Immigration or the Welfare State?
Which Is Our Real Enemy?
RON UNZ • POLICY REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 1, 1994 • 4,100 WORDS • 6 COMMENTS • REPLY
Immigration has recently become a lightning rod for America’s deepest fears of social chaos and national decline. Millions worry that immigration is rapidly transforming America into a third-world country, with crowded, violent cities, under-educated and low-skilled labor, and an ethnic spoils system replacing America’s tradition of constitutionalism and individual rights. Concerns are rising that immigrants are abusing the generosity of our welfare state, and will become an enormous burden on taxpayers. And because a large number of immigrants are Spanish-speaking, many Americans fear that continued immigration, especially from south of the border, will result in the balkanization of our country into different language and ethnic groups, ultimately leading to the sort of social tensions afflicting countries from Canada to Ukraine to, in the worst case, Bosnia.
These are legitimate concerns, but the problems that Americans rightly fear are not due to immigration itself, but to the wrong-minded social policies of our government. State-sponsored affirmative action, bilingual education, and multiculturalism are promoting dangerous levels of ethnic group tensions and conflict. And our welfare system is breeding pathological levels of crime and dependency–not primarily among immigrants but among native-born whites and blacks.
A country in which 22 percent of white children and 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock need not look to immigrants as the source of social breakdown. The underlying problems are government policies whose emphasis on group rights promote ethnic tensions and a welfare state that encourages individuals to destroy their own families.
https://www.unz.com/runz/immigration-or-the-welfare-state/
