ARTICLES/EDITORIALS

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By Chad Groening

What numerical level of immigration is good for the people of the United States? That's the question being asked by a group that argues it's unfair to continue high immigration when so many Americans need jobs.

Roy Beck is founder and president of NumbersUSA. He recalls that during the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump made immigration one of his bedrock campaign issues. And Beck argues that since taking office, President Trump has done a great deal to improve border enforcement, including funding construction for a border wall and taking steps to stop the massive flow of refugees across the southern border.

But there is much more to be done, says Beck. He points out that, for the most part, immigration has been relegated to the back burner; and in fact, it wasn't a topic during the first presidential debate in Cleveland Tuesday night.

The NumbersUSA founder admits he's disappointed that the media is largely ignoring the immigration issue during this presidential election cycle, because he contends immigration is even more of an issue now than it was four years ago.

"… We had a pretty good economy [in 2016], but right now we have the pandemic economy. We've got 30-million Americans who are [receiving] unemployment benefits," he tells OneNewsNow. "So, does it make sense, is it fair to continue high immigration when so many Americans need jobs? You're not hearing that talked about much."

To address the issue, NumbersUSA has once again launched a massive national TV and social media campaign.

"… Back in the 1990s, we began running ads during congressional campaigns [and] presidential campaigns to insert immigration issues that weren't being addressed in the national media – and really, that's the key reason to spend the kind of money we do on ads," he explains.

"If everybody's talking about something, that's great – but unlike 2016, you don't hear much about immigration right now. And so we're having to pay to get immigration into the public sphere."

With the aid of the ad campaign, Beck hopes immigration will be a topic in future debates.

By Peter Skerry

More than most issues, immigration is characterized by a wide gap between elite and non elite opinion.  While poll after poll has for years demonstrated overwhelming majority support for curtailing immigration, our political and economic leaders have just as consistently held the opposite view. And the elites have prevailed, at least in the sense that since the overhaul of our immigration laws in the mid-1960s, legal immigration has steadily increased, from about 297,000 in 1965 to over 720,000 in 1995.  

With a net annual addition of 300,000 to 400,000 illegal immigrants, today's influx is equivalent (in absolute numbers if not as a percentage of total population) to the historically high levels immediately preceding World War I.  Does this mean that our immigration policy simply reflects the efforts of manipulative and deceitful elites flouting majority opinion?  Many Americans seem to think this way.  So do the authors of two new books that challenge this elite pro-immigration consensus in two very different ways.  

One of these books is an utter failure, the other an earnest but flawed effort.  Yet both bring a message from the heartland that deserves to be heard...

... Roy Beck's The Case Against Immigration comes closer but falls short. Where Williamson is the disaffected literary intellectual, Beck is the policy-wonkish journalist. Like Williamson, Beck self-consciously hails from the heartland and is very much a populist who sees "the rich" benefiting from immigration at the expense of ordinary working Americans. His 1994 Atlantic article about the negative impacts of immigration on the small town of Wasau, Wis., was widely cited. As an editor of The Social Contract, a quarterly journal linked with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Beck has direct ties with the principal restrictionist lobby.  Yet despite such advocacy roots, Beck is a reasonably reliable guide through a mounting body of evidence on the problems generated by immigration. For example, he shrewdly identifies a connection between immigration and the emergence of gated communities. He also marshals the latest research indicating that up to a third of America's troubling economic inequality is traceable to immigration. Moreover, Beck adroitly supplements such statistical findings with case studies of how immigrants have transformed industries once dominated by native-born Americans, such as meat packing a poultry processing.  

Always balanced and never strident, Beck argues persuasively that immigration is a relevant but not necessarily primary factor in many of our economic and social problems. Perhaps most cogent is his discussion of the negative impacts immigration has had, historically and contemporaneously, on black Americans.  Yet Beck goes astray when he attributes the breakdown of urban infrastructure, including the need to replace Washington's Woodrow Wilson Bridge, to immigration-induced population growth. Holding up Boulder, Colo.'s slow-growth zoning as a model for the nation, Beck doesn't seem to recognize that such upper-middle-class strategies collide with his populism, excluding less affluent native-born Americans, never mind struggling immigrants. Such strained arguments succeed only in reminding us that the environmental and population-control movements (not organized labor or advocates for the poor) have been important spawning grounds for anti-immigration activists.  Similarly, Beck goes too far when he argues for a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants admitted (down to 250,000 annually) and asserts that "legal immigration could be stopped with a simple majority vote of Congress and a stroke of the pen.

By Roy Beck

The forces in favor of reducing legal as well as illegal immigration roared into Washington like a speeding train last year. The momentum appeared to be unstoppable. Polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly favored reductions in the number of legal migrants. Support came from a bipartisan reform commission led by the late Barbara Jordan, from President Clinton and from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who introduced bills to change the current policy, which brought in 720,000 legal immigrants last year.

But in the last month, both houses of Congress rejected or sidetracked these reductions. In the end, almost nobody was for them – except the American people.

By contrast, Congress has managed to agree on some bars to illegal immigration. The Senate is expected to pass a bill this week that will beef up border enforcement and impose greater penalties on those who violate immigration law.

Puzzled Americans – fewer than 6 percent of whom support current policies, according to a Roper poll released in February – may wonder why Congress was able to take modest steps against illegal immigration but backed down from limiting the legal influx. People need look no further than the national organizations representing them.

Groups from across the spectrum – business, labor, liberal Protestants, the religious right, Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Hispanics, Republicans, Democrats – have been on Capitol Hill supporting the current legal-immigration system. Few issues have created such a gap between the views of the people and the actions of their leaders – who often go their own way when horse-trading in Washington.

Take business executives and professionals. The Roper poll found that they opposed the present high legal immigration levels by 11 to 1. But their leaders and trade groups like the National Association of Manufacturers have been as relentless in protecting the legal importation of foreign labor as the robber barons were a century ago. Well-connected executives – representing everything from agribusiness to computer engineering – flooded Washington to fight to maintain this loose labor marked, which has helped depress wages for American Workers for two decades.

The corporate lobby has been even more powerful than appears at first glance, as we saw after a key House vote on March 20. With a switch in only 28 votes, the House could have cut the continuing entry of citizens’ adult relatives, the largest source of cheap foreign labor. But both Mr. Clinton and the Christian Coalition sent last-minute declarations of opposition to the cuts.

The reason for the President’s reversal remains vague. But the Christian Coalition’s action was widely attributed to pressure from Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, who brought together a network of conservative groups. His tax group’s initially puzzling opposition became more understandable after the media disclosed that since February he has been a registered lobbyist for Microsoft, whose industry employs many immigrants.

And labor? The A.F.L.-C.I.O. legislative director, after meeting with immigrant labor leaders opposed to tighter rules on family reunification, joined the business lobby in urging Congress to defeat those provisions.

It was a strange way to represent laborers, native or foreign-born. Roper found that 58 percent of blue-collar workers want to cut the current level of legal and illegal immigrants to below a total of 100,000 a year. Only 2 percent of workers – and 4 percent of all Hispanic people nationwide – support today’s level.

But group after group in Washington seems to deny that many of its grass-roots members feel that mass immigration has hurt their wages, environment, schools and the social fabric of their communities. 

In fact, some members of Congress may be confused about what Americans want. Or perhaps lawmakers have decided that it is riskier to ignore lobbyists than to ignore voters.

In 1981, a bipartisan Federal commission on immigration warned that the public interest was being subverted by the lobbying of two groups – conservative business interests and liberal coalition of religious, immigrant and civil liberties organizations. The commission rejected arguments of those lobbyists about the need for high immigration levels.

Then, as now, Congress has listened to lobbyists more than public opinion. If Americans want a different immigration policy, they may need to challenge their own religious, economic and political organizations.

A good magazine piece combines the timeliness of a newspaper article with the distance and thought that comes from months of research.

An excellent example of this appears in the April Atlantic Monthly: "The Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau," by Roy Beck. The piece couldn't be more timely, considering the current firestorm over the proposal to curtail the benefits of illegal immigrants can receive.

Beck's piece explores the history of how Wausau, Wis., became an inadvertent Mecca for Southeast Asian refugees, particularly the Hmong people from Laos. The immigrant population has more than quintupled in the small city since 1978. With jobs scarce, 70% of the immigrants and their families receive public assistance.

Quite simply, the town feels overwhelmed by rising school taxes, gang activity and the cost of social services. Writes Beck, "The overwhelming emotion seemed to be sadness about a social revolution that the community as a whole had never requested or even discussed. While most residents spoke well of the immigrants as individuals, they thought the volume of immigration had crossed some kind of social and economic threshold."

Beck draws parallels between the current immigration situation and the tensions that emerged around 1910 in Wausau between German immigrants and the established Yankees. And, more ominously, he believes the troubles that beset Wausau will soon be played out across the nation.

By Scot Lehigh, Focus writer

The Immigration Bill working its way through Congress is a prime example of doing the popular at the expense of the necessary.  In focusing exclusively on stopping illegal immigration, lawmakers have avoided an issue at once more divisive and more fundamental: Can the United States afford to admit 800,000 to 1 million new legal immigrants every year?  

That question is directly linked to, but rarely discussed in conjunction with, the transcendent economic issues of the last few years: eroding wages, a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the plight of the American worker in an era of economic anxiety.  Instead, political pyrotechnics have overshadowed any rational discussion of immigration and its economic effects.  

A year ago, a bipartisan commission chaired by the late Texas congresswomen Barbara Jordan concluded that the nation's current high level of immigration contributed to the declining earnings of less skilled American workers.  In a nutshell, high immigration has hurt American workers by increasing the supply of unskilled labor, thereby depressing the wages American workers are paid - or displacing them altogether.

  The Jordan Commission proposed changes designed to phase down legal immigration from the current level - a yearly average of 773,000 from 1981 to 1990, some 1.1 million from 1991 to 1994 - to about 550,000 a year over five to eight years.  At the time, President Clinton offered lavish praise of those recommendations.  Then, in January, Jordan died, and with her passing, the commission's recommendations lost momentum in the face of heavy opposition from big business.  In March, Clinton flip-flopped, sending word to Congress that he no longer supported proposed reductions in legal immigration this year has been lost.  The most that will happen this year will be a heightened crackdown on illegal immigration, which totals an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people annually.  

But as journalist Roy Beck documents in his new book, "The Case Against Immigration," that's a misreading of history.  Only in the period from 1880 to 1924, the so-called Great Wave when immigration levels hit an annual average of 584,000 did yearly immigration consistently approach today's levels. After the Immigration Acion of 1924, the yearly average fell too 178,000.  Nor was a return to high immigration levels the intent of the Immigration Act of 1965, the law that established the basic framework for current policy...

The Real Immigration Issue: Economics

Although there remains sharp disagreement about the overall economic impact of immigration, a growing body of research suggests high immigration depresses wages for unskilled workers.  The dynamic is as simple as supply and demand.  With American experiencing only moderate economic growth, the nation's immigration policies have contributed to an excess of labor.  Loose labor markets, which see workers vying for jobs rather than employers competing for employees, always spell lower relative wages.  In tight labor markets, where employers must pay decent wages to keep workers, economic competition means more training and greater investment in equipment to increase productivity. Mistreated or underpaid workers have plenty of opportunities elsewhere, a reality that acts as a check on corporate behavior.  But the loose labor markets that-high immigration helps create lead to quite different behavior.  In his book, Beck documents the way employers have used cheap immigrant labor to slash pay or worsen working conditions in blue-collar jobs such as meat cutting, poultry processing and janitorial and agricultural work.  "High immigration rewards the most ruthless employers by making it possible to compete simply by reducing wages and worsening working conditions," Beck says.  By putting conscientious companies at a competitive disadvantage, "it punishes the kind of responsible corporate citizens Clinton and [Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Kennedy say they want more of."

... One particular group that suffers seems to be unskilled black workers, whose Beck found were disproportianately displaced by immigrant labor. Economist Marshall Barry, former director of applied research at Florida International University's Center for Labor Research and Studies, cites Florida's agricultural sector as an example. In 1970, for example, 88 percent of agricultural workers in Florida were U.S.-born blacks. Today, 80 percent are immigrants from Mexico, Haiti and other Caribbean nations.  Part of that dispute placement comes because immigrants are willing to accept lower wages than native workers. From 1967 to 1987, Florida agricultural wages, when adjusted for inflation, were halved, Barry said.  Beck and other specialists say part of the reason blacks suffer in particular is that discrimination too often consigns unskilled black workers to tie end-of the hiring line - and high immigration makes that line ever longer.  

A second group that suffers from present immigration is past immigrants struggling for an economic toe-hold. An economy that continues to shed the type of manufacturing jobs that once lifted non college-educated workers into the middle class only worsens the problem.  "The real question," says Beck, "is that, given that fact that wages are stagnating or depressed, does it really make sense to have a federal policy that exacerbates that trend by increasing the surplus labor supply?"

By Lolis Eric Elie, Staff writer

The thesis of Roy Beck's new book is a compelling one. He argues that the aims of the 1960s Great Society programs – the Was on Poverty, Medicaid, Affirmative Action, etc. – have all been undermined by one policy: liberal immigration laws. Beck's book, "The Case Against Immigration," is a forceful re-examination of the oft-held assumption that we should continue the open door immigration policy that has been in effect since the 1970s.  When I began the book I was inclined to support current policy. Having read it, I'm inclined to change my mind.  

What Beck seeks to demonstrate is that all American workers, no matter what color the skin on their backs or the collars on their shirts, are hurt by the importation of foreign workers.  He contends that immigration has not been ruled by a shortage of American workers. Rather, the availability of cheap, immigrant labor has expanded the appetite of employers to fire their own workers in order to save money.  In the chapter "Jobe Americans Will Do," Beck proves the falsity of the notion that Americans are unwilling to do the work that immigrants do. 

For example, Mexican-Americans, who share the language and much of the culture of immigrant laborers, are often passed over.  "Simply citizenship has become a liability for them (established Mexican-Americans)," according to a study Beck cites. "Their status as citizens affords them powers and rights that impeded the current 'efficiency' of the agricultural labor process;"  That 'efficiency' of the agricultural labor process."  That 'efficiency' is closely related to low pay and exploitive conditions, Beck notes.  And it's not just unskilled workers who are losing out to imported labor.  Beck cites the example of American International Group, an insurance company that fired 250 Americans and replaced them with freshly imported workers. The Americans could clearly do the work. In fact, they were told that they could receive their severance pay only if they trained their replacements. The problem was that the Americans, who were earning between $40,000 and $80,000 a year, were roughly twice as expensive as their replacements.  Beck dedicates two chapters specifically to the impact of immigration on African-Americans. He notes that during the low immigration period from 1940 to 1970 for example, "the black middle class grew from 22 percent to 71 percent!"  But by 1970 the current trend toward high immigration had begun. 

Black workers had the right to jobs previously denied them under segregation, yet that meant little since American employers were intent on using imported labor.  It is difficult to raise the issue of immigration without sounding anti-immigrant. Beck makes a point of stating that his book is not another tirade against illegal immigrants. Rather, it's about  those immigrants whom we recruit and encourage to come here for the specific purpose of lowering prevailing wages.  Like Beck, I have no sympathy for Pat Buchanan and David Duke and their ilk who oppose immigration in part bacuse they think it dilutes our Judeo-Christian traditions. Our traditions have always been multi-racial and multicultural.  But given the evidence of the harm being done to American society by the roughly 1 million immigrants who cross our borders legally each year, perhaps it's time we re-examined our policy.

By Aaron Bernstein

Immigration is a hotly debated topic these days, igniting passions and splintering political camps. Some liberals and unions agree with conservatives such as Pat Buchanan that immigrants take jobs from Americans. Other liberals see anti-immigrant sentiment as thinly disguised racism and agree with traditional conservatives that America's history of open arms contributes to the country's economic vitality.  All sides can lear from Roy Beck, Washington editor of The Social Contract, a strident quarterly that deals largely with immigration issues. Beck makes no pretense of objectivity as is clear from the title of his book. This sometimes leads him to hyperbolic extremes, as when he argues that America's environmental woes would have been solved by now but for the extra new people immigration has brought in. Beck also has a distracting habit of lapsing into leftish rhetoric.  Still, clear away the Bruch, and The Case Against Immigration presents a powerful view that has been ill argued by opponents of immigration and largely ignored by the other side. The numb of his case: Large immigration flows have a tremendous impact on U.S. labor markets. And the pain has been felt by the bottom half of U.S. workers, whose wages have declined for two decades. Meanwhile, employers have benefited from cheaper and plentiful labor.  True, all Americans gain to a degree, because many goods cost less. And affluent families an more easily afford nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers.  "Unfortunately," Beck writes, " the roster if immigration losers is much larger and includes some of America's most vulnerable citizens: poor children, lower-skilled workers, residents of declining urban communities, large numbers of African Americans."  Some prominent labor economists recently have come to similar conclusions. For years, most studies found that immigration had little impact on American jobs or pay levels. However, the studies usually looked only at a city or region. More recently, economists such as George Borjas of Harvard University have conducted national studies that found large impacts. Borjas and others conclude that immigration has been responsible for up to a quarter of the increased pay gap between high-andlow-skilled workers. And new arrivals may have been responsible for up to half of the collapse in the wages of high school dropouts sine 1973, other studies have found.  Beck also argues that immigration may play a role in overall U.S. wage stagnation. Sluggish productivity growth since 1973 has been a central factor in holding down pay. 

Beck presents a powerful argument that immigration hurts America's working poor.

However, productivity growth itself may have been affected by the surge in immigration that began in the 1970s. At the same time, baby boomers and women flooded the market, boosting the supply of labor. This held down the growth of capital investment per worker, sapping gains in efficiency. "Congress picked a terribly inappropriate period of U.S. history to be increasing the number of U.S. workers through immigration," Beck writes.  Unfortunately, Beck is so eager to castigate immigration that he sometimes undermines his own case. The book argues that the half-million annual average inflow of immigrants since 1965 is comparable to the 1880-1924 Great Wave, when nearly 600,000 newcomers arrived on average each year. (By contrast, 178,000 people entered annually between 1925 and 1965.0 But a half-million people represented nearly 2% of the workforce in 1900, whereas it's less than half a percent today. This doesn't invalidate Beck's points about the past 20 years. But skeptical readers may feel as if they're being taken for a ride even when they're not.  Skeptics can learn something about American attitudes toward immigration, too. Advocates frequently invoke this country's openness to newcomers and cite Emma Lazarus' poem at the Statue of Liberty welcoming the "huddled masses yearning to be free." "For all of today's dewey-eyed remembrances of 'tradition' and 'openness,' however, mass immigration always has provoked widespread, deep-rooted objections,' says Beck.  Indeed, France erected the Statue of Liberty in the 1880s to commemorate America as a shining example of democracy, not as a place of refuge, he points out. Not until 17 years later did friends of the obscure poet hang a plaque with her poem on the statue's base – where it joined many others. Subsequent media attention linked the statue and the poem and made them equally famous.  And, Beck points out, there is nothing new about basing objections to immigration on its effect on American workers. For instance, in the mid-1800s, California employers broke strikes with Chinese workers, who accounted for 25% of the state's workforce by 1880, Angry Americans lashed out with an ugly racial campaign that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For the nest four decades, anti-immigrant sentiment ws a constant in U.S. politics. Majorities in both houses of Congress voted to slow the Great Wave five times between 1897 and 1916, only to be vetoed by a President. The Great Wave finally was halted by legislation in 1924.  Today's immigration debate is as riddled with racial and nativist overtones as ever. Still, the labor-market impact of newcomers can't be ignored.

By James P. Pinkerton

Response to the Riverside incident is muted because both left and right agree that there has to be a crackdown.

The perversities of contemporary immigration law enforcement were captured by Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show" recently, when he kicked off his monologue "f rom Los Angeles, the videotaped beating capital of the world!" Commenting on the case involving Riverside County sheriff's deputies, the comic predicted that the beaten Mexicans will soon find their own version of the American Dream: "After they sue, they'll be rich!"  Even after videotapes of who appear to be unwarranted beatings were televised repeatedly, public reaction has been muted. Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, reports that the police, as an institution, rank extraordinarily high in public esteem. Cops rank second only to the military, ahead of religion, the presidency and Congress. They enjoy nearly double the esteem of TV news and newspapers.  Still, there is something – or some people – rotten in law enforcement.  The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, has shelled out $67.1 million in liability judgements in the past five years; the bulk of those payments resulted from instances of excessive force, false arrest or wrongful death. And that dollar total does not include the 158 lawsuits filed against the LSPD in 1995; those cases are in the judicial pipeline.  Yet the American people seem to have concluded that the police, for all their flaws, are – as cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh wrote a quarter-century ago – the new centurions, dangerously exposed atop the ramparts of American society. They are charged with the dirty and dangerous work – 76 were killed in the line of duty in 1994 – that the larder society doesn't want to deal with. So the scope of law enforcement keeps expanding. Illegal immigration is one of the major concerns. The Census Bureau estimates that 4 million undocumented aliens live in the U.S. today, and that number is growing rapidly.  Both left and right seem agreed: A crackdown is needed. Last year, Pete Brimelow, an editor at Forbes magazine, flailed newcomers in his book "Alien Nation," blaming them for lowering economic growth, worsening crime and jeopardizing public health. But that was just an overture to Pat Buchanan, who denounced "Zulus" and "Joses" for upsetting the ethnic ecology of America.

In "The Case Against Immigration," Roy Beck puts the argument in terms that liberals can relate to. The victims of immigration, he declares, include "poor children, lower-skilled workers, residents of declining urban communities, large numbers of African Americans."

MIT economist Lester Thurow, in his new book "The Future of Capitalism," describes immigration as a virtual force of nature, one of the "tectonic plates" shifting the global economic landscape. Around the world, 100 million live outside the country in which they were born: prospects for more human motion are increasing. What can we expect, Thurow wonders, when the standard of living in California is 20 times higher than that of Mexico? "The motive for immigration is partly the pull of being able to earn higher incomes in the First World," Thurow explains, "and partly the push of miserable conditions in the Third World."  Noting that "all across the developed world, anti-immigration movements are growing like mushrooms, "Thurow pops up with a tough platform of his own: a national ID card, random checks of those cards at toll booths and "high-voltage electrified fences" at the border.  Washington isn't ready to go that far. Just this week, the Senate's leading immigration hawk, Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) failed to get a vote on legislation that would have strengthened federal investigative powers, built more prison cells and streamlined deportations. President Clinton, always triangulating, has proved more adept at harnessing nativist passions: In the coming fiscal year, the administration has budgeted 600 more customs agents and 700 more Border Patrol members.  If the pressures underlying migration are a tectonic as Thurow asserts, though, it's not obvious that even dramatically harsher enforcement will work, at least not without a lot more Riverside-like incidents as byproducts. And so we come back to the police, doing more and liking it less, charged with enforcing more and more laws against more numerous and infinitely more violent criminals.

James P. Pinkerton is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.

By John Payne, Editor

While the topic of illegal immigration seems to resurface each election year, politicians and most other Americans continue to overlook the larger issue, author Roy Beck believes.  In his recently released book "The Case Against Immigration," Beck details how legal immigration into the United States is slowly crippling its economy, increasing racial and ethnic tensions and placing a heavy burden on the environment. For readers who skip ahead to the book's final chapter, in which Beck suggests appropriate levels of immigration, the author's views may seem radical.  In the preceding chapters, however, Beck lays a solid platform for his argument: a drastic reduction of immigration into the United States is needed if Americans are to maintain their current standard of living.  

"We tend to have a romanticized distorted view of immigration," Beck said in a telephone interview from St. Louis. "we say to ourselves: "Throughout our history, people who have opposed immigration were hateful people, racists. I want to be a nice person, therefore I cannot oppose immigration." There are many bigots who are against immigration. But there are also many legitimate people with legitimate reasons."  

In the preface to his book, Beck, whose work appears regularly in The Atlantic Monthly, identifies the winners and losers of U.S. immigration policy over the past 30 years.  Among the biggest winners, he says, have been the non-union, "new wave" of meatpackers like IBP, which were given a decided advantage over their unionized competitors when America renewed its open door immigration policy in 1965.  The rise of IBP, Beck contends, coincided with the great surge of immigration into the United States – which increased from about 230,000 annually prior to 1965 to more than 500,000 in the 1970s nd 1980s. In the 1990s, legal immigration has been running around 1 million a year.  By providing a virtually bottomless well of cheap labor, "Congress in 1965 inadvertently came to the rescue of the union-busting, wage-lowering strategy of the new meatpackers," Beck writes.  In researching his book, Beck visited Spencer in April of 1995, shortly after citizens had rejected efforts by Monfort to open a pork processing plant in the city. He also went to Storm Lake to talk to residents about how their town has changed since IBP took over the old unionized Hygrade plant.  The conclusion he draws is that the "former twins" of northwest Iowa have become very differenct cities, largely because Storm Lake embraced the new meatpacking industry – and its large immigrant workforce – while Spencer did not. 

Since 1981, Storm Lake has become a more economically stratified city, with a crime rate "four times higher than in Spencer."  "The most telling reason Spencer citizens gave for blocking the new (Monfort) jobs was: 'We don't want to become another Storm Lake," Beck writes.  In a chapter titled "Jobs Americans Will Do," he sets out to debunk what he calls the most common myth about immigration: The supposition that most immigrants are performing jobs that native-born Americans will not.  Every time somebody points to a job and declares that it depends on immigration because it is beneath an American to take,

 it is important to ask how that job became so unattractive," he writes." ...there may not be a sufficient number of Americans who would take them as they now exist because the pay and working conditions are so deplorable – the meatpacking industry being a notable example". "The reason the meat packing industry left Spencer, for example, was not because the people didn't want to do the work," he said, "Other circumstances were the cause – they were setting up these plants in other states where they were hiring primarily immigrants at low wages, so the company moved out."  Beck whose book tour has taken him throughout California and the Midwest, said Spencer has become a sort of "poster city" for small town that believe in self-determination.  "People are saying 'That's amazing – A town actually stood up and said no." It's not like Spencer Just said no to Monfort; Spencer said no to the federal government," he said.  

Though a considerable portion of the book is devoted to immigration's impact on the meatpacking industry, its scope is much greater.  Although immigrants tend to pollute the environment 'less than other American's they also emit more hydrocarbons into the air than they would in their native lands. Since the United States is the world's biggest polluter, it stands to reason that more. Americans means more pollution, Beck contends.  His chief argument against high immigration, however, is that it hurts black Americans more than any other segment of the population. High immigration, Beck says, "has eliminated the best friend black Americans had: a tight labor market."  "By bringing more immigrants, you make the line longer, and blacks have always been at the end-of-the-line," he says.  "Secondly, in some inner-city areas, a high percentage of businesses are owned or run by immigrants. Studies have shown that they hire primarily within their own ethnic group. When the do hire outside their ethnic group, they hire almost anyone but blacks. Whatever level of racism there is among white Americans, it's far higher among immigrants."  Advocating reduced immigration as away to combat racism in America is a tough sell, Beck admits. On the one hand, he says Pat Buchanan's "moratorium" on immigration – which would actually lower the annual influx from one million to about 225,000 – doesn't go far enough (Beck believes 0-100,000 is a more appropriate number.) 

On the other hand, the author says Buchanan's tone is often racist.  Of course, it's difficult to call for immigration reduction without being labeled a racist, a consideration Beck quit worrying about long ago, he said.  "I'm finding more and more that the 'racist-xenophobic' attacks aren't very hart to parry anymore," said Beck. "I think the key maybe is non-defensiveness. When you get attacked, and you're not used to be called a racist, you start defending yourself. And all of a sudden you end up looking more guilty."  Even worse, Beck writes "is the risk of inadvertently encouraging  somebody else to show hostility toward the foreign-born."  With that in mind, Beck says ha aimed o write a mainstream book about a topic that mainstream America isn't discussing openly.  "This is something, I hope, that thinking conservatives and liberals will have to look at and say, 'There's something that can't be dismissed as pure xenophobia," he said.  "The book is now about hostility toward immigrants, and I think people haven't realized that you can be both pro-immigrant and anti-immigration. I think that's one of the most important things this book has to offer."

By David Briscoe, AP Writer

America opens its arms to almost 1 million immigrants a year. Some economists, demographers and politicians think that it is time to stem the flow.

Recent polls also show that most Americans, including minorities, think that too many foreigners are allowed into the country. Scores of bills to revise immigration laws are pending in Congress. And several groups actively oppose current immigration policies.

Although ethnic organizations generally oppose tough curbs on immigration, many long-time black, Hispanic and other minority citizens are raising concerns because they see economic gains eroded by new immigrants who take low-paying jobs.

A poll in September by Time magazine and CNN showed that 73 percent of respondents favored strict limits on immigration. A Hisppanic research group's poll last summer showed that 89 percent of Hispanics surveyed supported a freeze on immigration.

"Everything we fight for ... is compounded and made worse by this question of immigration," said former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, referring to a long list of social, environmental and economic problems linked to population growth.

"If immigration, fertility and mortality rates remain unchanged, the United States population explosion will resemble that of the most chaotic of underdeveloped countries." - Roy Beck, editor of journal on immigration policy

An analysis of Census Bureau data by Leon Bouvier, a demographer, says the U.S. population - now about 250 million - would be leveling off at about 240 million early in the next century if all immigration had stopped in 1970. But if current immigration levels continue, it will reach almost 400 million by midcentury.

About 974,000 legal immigrants were accepted last year. Immigration officials estimated a year ago that 3.2 million illegal aliens lived in the United States. Estimates of net immigration each year range from 1.2 million to 1.5 million. Two-thirds of illegal immigrants come from North America.

About 40 percent of legal immigrants come from MNorth America, 36 percent from Asia, 15 percent from Europe, 6  percent from South America and 3 percent from Africa, the Immigration and Naturalization Service says.

"If immigration, fertility and mortality rates remain unchanged, the United States population explosion will resemble that of the most chaotic of underdeveloped countries," said Roy Beck, Washington Editor of The Social Contract, a quarterly journal dedicated to revising immigration policy.

Beck and Lamm were among speakers at a recent Capitol Hill briefing sponsored by the Federation for Immigration Reform, which supports 44 bills in Congress that would tighten immigration laws. A key measure would cap legal immigrants at 300,000 a year.

Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Monday that the Federation for immigration Reform was "maliciously trying to confuse illegal and legal immigration." He said that the rate of legal immigration was substantially lower than it was at the turn of the century and that many economists believe that immigration into the United States improves the economy. "Immigrants not only take jobs, they create the demand which forms jobs," Wattenberg said.

A participant in the briefing by the Federation for Immigration Reform, former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., said current immigration laws had caused an unfair impact on low-income blacks who have lost job opportunities in major U.S. cities because of the influx of immigrants willing to work for low pay. "It's a moral issue when it impinges on the poor in our country." McCarthy said.

Lamm said the immigration reform movement was not an anti-immigrant movement. "We have to make sure that people who are here become part of our community," he said.

With the vast majority of Americans having roots in other nations, most politicians laud the contributions immigrants make to the society. Human rights groups have raised the concern that an anti-immigrant backlash has led to discrimination and even violence against minority citizens.

Robert Dunn, economics professor at George Washington University,, said a reduction in immigration quotas should reduce ill feelings against immigrants already in the United States.

WASHINGTON - Every once in a while, some little and unassuming book comes out that rings so true that one has to take note. Roy Howard Beck's "On Thin Ice" is such a watershed book.

Beck is a top-notch religion reporter who is now Washington bureau chief of Michigan's Booth newspapers, and his story concerns what should have been his innocent years at the United Methodist Reporter, covering Protestant church news. Instead, his becomes the story of an honest young reporter discovering to his astonishment the way manipulative, extreme-left staffers in the mainline churches are using those churches.

Beck starts out as an honest, caring liberal. But soon he gets thrown into bizarre, falsely liberal cases of the churches being used for purposes never dreamed of by their members. 

First he finds himself covering a conference on South Africa, sponsored in part by his beloved Methodist Church, but run openly by communists and sympathizers. Then he is sent to cover a big "civil rights" case in Mississippi in which the National Council of Churches is promoting as a martyr to racial injustice a black hoodlum clearly seen as such by black Mississippians.

Finally, and most important, he is asked to examine the human-rights record of the National Council, the umbrella group of mainline Protestant churches. What he finds is devastating.

Noting that both Freedom House and Amnesty International find that the 36 nations with the worst human-rights records during the last five years were almost evenly split between right-wing and left-wing governments, Beck expects "a somewhat evenly divided set of actions showing concern for victims of communist and other Marxist governments ... and victims of military and semifascist governments."

Instead, he and his colleagues find that no fewer than four-fifths of the NCC's human-rights actions were related to abuses of people by right-wing governments. But they were given explanations.

"Confronted with our findings, many NCC staff people acknowledge that indeed a tilt existed," Beck wrote. "The reason, they explained, was that the U.S. government had more clout with the right-wing governments, and the United States itself sometimes was supportive of the repression. Thus, the NCC focused its pressure where it could achieve the most results - on its own government and allies."

Beck has trouble with that, as do I. "The tilt made the churches' human-rights work appear at times to be more of a political movement than a fulfillment of Christian ministry." he writes.

The staff problems, he writes, include an "amorphous organizational style" at the center of the mainline churches little accountability on the part of highly ideological "utopian leftist: staffers there who set the trends in church central offices (just as similar types do in Congress), and a high number of decent, "level-headed people who are all too easily led" by the ideological fashion-setters of the moment.

The church bureaucracies' responses to Beck's book (published by Bristol Books) have been disappointing. Methodist bodies have deliberately kept it out of church catalogs and periodicals. The circle of faith that should be open to God and to the search for truth has instead closed in on itself.

Personally, I identify with Beck and with the quest that his profession, in effect, imposed upon him. Still considering myself a Kennedy liberal, I have faced the same embittered criticisms when I have tried to deal honestly with extremes of utopian leftism and Marxism similar to the ones he found. I have heard the same cries that I had sold out to the right wing.

In answer, I would say that it is these staffers - these perfervid church cadres - who have sold out their search for truth to the fashionable "liberation movements" of the world, which include some of the most ruthless and immoral people I have ever met. They have also done un-Christian work in tilting political processes away from Christian support of the democracies and toward a hopeless leftism that Mikhail Gorbachev has himself rejected.

We desperately need the mainline Protestant churches today. We need them for forming moral character among out young and for again inculcating the original work ethic of this country.

How can we get back to that time and to that job? The answers will have to come from average, sensible American churchgoers. It is time they started asking a whole lot of questions.

Georgie Anne Geyer is a former foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.