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U.S. Policy on Asian Immigration (cont'd)
2) If we assume that the native birth rate holds steady and that the current level of immigration continues at about 750,000 per year (this is roughly the total "legal" immigration consisting of immigrants and refugees for the past few years), the population of the U.S. in 2080 will be about 301 million.
3) These factors suggest that fully one-third of the U.S. population in 2080 will consist of migrants entering the U.S. after 1980 and their descendants. Given current patterns, only a small proportion of these new migrants will be European.
All of this has not been lost on those who formulate immigration policy in Washington, D.C., where pressure has been growing for many years to revamp immigration law and policy. The latest impetus began with Jimmy Carter's effort in 1977 which focused upon the "problem" of undocumented or "illegal aliens" in the U.S. work force by proposing sanctions against employers who knowingly hire such workers. To be sure, this was not the first such proposal: The House of Representatives had voted for such legislation several times, but it never made it through the Senate. The sweetener in the Carter package was a proposed "amnesty" for those undocumented people already in the U.S. as of a certain date, which was designed to make it easier for liberals and Hispanics to accept the employer sanctions proposal. They did not, but instead joined forces with employer interests to defeat the Carter package by calling for more study of this very knotty and complex situation. What we got, then, was the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. This commission did draw a lot of attention from immigrant communities as well as from many other constituencies and interest groups, and it also took the heat off of Congress for a couple of years. Its recommendations incorporated the Carter proposals with an added kicker of a "secure" national identity system to ease the burden on employers of identifying who is and who isn't entitled to work.
Debate has raged over the years of just what the impact will be upon communities whose members look foreign and sound foreign when they speak, should an employers sanction provision be enacted. Few have seriously opposed the argument that the impact on Hispanics and Asian/Pacifics will be great that employers will tend to shy away from hiring or will at least more closely scrutinize brown and yellow applicants for work. What defenders of the national identity system argue is that such a system will reduce the negative impact on Asian/Pacifics and Hispanics by giving us a positive means of establishing our legitimacy, thus removing any ambiguity. Taken in