 million residents of the U.S. are legal and illegal immigrants. This total is by far the highest ever in our history. At 15 percent of the population, the foreign-born percentage also exceeds all past records. Another way of viewing this statistic is that approximately one out of every seven U.S. residents was born in another country.
Yet the massive intake continues. For the past three decades, we had the highest sustained level of immigration in our history, averaging more than a million a year. During that same interval illegal immigration has surged, and during the past few years it has reached record levels. To say that we haven’t been generous with immigration is simply delusional.
The advocates of such delusion typically enjoy positions of privilege which shield their delusions from the realities of mass immigration. “Mainstream” journalists, for example, need not fear that illegal aliens will take their jobs. That’s mainly a concern of low-skill and low-wage Americans. None of these journalists ever suggest generosity toward them.
Villagram and Suarez use bogus arguments, commonly employed by mass immigration advocates. The first is to suggest that we can’t restrict immigration because we’re a “nation of immigrants.” It is simply dishonest to make immigration the be-all of America. First and foremost, we’re a nation of Americans if we’re going to be a nation at all. This means that we have the right—and the duty—to set immigration policy to serve our national interest.
Suarez next employs the tiresome claim that people had problems with immigration in the past, but it worked out just fine, and that’s what will happen with the current wave. Today we view immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries through rose-colored lens. The reality is that immigration then was excessive, and its consequences were the brutal exploitation of immigrant workers, vast slums, and social disfunction and strife. Finally, in 1924, our government acknowledged these problems and substantially reduced immigration. Subsequently, conditions improved. Immigration advocates refuse to acknowledge that immigration restriction helped past immigration to work to the extent that it did.
Assimilation also proceeded better in the past than today because of two reasons. One, as Suarez acknowledges, most immigrants were white Europeans with cultures similar—or relatively similar—to that of the white American majority. Two, in the past we embraced the idea of the Melting Pot. We had clear standards for assimilation, and we expected immigrants to adhere to them. Today, again as Suarez notes, the immigrants are much more racially and culturally diverse. Simply put, it’s much easier to assimilate similar groups than dissimilar groups. Furthermore, our will to assimilate immigrants has largely vanished.
And finally, in the present year 2024, there’s no sign that we are preparing to put the brakes on runaway immigration as we did 1924. To say this will all work out fine is delusion and deception to the nth degree.