Continued immigration constantly reshapes the demography, economy, and society of the United States.
As a country of immigrants, write Philip Martin and Peter Duignan in the new Hoover Institution Essay Making and Remaking America: Immigration into the United States, America must respond to three fundamental immigration questions:
- how many migrants should be admitted
- from where and in what status should they arrive and
- how should the rules governing the system be enforced?
During the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Congress responded to growing gaps between immigration policy and immigration reality by making major changes in immigration laws and their administration.
In 1986, the United States enacted the world's largest legalization program for unauthorized foreigners and introduced sanctions on employers who knowingly hired illegal foreign workers. Instead of slowing illegal immigration, however, this program allowed more foreigners to arrive legally and illegally, which prompted another round of reforms in 1996 aimed at ensuring that new arrivals would not receive welfare payments.
On September 11, 2001, foreigners in the United States hijacked four commercial planes. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, bringing them down and killing 3,000 people. President George W. Bush declared war on terrorists and the countries that harbor them, and Congress enacted legislation to fight terrorism.
This includes new measures for tightening procedures for issuing visas to foreign visitors, tracking foreign students and visitors while they are in the United States, and giving immigration authorities new power to arrest and detain foreigners suspected of ties to terrorism. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished, and its functions of preventing illegal immigration and providing services to foreign visitors and immigrants were separated in the new Department of Homeland Security.
However, anti-terrorism measures have not slowed immigration to the United States.
America is poised to remain the world's major destination for immigrants, and as patterns in U.S. history suggest, most of the newcomers will soon become Americans.
However, past success in integrating immigrants does not guarantee that integrating newcomers will be easy or automatic. As immigrants continue to make and remake the country, the United States must develop an immigration policy for the twenty-first century.
Philip Martin is professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California-Davis, chair of the University of California's Comparative Immigration and Integration Program, and editor of Migrant News and Rural Migration News (hptt://migration.ucdavis.edu). Martin cochairs Migration Dialogue, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing timely and nonpartisan migration analysis through seminars, newsletters, and monographs and research articles.
Peter Duignan is the Lillick Curator and senior fellow emeritius at the Hoover Institution and has written or edited more than forty books and monographs. He wrote, with the late L.H. Gann, The Rebirth of the West: The Americanization of the Democratic World, 1945–1958 (1991), The U.S. and the New Europe, 1945–1993 (1994), The Spanish Speakers in the United States: A History (1998), and Contemporary Europe and the Atlantic Alliance (1998). In 1998, Hoover Press published, in the Duignan-Gann edited volume on The Debate in the United States over Immigration, the proceedings of a Hoover conference on immigration, and a Hoover Essay by Duignan, Bilingual Education: A Critique.
Complimentary copies of the Essay are available to working press.
