In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Dowell Myers outlines the key demographic changes in immigration patterns and the bold changes in our approach to both legal and illegal immigration policy that they should precipitate.
Myers, a professor in the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, identifies the startling shift in immigration patterns of the last two decades: "the total number of immigrants, legal and illegal, arriving in the 2000s grew at half the rate of the 1990s, according to the Census Bureau. The most startling evidence of the falloff is the effective disappearance of illegal border crossers from Mexico, with some experts estimating the net number of new Mexicans settling in the United States at zero."
According to the author, the effect is that, "we must shift from an immigration policy, with its emphasis on keeping newcomers out, to an immigrant policy, with an emphasis on encouraging migrants and their children to integrate into our social fabric. "Show me your papers" should be replaced with "Welcome to English class."
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