Now we have a welfare society that wasn’t available until the ’60s, ready to provide a safety net. Some day that safety net is going to break
By Juanell Garrett
Midwest Voices Panelist 2008
When I started researching my column on illegal immigration several months ago, I knew illegal immigration wasn’t a good thing. Turns out, I didn’t know the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4388 of it.
I am a product of legal immigration. My ancestors fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. (Yeah, I know. We can’t get along with anyone!)
As Kathleen Parker’s column last week said, “We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there’s a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through enerations of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4093."
This isn’t the first time that our country has been concerned about huge influxes of people from a single group. In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin was concerned about http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3103 becoming Germanized. Great immigration waves–the Irish in the 1840s and the Europeans from the late 19th century through the 1920s–were followed by restrictive immigration laws.When the former head of the Mexican department whose job is to promote the interests of Mexicans living abroad says on American television, “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico first,'” it makes one wonder whether assimilation is even a priority.
In her book The Immigration Solution, Heather MacDonald says that 60% of immigrants in the first great immigration went home when they couldn’t make it. That immigration was made up of workers that were as equally skilled as workers already here.
Now we have a welfare society that wasn’t available until the ’60s, ready to provide a safety net. Some day that safety net is going to break. Children born to illegals on U.S. soil become U.S. citizens at the rate of 300-350 thousand per year.
Every once in awhile somebody thinks providing amnesty for those already here is a good idea. It turns out that only causes more to “head for the border.”
http://voices.kansascity.com/node/1333