I recently mentioned having just read Ken Galbraith's memoirs, A Life in Our Times (my reading list is a bit backed up; he wrote them 33 years ago), and today's news of Republicans' all too familiar punting on immigration reform reminded me of his thoughts on the general topic:
The practical evidence on its effect is overwhelming: West Germany, Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Miami and the Punjab of India have all had a large inflow of migrants since World War II. These areas are the economic success stories of this era. That such migrants, extensively selected by themselves for their initiative and by disaster for their strength, resource and ability to survive, should make a powerful contribution to economic development is hardly surprising. Many are made strong by the very act of migration intself. Had they remained at home in peace, they would have lived out their lives in the comfortable mental and physical lassitude that is praised as happiness and contentment.
Galbraith's was not a "liberal" view; it was merely a sober appreciation of non-ideological socioeconomics supported by empirical facts. Many conservatives of Galbraith's era still adhered to such quaintness of thought, yet conservatism's Southern surge was even then in the making--a surge which is, by now, complete. And that regional sweep explains much about Republicans' anti-immigration obsession. It's Old South.
Increasingly throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, white Southerners were model citizens of rank xenophobia. They first possessed their "peculiar institution" of slavery, which they traded in for Jim Crow--and neither, in their retro-opinion, which they believed was sanctioned by God, was ever meant to be contaminated by naysaying, external opinion. This conceit Southerners cultivated by culturally isolating themselves; even, in the antebellum era, to the radical extent of censoring the U.S. mails. Abolitionist opinion was threatening to the South's white way, hence Southern authorities simply cut it off.
In time, fear of the new became tradition. Outsiders in general were viewed with suspicion and dread, reactionary government became embedded, economic and especially industrial development was something only the North foolishly prized, socioeconomic desolation and widespread disease were the norm for blacks and whites, and thus the South wrapped itself in the "comfortable mental and physical lassitude that [it insisted on praising] as happiness and contentment." Foreigners and, it hardly requires adding, foreigners of color needed not apply.
There have over the decades emerged many New Souths: a move from the agrarian alone, non-unionized industrialization, improved racial cooperation, centers of actual higher learning and the like. Yet some of the old ways persist. And those ways, and their backward voices, are represented in Congress by today's utterly backward Republican Party--which still thinks the oppressive Old South was a white man's paradise.
No surprise the party resents empirical facts, on immigration and anything else.