Filter By:
Date
Topic
- Economic Policy (8) Apply Economic Policy filter
- Education (1) Apply Education filter
- Energy, Science & Technology (1) Apply Energy, Science & Technology filter
- Foreign Affairs & National Security (6) Apply Foreign Affairs & National Security filter
- Health Care (1) Apply Health Care filter
- History (4) Apply History filter
- US Politics (14) Apply US Politics filter
- Values & Social Policy (11) Apply Values & Social Policy filter
Search
James Ceaser is the Harry F. Byrd Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, director of the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy, and was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of several books on American politics and American political thought, including...
“Why Wouldn’t People Like ’Em?”
Trump’s Executive Orders On Immigration
On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. He replaced it with Executive Order 13780 on March 6, 2017,
Open the Gate
James Kirchick on Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason Riley
To the Shores of Tripolitania
Libya has known autocrats and invaders before. A century ago, Italians came, saw, conquered . . . and were defeated. By Charles Lindsey.
The Palestinian Proletariat
Permanent refugees, generation after generation: these are the fruit of a U.N. agency that blocks both peace and a Palestinian state. By Michael S. Bernstam.
The Scapegoats Among Us
Blame-shifting after 9/11.
Fighting Words
Craig S. Lerner on A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America by Jim Webb
Citizen Terrorist
Deportation Before Incarceration
Immigration and the Rise and Decline of American Cities
More than half of all immigrants in the United States reside in just seven cities: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Houston, and San Francisco. A controversial issue is whether immigrants are a benefit or a burden to these areas. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences study reports that "immigrants add as much as $10 billion to the national economy each year," but "in areas with high concentrations of low-skilled, low-paid immigrants," they impose net costs on U.S.-born workers. This essay questions that finding.
Examining a range of economic variables for the eighty-five largest U.S. cities over the period 1980–1994, this essay finds that those cities with heavy concentrations of immigrants outperformed cities with few immigrants. Compared with low-immigrant cities, high-immigrant cities had double the job creation rate, higher per capita incomes, lower poverty rates, and 20 percent less crime. Unemployment rates, however, were unusually large in high-immigrant cities. These findings do not answer the critical questions of whether the immigrants cause the better urban conditions or whether benign urban conditions attract the immigrants. But the essay does refute the assertion that the economic decline of cities is caused by immigration; that assertion cannot be true because, with few exceptions, the U.S. cities in greatest despair today--Detroit, Saint Louis, Buffalo, Rochester, Gary--have virtually no immigrants.
Making and Remaking America: Immigration into the United States
Continued immigration constantly reshapes the demography, economy, and society of the United States. As a country of immigrants, America must respond to three fundamental immigration questions: how many immigrants 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.