Business Owners to Become I.N.S. Agents? Republicans Seek Job-Killing Regulation of Business

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Bill Cavala
A veteran of over 30 years in Sacramento

“Illegal” immigration. The word “illegal” used to stop most voters in their tracks. When a public official argued we should provide health care to the children of undocumented immigrants (so that their kids didn’t become a source of infection), the opposition always began with the cry that we should not reward “illegal” behavior.

The behavior decried did not have anything to do with crimes against persons or property. Undocumented immigrants are not dishonest people by nature. They are hardworking people by nature, prepared to accept work at the bottom of the ladder to provide opportunity for their children.

In some sense, this attitude defines America. We have always been a cultural and ethnic polyglot. The common idiom has always been opportunity. If not equal opportunity, then usually a better opportunity than that available in the birth land. Typically, not a better opportunity for the first generation, but for the children and grandchildren.

Millions of immigrants, most from Mexico, have sought that opportunity here – “illegally”.

It’s “illegal” because our immigration laws established – in the 1920’s – limits on total immigration and quotas on immigrants from specific countries. Western Europeans were more welcome than others. This system was established – largely through the support of the Ku Klux Klan – in the wake of a wave of isolationist and nativist reaction to the First World War, to the devastation of the “Spanish” influenza pandemic of 1918-19, and to the success of the suffrage movement that resulted in a vast influx of voters influenced by the Protestant institutions of the period.

Limits on Immigration, the administrations of Harding and Coolidge, and the Volstead Act were the great achievements of this period.

It is not longer “illegal” to drink. It remains “illegal” to come to America in violation of quotas established by the reactionary white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant government of the day.

Over the years, millions of people have violated our immigration laws. Three million are estimated to reside here in California. Reside here for decades.