Long Past Time To Scrap Hart-Celler And Insist Immigrants Assimilate
Our immigration regime is a relic of 1960s liberalism, based on the fatuous notion that anyone from anywhere can become an American.
One of the stubborn realities hanging over all our immigration debates - whether about ICE arrests and deportations, asylum reform, border security, even H-1B visas - is that America today has a sclerotic immigration regime whose basic structure and premises were set down 61 years ago in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965... Hart-Celler is one of the most destructive laws ever passed in this country, and we will never solve our immigration problems until we get rid of it.
Hart-Celler replaced a system based on national origins that favored immigration from Northern and Western Europe, the so-called National Origins Formula devised in the 1920s, with one based on family reunification and employment needs in certain industries. The practical effect of this change was... reshaping the demographics of the country in a single generation - despite the insistence of Hart-Celler's authors that it would do no such thing.
But at the heart of the legislation was an assumption that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were no more desirable than immigrants from... anywhere else. In essence, the new law codified an assertion of multiculturalism...
[Today] Even the concept of remigration (that recent immigrant arrivals, legal and illegal, must go back to their own countries) is gaining traction - even in the Trump White House...
No surprise then, that this week two Republican congressmen, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, introduced a bill called the Assimilation Act... to "GUT the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, as well as scrap provisions of the Immigration Act of the 1990s. The goal of this bill is simple: end replacement migration and ensure American cultural cohesion."...
... immigration without assimilation is national suicide, and it's long past time we had an immigration system that recognized that.
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