The long arc of the immigration story has gotten us here, literally.  Yet on one hand, the demographic and economic forces which are structural in nature and in place have led to the assertion of immigration as a population change agent.  Immigration, as it has always, is adding to the population of the country and changing it in the process.

On the other hand, the countervailing sentiment is also asserting itself, so that states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas are leading the equally natural anti-immigrant reaction.

Demographic duels between peoples are as old as the Scriptures and the hills.  The great stories of the ancient times are often cast in religious terms, such as the wandering of the Jews looking for a home.  The sacking of Rome by “barbarians” centuries later resulted in part from a demographic upheaval in the northern reaches of the empire.  The Moors thrust a whole people across a sea to Spain.  Our movement from our original birthplace in great Africa is a compendium of endless such struggles.

Most of these experiences in human history are natural, in the sense that they are the result of the movements of people, though not like the practice of enslavement that transported individuals forcibly to places where they otherwise might not have gone.  But slavery, too, — which continues today – in the end rearranges the demographic components of a population.  And hate is not an absent component.  Whole swaths of the Jewish population were transported out of existence – and gave rise to another installment of demographic turmoil in the Middle East.

And, as is also natural, the reaction of individuals to these movements most often and most brutally occur at the local level, so that people are uprooted and dehumanized by poorly written laws like Alabama’s recent attempt to resolve a problem that exists more in its mind than in actuality.  Now the law has to be redone by its authors and Arizona’s anti-HispanicLatino laws are being reviewed by federal judges, with Georgia’s not far behind and Indiana’s undemocratic voter registration-identification law barely mustering court approval and a similar law in Texas also being branded problematic – all the while tearing at the unity the nation needs to survive.

None of this should be this way, of course.  The federal government – trying to meet its responsibilities – is now going to attempt to address a very large management problem by giving local federal agents and administrative judges more discretion – a move that is going to accomplish two things: 1) Generate more ill will between groups as local officials misapply the law according to their own personal views and 2) delay the day when the nation fully and truly accepts the unmistakable and undeniable fact that without immigrants the country over the course of time will die.

Immigration and the laws trying to manage it should be about one thing: Issuing identification to individuals who are not citizens and who are not criminals so that they can work under a time-limited basis.  In my mind, having observed the demographic changes underway in the country for decades, I have thought always that two five-year periods of work without any unlawful transgressions automatically would qualify an immigrant for citizenship.  I have long thought so in the hope that the number of people who would become citizens would tick up the national population replacement rate in light of the naturally and rapidly-declining Anglo population, which is facing demographic collapse.

Such an approach would factor out the local anti-immigrant reaction.  Indiana would not have to limit the voting rights of its current citizens.  Alabama could go on being its desperate self.  Arizona would not need Joe Arpaio, so far this century’s Bull Connor.  And states like Georgia across the Union could concentrate on their most important calling: To educate their populations to be able to compete against the world economically instead of waging war against workers toiling in the fields for little more than $7 an hour.

In the end, immigration is a national security interest.  That is its true nature.  Local laws should not take precedence over the greater and higher national concern of maintaining a slightly growing population so that the country is not completely overwhelmed by the billion-population nations that are harnessing their collective production power to leave us in the dust.

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