A Tired Immigration Debate
We don’t usually blog about the commercial breaks (we have to refill our Diet Cokes sometime, after all), but the anti-immigration ad that just aired provides a good opportunity to make a point I’d hoped to make during the earlier immigration discussion: Just like in the Republican debates, this discussion has focused, at least implicitly, on familiar (some might say tired) issues of low-skilled immigration from Mexico.
But as I wrote last year (and as Pew noted in a report last month), immigration has changed far more than the public conversation around it. The U.S. now gets more immigrants each year from Asia than from Latin America. Unauthorized immigration has slowed dramatically. And new immigrants are increasingly well-educated.
One of these days, the debate will catch up to the reality.