ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 28, 1997 TAG: 9703280041
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
Anti-immigration sentiment in America is too often based on false fears stemming from a misunderstanding of economics and a misreading of history.
FOR A NATION of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, America's periodic spates of anti-immigrant fervor are somewhat odd.
Nevertheless, they occur. For instance, in the 1840s, when the nativist Know-Nothings threatened to become a major political party.
Or, for another instance, now - when even legal immigrants have been reformed out of eligibility for benefits of social programs like welfare, and there's serious talk of amending the Constitution so that the children born here of noncitizens no longer would automatically be citizens by reason of their place of birth.
While fears about immigration are not wholly without basis, they tend to be considerably overwrought.
Worries that recent waves of immigrants are ethnically and culturally unlike earlier waves, and are therefore a threat to the primacy of the English language and the durability of other features of American life, are not new. Precisely the same fears arose on the arrival of the earlier immigrant groups against whom recent immigrants are unfavorably compared. But the pattern of cultural assimilation by succeeding generations proved constant. Why expect it to change among the children and grandchildren of today's immigrants?
Many Americans worry, too, that immigration is putting pressure on scarce resources, taking jobs from people already here, and contributing to such economic ills as the widening income gap between affluent and poor Americans.
Immigration, whose impact is geographically uneven, can create localized economic disruptions that policy-makers might do well to address. But overall, most studies suggest, the net economic impact of immigration is positive. Immigration should not be blamed for the declining value of low-skill jobs in an increasingly high-skill world.
Immigrants generally bring not only a willingness to work, but also an entrepreneurial drive that, far from taking jobs, creates them. Up to one-quarter of firms in California's high-tech Silicon Valley were established by immigrants. But even more important, suggests a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment and the Urban Institute, may be immigrants' lower-profile contributions to the revitalization of the small-business sector of the U.S. economy.
Plenty of valid criticisms can be leveled at America's immigration policies and how they're implemented. But don't overrate immigration's alleged dangers by underrating the resilience of American society and the dynamism of American capitalism.
LENGTH: Medium: 52 linesby CNB