Good evening. This is Lee Fong. I'm your host of System Update.

Glenn is out this week and I'm filling in. For the last 10 years, the politics of immigration

have become more extreme and more predictable. The left wave signs claiming refugees welcome here,

while the right rejoices over Trump's promises to lead the greatest

deportation in American history. What is all too often left out of the conversation is the root

cause that brings millions of people into this country. The biggest factor left unsaid on cable news

and in our mainstream political discourse is economics.

Big business interests push our politicians to allow a flood of immigration into this country

as an attempt to bring down wages and find more vulnerable workers or less likely to agitate

for unions or better work conditions.

I don't mean to say that business interests

are the only concern or only factor involved in this debate. For the left, there are genuine

and persuasive arguments that some immigrants are fleeing intolerable situations in their home

countries, war, devastation, discrimination, and violence,

and there are many genuine asylum seekers coming to this country. The right, meanwhile,

will point out that immigrants strain welfare budgets and at times threaten social cohesion.

Republicans are quick to point this out and they have a point.

Meanwhile, many conservatives forget that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants

and those claiming to be, quote, heritage Americans have ancestors who were treated poorly by nativists of the past. We forget that many of the Irish,

Polish, German, Portuguese, and Italian waves of mass migration in the 19th century were met

with lynch mobs and xenophobic violence, often from bigots who claim that Catholic or non-Anglo

immigrants were incompatible with the American identity.

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