CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – There is some historic truth to the movie The Gangs of New York. One gang, the Natives, trace their roots to the American Revolution. Their forefathers are the founders of our nation. And they brawl in the streets with the Dead Rabbits, most Irish immigrants who are coming to America during the potato famine.
The leader of the natives says the immigrants “aint got no part in the making” of our country. But the natives are overwhelmed by the numbers of new arrivals, 15,000 a week.
The Irish migration changed our nation. It established Catholicism as the dominant branch of Christianity in the United States. It gave the north a new supply of labor, a counterweight to slavery in the south. It gave the union a new supply of soldiers. And, because the new immigrants already spoke English, their assimilation into larger American society took only one generation.
It would happen again in the early 1900s, the Ellis Island era. Those arrivals were more diverse, spoke different languages, and took longer to assimilate. So much so that our nation decided on an immigration pause that lasted nearly four decades. Fewer foreigners were allowed in, and quotas were shifted towards mostly European nations with cultures more similar to our own.
Those were the only two times in our nation’s history where the foreign born population was above 15-percent. Until this year, which is fundamentally different. 15-percent today is much larger in actual head-count, since our population overall is much larger. That’s 59.8 million people born somewhere else – far more than the populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia combined. About 12-million are in the country illegally. Since they have no path to citizenship, and many do not want it, their assimilation will be slow – if at all. Things that used to bind us together – language, common holidays, common Judeo-Christian values, basic law and order, patriotism – are found in much lesser degrees in our foreign-born today.
Consider how things used to be done: an immigrant had to be sponsored, had to assure us that they could support themselves, had to swear allegiance to the United States before becoming a citizen. Our immigration system now is completely unmanaged; anyone who can walk, swim or climb across our borders can stay here indefinitely with little or no fear of being deported.
Today’s commentary isn’t really about illegals. Its about the demographics of America. 58-million foreigners will change us in ways we haven’t even contemplated yet.
Chris Conley
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