Immigrants take toll on American life

By Jim Ludwick

The Portland Tribune, Jul 30, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

The political debate regarding the issue of immigration has intensified since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

It is tragic that it took such an event to open up a dialogue on the issue. But the fact is that immigration policies allowing more than 1 million legal immigrants and between 300,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants into the United States each year have had terribly negative impacts on our environment, livability, public educational system, health care, tax structure and crime, impacts felt long before Sept. 11, 2001.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently predicted that the population of the United States would grow from 282 million in 2000 to nearly 420 million by 2050. In the 1990s, immigration and immigrant fertility accounted for most of the 33 million person increase in the U.S. population. An analysis of Census Bureau statistics performed on behalf of the Center for Immigration Studies concludes that the more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants who settle in the country each year, along with 750,000 yearly births to immigrants, are equal to 87 percent of the annual increase in the U.S. population.

How do most Americans feel about immigration? Numerous polls conducted about immigration in the past 12 years have shown that the vast majority of Americans want illegal immigration ended, legal immigration reduced and our borders secured. (The Federation for American Immigration Reform Web site Ñ http://www.fairus.org Ñ has a compilation of polls conducted by and for the Gallup organization, CNN/USA Today and others. Among them is a November 2003 study on behalf of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, showing that 77 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “we should restrict and control people coming into the country to live more than we do now.”)

If the vast majority of Americans want immigration reduced, why is it that immigration levels continue at between 1 million and 2 million people a year? The answer is that the leadership of the two major political parties, Republican and Democrat, wants high levels of immigration Ñ but for different reasons.

The Republican leadership wants large-scale immigration because it supplies employers with cheap immigrant labor and depresses wages generally.

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