Immigration limitation

California is being transformed by “massive illegal immigration,” says one fifth-generation resident. In neighboring Arizona, residents have formed armed militias to patrol the Mexican border.

From Maine to Iowa to North Carolina, small-town residents are protesting what many call an “invasion” of immigrants. And some warn that terrorists are taking advantage of U.S. immigration policy.

One recent poll showed that 85 percent of Americans consider illegal immigration a “serious problem.” That poll, conducted in March by Roper ASW, found that two-thirds of Americans would support reducing legal immigration to fewer than 300,000 newcomers a year, less than a third of the 1 million who came to the United States in 2002.

Immigration seems to be a concern everywhere except Washington, where — except for the 66 members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus — neither Republicans nor Democrats appear interested in tackling the issue.

“How many people in America want to be called a racist?” Victor Davis Hanson says, when asked why politicians avoid the immigration issue. He answers his own question: “Not very many.”

Being called a racist has been a new experience for Mr. Hanson in the two months since he published “Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.”

A professor of classics at California State University at Fresno, Mr. Hanson is a military historian who says he reluctantly agreed to write a book about illegal immigration at the urging of his publisher.

He credits a “strange alliance” of special interests with stifling popular unrest about immigration.

“You have the power of the employers that have a lot of money — meat-packing, restaurant business, agribusiness, hotels, construction. They like to have a perennial supply of cheap labor, all the better if it’s illegal and it won’t be able to organize or advocate for higher wages,” Mr. Hanson says in a telephone interview.

“They’re in alliance with the race industry on the left, [who] want a nonassimilated constituency. You put the two together and the people in the middle get drowned out.”

Mr. Hanson, who will be the featured speaker at a forum on immigration today at the National Press Club, says defenders of the status quo distort the issue.

“The way the political climate is, the issue is never illegal immigration. It’s always portrayed as one is against immigration per se, or is against a particular ethnic group,” he says. “So when you try to talk about the need for legal, measured immigration, it’s easy to caricature you as a nativist, a protectionist or whatever.”

A decade ago, U.S. immigration policy was debated widely — 59 percent of California voters approved Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative that limited public benefits for illegal aliens. But both President Clinton and Congress ignored the immigration reforms proposed in 1994 by a commission.

Since then the only significant attempt to change U.S. immigration policy was a 2001 Bush administration proposal to extend amnesty to some illegal aliens from Mexico. That plan was dropped after the September 11 terrorist attacks made immigration a national-security issue.

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