Overall, in the long term, I believe immigration is a net positive for the United States. I know others have mentioned the benefits, so I don’t need to repeat them. There are short term costs as well. Immigrants can place a strain on public services, particularly local services and they can depress wages, usually for lower skilled workers but even among skilled workers thanks to H-1B immigrants. The United States as a whole is capable of absorbing a lot of immigrants without worrying too much about them overwhelming us culturally.
I’m not really sure where to draw the line. But, yeah, I imagine there’s a point where the immediate cost is a bit too much for people to stomach even if it’s beneficial in the long run.
You are correct that internal migration may demonstrate if there are any potential problems with wide open migration … and there is.
The immediate cases to look at are places like the Phoenix region where population influx has outstripped water resources, or the Sun Belt metropolitan regions that have had growth overwhelm the educational systems. The tools to limit the influx are limited but implemented where possible.
On a smaller scale gentrification comes to mind, with higher income folk moving in, driving housing prices up so much the analogous “natives” families there, for generations even, are driven out, the neighborhood losing its older shops and getting Whole Foods, Juice Rx, and the Pilates studio instead. I don’t blame the old time residents there wanting restrictions placed.
So yes there definitely can be too much internal immigration, and little recourse to it.
On this I would argue even the opposite: this country’s secret sauce has been its hodgepodge stew of cultures. None overwhelms but all have added depth and complexity to the overall dish. Not melted together but chunks of different flavors abutting in novel ways. That ever changing stew IS American culture and is why our culture has been our most successful product. I argue for high rates of immigration for many reasons, including informed self interest ones, but arguing for control over the rate is not necessarily racist or ignorant. (Even as racists exploit ignorance as they use immigration bogeymen to further racist goals.)
That’s actually one of the culture war points the Right loves to point out. They get really bent out of shape when people immigrate here and live in ethnic enclaves of people like them, as if they’re refusing to assimilate and just leeching off American society.
Thing is, it’s hard to assimilate as adults. And living in a community of similar people is comforting. And for the most part, everyone bitching had forefathers who did the exact same thing. I’ll bet that the upper Midwest and elsewhere had German (or whatever) language newspapers until well into the 20th century, just like parts of Texas did. And they still eat stuff like fleischkuechle, kolaches, pasties, and chicken fried steak which are immigrant dishes at heart.
To make it more silly, most of their children are bilingual, and their grandchildren are often monoglot English speakers and often first generation college students.
And in places like border states where you do have solely Spanish speaking communities of US citizens, those communities typically predated US sovereignty over the areas, as they were typically part of Mexico before they were part of the US. I mean if you live in Laredo and you are a Mexican American who speaks only Spanish, it’s not like you’re the person who’s refusing to assimilate.
Longer arc of immigration history makes me wonder about the racism issue some?
To some degree the directionality sometimes went the other way … an immigrant group got labeled as a different race during an initial immigration phase, often some variant of black but not always, to then be considered “white” in a subsequent more culturally assimilated generation.
Italians, especially Sicilian origin, Greeks, even the pale Irish had the n word applied to them. Jews of course a different race.
So yes racism motivates, but the anti immigrant mindset defined groups as an inferior race deserving of discrimination.
Yes, but when the N word was applied to us, it didn’t get mean we were Black. It meant we were beneath the true whites, that our whiteness (unlike theirs) was subject to recall. And had as much to do with language and religion as skin tone.
Not sure what you mean. The gold rush was a massive migration that completely changed California but it was already part of the US by then. When we captured it from Mexico, it was a sleepy backwater that was too far from anything to really bother with.
A few decades later, we were a driving force behind some really awful immigration laws called the Chinese Exclusion Act. The repercussions continue to this day. I know a paper nephew. He was probably raised to keep his mouth shut to avoid problems.
Well I think it’s more complex than a single number. Obviously there are different ages, education levels, whether they need support (e.g. people who have trauma from conflict), and this changes a lot the effect that a given cohort of migrants will have on the wider population.
Now, to be clear, I am in fact an “open borders” person. Aside from people trying to escape arrest, probation, taxes etc, I would like to see a future where people can freely move around. However, I accept that it is not practical for an individual country to set such a policy overnight; it’s something that needs to be done stepwise over time.
And finally I think the appeal to a singular scary number is often for political means. FTR I am not accusing the OP of this, but here in the UK, it’s common for pictures of irregular migrants (e.g. the “boat people”) to be accompanied with stats on total migration, which is of course very misleading.
My general thinking is that it ought to be as easy for people to cross borders as it is for money to cross borders. Otherwise we get unfair labor practices, where money can move where labor is cheapest, but labor can’t move where it’s most valued.
One million immigrants per year means that about three people in every thousand will be new to the country. I think that’s pretty easy to absorb and even the minimum necessary, especially in light of our aging population and that our current annual surplus (births minus deaths) is only around 500,000 and projected to drop even further.
Immigrants are good for the country. It’s who we are and we need them.
A very large number of Americans poured into California after Mexican independence from Spain. This is part of what brought about the Mexican-American war and California’s brief flirtation with independence before the gold rush.
Edit: maybe “very large” is an exaggeration — I’m most familiar with San Diego but most of the sources I sees discuss the Bay Area.
I would also add that the stronger a social net a nation has, the more it needs to put in safeguards and restrictions to prevent people from coming into the nation and using the net but not contributing to the net - else the net may soon be unsustainable. The immigrants who come in need to be productive.
Unless you are a refugee, it is pretty hard to get an immigrant visa and permanent resident permit without being “productive”. I have always had to show a letter from my employer.
The medical exam, if any, is after they’ve let you in the country in the first place. They check for stuff like tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, but it has nothing to do with whether you are “disabled”. Remember, you already have a job (unless you are an asylum seeker)
My personal feeling is that ANY illegal immigration is “too much”. If they go through proper channels, great. Welcome to America. It’s kind of like my home. I have locks on my doors to prevent “illegal immigration”.
If the “proper channels” are too much of a nightmare, people (which, again, already have a job) have an incentive to skip them. They need to start work now, not 2–5 years from now.
Understood, but the solution is to fix the problem, not create something worse instead. Using my home as an example again, I don’t take the lock off my door if it is stuck and is very hard to unlock. I repair/replace the lock instead.