Immigrants and Immigration - Roy Becks The Case Against Immigration :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Roy Beck's The Case Against Immigration One of the more remarkable aspects of the continuing debate over American immigration policy is that the nation's liberal elites seem, ever so gradually, to be finally catching up with the people. For years opinion polls have shown that a large majority of the American people, of all political persuasions and all ethnic backgrounds, want less immigration. Yet year after year immigrants continue to flood across our borders as "opinion molders," elected officials, business executives, and professional eggheads insist that mass immigration is really beneficial and its dangers are much exaggerated by "nativists" and "racists." Only in the last couple of years have a few books been published that dissent from that view, and the appearance of these books, published by major New York houses, suggests that the elites are finally beginning to grasp what uncontrolled immigration means for the people and the country they rule. What began as a popular protest against elite policies and preferences has now started influencing the elites themselves, even if the elites still like to imagine that they thought of it first. Roy Beck's *The Case Against Immigration* is the most recent example of a book published by a major publisher that challenges the conventional wisdom about immigration (Peter Brimelow's *Alien Nation,* published last year, was the first), and although Beck has been actively engaged in the movement to restrict immigration for some years, he has done so as a card-carrying liberal. A former newspaperman in Washington, DC who has been deeply involved in the social activism of the Methodist Church, Beck has seen firsthand what immigration means for ordinary Americans, not only underclass blacks but also middle and working class whites. His book is an exhaustive documentation of the evil consequences that immigration is causing for these groups as well as for the nation as a whole. Beck's liberalism, however, is by no means of the polemical or partisan variety, and the impression that his book gives is that he is a man deeply and genuinely concerned about the injustices endured by the real victims of immigration. He avoids most of the cultural arguments against immigration that conservatives tend to use, his main concern focusing instead on the economic effects of immigration on workers and on the social consequences for those Americans whose jobs