Immigration security

Why America Is Fighting About Immigration

...The United States contains a lot more immigrants. In 1960, when America was, presumably, great, the foreign-born comprised less than five percent of America’s population. Now they comprise more than 13 percent. Moreover, today’s immigrants are now mostly people of color. In the 1960s, when US immigration law strongly favored Europeans, the country that sent the most people to live in the United States was Italy, followed by Germany and Canada. In 2015, more than a quarter of those who immigrated to the U.S. were from Mexico. So immigration is changing America’s racial and ethnic character.

But while this explains why immigration was likely to become a more important issue over time, it doesn’t explain its dramatic rise in political significance over the last few years. In recent years, according to the Pew Research Center, immigration has actually slowed, and there are fewer undocumented immigrantsin the US than there were in 2009. So why now? One of the explanations is probably Barack Obama. The fact that the Democratic Party—which gets an increasing share of its votes from immigrants and people of color—elected the son of a visiting Kenyan college student as president probably elevated immigration’s political salience, and exacerbated the partisan divide surrounding it.