CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
from the May 28, 2009 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0528/p09s01-coop.html
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What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison
PALO ALTO, CALIF.
President Obama has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country – on a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The US must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from Latin America.
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
Do I sound like a right-wing "nativist"? I'm not. I'm a lifelong Democrat; an early and avid supporter of Obama. I'm gratified by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm also the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; and a member, along with several other Democrats, of the advisory boards of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Pro English. Similar concerns preoccupied the distinguished Democrat Barbara Jordan when she chaired the congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform in the 1990s.
Congresswoman Jordan was worried about the adverse impact of high levels of legal and illegal immigration on poor citizens, disproportionately Latinos and African-Americans. The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.
The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.
The US population totaled 281 million in 2000. About 35 million, or 12.5 percent, were Latino. The Census Bureau projects that our population will reach 439 million in 2050, a 56 percent increase over the 2000 census. The Hispanic population in 2050 is projected at 133 million – 30 percent of the total and almost quadruple the 2000 level. Population growth is the principal threat to the environment via natural resource use, sprawl, and pollution. And population growth is fueled chiefly by immigration.
Consider what this, combined with worrisome evidence that Latinos are not melting into our cultural mainstream, means for the US. Latinos have contributed some positive cultural attributes, such as multigenerational family bonds, to US society. But the same traditional values that lie behind Latin America's difficulties in achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.
Prominent Latin Americans have concluded that traditional values are at the root of the region's development problems. Among those expressing that opinion: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Nobelist author Octavio Paz, a Mexican; Teodoro Moscoso, a Puerto Rican politician and US ambassador to Venezuela; and Ecuador's former president, Osvaldo Hurtado.
Latin America's cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate – 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language's growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America – a problem highlighted in recent books by former New York City deputy mayor Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican, and Mexican-Americans Lionel Sosa and Ernesto Caravantes.
Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for "compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for "accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").
As the USAID mission director during the first two years of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, I had difficulty communicating "dissent" to a government minister at a crucial moment in our efforts to convince the US Congress to approve a special appropriation for Nicaragua.
I was later told by a bilingual, bicultural Nicaraguan educator that when I used "dissent" what my Nicaraguan counterparts understood was "heresy." "We are, after all, children of the Inquisition," he added.
In a letter to me in 1991, Mexican-American columnist Richard Estrada described the essence of the problem of immigration as one of numbers. We should really worry, he wrote, "when the numbers begin to favor not only the maintenance and replenishment of the immigrants' source culture, but also its overall growth, and in particular growth so large that the numbers not only impede assimilation but go beyond to pose a challenge to the traditional culture of the American nation."
Obama should confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the needs of the economy, as Ms. Jordan urged, and (2) past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.
We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish- language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.
Lawrence Harrison directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself."
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But his worst and most destructive legacy for the United States stems
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Date: 2009-09-13, 7:12PM EDT
Reply to: see below
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But his worst and most destructive legacy for the United States stems from his authorship of the 1965 "Immigration Reform Act" that added the bulk of our additional 100 million people into America within 40 years. It jumped legal immigration from 170,000 annually to 1.1 million annually. Added to that disastrous environmental legacy, his actions provoked a complete ethnic change of our stable society into a fractured civilization. How? He provided for entrance of immigrants from cultures totally incompatible with U.S. culture. He downgraded citizenship by not enforcing our laws or maintaining educational standards.
"We are the only country in history that deliberately changed its ethnic makeup, and history has few examples of 'diversity' creating a stable society." Governor Richard D. Lamm
As those immigrants poured into this country, he facilitated and languished as millions of illegal aliens marched across our borders to wreak havoc on our schools, communities, jobs, hospitals, language and prisons. Over 20,000 members of MS-13 gangs distribute $130 billion in drugs yearly. We pay for 400,000 babies born to illegal alien mothers annually. We suffer 28 million Americans on food stamps because illegals downgrade wages and take jobs from our working poor.
Kennedy single handedly planted the seeds for the destruction of our country per the words of President Teddy Roosevelt, "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing all possibility of its contin- uing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
How did Kennedy answer that crisis of unrelenting illegal border crossing?
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He proposed, wrote and encouraged Ronald Reagan to sign the 1986 Immigration Amnesty that allowed what he said were only 1.3 million illegals. The true number of illegal aliens that gained instant citizenship became 4.3 million.
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Later, Reagan said signing that amnesty was the worse mistake of his presidency.
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Last June, 2007, as another 20 million illegal aliens broke over U.S. borders since 1986,
Kennedy tried to give another amnesty by forcing S.B. 1639
into law with his bluster and pompous bellowing. He voted to double legal immigration to 2.2 million annually! Kennedy remains responsible for our $346 billion annual costs paying for illegal aliens!
In Dr. Otis Graham's "Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis," he writes, "Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide, but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all--ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet."
He's voted against making English our national language which ensures further Balkanization of our nation via linguistic chaos. When a nation cannot speak to itself, it becomes fractured and separated.
While he battles with brain cancer, we battle for our nation's life. While he sails his boat around Martha's Vineyard, we pick up millions of pieces of trash on our borders from invading illegal alien hordes that he encourages. While he tips yet another glass of wine, we struggle to maintain our schools, communities, hospitals and prisons from this illegal invasion. While he sat on his barnyard wide rear-end for 40 years in the Senate creating the problems that now destroy our nation, we watched the American Dream turn into a nightmare.
Contrary to the editors of the Denver Post, Ted Kennedy may be likened to Nero of Rome who fiddled while it burned. Kennedy drank while we fought for our nation's survival. Kennedy ate at the finest tables while we struggled with his voting for H-1B and H-2B visas that displaced millions of American workers. Kennedy sailed his boat while our nation sank into consequences of a dysfunctional and unsustainable nation.
Because of Kennedy, our successful culture finds itself turning into a foreign culture that failed, i.e., Mexico.
The March PEW report shows Mexicans in America becoming the new dominate majority by 2050 at 53 percent.
While we struggle nostril-deep in the nightmare waters of immigration swirling around us, we may well drown, too!
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