American opposition to the Obama administration and GOP establishment’s extremist immigration policies is boiling at an all-time high, a broad survey of polls shows.
Sixty percent of Americans are displeased with the current levels of immigration, according to Gallup—a decline from 72 percent in 2008, when the country plunged into a recession, but an increase of six percent from 2014. The majority of adults Gallup polled, 39 percent in a plurality, said they wanted to see immigration levels decrease. Gallup presents these numbers through a partisan filter as “fodder” for Republicans, discomforted as they are by the results.
According to Pew Research Center, 69 percent of Americans want to “restrict and control” immigration rates. That’s 72 percent of whites, 66 percent of blacks, and 59 percent of Hispanics. Pew frames its questions to suggest that minorities are being somehow oppressed in America, so the results are not only indicative of support for immigration control but also a rejection of the leftist narrative that the U.S. selfishly hoards its goodies from the world. (DREAMers are just breaking into the country for a better, more exciting life of murder and mayhem, you see.)
A nervous Reuters report, published before the historic 2014 midterm elections, found that support for reduced rates of immigration crushed support for an increase by a three-to-one margin, 45 percent to 17.
With reports revealing that foreign-born workers seized all newly-created jobs from 2000 to 2014, Americans sense that while low-skilled immigrants steal opportunities from Americans looking to enter the job market, highly-skilled immigrants imported on the cheap by businesses threaten to turn middle class professionals into commodities. Sixty-one percent of respondents polled by Princeton Survey Research Associates in June 2013 said we must restrict the number of highly-skilled foreign workers coming into the country, the same summer the Senate struggled to pass the Gang of Eight immigration bill to open the floodgates.
Perhaps the most stunning look at American resistance to mass immigration can be seen in a Polling Company study that revealed Americans believe businesses looking for workers should raise their wages rather than recruiting foreigners, 75 percent to eight. Across racial and political lines, respondents supported higher wages—with immigration restrictions, not minimum wage laws.
Also of concern are the waves of Muslims immigrating to America after the catastrophic September 11 Islamic terror attacks. Fully 49 percent of Americans believe that Muslims across the world hate the United States of America. Eighty-six percent believe that “radical” Muslims—for example, the Somali Muslims imported into Minnesota who leave to join ISIS—are a threat to the U.S., while only 34 percent believe we are “safer” after 9/11.
Such a broad swath of well-documented support for caps on immigration rates presents Republicans with an opportunity: Will they stake out a position against the extremist immigration policies that threaten America with demographic catastrophe? Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, uber-polite bête noire of the Left, has ditched his support for a pathway to U.S. citizenship for lawbreaking foreigners to endorsing a cap on legal immigration. (The all-American Igor Bobic is Not Happy about Walker’s new position.)
Republicans may have a tough time flipping the frame. As Sen. Jeff Sessions has noted, limitless immigration proponents rarely use numbers in their arguments for more, more, more foreigner workers, voters, and anchor babies being welcomed into the U.S.
There’s a reason for this. In the immigration debate, numbers are not treated as concrete realities, especially concerning illegal aliens. The number eleven million is a kind of Kantian predetermined category, a rough shorthand for “too many to grasp.” There’s as many as 20 million illegals squatting on our territory, but 20, being a multiple of 10, doesn’t have quite the same effect on perception as a constant order of magnitude.
We don’t have words in our liberal political vocabulary to describe the immensity of the human wave crashing into the United States and the unalterable changes it will inflict. To mass immigration enthusiasts, it’s a great thing, while to pro-Americans, it’s a terrible thing—but eleven million signals the same thing to both groups: Fundamental transformation of the United States.
Many Americans sense what’s taking place. The creeping feeling that debt is forever, isolation is permanent, and a reversal of our course is impossible silently corrodes public life until despair destroys the will of the people to assert themselves.
This has been true of us since before our country’s inception—as Gen. George Washington wrote in a 1787 letter: “It is among the evils, and perhaps is not the smallest, of democratical governments, that the people must feel, before they will see. When this happens, they are roused to action—hence it is that this form of government is so slow.”
The question remains whether unhappy Americans will be roused to action before becoming aliens in their own country or after the damage wreaked by the anti-American political elite is already done.
Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.
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