The immigration issue is the sleeping giant of politics. Mass immigration is transforming America in ways most Americans dislike; yet the political parties refuse to discuss it in front of the voters. Welfare/multiculturalism/illegal immigration is the problem, run the mantras, not legal immigration. These illusions are analyzed in the pages that follow. The task of analysis has been made easier by the amount of information now available. The San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Post have recently run major articles on the deleterious impact of mass immigration on schools, the labor market and—not least—on the immigrants themselves. Academic research has exploded its comforting myths. Popular discontent is rising over such consequences as the spread of bilingualism and the increased fiscal burden on native-born Americans. If the GOP continues to deny them, it will make itself irrelevant even before the impact of immigration on America’s demography does so.
DEMOGRAPHY is destiny in American politics. This point was made brilliantly almost exactly thirty years ago, by Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority (1968). In the shadow of the Democrats’ long-dominant “Roosevelt coalition,” and amid the wreckage and recrimination of the disastrous Goldwater defeat, Phillips boldly predicted a generation of Republican victories based on the persistent but dynamic pattern of ethnic politics. He has been triumphantly vindicated.
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