http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/30/h … index.html
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act (Ted Kennedy shepherded the bill in the Senate), destroying the national quota-based system that had, among other things, restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asian countries and kept immigration at sustainable levels since the end of World War I.
The 1965 law created "chain migration," which allowed the most recently arrived immigrants to set U.S. immigration flow by sponsoring family members, and stoked an insatiable demand to immigrate among billions of impoverished foreigners worldwide. The old scourge of cheap labor exploitation, which had been disappearing for a generation, re-emerged in the midst of millions of illegal migrants, primarily from Mexico.
SB 1070 happened because neither political party has been willing to close the floodgate inadvertently opened in 1965.
In 1986, President Reagan and Congress tried amnesty, with disastrous results. The newly legalized immigrants used chain migration to choke the system with new applications for relatives, and illegal immigration swelled to historic levels by the mid-1990s. Massive immigration began to distort every aspect of American life, from crime to higher education.
In Congress, the cheap labor and ethnic voter interests could never agree on who got to exploit the new arrivals first but did find common ground in eviscerating attempts to control unauthorized employment.
Dismayed at the effects of federal gridlock on their once Golden State, in 1994, California voters enacted Proposition 187, still America's "toughest" immigration control law....
....The turning point was Proposition 200, a 2004 Arizona ballot initiative called Protect Arizona Now. Ballot committee leaders included Russell Pearce, the state legislator who became the sponsor of SB 1070 and other ground-breaking local enforcement legislation.
Proposition 200 required proof of lawful presence for voter registration and state-funded public benefits. It was opposed by virtually every organized interest in the state. Yet it passed overwhelmingly in every demographic sector, including a plurality of Americans of Hispanic descent.
While we've discussed the possibility of racial profiling coming from this law, it is interesting to note how many Hispanic citizens seem to support it.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/04/30/arizon … tml?hpt=C2
I guess we'll see if this support holds after the law takes effect.
Still, it begs the question... Did the problem begin back in 1965 with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act?
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act (Ted Kennedy shepherded the bill in the Senate), destroying the national quota-based system that had, among other things, restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asian countries and kept immigration at sustainable levels since the end of World War I.
The 1965 law created "chain migration," which allowed the most recently arrived immigrants to set U.S. immigration flow by sponsoring family members, and stoked an insatiable demand to immigrate among billions of impoverished foreigners worldwide. The old scourge of cheap labor exploitation, which had been disappearing for a generation, re-emerged in the midst of millions of illegal migrants, primarily from Mexico.
SB 1070 happened because neither political party has been willing to close the floodgate inadvertently opened in 1965.
In 1986, President Reagan and Congress tried amnesty, with disastrous results. The newly legalized immigrants used chain migration to choke the system with new applications for relatives, and illegal immigration swelled to historic levels by the mid-1990s. Massive immigration began to distort every aspect of American life, from crime to higher education.
In Congress, the cheap labor and ethnic voter interests could never agree on who got to exploit the new arrivals first but did find common ground in eviscerating attempts to control unauthorized employment.
Dismayed at the effects of federal gridlock on their once Golden State, in 1994, California voters enacted Proposition 187, still America's "toughest" immigration control law....
....The turning point was Proposition 200, a 2004 Arizona ballot initiative called Protect Arizona Now. Ballot committee leaders included Russell Pearce, the state legislator who became the sponsor of SB 1070 and other ground-breaking local enforcement legislation.
Proposition 200 required proof of lawful presence for voter registration and state-funded public benefits. It was opposed by virtually every organized interest in the state. Yet it passed overwhelmingly in every demographic sector, including a plurality of Americans of Hispanic descent.
While we've discussed the possibility of racial profiling coming from this law, it is interesting to note how many Hispanic citizens seem to support it.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/04/30/arizon … tml?hpt=C2
I guess we'll see if this support holds after the law takes effect.
Still, it begs the question... Did the problem begin back in 1965 with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act?
