Immigration what's all the fuss?

• Author: McCorkle, Vern C.
• Position: From the Publisher

"GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE; THE WRETCHED REFUSE OF YOUR TEAMING SHORE. SEND THESE, THE HOMELESS, TEMPEST-TOSSED TO ME. I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR."

Bronze plaque, Statue of Liberty Bedloe's Island,* New York Harbor From the poem by Emma Lazarus, 1883 ** Statue a gift from the people of France ***

The fuss is not about race, ethnicity, language or place of origin. It is about economics! Alaskans, perhaps better than other states' residents, know about this kind of thing. Everybody here is an immigrant. Everybody.

Native Alaskans are fond of reminding non-Natives that they have been here for 10,000 years. While that may be true, they themselves came from elsewhere. The New World, later called North America, was an empty land before they and others came, and that's why they came-the place was empty. The Pleistocene Epoch with its continental ice cap melted, coincidentally, about 10,000 years ago. Mother Nature hates a void and soon filled it with the Navajo and Apache people who crossed the land bridge ('tis so) to fill the empty, ice-free continent, as did the Cree and Iroquois who emigrated from Newfoundland and New France, later called Canada.

Bringing this home to Alaska, where not unlike other states demographics are also in flux, the Census Bureau issued revised state-level figures at the end of 2005. They show that since 2000 Alaska lost about 4,600 citizens to other states in the Lower 48, but gained 5,800 newcomers from countries outside U.S. borders.

In the present situation, it is of little help to harp on cultural and ethnic differences. So your neighbor speaks another language.

Wise men teach it's the duty of every country to protect its borders, limiting immigration to numbers that don't negatively impact its work force, thereby protecting a stable middle class. The present chaos demonstrates that the U.S. gets...