From Pine View Farm

A Nation of Immigrants 0

In my local rag, local activist Don Tabor outlines the fundamental racism underlying our immigration laws and argues that, if they want to come, let them.

Between our Civil War and World War I, our country grew by as much as 1 percent a year through legal immigration by the poor and oppressed of Europe. Many of us can trace our American story to that period. But in 1924, spurred by fears that the United States would be inundated with “inferior races,” such as Irish and Italian Catholics, and guided by the eugenics movement, the nation adopted immigration quotas based on country of origin.

The quotas essentially excluded Africans and Asians from immigration and limited Hispanics and Eastern and Southern Europeans to the point that in the 1920s and ’30s, legal immigration added less than 0.01 percent a year and has held growth by legal immigration to under 0.5 percent ever since.

In 1965, the blatantly racist quotas were abandoned in favor of more subtly discriminatory “skills-based preferences,” which accomplish pretty much the same results under a veneer of merit.

The capsule description of Mr. Tabor describes him as a Libertarian.* That means I probably disagree with many of his positions.

On this one, though, he’s got it right.

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*Libertarian: a Republican who is ashamed to admit it.

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