A Profound Question Behind the Immigration Debate
For most of our history, we have been largely a country of Europeans, a country of the West, with Western sensibilities and a shared devotion to the Western heritage. Now we are in the process of becoming something else—a mixed country without a coherent, guiding heritage of any civilization and certainly not of the West.
This is largely the result both of the numbers of immigrants coming into the country (both legal and illegal) and of the place of origin of most of those immigrants. In 1960, 84 percent of U.S. immigrants came from Europe and Canada; now that number is just 14 percent. Also, the percentage of people in America who were born outside the United States reached 13.7 percent in 2015—just a shade below the all-time high for that statistic, which was 14.8 percent in 1890, after a similar wave of immigrants largely from Central and Eastern Europe.
What’s more, experts expect that percentage to climb to 14.9 percent by 2015 and 18 percent by 2065. In 1965, when the country’s current immigration philosophy was enacted into law, the percentage of foreign-born people in the country was 5 percent. According to the Pew Research Center, by 2055 the United States will have no ethno-racial majority. When that happens, America will be a completely different country from what it was, say, when the Baby Boomers appeared on the scene and throughout American history before that.
This is a profound national alteration, and what’s remarkable about it is how little debate, or even discussion, has attended it until recently. The American left and most of the country’s elites considered it a natural and beneficial development, a testament to the value of diversity and a shared aversion to discriminatory practice or even discriminatory thinking. Any suggestion that this sweeping change in the makeup of the American population could be ultimately detrimental was considered an assault on the country’s core values and hence our foundations. That tended to stifle dissent. And, if wary critics got too uppity, there was always the allegation of racism to shut them up.
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Trump supporters want fewer immigrants to allow the country to better absorb that current 13.7 percent of foreign-born Americans, to allow for some debate about the implications of current immigration policy, and to preserve the country’s ties to the Western heritage.
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