Penguin.com (usa)

Nativists warn that the brown influx from Mexico is soiling our Anglo-American cultural fabric, damaging our social mores, and facilitating a U.S. identity crisis. Anti-immigrant screeds with hysterical titles like Invasion by Michelle Malkin and State of Emergency by Pat Buchanan have become best-sellers. Tomes by serious academics like Samuel Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson make the same arguments using bigger words and giving the cruder polemicists some intellectual cover.

And then there's the odd bed-sharing. Liberal columnists like Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and conservative policy analysts like Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation both fret that immigration from Mexico merely swells the ranks of the U.S. poor and burdens our social services. Republicans convinced that Mexican immigrants are natural Democrats find common cause with both the economic protectionists, who say immigrants crib jobs, and the population-control environmentalists, who want the border sealed on grounds that the United States already has too many people.

All of them, however, arrive at the same pessimistic conclusion, which is that immigration on balance is a net negative for the United States. They go to great lengths to demonstrate that today's new arrivals are different from yesterday's, uniquely incapable of assimilation. They cite special circumstances that made the past acculturation of European and Asian immigration possible but render it impossible for Latinos. They view these foreigners as a liability rather than an asset. The want an immigrant "time-out."

What Would Reagan Do?

If you're a free market conservative in the Ronald Reagan tradition, this debate has been doubly depressing because so much of the bellyaching has originated with the political right, where many people have convinced themselves that scapegoating immigrants for America's economic and social ills—real and imagined—is a winner at the polls. On the topic of immigration, at least, too many conservatives have pocketed their principles and morphed into reactionary Populists. They claim to be Reaganites, but temperamentally and rhetorically that have more in common with Pat Buchanan, if not Father Coughlin. Their right-wing version of the "angry left" promotes a politics of resentment, frustration, and fear. It stirs up isolationism and xenophobia. And as a political strategy it's heretofore been a loser, just like Buchanan for his presidential bids.

Besides, the nativist noise that has saturated so much of talk radio, cable news, and conservative print journalism in recent years is about as far from the Gipper's style as you can get. To Reagan, ever the optimist, America was "a shining city upon a Hill," in the John Winthrop phrase he liked to use. Liberal immigration policies were proof that this country remained a land of opportunity, a nation built on the idea of liberty, not the Blut und Boden European doctrine.

Reagan held this view long before he became president, as Lou Cannon, his biographer, had documented. In 1952, when the United States was still under the thumb of highly restrictive immigration quotes enacted in the 1920s, Reagan gave a speech endorsing open borders. In his view, America was "the promised land" for people from "any place in the world." Reagan said "any person with the courage, the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange land and foreign place, to travel halfway across the world was welcome here."