The Ugly Bipartisan Obsession with the Right Number of Immigrants – The New Republic

As the number and variety of immigrants grew, so did the modern restrictionist movement. John Tanton, an ophthalmologist from Michigan, pioneered this rise, using environmental concerns about population growth, trendy in the 1970s, to argue for stopping immigration. Tanton, who was interested in eugenics, left a legacy in Washington, D.C.: He founded a number of organizations to lobby elected officials that are still operational today, as the historian Carly Goodman notes in the forthcoming collection A Field Guide to White Supremacy. These organizations were successful at shaping policy, especially under Trump. But even during less sympathetic administrations, they have been hugely influential, routinely testifying on immigration legislation in Congress. Its not a surprise that no major immigration bill has passed since the 1990s.

The restrictionists success stems from their messaging strategy, which, as Goodman explains, is focused on deriving legitimacy from data. Roger Connor, the first executive director of the anti-immigrant organization Federation of American Immigration Reform, put it this way: The issue for the modern immigration debate is not race or ethnicity, its numbers.

Thanks to FAIR and others, Americans today do think about immigration in numbers, but they are often wrong: Polls find Americans tend to overestimate the share of immigrants in the population andgrossly overestimate the proportion of undocumented among the U.S. Latino population. American views on whether immigration is good for the country remain deeply split by party affiliation and yet also show some contradictions. A majority of voters, for example, support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people as well as an increase in border security, apparently not realizing that the two measures are related: that, as some researchers have argued, tougher border enforcement may have actually contributed to the rise in the U.S. undocumented population.

In April, the Migration Policy Institute reviewed Biden administrations progress on immigration in his first 100 days in office and found, among other things, that the government has been slow to scale up its capacity to address the increasing [border] numbers, while also giving mixed messages about who will be allowed into the country.

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The Ugly Bipartisan Obsession with the Right Number of Immigrants - The New Republic