Molly Ivins April 25

SAN DIEGO — The United States currently allows around 775,000 legal immigrants annually into our country. That's 0.3 percent of our population. But the number who actually come every year has been dropping. According to published reports, legal immigration has been dropping for four consecutive years.

The late Barbara Jordan, who headed the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, recommended that the number be dropped to 500,000, but since the number is going down anyway, there doesn't seem much reason for it.

We've always gotten more than we've given from our immigrants. How many stories have you read in the papers about high school valedictorians from Vietnam or Nicaragua? How many of you went to school with bright kids from Germany, Cuba or Asia? American physics is going to ride into the 21st century on the brains of the Chinese students who couldn't go back home after Tiananmen Square. Indian-Americans (not the same as American Indians) have worked their way up in the hotel business from mopping floors at motels to owning famous resorts.

Take a look around — Shalishkavili, Shalala, Soros, Giuliani, Pataki, Mikulski, Pena, Cisneros, etc.

Legal immigration works so well and is so little trouble that only an election year could have brought on the current blather about a three-year or five-year moratorium on it. Why?

"But they're taking our jobs." Oh, for heaven's sake. Korean grocery-store owners alone have created more jobs than there are immigrants. Legal immigrants arrive with money and/or skills and/or families here to take care of them. They are by definition folks with get-up-and-get.

This is such a tired old blame game. Who do we always pick on when something goes wrong in this country? Some marginal out-group that has no power. Welfare moms, illegal Mexican workers, gays and that old favorite, immigrants. I've got news for you: Haitian immigrants did not run the savings and loans in the '80s, Latin American immigrants did not shut down the defense industry in California, and African women who are afraid of genital mutilation are not in charge of the corporate mergers that have cost millions of Americans their jobs. We've got some real problems here, but they're not caused by immigrants.

Anti-immigrant sentiment in this country has always been racist, and it still is.

This is what the shrinks call displaced anger, and it's just as common as dirt. You see it all the time in families. Dad has a lousy day at work; the boss is on his case all day. He comes home and finds some excuse to clout the oldest kid on the head. You watch that kid. He's not big enough to hit his daddy back, so he'll go over and whack his kid brother on the head.

That's displaced anger, and you see it all the time in politics. Listen to Pat Buchanan inveigh against "Ho-zay," and you'll notice that those playing the blame game are so busy whipping up ill feeling that they don't even bother to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration.

Speaking of illegal immigration, in San Diego, just a pleasant stroll from Tijuana, the unemployment rate is 5.5 percent (below the national average), the economy is blooming, and the going rate for yardwork is $5 an hour or less. And you would be amazed at who hires Ho-zay to do the yardwork, all the while complaining vigorously about the terrible burdens imposed by immigration.

One could make an argument against immigration on environmental grounds (although you will notice that it's not Irish secretaries or French restaurateurs who are about to cut down the last great stand of redwoods on private property in California). Vanishing wilderness, polluted rivers, shrinking aquifers — there's no way to argue that immigrants help any of these problems.

But Professor Patricia Limerick of the University of Colorado, perhaps the best of the "new" Western historians, uses a telling analogy. Suppose you are in a lifeboat with room and supplies for 10 people, and there are only seven of you. Do you want to take on three more? Not if three of those already on board have all the food and water and are rapidly guzzling and chomping their way through it.

When you look at who is using up this country's natural resources at an unnatural clip, it's not poor immigrants who have two homes; it's not poor immigrants who have Connecticut lawns in Arizona; it's not poor immigrants who demand that the taxpayers subsidize their cattle operations by refusing to pay market prices for grazing permits on public land.

And if you are concerned about the vanishing resources on the lifeboat called Earth, you might want to have a chat with your Republican congressman about the wisdom of cutting off funds for international family planning programs. Just a thought.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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