Thread: Our Broken Immigration Record

Steven Malanga
Our Broken Immigration Record
A history of violated promises has shattered the public’s trust.
5 July 2007

In the aftermath of the immigration bill’s defeat, supporters on both the left and the right have wondered how compromise legislation, containing so many proposals that Americans seemed to back in polls, could have won so little public support. Many of the bill’s backers seem to be missing the point: what killed it was not opposition to any single proposal, but rather the public’s overall cynicism on immigration. Ordinary citizens simply don’t trust our leaders on this subject any longer, and until the president—some president—and the Congress gain back their trust, it’s unlikely that we’ll have any “comprehensiveâ€

[quote]I can’t blame them for thinking that way. The American public has been misled numerous times on the issue of immigration, and the backlash against this bill represents its collective anger about those betrayals, which date back to the 1965 legislation that drastically changed our system and led to the mess we have today. That legislation, conceived during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, was supposed to make our immigration system appear fairer by moving us away from quotas based on national origins. Proponents swore that the adjustments would be mostly symbolic and have little real effect on immigration. Senator Edward Kennedy, who back then was the young chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on immigration, boldly proclaimed that the bill, “contrary to the charges in some quarters, will not inundate America with immigrantsâ€