LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The Dec. 6, 2010 editorial, which Mr. Marinos accuses of ‘reflecting opinions and conclusions based on very faulty and erroneous assumptions,’ was not intended to serve as a treatise on American immigration policy since 1924 – the year Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, nor was it intended to proliferate hatred or racism. It was intended to reflect the opinions of an editorial board who felt Texas legislators would not be acting in the best interests of Texans by enacting state immigration laws. Immigration laws, really, are the purview of the federal government.
The Immigration Act of 1924 established the quotas to which Mr. Marinos refers and were especially unaccommodating and discriminatory to immigrants from Asian countries. These quotas, however, were enacted within the last century. The Southern Poverty Law Center discussed immigration myths in its spring 2011 Teaching Tolerance. “For about the first 100 years, the U.S. had an ‘open immigration system that allowed any able-bodied immigrant in.’” In the years since, however, the U.S. has allowed immigrants to enter from different nations at different points throughout its history based largely on its need for skilled labor.
Mr. Marinos’ statement “The immigrants then learned our language, studied for citizenship, worked hard, paid taxes and accepted no entitlements unless they were destitute; not today’s picture,” is not only unabashedly vitriolic, but also inaccurate. What Mr. Marinos is referring to is called assimilation. It is the process by which a group takes on the cultural traits of a larger group. And, due largely to education and media, immigrants today both assimilate and learn to speak English much more quickly than “the immigrants of yesteryear.” “The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world,” said professor William Denevan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in S. Dale McLemore’s Racial and Ethnic Relations. McLemore also notes that the American Indian population declined from at least 2 million to one-eighth of that. Today, American Indians have among the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in the country.
We appreciate feedback to our work and encourage educated, reasoned discourse – it is after all what democracy is built upon. We stand by our assertion that state laws do little, if anything, to prevent illegal entry into the United States.
Corey Benson, Carla Bradley, Dana Lizik
Editors emeriti
