Not since the Great Depression has the United States seen a tide of anti- immigrant sentiment to rival today's. But Since 1950, close to 14 million Mexicans, Central Americans, Asians, and other immigrants have entered the United States, about two million of them illegally. Net immigration (excluding undocumented aliens) now accounts for over 35 percent of U.S. population growth, and its share will grow in the years ahead. Half or more of all workers entering the labor force during the next decade will be immigrants or the children of foreign-born families that arrived after the mid-1960s. Unlike earlier immigration waves, this one has washed over the entire nation, bringing foreign-born workers to virtually every community, large and small, from the rural South to the mountain west (George E. Pozzetta, ed., 1991, pg 63).
Anti-immigrant feeling is a simple sentiment with complex roots, some of them social and racial, and some seeming more practical. Immigrants are blamed for overcrowded schools, rising hospital deficits, and high welfare costs--indeed, for virtually everything that ails American society. Nothing ails this country more than the poverty of a large segment (one-third) of the black population, and stagnant or declining wages among Americans of all races and all but the highest income levels, and fingers are being pointed at the immigrants. Not too many years ago, the sight of a Korean shopkeeper or a Salvadoran construction worker would have been taken by many citizens as reassuring evidence of the American Dream's lasting power. Now such recent arrivals are likely to be seen as alien interlopers who are taking good jobs from hard-working Americans.
These sentiments are strongest, of course, among groups with a disproportionately high share of low-wage and unskilled jobs. This has always been so. "Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant," Frederick Douglass despaired in 1853................
