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Submerging the Camp of the Saints
If enacted, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years, allowing an estimated 103 million persons to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years—fully one-third of the current population of the United States.Much attention has been given to the fact that the bill grants amnesty to some 10 million illegal immigrants. Little or no attention has been given to the fact that the bill would quintuple the rate of legal immigration into the United States, raising, over time, the inflow of legal immigrants from around one million per year to over five million per year. The impact of this increase in legal immigration dwarfs the magnitude of the amnesty provisions.
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The figure of 103 million legal immigrants is a reasonable estimate of the actual immigration inflow under the bill and not the maximum number that would be legally permitted to enter. The maximum number that could legally enter would be almost 200 million over twenty years—over 180 million more legal immigrants than current law permits. ~Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation
Hat tip to Michael Brendan Dougherty
Not only does this wave the white flag on illegal immigration, which we assumed the Senate bill would do, but may as well have a prologue that says, "We, the United States Senate, have determined to elect a new people." At the end of this twenty year period, according to the article, the foreign-born will account for 25% of the total population. Not only is this unprecedented in our history, it is simply a mad policy to pursue if you would want to have any remote hope of even the most superficial assimilation. It would be an ethnic and political remaking of the country unlike any undertaken in any country anywhere. All Senators who cast votes in favour of this must be voted out.
Daniel Larison | May 17, 2006
Comments
I have already posted much the same comment over at Surfeited, but I cannot restrain myself from posing the question as often as possible: given that our elites have apparently purposed to constitute a new people, are they doing this with some supreme object in view, or are they merely epochally, world-historically stupid, so stupid that historians millenia hence will read of their actions and inactions and revile them?
Is theirs the madness of cunning or the madness of insanity?
Maximos | 05/17/06 12:54
I guess it comes down to how far the American people can be pushed before they push back? So far the public's passivity has been remarkable -- disheartening, really. Do the American people no longer believe in the idea that America is a democracy? Is it a matter of leadership or the absence thereof? What?
Luke Lea | 05/17/06 18:27
Nobody ever discusses it much, but has anybody thought what the enviromental costs this wouldential , if that many people showed up here? Trying to house, feed, clothe, provide water, sewer etc, for that many people would be a enviromentile disaster area. California would by then be one big suburb from border to border. I live in the Ozarks. One can only imagine waht would happen to the quality of life here, if millions more moved here. Ted Kennedy can at least escape to Nantucket, what about the rest of us? Where the idea that the rest of the world gets to come here, just because they want to, i would like to know
brerabbit | 05/18/06 09:12
The backlash may be coming. But for a lot of Americans the "nation of immigrants" line is so deeply ingrained now that they do not have the language or the concepts with which to oppose mass immigration. Illegality is one thing that many instinctively react against, but legal immigration on such a scale leaves them at a loss, because one or two entire generations have grown up believing that immigrants are our strength and glory. If you think of immigrants as such boons to the country, who could possibly oppose having more and more of them? If you have a shallow, propositional understanding of American identity (a "nation dedicated to the proposition...") or think that people from every culture understand freedom and politics in more or less the same way we do, you will be easily persuaded that a massive infusion of new population can only help. Oh, yes, there would be some concern about the possibility of assimilation, but if you already think that people from every culture are basically not particularly different in their core "values" assimilation ought to be a piece of cake. Many people may not care for multiculturalism, but it has already broken down much of their understanding of the idea that cultures do not necessarily mesh well with one another and that some are worse than others. If you have no ideas with which to describe mass immigration from these cultures in terms of causing decline or radically transforming our way of life, you are left with an inchoate sense that you just don't like the foreigners, which was once all that was needed to "win" the argument but has now become a liability to restricting immigration.
The environmental impact has caught the attention of groups like the Sierra Club. They have taken up a more restrictionist position, I believe, on precisely the basis of trying to keep the country's population within certain limits. Whether other restrictionists are willing to make serious common cause with them, or make use of their arguments, remains to be seen.
Daniel Larison | 05/18/06 12:28
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