Immigration

Here's the conventional wisdom: Americans scapegoat immigrants during bad economic times. They fear for their own well-being and turn on those they think are competing with them unfairly for jobs, for help, for a place at the table. But last week's L.A. Times/USC poll of likely California voters puts a giant dent in that political trope: 48% said they thought immigrants were a benefit to the state, and 59% were in favor of allowing illegal immigrants who have lived or worked in the United States for at least two years to remain here.

Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada, suggested recently to a group of tea partyers that the U.S. was being taken over by Muslims. Seriously.

She pointed to Dearborn, Mich., and wondered aloud how it could have happened that Sharia law was allowed to take over there. Never mind that, as Dearborn's mayor, Jack O'Reilly, later pointed out, no one was tapping into Islamic law to run the city. (Angle's defense? She said she read "somewhere" that Sharia law was in effect in Dearborn.)

If Meg Whitman loses the gubernatorial race because her actions didn't jive with her words on illegal immigration, she could become a sacrificial lamb for the rest of us. Her sin is our sin. Because where illegal immigration is concerned, we are all hypocrites.

Just when you thought the Republican far-right had enough enemies to keep itself busy — gays, socialists, Muslims, Arabs, illegal immigrants — it launched a new war against babies "dropped" (in the loving words of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) by illegal immigrant mothers. These politicians want to change the 14th Amendment so that those U.S.-born children would be excluded from "birthright citizenship."

The worst idea in American politics right now may be the effort by some Republicans in Congress to end birthright citizenship - the constitutional fact, under the 14th Amendment, that a person born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.

With the immigration debate heating up — and a federal court case over Arizona's SB 1070 brewing — you'd think that the U.S. was besieged by growing numbers of illegal immigrants. But you'd be wrong.

Despite the heightened rhetoric and the bloodcurdling vitriol surrounding the issue, illegal immigration has actually declined significantly over the last few years. While journalists like to characterize the anger over immigration as a response to facts on the ground — i.e. people are inundated and incensed — the numbers don't bear them out.

Poor France. On Tuesday, just in time for Bastille Day, the lower house of the French Parliament overwhelmingly passed a measure aimed at changing the offensive sartorial habits of 2,000 Muslim women who critics say are a threat to French values and identity.

In the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day and the Times Square bombings, much of the political debate surrounded what should happen to suspects after such attempts. The dispute primarily focused on whether the failed Times Square and Christmas Day bombers should have been Mirandized and on how harshly they should have been interrogated. But most of this debate is missing the point.

Abstract: For those who prefer light to heat on the immigration question, Not Fit for Our Society is the perfect place to start. Drawing on his decades of reporting and reading of primary sources and the latest scholarship, Schrag traces the strange career of American nativism and America’s enduring ambivalence about immigration from the Puritan saints to the Tea Partiers. He delivers a story rich in irony, detail, and nuance, often told with passion and frequently challenging orthodoxies of both the political right and left.

These are jittery times in Washington. President Felipe Calderon of Mexico arrives for a visit with President Barack Obama on the heels of a catastrophic oil spill, primary upsets for Democratic candidates, and just as rhetoric surrounding illegal immigration into the American Southwest has reached the screaming point. Given the White House’s new focus on immigration reform, its second official state dinner will be more concerned with security than the last—not just at the White House gates, but at the border that joins Mexico and the United States.