Crowded Land of Liberty: Solving America's Immigration Crisis
176
Crowded Land of Liberty: Solving America's Immigration Crisis
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781461623144 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bridgeworks |
| Publication date: | 12/09/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Chapter One
Why a Crisis?
The United States, until 2000, was basking in the warm glow of prolonged economic growth and low unemployment. Mesmerized by the length and strength of the economic expansion, neither citizens nor our political leaders allowed the problems of unchecked immigration to register on their anxiety meters. Although economic history has shown us time and again that to predict a recession following an extended period of growth is akin to predicting one will exhale after inhaling, we seem unable to imagine what effect excess immigration will have during and after an inevitable downturn in the economy. No major candidate in the 2000 election even approached the subject of immigration.
Yet, millions of immigrants — legal and illegal — are inflicting a crushing burden on our already disadvantaged underclass with a flood of cheap labor. When the predictable recession comes, an avalanche of societal problems will thunder down, led by the weight of cheap immigrant labor reducing wages on already low paying, entry-level jobs. Additionally, enormous immediate and future population growth diminishes the quality of life for natives and immigrants alike, due to the twin scourges of overcrowding and the resulting environmental damage.
Our immigration policy was drastically changed in 1965 by amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Opponents charged that the amendments would greatly increase immigration. But Senator Ted Kennedy, floor manager for the amendments, said, "Under the proposed bill the present level of immigration remains substantially the same." Senator Kennedy also asserted that, "the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset." Both statements have proved false. Before the 1965 amendments, the ethnic mix of immigrants matched closely the ethnic mix of our population. Since 1965, the mandated immigrant mix has nearly excluded Europe as a source. It favors, instead, Third World Hispanic and Asian countries, contributing an unprecedented high volume of offspring. With the addition of huge numbers of illegal immigrants that yearly grow larger, our population has increased far beyond anyone's expectations. Although it took from the dawn of human history until 1800 to reach a world population of one billion, and by 1960, of three billion, by 2000, world citizens numbered six billion, a 100% increase in forty years. Such enormous population growth and its accompanying pressures on poor countries has resulted in unprecedented numbers of desperate, poverty-stricken people immigrating to the richer countries like the United States.
During the decade of the 1960s the United States averaged just over 300,000 legal immigrants per year. Because of the 1965 amendments, by the 1980s immigration had doubled to about 600,000 per year. The 1990s saw the number of legal immigrants to the U.S. balloon to an average of more than 1,000,000 each year. Legal immigration hit a peak of over 1.8 million in 1991. This is the highest level of immigration in our nation's history, exceeding the previous record of just over 800,000 per year set during the initial decade of the twentieth century.
To these numbers of legal immigrants, it is estimated that undocumented aliens add 275,000 people to our population each year. These are divided between "visa abusers," who enter legally and simply overstay their visas (forty-one percent), and those who sneak across our long, porous borders in the dark of night, or use falsified documents (fifty-nine percent). The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimates that we are host to about five million illegals today. However, the 2000 U.S. Census estimates eleven million.
When assessing the impact of immigration, the point to keep in mind is that population is affected first by immigrants themselves, then by their offspring. The birthrate among women born in the U.S. has been declining in recent years. On the other hand, the birthrate among today's immigrant women ranges from 3.0 children to a robust 4.6 children, depending on ethnicity and education. For this reason, according to demographer Leon F. Bouvier, the post-1970 population growth is nearly all due to immigration. If fundamental changes to our immigration policies axe not made soon, current immigrants and their children will add twenty-five million people to our already crowded metropolitan areas every decade for at least the next sixty years. This is the equivalent of adding the present population of California to America's already jammed population centers every thirteen years.
President Clinton shared this truth with the American people in his final State of the Union message delivered on January 27, 2000: "Within ten years — just ten years — there will be no majority race in our largest state of California. In a little more than fifty years, there will be no majority race in America." Whether one applauds or condemns this alteration of our ethnic makeup, few would argue against the premise that so fundamental a change should have been exhaustively debated prior to its implementation. No such public dialog took place concerning one of the most drastic demographic changes in history. The result will be an overwhelming social revolution.
The most obvious and immediate negative impact of adding large numbers of people to already overcrowded urban areas is on the quality of life and on the physical environment. That Americans now regard the environment as nearly sacred is evident when we see the size and the speed of growth of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While new, as federal agencies go — founded in 1970 — it now accounts for a seventh of the staff and a third of the spending of the entire U.S. government regulatory apparatus. Yet, during the same time period the EPA and its budget were growing at such breathtaking rates, the U.S. was welcoming record numbers of immigrants. From an annual rate of immigration during the 1970s of about 400,000, the rate has grown to over one million.
It is shocking to realize that our government's environmental and immigration policies are working at cross-purposes, and the objectives of immigration policy are out of alignment with environmental realities. Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado, wrote in 1999 that public policy and most of our institutions as presently structured assume unlimited resources and an infinite capacity to create wealth with no ecological limits. The resulting society, he said, is vastly different from a society that assumes environmental and ecological limits.
Although the present concentration of immigrants is in urban areas, this overcrowding negatively affects our cherished environmental beauty, as well. One of our most famous and important bodies of water is the Chesapeake Bay, a virtual inland sea that runs from Baltimore, Maryland, to Norfolk, Virginia. Only a decade ago the bay yielded two million bushels of oysters each year, today only about 300,000. The cities and suburbs of Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland, and nearby Washington, D.C., along with countless towns and villages are on or near the bay's shoreline. Runoff from farms, lawns, and sewage plants, plus air pollution, have combined to convert much of the bay into a watery desert. The amount of oxygen-depleted "bad water" increased fifteen-fold between 1950 and 1980. There is no evidence of improvement since then.
Roy Beck, Washington, D.C. editor of The Social Contract magazine, wrote:
After years of study, it appears that the single
greatest problem for the Chesapeake Bay may
be population growth in the bay's watershed,
according to Christopher D'Elia, provost of
the University of Maryland Biotechnology
Institute. And the single biggest cause of
population growth in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore
metropolitan area in the watershed
is immigrants and their children....
Governments, industries, and individuals
have spent billions of dollars since 1970 to
reduce air pollution and water pollution to
save the [Chesapeake] bay. But the federal
government has undercut all those efforts by
forcing — through immigration — continued
intense population growth in the watershed.
In addition to devastating many other natural wonders such as Chesapeake Bay, the environmentally negative impact of immigration on villages, towns, cities, and vast metropolises across the length and breadth of America is enormous. Some specifics: Forty percent of our lakes and streams are not suitable for bathing or fishing. Thirty-five states are using groundwater faster than it is being replenished. The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, listed 500 plant and animal species by 1988; by 1993 the count was 700. During that period, we admitted nearly seven million legal immigrants to a country struggling with its own ecology.
When interviewed for this book, Dick Schneider, chairman of the Population Committee of the Sierra Club, a California-based environmental organization, said, "Immigrants are no bigger contributors to that impact on the environment on a per capita basis than are natives. It is a combination of their arrival in such great numbers and their subsequent fertility that does the damage." Schneider pointed to energy consumption as an example. Energy consumption per capita has remained static, but the dramatic increase in population has driven up total energy consumption, depleting resources and further polluting the air we breathe. His observations, made in mid-2000, were prescient. California's early-2001 energy crisis marked by soaring electricity costs and rolling blackouts affirmed Schneider's observations. While none of California's political leaders has the political courage to mention immigration as a cause for high energy consumption, it is clearly a major factor. From 1997 to 2000, energy demand increased by twenty percent while generating capacity increased a mere one percent.
Nationally, the cost of being host to more than a million immigrants each year expands further by the need for additional, necessary infrastructure. Not only are additional schools and roads required, but also additional sewers, water, public recreational facilities, police and fire protection, hospitals, and many other taxpayer-funded services such as Medicare and welfare. While citizens recognize the need for these services, to most immigrants they are at once a miracle and a magnet drawing them here.
In the thirty years since 1970, the number of licensed drivers in America is up by sixty-four percent, reports the Wall Street Journal, and vehicle miles traveled have increased by 131 percent. Yet, during that same period, the nation's road mileage has grown by only six percent. Remember that deficit next time you are stuck in traffic. In 1999 the California Business Roundtable estimated that $90 billion to $100 billion would be needed over the next ten years to bring the state's roads and public works up to par. Perhaps they had heard the joke about the number and size of the potholes pocking California's streets. Some are said to be so large they are being stocked with trout.
The infrastructure problem is by no means limited to California. Nor have we yet seen the worst of it. Michael A. Pagano, professor of political science at Miami University of Ohio, writing in Government Review, warns that if history is any guide, city finance officers can expect the downside of the boom-and-bust cycle to raise its ugly head. He cautioned that concerns about crumbling infrastructure are more pronounced during times of economic recession.
In addition to the damage done to the physical environment, high levels of immigration also affect what we will call the psychic environment. How pleasant or unpleasant are our surroundings? When we seek the tranquility of open space, can we find it? Is it overrun with people or so distant that it's impractical? Are the billions we are spending on freeways and highways reducing traffic congestion or does population growth cancel out our efforts? As we sit immobile on interstate parking lots, do we not curse the endless stream of cars?
The loss of open space is real and serious. Across America, people seek to get away from the clamor of the city and move far enough away to enjoy the beauty of nature and get to it quickly. As Francis Emma Barwood told Newsweek about a popular development on the edge of Phoenix, Arizona, "The people who bought houses in phase one were told they'd be surrounded by beautiful lush deserts, but instead they're surrounded by phases two and three."
Loss of open space is by no means limited to the exodus from cities to suburbs. Man's innate desire to communicate with the wilderness is also threatened. In 1993, Congress opened up 353 square miles at South Colony Lakes in Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Within two years it was so crowded that rangers considered limiting the number who could visit. In state and national parks near population centers, reservations and daily visitor limits are becoming more common as the nation's population grows.
Arizona and Colorado are struck by both edges of the immigration sword. The two states are popular destinations for immigrants, mostly from Mexico. In addition, they are common destinations for Californians fleeing the huge influx of immigrants into what is already our most populous, yet still one of our fastest-growing states. In 1999, Richard Schneider of California's Sierra Club wrote that over eighty percent of recent population growth in California is a result of immigrants and the U.S.-born children of recent immigrants. Schneider pointed out that California is now growing at virtually the same rate as India, 1.8 percent per year. This is much faster than the rest of the country (1 percent per year) and the world as a whole (1.3 percent per year).
Traffic congestion is the part of our psychic environment that affects us most on a daily basis. Anyone traversing the streets and avenues of Manhattan or the freeways of Los Angeles must either curse the traffic or possess the patience of Job. The Federal Highway Administration offers no solace, predicting in the mid-90s that congestion on our already crowded highways would quadruple by 2005. Inasmuch as eighty-five percent of America's households own one or more cars, the enormous growth in the number of motor vehicles can only be fueled in large part by population growth. Traffic congestion is, of course, only one result of more motor vehicles. Another serious consequence is air pollution. The two problems go hand in glove, as immigration expert Roy Beck has written:
The fight against air pollution may be America's
greatest environmental success story. Despite
Herculean clean up efforts, however,
about forty percent of Americans live in metropolitan
areas that still fail to meet some of
the Environmental Protection Agency's health
standards. How different would this statistic
be if there were sixty-five million fewer Americans
driving cars and using electricity? And it
only gets worse. Each year the U.S. population
grows by [over a million] people, most of them
immigrants and the descendants of recent
immigrants.
In addition to a clean, open environment, a quality education for our children in schools adequate in capacity to insure reasonable class size is a vital part of our nation's psychic environment. Today, America's schools are undergoing an unprecedented period of introspection. Everything about education is on the table: faculty quality, teaching techniques, physical plant, even vouchers to provide parents with options for schools. We need to add another question to this healthy mix: Should we continue to add legions of foreign students, the great majority of whom have limited English capability, to our already beleaguered education system? Beck's look at the New York City school situation helps answer that question:
In the thirty-three overcrowded high schools
of Queens, teachers must deal with sixty languages.
And the immigrant flows change so
rapidly, says the superintendent, that "the
languages we need this September will be different
than the languages we'll need the next
September." Immigration has so overwhelmed
the schools in Washington Heights, Manhattan,
that teaching is done in shifts. Rapid immigration
has left the neighborhood crammed
with twice as many children under twelve as
lived there before the boom in immigration
that began twenty years ago. Some 25,000
children share two school playgrounds because
portable classrooms have covered all the rest.
There are thousands of children trapped inside
crowded apartments with nowhere to play....
High school dropout rates exceed fifty percent.
New York State is second only to California in the number of immigrants who settle there, 95,599 during 1998 alone.
So great is California's school overcrowding problem, the need to complete a new school arises each day to keep pace with growth. Exacerbating the problem are some enterprising Asian parents who, because they value education so highly, make arrangements for their children to live with friends or relatives in America and simply drop their children here to be reared and educated. This practice is so prevalent in Southern California, with its large concentrations of Southeast Asians, the term "parachute children" has been coined to describe them.
The problem of overcrowded schools exists not only in California and New York, but in all states with a high immigration influx. Texas, for instance, needs to open two new schools each week just to keep up. The Houston, Texas, school system, with its close proximity to the border of Mexico, has a large number of Hispanics and is growing rapidly. In 1998, the system became embroiled in a heated controversy when it began asking for the parent's Social Security number or other proof of residency to enroll a child. Deputy Superintendent Faye Bryant said they "began to require affidavits this summer from parents who had no other proof of residency, such as a utility bill." Although the president of the Houston Immigration and Refugee Coalition charged that the practice "violates people's rights and intimidates immigrants who are not U.S. citizens," they are similarly "intimidated" and "their rights violated" everytime a traffic officer asks for their drivers' licenses or an immigration official their passports.
In 1998, the Loudoun County school district, near Washington, D.C., had a similar brouhaha. Like many districts across the country, it imposes tuition on students who are not residents of the county. Because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that states could not deny free, public education to illegal aliens and their children, the district cannot charge illegal immigrant students tuition. However, it does charge students who are on a tourist visa, viewing them the same as citizen-interlopers from surrounding areas. To differentiate between the two situations, i.e., illegal aliens and aliens here on a tourist visa, the district began requiring illegals to sign a statement of no visa. Predictably, this drew fire from an immigrant advocate's group. David Bernstein of the Immigration Rights Coalition of Greater Washington, said that such a statement has a chilling effect on enrollment because it discourages immigrant children from going to school. "This should be about education and not illegal immigration," he fulminated.
But immigration and education are inextricably intertwined. A 1993 Rand Corporation study of urban school systems with large numbers of immigrants found that in inundated schools, "Education failure is the norm for immigrants and natives alike. Fewer than one of two kids going into these high schools comes out employable." The Rand study concluded, "The size of the wave and the chaos of the situation are too great."
In our highly politically correct society, it is perilous to talk about such downsides of multiculturalism. Yet, in addition to other psychic problems, a deep-seated frictional component known as "hate crimes" has surfaced concurrently with the steep rise in immigration. While this type of crime is not inflicted solely on immigrants, they receive far more than their share. Unsavory instances abound — for instance, the distribution of hate-filled flyers aimed at Chinese-Americans in the summer of 1999, in San Francisco. The flyer was titled What About Us Whites and its message was painfully clear. It urged white people to "Rip them off. Spit on them. Flip them off, anything." Reflecting on the gravity of such inflammatory rhetoric, Diana Chin, executive director of a San Francisco Chinese civil rights group, said, "All sociological data show this is how violence really begins. This kind of campaign that dehumanizes a community creates an environment that's ripe for violence." Racism is abhorrent in any form and these pamphleteers are obviously ignorant and unstable. Nevertheless, Asians were singled out for hostility at a time when they constituted eighty-five percent of the immigrants admitted through the San Francisco port of entry. Overwhelming numbers cause many citizens to feel threatened.
South Florida is another psychic hot spot because of its massive influx of Cubans. Particularly provocative was the 1982 statement by the mayor of Miami, Maurice Ferre, an Hispanic, that, "Within ten years there will not be a word of English spoken — English isn't Miami's official language. One day residents will learn Spanish or leave." While the mayor's prediction has not materialized, an elderly English-speaking pensioner in Miami complained of hearing only "Spanish on the school grounds, Spanish in the hospital wards, Spanish on the bus, Spanish on the freeways, Spanish in the store and bank."
The handling of the celebrated Elian Gonzalez case is another example of immigration-related friction. Elian was the six-year-old boy who clung to an inner tube when the small boat on which he and his mother were fleeing Cuba capsized. After his mother drowned, Elian was picked up and brought to Miami, where his extended family began a campaign to keep him in the U.S. in spite of his father's pleas to return the boy to him in Cuba. The protracted battle over Elian caused havoc both in Washington, D.C. and Miami. Civil disobedience, including blocking traffic and defying police, was used by thousands of Cubans in Miami, leading to hundreds of arrests. The early morning raid by armed INS agents to deliver Elian from his Miami relatives to his father was an international incident reflecting poorly on all concerned.
Repeated clashes between the U.S. Coast Guard and Cuban boat people trying to land on Florida's shores and claim political asylum have strained relations between Florida natives and the Cuban-American population. As arrests are made, Cuban-American protests frequently resort to civil disobedience. After one such incident, an article by Andrea Robinson in the Miami Herald reported the outrage of some Miamians:
Through e-mail, telephone calls, faxes to the
Herald, and talk radio, hundreds of non-Cubans
were angered by what they see as an
unlawful, self-defeating tactic of disrupting
traffic.
Although we have compassion for
refugees ... Pushing the Cuban flag in our
faces, screaming and blocking traffic is a poor
way to say "thank you."
Excerpted from CROWDED LAND OF LIBERTY by Dirk Chase Eldredge. Copyright © 2001 by Dirk Chase Eldredge. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Author's Preface | ix | |
| Chapter 1 | Why a Crisis? | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | Good Intentions Gone Awry | 21 |
| Chapter 3 | The H-1B and Its Discontents | 32 |
| Chapter 4 | Down on the Farm | 45 |
| Chapter 5 | Chain Immigration Perils | 55 |
| Chapter 6 | The Futility of Sponsorship | 64 |
| Chapter 7 | Asylum and Amnesty | 73 |
| Chapter 8 | Open Borders? They're Porous Already | 87 |
| Chapter 9 | Assimilation Is Not Working | 108 |
| Chapter 10 | A New Beginning | 132 |
| Bibliography | 151 | |
| Index | 165 |