Title: Why Americans Think Immigration Hurts the Economy
Headings: Why Americans Think Immigration Hurts the Economy
Why Americans Think Immigration Hurts the Economy
Content: Illegal immigrants used to be clustered in a handful of big states, like California, Texas, and New York. But in the 1990s, they began dispersing en masse, chasing jobs in the remote reaches of the country. As a result, California's share of the undocumented population dropped from 42 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2008, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. A group of 28 fast-growing states, such as North Carolina and Georgia, more than doubled their share, from 14 percent in 1990 to 32 percent in 2008. Natives in those areas had barely any experience with undocumented immigrants, and they felt overwhelmed by the sudden change. The once distant debate over illegal immigration was now bubbling up in the heart of their communities. In a new book, "Brokered Boundaries," Douglas Massey and Magaly Sánchez cite research showing that such rapid demographic change tends to trigger anti-immigrant sentiment when it gets entangled in inflammatory political rhetoric. They argue that in the past several decades, a "Latino threat narrative" has come to dominate political and media discourse. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan began framing immigration as an issue of "national security," they write. In the 1990s, the image of the immigrant-as-freeloader gained wide circulation.