Immigrants: Give Us Your Poor

Immigration has always been.  From Ionian Greeks being pushed out of the mainland and colonizing the western shores of Anatolia about 1,000 BCE to impoverished Africans desperately moving north into Europe today.  I don’t know about the tribes who had to accommodate the Greeks but surely in most places and most times the resentment of those who immigrated earlier towards those who arrive later, is a constant.  We’ve seen a whole lot of such resentment in the United States, by children of immigrants themselves, towards the most recent “other.”

In fact, I recently “fired” a client where I do computer work, after I could no longer take a senior employee’s rants about the evils of immigrants.  And it turns out, all of his “facts” are false.  From an article in the NY Times:

… in the regions where immigrants have settled in the past two decades, crime has gone down, cities have grown, poor urban neighborhoods have been rebuilt, and small towns that were once on life support are springing back.

Scholars can’t say for sure that immigration caused these positive developments, but we know enough to debunk the notion that immigrants worsen social ills.

For example, in rural counties that experienced an influx of immigrants in the 1980s and ’90s, crime rates dropped by more than they did in rural counties that did not see high immigrant growth.

 

 

Despite what many know, that immigrants are overwhelmingly a benefit to the communities they are part of,  deportation has picked up speed under this so-called left-wing president.  And with it the human hurt.  The NY Times has done  a very fine article about the increasing rate of south-bound border crossing, sweeping along with it American kids.

In all, 1.4 million Mexicans — including about 300,000 children born in the United States — moved to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, according to Mexican census figures. That is roughly double the rate of southbound migration from 1995 to 2000, and new government data published this month suggest that the flow is not diminishing. The result is an entire generation of children who blur the line between Mexican and American.

And finally, speaking of immigrants, here is Nate Silver’s intelligent take on whether President Obama’s suspension of deportations for some n0n-citizen aliens will have an effect on the upcoming election.