The immigration debate has become increasingly acrimonious in the first years of the new millennium. Pundits and politicians demand a solution to the immigration “crisis.” The more they talk about the crisis, the more worried people seem to become about it. With so many well-placed voices talking about a crisis, people begin to feel there really is one.
We need to pause, though, and think about what exactly is so dangerous about immigration—what makes it a crisis.
For many Americans, there is indeed a crisis. It’s a crisis of worsening jobs and working conditions, of deterioration of public services, of lack of health insurance. It’s an economic crisis. It’s also a crisis that benefits one sector of society: the very rich. And it’s a crisis that has very little to do with immigration.
There’s also another crisis facing many Americans, and that’s the crisis of national security. Americans are being sent to fight in far-off wars, and like Rudyard Kipling’s “new-caught, sullen peoples,” people in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t seem properly grateful for American troops’ sacrifices. Instead, the people we’ve invaded seem intent on driving out or killing their presumed saviors. Meanwhile, anger at the United States and its policies, and threats of attack against this country, are increasing.
Then there’s the crisis of global warming, and scientists’ predictions that if we keep up our current rate of consumption, our common homeland, the earth, will become uninhabitable in the foreseeable future.
With so many real crises facing us, why has so much national attention been focused instead on the issue of immigration? Perhaps the pundits and politicians who are spending so much energy whipping up this immigration scare are trying to distract us from some other, more pressing, national—and global—issues.