Arizona Seizes National Spotlight on Immigration

Today's Wall Street Journal has a penetrating front-page story on Arizona's immigration crisis and response:

Arizona is at the heart of what many say is the biggest, angriest storm over immigration to hit the U.S. in nearly a century.

Efforts to combat illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America are popping up across the state, fueled in part by an influx of immigrants of another sort: Americans from the North and East.

The collision of these two groups has helped turn Arizona into a laboratory for new ways to crack down on illegal immigrants. Employers here can lose their licenses if they hire undocumented workers. English is now the state’s official language. And the latest idea being floated in the state legislature would bar U.S. citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants.....

Immigration has become one of the most hotly contested issues heading into Tuesday’s presidential primaries. Arizona Sen. John McCain was an architect of the defeated U.S. Senate bill last year that included a guest-worker program and a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants. He is now the Republican party’s front-runner, but the issue has hurt his standing among some voters. Among the remaining Democrats, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton support comprehensive immigration reform....

Hostility toward immigrants has waxed and waned throughout U.S. history. At the turn of the 20th century, restrictionists denounced Italian and Eastern European immigrants as crime-prone, diseased and unable to assimilate. After isolationist sentiments flared during World War I, nativists in Congress pressured President Warren G. Harding into signing the first immigration Quota Act in 1921. The law effectively ended the open-door policy that had allowed millions of foreigners to settle in the U.S. in the previous decades. The National Origins Act of 1924 further stymied the flow, and the impact lasted for decades — the stanched flow of immigrants to the U.S. did not pick up again until the 1960s.

Today’s debate is partly a reaction to the fact that the U.S. is now home to more than 35 million immigrants, an all-time high in absolute numbers, scholars say. The density of the foreign-born population — almost 13% of the total — is approaching the 15% peak reached in the last massive wave of immigration from the 1880s to 1920s, according to scholars who study immigration. “In the last two years nativism has become as intense as it was during its last peak, the 1920s,” says Gary Gerstle, an immigration historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

The current wave of immigration has reached pockets of the country untouched by immigration for decades, and the fact that a huge number of the immigrants — 12 million — are here illegally further inflames passions.

Nationally, more than 1,500 pieces of legislation were introduced in state houses last year related to illegal immigration, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Coming from all but four states, 244 of them became laws — three times as many as were passed in 2006. Arizona is one of the top states in terms of enacted laws last year, with a total of 13. The proposals typically tackle employment, law enforcement, drivers’ licenses and public benefits. Many of them are facing legal challenges; others are yet to be enforced.

Here's another link to the article.

More than any other issue, immigration is driving the grassroots conservative backlash to John McCain's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

I've blogged quite a bit on immigration policy. I discussed the key crisis-issues in my earlier post, "John McCain, the Irrational Right, and the Politics of Immigration Control."

Also, for an argument on slowing down the flow of new migrants to the U.S., see Peggy Noonan's, "What Grandma Would Say."