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By Luz María Gordillo

As a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico City, and living in the United States for 25 years, I wonder how our nation's ancient, repetitive and unsuccessful anti-immigrant litany can actually have any credibility in the 21st century. But recent demonization and criminalization of Mexican immigrants, compounded by legislation such as that recently signed into law in Arizona, points to the social repercussions of this very serious historical amnesia and the inhumane methods used to defend what we all are led to believe are "American values."

That immigrants rob our jobs, that they depreciate our wages, that they put American culture at risk by refusing to deny their native language, that they bring crime and drugs with them -- all of these statements have been effectively used against different minority groups at different times in our nation's history. At the end of the 19th century, the United States aggressively recruited Chinese labor while implementing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which curtailed all Chinese immigration to the United States. At the beginning of the 20th century and continuing until World War II, the United States recruited Japanese immigrants, again to promote economic growth by exploiting cheap labor. In another bout of xenophobic hysteria, the nation imprisoned not only Japanese immigrants but also Japanese-Americans. The United States has a pathological attitude toward immigrants whose phenotype is not white. More seriously, however, are the absurd connections this attitude promotes: that these immigrants will not assimilate and therefore are inherently un-American.

It seems to me that after generations of such experience as a nation, we would be able to discern the link between the enforcement of racist attitudes - such as Arizona's SB 1070 - and capital gain - such as the large numbers of Mexican workers who have brought economic prosperity through their cheap labor. In a simple tour of downtown Portland's vast array of international-cuisine restaurants, one notices the labor demographics: the majority are Latino immigrants. In Oregon the Latino population is the fastest growing of all, significantly reporting 11 percent of the total in 2008.

As members of civil society, we should acknowledge the efforts that Latino immigrants make and the tribulations that they overcome in order to belong - if minimally - to our very structured and not very welcoming society. We enjoy the fruits of their labor, but we are not compassionate of their lives, their families and their hearts.

Arizona's anti-immigrant sentiment only foments hatred and ignorance at a point in history when the majority of U.S. citizens have proven that they won't tolerate a racist nation by voting for a black president. Let's continue to demonstrate that posture and that we won't tolerate hate crimes against a population that is now an important part of our social fabric. The latest incident of racist police brutality in Seattle against Mexican immigrants illustrates some of the hideous repercussions that the current anti-immigrant hysteria has provoked.

Are we, as members of civil society going to condone, again, another ethnic cleansing at this point in our history? Are we to stand by and let ignorance and hatred roam free in a country that has been wounded again and again by nativism and false ideals of civic principles that favor some and discriminate against others?
Luz María Gordillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies and American Studies at Washington State University, Vancouver

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Immigration: Let's stop history from repeating itself again

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By Luz María Gordillo As a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico City, and living in the United States for 25 years, I wonder how our nation's ancient, repetitive and unsuccessful anti-immigrant litany can actually have any credibility in the 21st century.

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How the Past 50 Years of Immigration Changed America

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59 million immigrants have entered the country since a 1965 reform

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Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions.
This brief was originally published on April 3, 2013. It has been updated with current information as of October 23, 2014. For a more recent version of this information, see "The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition."
Immigration has been a constant source of economic vitality and demographic dynamism throughout our nation's history. Immigrants are taxpayers, entrepreneurs, job creators, and consumers. But the immigration system is broken and in need of an overhaul. Although the U.S. border is now more secure than ever, decades of ever-increasing border and interior enforcement have exacerbated the dysfunction caused by rigid, out-of-date laws. Immigration reform that comprehensively addresses these systemic problems-including providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States-is supported by large swaths of Americans. Common-sense reform would restore public faith in the system and level the playing field for all Americans, while supercharging the economic benefits from our immigrant population.

Below are the latest and most essential facts about immigrants and immigration reform in our nation today. The facts are broken down into the following sections:

Today's immigrant population

Foreign-born population

Undocumented immigrant population

The undocumented population has stayed relatively stable, after declining slightly during the Great Recession. In 2000, there were an estimated 8.4 million undocumented people residing in the United States. This population peaked in 2007 at 12 million but saw a gradual decline during the Great Recession. In 2012, an estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants resided in the United States. Since then, the numbers have stabilized. By the end of 2012, there were approximately 11.2 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and that number remained constant into 2013 with 11.3 million undocumented immigrants.

People from Mexico account for a large part of the undocumented population living in the United States, but their share has diminished in recent years. In 2012, 6 million people-or 52 percent of the undocumented population-were from Mexico, down from the peak of 6.9 million-or 57 percent-in 2007.

Six states are home to the majority of the undocumented population. As of 2012,22 percent of the nation's undocumented population lives in California. Fifteen percent lives in Texas, 8 percent lives in Florida, 7 percent lives in New York, 4 percent lives in Illinois, and 4 percent lives in New Jersey.

The majority of undocumented immigrants are long-term residents, committed to living in the United States. In 2013, the median length of residence for unauthorized immigrants in the United States was 13 years, at least 5 years longer than it had been in 2003. Currently, 62 percent of undocumented immigrants have been living in the United States for 10 years or longer, and a full 88 percent have been living in the United States for five years or longer.

Many undocumented immigrants could be sponsored for a green card but cannot adjust their status because they are presently undocumented. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants could qualify for a green card by virtue of having a relative who is a U.S. citizen, but-because of bars to re-entering the United States that were put in place in 1996-most would have to leave the United States for a period of at least 10 years before becoming eligible to reunite with their families.

Undocumented immigrants are often part of the same family as documented immigrants. 16.6 million people were in "mixed-status" families-those with at least one undocumented immigrant-in 2011.Nine million of these families had at least one U.S.-born child.

Nearly half of the undocumented population has minor children, many of them born in the United States. In 2012, 4.7 million undocumented adults were parents of minor children, including 3.8 million whose children were U.S. citizens.

One in five undocumented immigrant adults has a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse. Of the 10 million adult undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2012, approximately 767,000 were married to a U.S. citizen and 944,000 were married to a lawful permanent resident.

Undocumented immigrants comprise a disproportionately large percentage of the labor force relative to the size of the overall population. In 2010,8.4 million undocumented immigrants were employed in the United States. They represented 5.2 percent of the U.S. labor force, although they comprised only 3.7 percent of the U.S. population.

There are more than a quarter of a million LGBT undocumented adult immigrants in the United States today. The estimated 267,000 LGBT undocumented adult immigrants as of 2013 are more likely to be male and younger relative to all undocumented immigrants. Around 71 percent of LGBT undocumented adults are Hispanic, and 15 percent are Asian American or Pacific Islander.

Nearly half of settled undocumented immigrants are homeowners. Among undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States for 10 years or longer, 45 percent were homeowners in 2008. Among undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than 10 years, 27 percent were homeowners in 2008.

More than half of the undocumented immigrant population has a high school degree or higher. According to a 2009 Pew Research Center's Hispanic Trends Project study, 52 percent of undocumented immigrants have a high school diploma or higher and 15 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher.

Demographics and political power of new Americans

Growing in number

Latinos and Asian Americans comprise a significant segment of the U.S. population. Latinos comprised 16.9 percent of the total U.S. population in 2012, while Asian Americans made up 5.1 percent of the population.

The Latino community is experiencing rapid rates of growth. The Latino community in the United States grew by 43 percent from 2000 to 2010, as well as by an additional 7 percent from 2010 to 2013. These numbers dwarf the growth of whites, whose population grew by 5.7 percent between 2000 and 2010 and 1.5 percent between 2010 and 2013.

Asians recently surpassed Latinos as the fastest-growing group of new immigrants to the United States. The Asian American population saw growth of 46 percent from 2000 to 2010 and growth of 10 percent from 2010 to 2013.

Immigrants and their children are rapidly becoming a larger share of the Latino electorate. Immigrants and their children made up 55 percent of eligible Latino voters in 2012, up from 49 percent in 1996.

Second-generation immigrants-children of immigrants-are the driving force behind the growth of the Latino electorate. Between 2012 and 2016, 3.3 million Latino citizens will turn 18 years old. Of these Latino citizens, 57 percent, or nearly 2 million, are the children of immigrants.

And growing in political power

Immigrants and the economy

The economic imperative for immigration reform

The record on immigrants and the economy

Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes annually. Households headed by unauthorized immigrants paid $10.6 billion in state and local taxes in 2010. This includes $1.2 billion in personal income taxes, $1.2 billion in property taxes, and more than $8 billion in sales and excise taxes. Immigrants-even legal immigrants-are barred from most social services, meaning that they pay to support benefits they cannot even receive.

Research shows that immigrants complement, rather than compete with, native-born American workers-even less-skilled workers. Research by renowned economists such as David Card, Gianmarco Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri, and Heidi Shierholz shows that American workers are not harmed by-and may even benefit from-immigration. This is because immigrants tend to complement the skillsets of American workers, thus helping them be more productive.

Immigration reform will not affect the unemployment rates of native-born Americans. The CBO estimates that during the 10-year period following passage of immigration reform, unemployment will increase by 0.1 percent. This small increase falls entirely upon the undocumented and is the short-term effect of growth in the labor force and of the labor market adjusting to undocumented workers positioning themselves to be productive for decades to come.

Taxes paid by legalized immigrants more than offset any use of social programs. The CBO found that increases in costs to social programs are modest and will be more than paid for by the tax contributions of immigrants. The increase in spending in Social Security and Medicare from 2024 through 2033, for example, will be $65 billion-just 4.4 percent of the total increase in tax revenue.

As Baby Boomers retire en masse over the next 20 years, immigrants will be crucial to fill these job openings and promote growth in the labor market. More than two-thirds of new entrants into the labor market will replace retiring workers. However, while 58.6 million new workers will be needed to fill these retirements, only 51.3 million native-born people are projected to enter the workforce, meaning that immigrants and their children will be crucial to filling the additional 7.3 million job openings while also furthering growth in the labor market.

The price of inaction and the cost of mass deportation

Inaction on immigration reform carries a heavy cost. Each day the House of Representatives fails to pass immigration reform costs the United States $37 million in missed tax revenue. As of October 2014, the House's inaction has cost more than $17.7 billion.

Maintaining the status quo is not revenue neutral. With only one-third of unauthorized immigrants working in the formal economy and contributing about $12 billion in payroll taxes each year, the United States loses around $20 billion in payroll tax revenue annually. This lost revenue would go a long way toward funding the retirement of Americans across the country.

The United States spends more on immigration and border enforcement annually than the annual gross domestic product of 80 countries. In fact, the United States now spends $3.5 billion more on immigration and border enforcement-a total of nearly $18 billion per year-than it does on all other federal law enforcement combined.

A self-deportation regime would cost our economy trillions of dollars. If all undocumented immigrants in the country were deported or "self-deported"-meaning they choose to leave the country because life is too difficult-the United States' cumulative GDP would suffer a hit of $2.6 trillion over 10 years.

Mass deportation of the undocumented immigrant population would cost billions of dollars. Deporting the entire undocumented population would cost $285 billion over a five-year period, including continued border and interior enforcement efforts. For that price, we could hire more than 1 million new public high school teachers and pay their salaries for five years.

It costs taxpayers more than $20,000 to carry out the deportation of a single individual. Apprehending, detaining, processing, and transporting one individual in the deportation process cost $23,482 in fiscal year 2008.

Federal immigration policy

The Senate's bipartisan immigration reform bill

In June 2013, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill with a vote of 68 to 32. The Senate bill remains viable for reconciliation with a House bill until the 113th Congress ends on December 31, 2014.

House's immigration legislation

House Republican leaders put out a set of principles on immigration reform in January 2014 but have not brought any immigration bills to the floor. This list included an endorsement of legalization for the 11.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the country but stopped short of a full pathway to citizenship. One week after releasing these principles, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) walked them back, saying his party would not move forward on immigration until members of the House regained their trust that President Obama would enforce immigration laws. Despite of the House leadership's best efforts to bury reform in 2014, 30 House Republicans have come out in support of immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship.

House Democrats have introduced a version of the Senate-passed immigration reform bill, H.R. 15. The bill includes almost all parts of the Senate bill, substituting the border provisions with House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX)'s border security bill. In September 2014, the bill had 199 co-sponsors, but House Republican leadership refuses to bring it to a vote.

House Republicans have taken multiple votes to defund the Deferred Action Against Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. Instead of passing immigration reform, the House has voted to cut funding for the DACA program. The first of these attempts took place in June 2013, when Rep. Steve King (R-IA) successfully introduced an amendment to the Homeland Security budget bill to defund the program. House Republicans passed a similar measure in August 2014.

Administrative action and Supreme Court decisions

Building a 21st century border

Immigration enforcement is in overdrive

Public opinion polling on immigration

Americans want immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship

A majority of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. A June 2014 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 62 percent of Americans support an immigration bill that provides a way for undocumented immigrants to become citizens. An additional 17 percent said that they should be allowed to become legal residents, and just 19 percent said that they should be deported.

A majority of Americans believe it is imperative that Congress passes immigration reform by the end of 2014. A July 2014 poll conducted by CBS News found that 59 percent of Americans believe passing legislation that addresses unauthorized immigration is important, while only 6 percent of Americans thought it was not important at all.

Tea Party Republicans support a pathway to citizenship or legal status. A May 2014 poll by the Partnership for a New American Economy, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Tea Party Express revealed that 70 percent of Republican primary voters who identify with the Tea Party support a way for the undocumented to attain citizenship or legal status.

Voters in key Republican congressional districts support immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. July 2013Public Policy Polling surveys conducted in seven key congressional districts across California, Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, and New York unequivocally show that Republican and independent voters want Congress to fix the country's broken immigration system. They also show that many of these voters are less likely to support Republicans if immigration reform stalls.

Americans support executive action on immigration. An ABC News poll conducted in August 2014 found that 52 percent of Americans support President Obama taking unilateral action on immigration reform if Congress does not act. Forty-four percent say he should not take any action.

Latino voters have a deep connection to immigration and want reform

Latino voters want immigration reform before the 2014 midterm elections. In a June 2014 poll, 71 percent of Latinos said that it is "very or extremely important" for Congress to pass immigration reform in 2014.

Latino voters have a direct and personal connection to the immigration debate. A June 2014 poll found that 62 percent of Latino voters personally know an undocumented immigrant. Of those people, 62 percent said that he or she is a friend or family member.

The children of immigrants feel a personal connection to the immigration issue. A 2014 analysis of Census Bureau data found that 68 percent of Latino children of immigrants-second-generation immigrants-have a family member or close friend who is undocumented. Moreover, 76 percent of second-generation immigrants say that it is "very or extremely important" for Congress and the president to address immigration reform this year.

A majority of Latinos would feel less favorable toward Republicans if Speaker Boehner does not allow immigration reform to come to a vote. A June 2014 poll showed that 74 percent of Latinos would feel "much or somewhat less" favorable to Republicans if the House does not allow the Senate-passed bill to move forward for a vote. The same poll found that Latinos will blame Republicans over Democrats by a 3-to-1 margin if immigration reform does not pass in 2014.

A majority of Latino voters would be more likely to support Republicans if the party supported immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. In a June 2014 poll, 53 percent of Latinos said that they would feel "much or somewhat more" favorable toward Republicans in Congress if Speaker Boehner allowed the Senate bill to move forward for a vote.

Immigration reform can serve as a gateway issue for Republicans and Latino voters. A June 2014 poll by Latino Decisions found that 61 percent of Latino voters would be more likely to listen to what the Republican Party has to say on other issues if Congressional Republicans support immigration reform and pass a bill that includes a pathway to citizenship.

In the news: Unaccompanied children at the U.S. southern border

Demographics and violence

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The Facts on Immigration Today - Center for American Progress

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Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions. This brief was originally published on April 3, 2013. It has been updated with current information as of October 23, 2014. For a more recent version of this information, see "The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition."

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Immigration:Now and Then essays Immigrant today and immigrants of the early 1900's have several obvious differences, but still come to the United States for one under lying reason. They come from different countries than they used to. Immigrants also have a more difficult time legally making it

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Teacher-approved stories, resources, and worksheets for teaching about immigration in your classroom, courtesy of Junior Scholastic, the middle school Social Studies classroom magazine

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Immigration | Free Teaching Materials for Middle School

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Teacher-approved stories, resources, and worksheets for teaching about immigration in your classroom, courtesy of Junior Scholastic, the middle school Social Studies classroom magazine

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I recently had a chance to read a book that I've been wanting to dive into for years. Immigration Stories, edited by David A. Martin and Peter H. Schuck, is part of the Stories Series, which relates the political and historical context behind some of the more important case law in a variety of different legal subject areas. The immigration law volume is a compilation of essays that each reveal the human beings involved in fifteen landmark U.S. immigration cases - both the noncitizens whose fates were at stake, as well as the attorneys and advocates working on their behalf. For anyone following the immigration debate in the United States in recent years, the essays, fascinating in their own right, also demonstrate that history does indeed repeat itself.

Take, for instance, the first chapter, which discusses the landmark cases Chae Chan Ping v. U.S. (1889) and Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. (1893). Gabriel J. Chin describes the country's growing racist attitudes toward the Chinese laborers who arrived in the U.S. in droves to take part in the California gold rush. They were often willing to work for significantly lower wages in whatever jobs they could find, in order to send money home to their families abroad and repay the loans they had taken from Chinese merchants to finance their travel to the United States. Non-Chinese laborers resented them, and the economic downturn in California in the mid-1870s led to a push for restrictions on the immigration of Chinese laborers. In addition, xenophobic attitudes led to rumors that Chinese immigrant communities were hotbeds of criminal activity, such as prostitution and opium smoking.

Growing anxiety over Chinese migrants eventually resulted in the country's first law controlling immigration, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and several subsequent extensions, which severely restricted the ability of Chinese citizens to enter the U.S. and codified the prohibition on naturalization of Chinese individuals. In essence, the Chinese were scapegoated for the economic troubles of the United States. Reading this chapter, the reasons for restricting immigration against an "undesirable" class sound strikingly familiar. The myth that "illegal immigrants" steal American jobs and lower Americans' wages persists to this day, though generally in relation to undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America rather than from Asia. And xenophobic stereotypes of undocumented migrants being drug smugglers and rapists are still perpetuated by politicians and used to fuel anti-immigrant opposition to comprehensive immigration reform efforts.

The book's third chapter addresses another issue that continues to make headlines today. Lucy E. Salyer delves into the history behind U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1897), in which the Supreme Court tackled the concept of birthright citizenship in the United States. In the wake of the Civil War, Congress added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided the first explicit definition of U.S. citizenship in the nation's history: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Though, as Salyer notes, this is a "seemingly unequivocal statement," exclusionists worked together in an attempt to deny Chinese Americans their birthright citizenship claims. Many Americans at the time continued to believe that Chinese were so fundamentally different from Americans that they would never be able to assimilate into the U.S. and believed "that such persons are utterly unfit, wholly incompetent, to exercise the important privileges of an American citizen," in the words of lawyer George D. Collins.

Born in San Francisco, Wong Kim Ark was denied admission into the United States upon his return from a trip to China because port officials did not believe that his birth in the U.S. made him a citizen. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark and upheld the long-standing tradition of birthright citizenship in the United States. In addition to worrying that denying Wong Kim Ark's citizenship would lead to denials of citizenship for thousands of other Americans of European descent, the Court held that birthright citizenship had been the common law of the United States since inception and was far too well-established to be abandoned now.

Although this case was decided over a century ago, restrictionists continue to advocate for the elimination of birthright citizenship today. A group of undocumented Mexican mothers were forced to sue the state of Texas just this summer, after officials refused to issue birth certificates to their U.S.-born children. Republican lawmakers continue to introduce (and reintroduce) the Birthright Citizenship Act in Congress, in an attempt to restrict citizenship to children born to at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces. And as recently as April 2015, the House Judiciary Committee hosted a hearing entitled "Birthright Citizenship: Is It the Right Policy for America?" All this, despite numerous studies demonstrating how catastrophic such an "unprecedented" policy change would be for the new permanent underclass of noncitizens it would create.

Other chapters in the book recount stories that bring to mind the flood of women and unaccompanied children escaping violence in Central America in recent years. Kevin R. Johnson's essay on the case of Landon v. Plasencia (1982) includes an introduction about the political violence and civil wars ravaging Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, leading thousands to flee their home countries and seek refuge in the United States. Much like the attempts to deter the Central American women and children of the present through increased detention and reducing asylum protections, Johnson reports that the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) "adopted a policy of mass detention of Central Americans pending decisions on their asylum applications, hoping to discourage asylum seekers from pursuing their claims and instead to 'voluntarily' return to their native countries." Advocates in 1985 sued the U.S. government for unfairly denying the asylum claims of many Salvadorans and Guatemalans based on foreign policy considerations, rather than the merits of their individual cases. Similarly, today's advocates claimed victory in a class action lawsuit earlier this year, when a federal appeals court ruled that the government cannot detain families solely "for the purpose of deterring future immigration to the United States." And the fraudulent asylum claim brought by Ghanian Adelaide Abankwah, discussed in a separate chapter by David A. Martin, highlights the worst fears of immigration opponents who allege that a high percentage of supposed asylum-seekers in recent years have actually been abusing the U.S. asylum system.

In the book's final chapter, Margaret H. Taylor explains the enormous impact that the events of September 11, 2001 had on U.S. immigration policy while telling the story of Demore v. Kim (2003). Due to amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) passed by Congress in 1996, lawful permanent resident Hyung Joon Kim was subject to mandatory detention after a few minor criminal convictions when he was a teenager, despite his strong ties to the U.S. and the INS's own determination that he would not pose a threat if released on bond. Notwithstanding prior precedent decisions requiring that individual determinations be made before holding noncitizens, particularly lawful permanent residents, in immigration detention, the Supreme Court in Demore rejected Kim's due process arguments and upheld mandatory detention without bond for noncitizens with criminal convictions. This was largely due to the Court's reluctance, post-9/11, to weaken the government's ability to detain noncitizens perceived as threats-as Taylor writes, "[i]t is the historical context of Demore v. Kim, rather than [the] Court's analysis of precedent, that explains the outcome." This is but one example of the tendency of U.S. immigration policy to be shaped as a reaction (or overreaction) to acts of terrorism. More recently, inquiries about the immigration status of the Boston Marathon bombers threatened to derail the Senate's attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2013. And this summer, Republican politicians like Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ted Cruz, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (all of whom are running for President in 2016) have called for restrictions on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries in the wake of the recent Chattanooga shooting spree.

Immigration Stories was a very engaging read overall, which I would recommend to anyone looking to learn more about the history of U.S. immigration laws and policies. Someday, I would love to see an updated edition, or perhaps a sequel, taking on more recent cases like Padilla v. Kentucky (2010) and its mandate that criminal defense attorneys advise noncitizen clients about potential deportation risks, the saga of Matter of Silva-Trevino's categorical approach to analyzing the immigration consequences of criminal convictions, Arizona v. U.S. (2012) and its overturning of Arizona's attempt to enact its own immigration laws, and many others certain to come in the future. While it can be disheartening to realize that many of the same immigration battles are being refought throughout American history, learning about the politics, litigation strategies, and human stories behind these and other landmark cases was certainly instructive. Given the recurring nature of so many issues in the ongoing U.S. immigration debate, an in-depth understanding of the tactics of both sides in the past will likely prove valuable in the future.

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Immigration Stories: The more things change, the more they stay the same

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I recently had a chance to read a book that I've been wanting to dive into for years. Immigration Stories, edited by David A. Martin and Peter H. Schuck, is part of the Stories Series, which relates the political and historical context behind some of the more important case law in a variety of different...

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Recent Executive Orders by President Trump has again left Americans scrambling for a sense of identity and searching for our now lost democratic ideals. Bans on immigrants, Muslims and refugees take us back to the 1940's and the Japanese internment, which solidifies our lack of respect for others and their diversity. Not only his actions are un-American but it reminds us of a time when hatred and bigotry took away the best of who we are as a beacon of democracy and as a nation of immigrants.

The President rush to judgement on immigration ban has threaten to undermine our fundamental orders of our democracy, who we are, what we stand for, but more so tests our concept of an immigrant nation. The idea of small segment of radical faithful represents an entire religious belief has become synonymous with American idealism and our historical stereotype that has existed in much of our history. Embodied in American history are the watchwords of our immigrant history and our nation; "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." No other time in our history has a debate on immigration divided the nation on its true values and rich tradition of freely welcoming immigrants? The recent immigration bans have raised several important questions regarding the role of the President, our federal government's policies, policy decision-making processes and more so, the role of hatred and bigotry continue play in our political process.

Throughout our history immigration policies of welcoming other groups have been tainted with hatred and bigotry based policies, for example, Benjamin Franklin in 1753 warned of German immigrants overrunning America, and not only was he concerned about the increasing number of German immigrants. Franklin worried that the German immigrants would threaten the Anglo-English language and insisted that America must set the principle of Anglo-conformity as the model of immigration. The Naturalization Act of 1790, which granted the rights of American Citizenship to all " free white persons "; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. Moreover, the plight of Jewish immigrants and the discrimination faced by the Jewish Community in American ranges from hateful slurs to barring of their ships in U.S. ports pre and post holocaust years.

Mexican immigrants became the scapegoat for America's economic, social, and political problems in the 1930's. Mexican immigrants were denied jobs, subjected to raids, illegally arrested and detained without due process. As a result of this fear of immigrants, the American government between 1929 to 1939 deported some one to two million Mexican-American citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent; this mass deportation was known as the Mexican Repatriation policy with the aim of cleansing America's ill. In other words, immigrants provide a convenient scapegoat for America's social problems thus making anti-immigrant rhetoric has become prevalent, a norm and has become acceptable in America. Immigration and immigrations rights have now generated so many debates and divisions in our society that it has become the new "c ivil rights debate of 21st century." Whatever the debates might be, immigration is America's greatest asset and the future of the America will ultimately complement our immigrants.

We must acknowledge and respect all immigrant contributions who have contributed to our great country. It would be impossible to conceive of what America would have become without our immigrant history, their cultural, economic, social, and multi-racial contributions- that make our nation what it is today. Let's not forget who we are as Americans, after all, we are still an IMMIGRANT NATION and we must continue to hold America to its true values.

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Stephen Balkaran is Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at Central CT State University.

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History is doomed to repeat itself. Immigrants, Muslims, Refugees, and the American Dream

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Recent Executive Orders by President Trump has again left Americans scrambling for a sense of identity and searching for our now lost democratic ideals. Bans on immigrants, Muslims and refugees take us back to the 1940's and the Japanese internment, which solidifies our lack of respect for others and their diversity.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Immigration must be stopped before newcomers overwhelm our generous welfare system, producing babies with full citizenship rights who add even more strain on social services. So goes a familiar argument for sealing the borders of the United States.

"In a lot of respects we have the discussion about immigration and the economy exactly reversed," says Paul A. Kramer, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. "There's a way that Americans often talk about immigration as if they're doing this enormous favor to immigrants by letting them in. In fact, immigrants play a crucial role in the U.S. economy and subsidize American consumer society with their labor, their consumption and the taxes they pay.

"Often, they can't receive those taxes back in benefits."

Kramer has written about immigration and border issues for the New Yorker and Slate, and been featured on National Public Radio. He has spent the last decade studying U.S. immigration history, and he's working on a book about the forces that push people into leaving their home countries and immigrating, including the United States' influence.

IT'S ECONOMICS
"In a globalized economy, people are trying to make their way and put food on the table for their families in places where often the local economies aren't able to do that for them," Kramer says. "Often this is the result of dictatorship or post-dictatorship societies, where predatory political forces have made it impossible for people to survive and thrive where they live. So they've been uprooted.

"In some cases the United States has been behind some of those dictatorships."

IMMIGRATION NUMBERS EXAGGERATED
Much of the angst Americans are experiencing today over immigration has been felt by previous generations, Kramer says. For example, there are those who warn that immigration numbers are at a dangerous all-time high.

"That's simply not true," Kramer says. "We're definitely at a high moment, but there have been other high moments. We're more or less about where we were at the turn of the century, that fabled era of European immigration between roughly 1880 and the mid-1920s. We're certainly not being overrun."

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP AN AMERICAN TRADITION
Birthright citizenship has emerged as an issue in the Republican presidential primary race, a sign that concern over immigration has reached a new plateau, Kramer says.

The Republican Party was largely responsible for the passing of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil. During Reconstruction after the Civil War, birthright citizenship was a tool to build a more inclusive population and move toward equal rights.

"Birthright citizenship is at this point a venerable American legal tradition," Kramer says. "It's one that sets the United States apart from most other societies, who often have much more rigid and exclusionary definitions of who gets to be a citizen."

RACISM AT CORE
Race is really what's at the heart of a lot of the current antipathy to immigrants, Kramer says.

"When people talk about 'illegals' it's ... not Canadians crossing into Maine," Kramer says. "They're talking about black and brown migrants whom many Americans are uneasy with. ... The fact that there's that legal kind of cover for racism is a really important part of its success."

Picking on immigrants can be done without much risk because of their need to stay in the shadows. "They can and do fight back, but the formal avenues available to non-citizens are limited, thus making them likely scapegoats," Kramer says.

"But he says immigrants are going to keep coming no matter what.

"The question for me is not whether the United States can or should stop immigration," Kramer says. "Immigration is going to continue to happen because the United States doesn't exist apart from the rest of the world.

"The question is whether U.S. immigration policy is going to punish and stigmatize and marginalize people who come here or whether it's going to treat the people arriving here in the spirit of justice."

-VU-

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History is repeating itself with current immigration issues, says Vanderbilt historian

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Immigration must be stopped before newcomers overwhelm our generous welfare system, producing babies with full citizenship rights who add even more strain on social services. So goes a familiar argument for sealing the borders of the United States. "In a lot of respects we have the discussion about immigration and the economy...

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How U.S. immigration laws and rules have changed through history

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The United States began regulating immigration soon after it won independence from Great Britain, and the laws since enacted have reflected the politics and migrant flows of the times. We looked at key immigration laws from 1790 to 2014.

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President Trump's stance on immigration isn't new to America's history. Boston Globe Magazine writer Neil Swidey says a group in Boston used these same tactics, even the same rhetoric, 100 years ago.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

And one more word on this - if you think today's debates about immigration are intense and unprecedented, think again. One hundred years ago tomorrow, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, one of the most sweeping anti-immigration bans of the era. The law taxed new immigrants and made them take literacy tests in their native languages for the first time. It was pushed by three scions of some of Boston's most prominent families who had founded the Immigration Restriction League.

Journalist Neil Swidey wrote about all this in a cover story for Boston Globe Magazine this weekend, and he joined us from member station WGBH in Boston to tell us about it. And I started by asking him to tell me about how the Immigration Restriction League got its start.

NEIL SWIDEY: Well, it's fascinating. Here is a group of kind of entitled guys who had a good way in life. They were Harvard educated, members of prominent families, and yet, in the late 1800s, they decided that the country was going to ruin basically because of immigration and because of these undesirable immigrants that were coming in. And they set about trying to influence the influencers to stop this.

MARTIN: Pick one of them and tell me a little bit more about his writings, particularly some of the work that reminds you of the rhetoric that we're hearing at the moment.

SWIDEY: The main leader of this was a guy named Prescott Hall who was frail, was kind of a homebody, and I was struck by just how eerily similar some of the rhetoric was, some of the rationale was, for what he was arguing and even the mechanisms that he was putting through to change how we handle immigrants. I mean...

MARTIN: Well, give me an example.

SWIDEY: ...From drain the swamp...

MARTIN: Yeah.

SWIDEY: From drain the...

MARTIN: They said that.

SWIDEY: ...Drain that great swamp - yes - to the race that made America great, to the invading hostile army of criminal immigrants - I mean, this idea of the other immigrants, and most crucially the idea that, hey, immigrants were OK in the past. We don't have a problem with immigration per se. It's the new kind of immigrants that we really have to worry about.

This was the rhetoric 100 years ago. In many ways, this is the rhetoric that had populated the campaign of 2016.

MARTIN: So who did they like and who did they not like?

SWIDEY: Who they liked were Northern and Western Europeans. Those were the so-called good immigrants. They saw a threat from Southern Europeans, Italians that were coming in, Eastern European Jews, Slavs and Asians. And the changes that they put in place really did radically transform the kinds of people we allowed into this country for 40 or 50 years.

MARTIN: So what should we learn from the country's prior experience with this? What did you learn from all this?

SWIDEY: Well, I learned, first of all, that there are no new ideas in immigration, there are just new people espousing them. I also learned that we tell ourselves about being this nation of immigrants, but in some ways we've been conflicted about immigration from the start. There are some logical, reasonable arguments for making immigration fair, coherent and manageable.

And where things get ugly in history is when there's an overall consensus in the country that the immigration system is broken, which I think we have now. And when that consensus happens, it tends to create a lane - an open lane - for people who are in favor of immigration restriction any decade of their lives. And that coalition pushes through these restrictions that then can have a major effect, as we saw in the early part of the 1900s. But what I also took from history was that the pendulum always swings back. Sometimes it really takes its sweet time, but it inevitably comes back to this sense of, hey, we are a nation of immigrants, and we have to remember that.

MARTIN: That's Neil Swidey. He's an author and a journalist. He's a staff writer for Boston Globe Magazine. His piece on the Immigration Restriction League is in this Sunday's issue. Neil, thanks so much for joining us.

SWIDEY: Thanks for having me, Michel.

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Boston's Immigration History Repeats Itself In Trump's Policies

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President Trump's stance on immigration isn't new to America's history. Boston Globe Magazine writer Neil Swidey says a group in Boston used these same tactics, even the same rhetoric, 100 years ago. MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: And one more word on this - if you think today's debates about immigration are intense and unprecedented, think again.