Andrew Adeola
America has traditionally been considered a melting pot, a mosaic of diverse cultures and people from different ends of the world with multicultural influences who nonetheless share a common interest in freedom and opportunity. This is the American value. This is the principle guiding the rush of American immigration, and it is as relevant today as it was a century ago.
The fourth of the Republican debates, hosted by Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, was one of the most policy-centered thus far, with matters such as immigration and fiscal issues coming to the fore. However, the right’s positions on these issues remain as predictable as always: tax cuts for the wealthy and strenuous immigration reforms leading to deportation.
The fact is, the demographics of this country are changing. Those who live in the United States today live in the new era of America. According to statistics from the Pew Research Center, without immigration since 1965, the United States today would be 75 percent white instead of 62 percent; the Hispanic population would be 8 percent of the nation, not 18 percent; and Asians would represent less than 1 percent of the national population instead of 6 percent.
These changes in population growth have an overarching implication for America’s politics regardless of whether we acknowledge it. Remaining impervious to the reality of its impeding consequences — particularly its impact on politics — is no justification for fostering ideologies that contradict a principle that has for so long buttressed the growth of the nation’s population and that has been a source of creativity and dynamism.
Political analyst David Brooks has gone so far as to predict that this presidential election cycle will be the last in which the Republican Party, “in its current form, has even a shot at winning the White House.” As defined by Brooks, a New York Times columnist, the question Republicans must ask themselves is: “Are we as a party willing to champion the new America that is inexorably rising around us, or are we the receding roar of an old America that is never coming back?”
The Republicans’ solution to the impact of evolving demography is to impose a preemptive undertaking aimed directly at weakening further expansions that threaten their party’s interests. For Donald Trump, this means deporting 11 million “outsider” immigrants and building a wall that keeps away threats against country and party interests.
I argued this point in an earlier column, and I will reiterate it: Trump’s campaign unequivocally divides his party at its seams with his contemptible and stinging commentaries. His incendiary remarks about immigrants of Hispanic descent have grown more polarized along racial and ethnic lines. Trump, like many of the Republican presidential candidates, appears to be out of touch with reality. The senseless rallying cry to “make America great again” is not reality. Deporting 11 million people is not reality. Building a fence along the southern border and holding Mexico monetarily responsible is not reality.
Breaking up families and separating mothers from their children are not echoes of the American values, and they do not embrace the principles and ideologies upon which this country was founded. This is America. Immigrant populations and their descendants have been a source of creativity, novelty and dynamism, paving the way to American innovation and progression. Tearing families and communities apart is not a solution — it is un-American.
