EDITORIAL: Don’t ignore legal immigration trends
President Donald Trump has made it clear time and again that he intends to keep his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration by building a wall spanning the entire length of the U.S.-Mexican border and by stepping up enforcement against illegal immigrants already in this country.
It’s hard to argue with his desire to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants who have committed felony crimes and pose a threat to public safety. It’s less easy to support immigration raids in which illegal immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding, hard-working and taxpaying members of the community are swept up with those who are the primary targets.
We continue to believe there should be a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have resided in this country for several years and have made positive contributions to their community. And we hope Friday’s reports that the Department of Homeland Security was considering using 100,000 National Guard troops for immigration raids were unfounded. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer emphatically denied the Trump adminstration had any plans of doing so.
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However, there are strong indications that Trump may go beyond his campaign promise to focus on the “bad hombres,” those who have been convicted of serious crimes. In the first major immigration raid of the Trump presidency last week, 679 arrests were made in 12 states. Of those, nearly one quarter had not been convicted of any crime. In 2016, under the Obama administration, 90 percent of those caught in raids had criminal records.
Also, an executive order signed by Trump Jan. 25 broadened the categories of undocumented immigrants deemed enforcement priorities. It includes those who have been charged with a crime but not convicted, those who have used fake IDs to access jobs or abused public benefit programs and those who “otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.”
Yes, get rid of the bad hombres. But don’t make it an all-out assault on those who have been longtime contributors to their communities. In many towns and cities throughout the world, those contributions have been essential to economic and civic life.
It’s also important for Trump and those intent on weeding out all the illegal immigrants to recognize that the overwhelming majority of Mexicans and Hispanics in this country are here legally. In 2015, the Hispanic population of the U.S. was 56.6 million, comprising 17.6 percent of the total. There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants — about 3.7 percent of the U.S. population. Of that number, 59 percent are from Mexico, according to the Pew Research Center.
That points to another issue often given short shrift in the immigration debate: the current rules governing naturalization. Most of the focus has been on those who are here illegally and what can be done to prevent further illegal immigration. But below the surface, much of the anti-immigration sentiment, particularly among Trump supporters, who tend to be overwhelmingly non-Hispanic whites, stems from a broader concern about what it is seen as the dilution of American values, language, customs and tradition by the dramatic demographic shift over the past several decades.
The percentage of Europeans in the total U.S. foreign-born population plummeted from 75 percent in 1960 to 11 percent in 2014, thanks in large part to the Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished national-origin quotas that gave preference to European migration.
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In 1960, Mexicans accounted for 5.9 percent of the immigrant U.S. population. In 2014, they accounted for about 28 percent of the 42.4 million foreign-born in the United States. That’s more than five times the next largest immigrant group — India. Millions more Hispanics immigrated from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Latin countries. Dozens of cities, large and small, now have majority Hispanic populations, and the trend continues. Most of the Hispanics live here legally.
But for many, the demographic shift has been traumatic. For many, the towns where they grew up, raised a family and made a living are no longer recognizable. And it has far less to do with illegal legal immigration than legal immigration. Many who have been drawn to Trump’s vow to make America great again aren’t just longing for steady, high-paying jobs. They are longing for a way of life that a crackdown on undocumented workers will not be able to reverse.