Nativist vs. Immigrationist
by Comparing Nativist and Immigrationist opinions on the issue of immigration in the United States.
- Immigrants take the boring and low paying jobs that most natives would not want anyways
- Immigrants are good people in search of a better life
- People have the right to live in whatever country they want to
- Immigrants don’t cause more crime; there would still be crime even if they weren’t here
- Immigrants own many small businesses
The Nativist versus Immigrationist argument has not changed much since the 1900’s. The Nativists believed that immigrants were isolating themselves and that they didn’t belong here, and they still believe that now. The Immigrationist argument hasn’t changed much either, but does from time to time as Nativists come up with new things to blame on the immigrants. There have always been many degrees of Nativism and Immigrationism, so that has not changed either. I think that most Nativists still do not believe in immigration, but some of them have realized that it is more beneficial to compromise than to argue.
I am neither a Nativist nor an Immigrationist, I fit in somewhere in between. I believe that immigration should be controlled, but I do not think that immigrants are a bad. There is a point where it gets to be a “too much a good thing” situation. Immigration is a good because it brings in diversity and workers, but when there are too many immigrants, you are faced with huge numbers of cultural groups who isolate themselves and natives who are jobless. I think that if the number of immigrants had controlled from the very start, we would not be having a problem in today’s world. In order to control the number of immigrants, we do not have to discriminate against a certain country or ethnicity, we simply should say that “first come first serve” and whoever immigrates here first, will be allowed to live here. At the start of each year they could come up with a number, based on availability of resources and population, and that would be the allowed number of immigrants for that year. All in all, immigration is a valuable and beneficial thing, but like anything else, it has to be controlled in order to remain useful.
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