A Disconnect on Immigration

By Rachel Marsden
Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Ipsos has just released a poll measuring citizens' perception of immigration in 23 countries. Despite what politicians around the world would have their countrymen believe, the average person isn't buying the benefits of current immigration policy.

The poll proves that our collective gut is indeed in line with reality: 80 percent of world citizens, from Russia and Brazil to America and India, feel that immigration has increased over the past five years, with 52 percent feeling it's too much. Of respondents, 45 percent believe immigration has a negative impact on their country. This is legal, above-board immigration with which people are taking issue.

While politicians in America typically focus on the 12 million or so illegal immigrants, they often ignore the fact that the country is taking in more than a million new legal immigrants every year.

America may have been built on immigration, but it wasn't the kind of mass Third World immigration that we've been seeing over the past 40 years. The left originally introduced the concept of Third World multiculturalism to America during the Lyndon Johnson presidency through the Democratic Party's Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It was born of white-guilt overkill in the shade of the Civil Rights Movement.

At the time, Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy said: "Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia. ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. ... The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs."

In the true final analysis, the new law opened the floodgates to exponentially more Third World immigrants than originally planned -- and did it on the basis of "family reunification" rather than skill.

Before the new law, immigrants to the U.S. came overwhelmingly from Western European democracies and Canada. Afterward, immigration from Latin America and Asia dominated, while European immigration was reduced from 86 percent of the total to a mere sliver of 13 percent.

The law led to an influx of new Democratic voters via immigration. Now, any politician wanting to land this growing immigrant vote -- whether Democrat or Republican -- had better find a way to pander to the idea of multiculturalism, or, theoretically, risk alienating a major swath of voters. Ronald Reagan presided over near-record levels of annual legal immigration, and George W. Bush was anything but tough on immigration, maintaining immigration levels from the same countries against which we struggled ideologically in the aftermath of 9/11. No one wants to touch it.

The idea of any and all legal immigration being a net positive is something that has been deeply planted in the public conscience through leftist brainwashing and diversity-promotion initiatives, typically starting in the public education system. If anything, the Ipsos poll finally proves this to be definitively true, with the most educated respondents being the most supportive of immigration. Educated Canadians have the most positive view of immigration of anyone in the world. As a product of that system, I can vouch for the amount of multicultural and diversity peddling to which the average student is subjected in the absence of any counterpoint. This, despite the fact that the two founding factions, French and English Canadians, haven't ever gotten along, even leading to a period of French nationalist terrorism, which has since been subdued by repeatedly buying off the French-Canadian province of Quebec.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Ipsos survey -- and most in conflict with current U.S. policy -- is that 45 percent of people prefer skilled, educated immigrants who take high-level jobs that locals won't do over low-skilled immigrants or those who don't work at all. So future policy ought to focus on importing top talent and limiting low-level immigration -- which is also a recipe for competitive success in the global economy. It would be a safe place for politicians to start on a subject they've all been avoiding.