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Introduction: Immigration: Boon or Bane to the U.S.?
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11868 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1994 |
1,187 Words |
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Everyone in America is an immigrant or the child of immigrants, however many generations removed. Even the American Indians--the so-called Native Americans--come from peoples who migrated to this continent from elsewhere. They just did it some years before the Europeans found out about (or "discovered") the New World and began coming here as immigrants. The term Native Americans thus has a political rather than descriptive origin, distinguishing the American Indians from all the other people who have been born within the boundaries of America and who are therefore also native Americans. But they were indeed here long before the Europeans arrived, so, if precedence makes an important difference, then perhaps the American Indians do have some special claim to nativity.
Claims of that sort about priority of nativity are an unresolved question in America. Since the United States is a nation of immigrants and their descendants, our history and traditions have usually been favorable to immigration--much more favorable, at least, than any nation in Europe or Asia. Immigrants have made and then enriched America immeasurably, both culturally and economically. The famous Emma Lazarus inscription on the Statue of Liberty--"Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me. / I lift my lamp beside your golden door"--resonates in American experience and mythology.
But people who have been here for awhile often see others coming in as a threat, much like the Europeans--with their ancient nations based on long-received cultures and traditions and language--view those who are not native to the nations as not belonging there. This attitude has become especially prevalent recently, when problems of unemployment and stagnant or even decreasing incomes for many Americans have met up with rising taxes and government expenditures, and with the perception by native-born Americans that immigrants are availing themselves of an array of expensive and unearned government-financed services.
In the last year or so, immigration to the United States has become one of the most heated and contentious public-policy issues. The positions expressed on this question do not break along received left-center (liberal)-right lines. There are leftists who oppose immigration and others who favor it, there are liberals who favor and others who oppose immigration, and there are conservatives on both sides, too. Leftists who wish to restrict immigration do so because they are worried that the influx of immigrants from the Third World (chiefly Asia
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