And soon the country under the weight of it….
The Narrative Collapse on Immigration
The Narrative Collapse on Immigration Immigrants travel north through Mexico, June 2014. (Jose de Jesus Cortes/Reuters)
by MARK KRIKORIAN June 2, 2016 12:56 PM
The numbers of arrivals, legal and illegal alike, are rising, not falling. ‘The immigration crisis that has roiled American politics for decades has faded into history.”
That was the lede of a New York Times op-ed four years ago that neatly summarized the preferred narrative of supporters of amnesty and unlimited immigration. This was reinforced by a Pew study that found “More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.” (though it arrived at that headline only by counting the U.S.-citizen children of the immigrants as “Mexicans”).
The storyline was that mass immigration was a phase we’d now finished with. Thus any continued agitation about amnesty or border enforcement or job competition could only be naked racism.
Oops.
The newest data from the Census Bureau show a surge in total immigration over the past two years. In 2014 and 2015, 3.1 million new foreign-born people moved here, or about 1.5 million per year. This is up from the 2.3 million in the prior two-year period, and 2.1 million in 2010–2011.
