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Introduction: The Challenge of Immigration
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20620 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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10 / 1992 |
576 Words |
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Immigration has become an increasingly controversial issue in the United States and Europe, forcing national leaders to confront issues ranging from illegal immigrants and political refugees to welfare benefits and bilingual education.
The United States has historically followed an open-door policy (welcoming an astonishing total of 57 million immigrants by 1990), but economic hard times and rapid demographic shifts are causing many Americans to reexamine a policy that will produce more than one million immigrants this year, an estimated 20 percent of them illegal.
In the Republican primaries last spring, conservative challenger Patrick Buchanan urged the building of a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border and received enough votes to make immigration a campaign issue to fall. Surveys reveal that as many as 68 percent of Americans think that our present immigration policy is bad for the country. Public opinion magazines and academics fiercely debate the role of immigration in multiculturalism and whether American is fast becoming a nation of minorities Amid the heater rhetoric, essential facts sometimes get lost: The United States has an overwhelming white majority of 75.6 percent.
The Old World also has growing immigration problems. In Germany, neo-Nazis beat up Turkish and other foreign workers while the Kohl government tries to revise the constitutional guarantee of political asylum. Bonn has a legitimate concern: Germany receives 70 percent of the applications for political asylum coming into the European Community. In France, Jean Marie Le Pen's anti-immigrant National Front won nearly 15 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Immigration's impact on European politics has been intensified by long-suppressed ethnic rivalries that have erupted everywhere.
American liberals as well as conservatives, reports Prof. Charles B. Keely of Georgetown University, have expressed concern about the impact of recent mass migration on the republic. Former Democratic Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado has called for a reduction in the level of immigration, while historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has taken issue with the growing "cult of ethnicity" in America. After passing major legislation in 1980, 1986, and 1990, says Keely, Congress has charged a bipartisan commission to recommend changes that need to be made in the entire package of laws. While immigration will not replace jobs or the economy as the leading national issue in the fall elections, it will be a key factor in Senate and House races, particularly in
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