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Immigration in America: The Four-Part Series

May 10, 2016
Jon Boldt

Writer

No other country in the world has welcomed more immigrants than the United States. Immigrants created the great “melting pot” that is America. However, the notion of “melting” or assimilating into American society is no longer taught, adding to the problems of an overburdened and broken immigration system. Presidential candidates on both sides claim to have the answer. But to actually find a solution, we have to understand how we got here and what’s been tried in the past. This four-part series covers the remarkable history of immigration in America and why the modern system desperately needs reform.

The four-part series is compiled below for your convenience.

Immigration in America Part I:

The Beginning There is a common refrain in the debate about immigration: We are a nation of immigrants. While that is true, there is a word nearly always left out of that refrain: legal. We have always been a nation of laws and a nation of legal immigrants.

The Pilgrims were the first immigrants able to create a permanent home here. Starting around 1620, tens of thousands of British, German and Dutch, but mostly British Puritans, came to North America to escape religious persecution, find opportunities or simply experience an adventure. Then there were the forced immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of Africans who were mercilessly captured in their own lands and put on ships bound for America to be sold into slavery.

As the United States Constitution took hold, American freedom provided the opportunity for American citizens to rise above their station in life. Word began to spread around the globe. The downtrodden throughout Europe and Asia looked to America for hope and opportunity, a situation that caused both enormous potential and inherent problems. Thomas Jefferson expressed concerns about the “great importations of foreigners” saying, “In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mess.”

Fortunately, the first wave of immigrants desperately wanted to leave behind the biases of European governments and enjoy the fruits of what our Founders had created.

By the 1850s, as America’s population topped 20 million and the immigrants kept coming, especially the Irish, escaping from the potato famine. In the late 1800s, massive steamships provided much faster cross Atlantic transportation for those who wanted a taste of the American dream. As mills and factories sprung across the land, cities grew up around them. In turn, these cities beckoned to workers by the millions from the American countryside and from overseas, to fuel the burgeoning industrialization. Between 1860 and 1910, the urban population grew from 6 million to over 44 million.

Ellis Island in New York was set up to process the mass of humanity arriving on our shores from the Atlantic, and the Angel Island in San Francisco to deal with those coming across the Pacific. It was a wave of immigrants that believed in the promise of America and had loved and longed for from afar — and they thanked God when they arrived. For those immigrants, assimilation wasn’t just a good idea, it was the only idea.

It was certainly not easy for these newcomers. With so many arriving from so many diverse locations around the world, taking jobs, housing and space in this land, and, yes, some resentment did arise. But no nation on earth has ever experienced, let alone survived so great an influx of humanity in such a short period of time, but the United States of America didn’t just survive it. It would thrive.

Immigration in America Part II: The 20th Century

In 2014, nearly 10 million visas were issued by the United States to those seeking to enter the country — including over 1 million admitted permanently. Overall, the United States has one of the highest immigrant populations and is one of the most visited countries on earth.

Some believe those who make it across our borders — legally or not — should be embraced and allowed to stay. This rift has divided Americans for generations. It has also created the false impression around the globe that Americans are extraordinarily xenophobic and racist when, in fact, the United States is the most culturally, ethnically and racially diverse nation in the history of mankind.

As highly regarded as diversity is now, unity was once thought to be paramount. American leadership knew, as Lincoln stated, a nation divided against itself cannot stand. That didn’t apply to just slavery in the Civil War period. It also applied to having a common language, a common culture and a constitutional direction.

Between 1944 and 1954, the number of immigrants coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. The problem of illegal immigration from Mexico, Central and South America, had become such a problem by 1954 that there were already around 3 million here illegally. Thus, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a new program to deal with the situation. Border agents were sent through California, Arizona, Texas, and northward into Nevada, Utah and even Idaho, rounding up illegal aliens for deportation. Within three months, border agents had apprehended and sent back deep into Mexico over 130,000 illegal aliens. And another 1.1 million more, fearing apprehension, self-deported back to their homes in Mexico and South America. By 1955, 2.1 million illegals had either been deported or had left the United States on their own. The problem was declared and solved for a time.

But it didn't last long.

Immigration in America Part III: Immigration Reform

There are 45 million foreign-born people who live in the United States. That’s more than six times the number of the next closest nation — Germany. In a 2014 survey, 34 percent of Mexicans said, if given the opportunity, they would migrate to the United States. That would be another 41.5 million people from Mexico alone.

No nation, no matter how prosperous can accommodate everyone. So in the 19th and 20th centuries, Americans began to place limits on immigrants. As a result, the numbers coming from Europe slowed, but the numbers pouring across America’s southern border exploded.

Reagan believed if he granted amnesty to the three million already here illegally — made them pay a penalty and shored up the border — that the United States could regain control over its immigration situation. In 1986, President Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It was designed to end the illegal border crossing crisis once and for all. The only problem was, it didn’t.

Since passage of the bill, the illegal immigration situation has careened out of control. Millions continued to pour across our southern border. Even Democrats understood how dire the situation was. President Bill Clinton supported securing the borders and deportation, saying, “We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.”

It seems that 20 years ago, it wasn’t xenophobic, racist, or hateful to want the border secured and our laws upheld. So what changed? How did left-wing politicians go from addressing the issue with this sense of purpose and understanding, to supporting amnesty?

Perhaps Senator Ted Kennedy summed up the change of heart best at the 2006 pro-illegal immigration rally when he said he saw the future of America. With over a million pouring across our border illegally every year, the Democrats saw the writing on the wall: New voters who would equal power for them.

In 2006, even George W. Bush tried desperately to sell skeptical Americans on so-called comprehensive immigration reform, encouraging support of a bipartisan immigration bill to bring illegal aliens out of the shadows. Burned too many times, the American people rejected his plan.

As a result of 70 to 80 years of failure on the southern border, Americans have become hardened and skeptical when it comes to so-called immigration reform. With so many millions of citizens out of work, they view anyone who shouldn’t be here in the first place as someone who is potentially taking jobs from them.

Immigration in America Part IV: The Immigration Fight Today

There used to be bipartisan agreement on the need to stop people from entering the United States without authorization, and the need to remove illegal aliens from the country. Democrats like Bill Clinton, Harry Reid and others spoke out passionately on the need to secure the border, clamp down on employers and stop any and all benefits to illegal aliens.

However, over the past decade or so, that has drastically changed.

The Democratic Party now supports illegal aliens in the hope of gaining tens of millions of Hispanic voters in the country. Today, Democrats address the issue with fear mongering, referencing young kids with tears rolling down their cheeks who are scared their parents may be deported. Should the tears or fears of those living in the United States illegally determine American policy?

In 1993, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that.” Nineteen years later, Harry Reid sang a very different tune from the Senate floor, saying, “Thanks to President Obama . . . 800,000 young people . . . who are American in all but the paperwork no longer need to live in fear of deportation.

Current Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders believes in passing comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship. Additionally, he is against building a fence or wall, supports funding sanctuary cities and believes climate change laid the groundwork for mass migration.

In 2005, Hillary Clinton was adamantly against illegal immigration. Today, like Sanders, Clinton supports comprehensive immigration reform, and favors the Dream Act and amnesty. She doesn’t want a border fence, but instead favors using more technology on the border.

Donald Trump’s highly publicized thoughts on immigration are well-known. He wants to build a wall on the southern border and have Mexico pay for it. Trump also wants to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States. He admits that in his business, he uses H-1B visas, but as president, would stop them from being used. He also believes that, “we’re the only country dumb enough to allow birthright citizenship.”

Ted Cruz also outlined a tough plan on immigration which includes enforcing current federal laws, deporting illegal aliens, building a wall and tripling the border patrol. Cruz is not in favor of a path to citizenship and would defund all 250-plus of America’s sanctuary cities.

Americans now face a choice: Will this decades old problem ever be solved? If so, how? And who is the best person to solve it?

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.