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Just about everybody has an opinion about illegal immigration these days, especially in the month since Denver detective Donald Young was shot to death. The suspect, 19-year-old Raul Garcia-Gomez, is now in custody in Mexico, but he was in this country illegally. Even so, he had a job and he had acquired three traffic tickets.
If only his employer, a restaurant in which Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper had an interest, had been more prudent. However, Garcia-Gomez produced Social Security and resident alien cards when hired. Eventually the federal government determined that the name and number didn't match, and told the restaurant. It couldn't fire him for that; all it could legally do was tell Garcia-Gomez to contact the Social Security Administration.
Or if the Denver Police Department had been more zealous at his traffic stops -- except that enforcing immigration laws is a federal obligation, not a local one. And I don't think most of us would think it appropriate to be hauled to an Immigration office if we didn't have a driver's license with us.
So it's hard to see how employer or police could have reasonably been expected to act any differently. However, it is easy to see why our two-party political system isn't going to fix our immigration problems.
Both parties, but especially the Democrats, do not want to offend ethnic groups. Since most illegal immigrants in this country are from Mexico, any serious enforcement would have to target people who appear to be of Mexican ancestry.
Throw in the fact that a goodly chunk of Colorado was
part of Mexico until 1848, and the descendants of those
pioneer residents still abide here (among them Sen. Ken
Salazar and Rep. John Salazar), and you've got the recipe
for a political firestorm if every person of
suspicious
appearance had to produce iron-clad proof
of citizenship whenever requested.
Further, many Democrats see support for immigrants as a way to build the party -- consider the decline of the Republican Party in California after a Republican governor, Pete Wilson, supported the anti-immigrant Proposition 187.
As for Republicans, its in their pro-business DNA to like cheap labor. Think of supply and demand, and the greater the supply of labor, as augmented by immigration legal or illegal, the lower the cost of labor and the more profit for corporations.
So politicians of either party might announce that the government should do something about the 8 to 12 million illegal immigrants in this country, but neither party has any real interest in finding or enforcing a solution.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the United States has been through this before, and managed to survive and thrive.
Immigration was essentially unregulated until 1855, and
before that, there were many who feared that the culture of
the United States would be destroyed by hordes of Irish
Catholics who would want their own schools while reducing
wages for native-born Americans. Opposition to the Irish
coalesced in the 1850s in the secretive Know Nothing
Party
-- so called because its members, when asked
about this anti-immigrant political party, were supposed to
say I know nothing.
The Know Nothings broke into Northern and Southern factions, as did the entire country. After the Civil War, immigration continued on a large scale, but it didn't become a major political issue until the 1920s.
Before that, big employers like Colorado Fuel & Iron
brought in immigrants by the boatload for its coal mines
and steel mill. The companies preferred immigrants since,
in the words of historian Page Smith, employers were
eager to replace native-born Americans who, by general
agreement, were volatile, aggressive, independent, and
impermanent, with more passive foreigners.
However, the foreigners quit being quit so passive, and started to organize. One result was our Ludlow Massacre of 1914. Suddenly it seemed that immigrants from central and southern Europe (especially those whose politics tended toward socialism) were a threat to the American way of life, and in 1921, Congress set immigration quotas, based on nationalities in the 1910 census.
To further discourage immigration from the wrong places,
the quota ratio was set back to the 1890 census. That
happened in 1924, the same year that the Ku Klux Klan took
over most of Colorado's state government by proclaiming its
ideals were pro American
and anti-immigrant,
especially those immigrants who persisted in using their
old languages as they congregated in their own
neighborhoods -- Italians, Greeks, Albanians, Magyars,
etc.
Nobody worries about them now, and some of their desendants, like Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, grumble about more recent immigrants, just as the settled Quakers of Pennsylvania in the 1750s complained mightily about my barbarous and violent forebears then arriving from Ulster.
Our history shows that immigration is one of those issues that tends to solve itself over time, no matter what the government does or doesn't do.
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