Editor's Letter: Beyond Arizona

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s not just Arizona. When it comes to illegal immigration, the nation is in a foul mood. A large majority of Americans now tell pollsters they favor an Arizona-style crackdown in their own states, including the requirement that immigrants carry their papers at all times or face arrest. Indeed, with Congress stuck in its usual paralysis, many states have been busy enacting their own plans to dissuade illegal immigration, from establishing workplace identification systems to denying driver’s licenses to people who can’t prove their legal status. In the first quarter of 2010 alone, state and local governments enacted more than 100 immigration laws. Ten state legislatures are debating “English-only” statutes mandating that official business be conducted in the mother tongue.

But then, it’s getting harder to say what the mother tongue is. One in eight Americans is now foreign born, while nearly a quarter of those under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, according to a Brookings Institution preview of the 2010 Census. Nearly 85 percent of our population growth over the past decade came from non-whites, with Latinos registering the largest spike. In short, America is changing, and immigrants are in the forefront—which shouldn’t be all that shocking, considering that’s been the American story from the beginning. Of course, so have eruptions of immigrant bashing. I’m reminded of my grandfather, a Russian immigrant who was never able to shake his own “foreign” accent. In his later years, he’d complain about how Cuban immigrants—he called them “those damn Cubanskis”—were “taking over” his Miami Beach neighborhood. We’re a nation of immigrants, but we got here first.