Immigration and Social Mobility Debated at AEI

WASHINGTON, JULY 1, 2008--The similarity of Barack Obama and John McCain's positions on immigration legislation may have shifted the issue from the center of the political debate, but it is unlikely to rest there for long. In a newly published book, The New Case Against Immigration, Mark Krikorian sets out the reasons why many Americans think that immigration adversely affects the nation's interests.

Presenting his case at an AEI forum on July 1, hosted by the Institute's National Research Initiative, Krikorian argued that the loud public debate which contrasts legal with illegal immigration misses the point. What is significant, he suggested, is that high levels of immigration are flooding the low-skilled labor market and that the United States is importing a nineteenth-century workforce of millions into a twenty-first-century high-tech economy.

Krikorian also suggested that America's ability to assimilate immigrants has radically deteriorated over the past half-century, and that modern social institutions have essentially neglected this task in favor of other objectives. Multicultural dogmas have prevented schools from insisting that immigrants adopt core American values, and modern technology has allowed modern immigrants to live transnational lives, so that they retain greater allegiances to their native communities than to the United States. Krikorian argued that high levels of unassimilated immigrants have also created an environment in which terrorist threats to the United States can percolate.

In response, Fred Siegel of the Cooper Union said that society has indeed changed since earlier major waves of immigration. But he reminded the audience that the modern welfare state was created in part as a response to the ill-effects of increased dislocation in a globalized world and hence was not its cause. Siegel also argued that America's education system is to blame for the breakdown of assimilation and for reduced social mobility for native-born low-wage workers and that this has only increased the need for America to import skilled immigrants.

The second panelist, AEI's Jason Richwine, said that while anti-immigration sentiment often seems to be driven by a grab bag of various anxieties, the underlying problem is that the current wave of immigration is different from existing American ethnic groups--and this has generated less readily eradicable tribal feelings.

--CHRIS POPE

For video, audio, and more information about this report, visit www.aei.org/event1739/.

For more information about AEI's National Research Initiative, visit www.aei.org/nri/.

For media inquiries, contact Véronique Rodman at 202.862.4870 or vrodman@aei.org.

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