If anyone doubts that bigotry is enjoying a Great Revival of its own in the United States, the spectacle of the past week’s “crass roots” banding up across the land to defeat what they called a “shamnesty” immigration bill in the U.S. Senate should kill those doubts. The bill was enormously problematic – except for the winding road to citizenship it gave some of the country’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. And that’s what killed it. The defeat is attributable to one thing: Americans don’t want more Mexicans and other brown-skinned people here.”These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” was how one Monique Thibodeaux, whose name suggests her American origins don’t quite date back to the Jurassic, summed it up in the Sunday paper.

These people. It’s as if the civil rights era never taught us anything. Welcome to Brave New America, where a nation of immigrants is re-engineering its once broad-hearted traditions to ape those of nativists, xenophobes and selective supremacists. It is, after all, the 75th anniversary of Aldous Huxley’s classic. “Progress is lovely, isn’t it?” as Lenina tells Bernard when the pair is, appropriately enough, traveling through New Mexico in the 26th century.

Let’s not look that far. By 2050, the population of the United States by one estimate is projected to reach half a billion. The 200 million increase is twice the current population of Mexico. Accommodating that many more people doesn’t seem to be the issue. More people means more consumers. In a nation that consumes more than it produces, and where two-thirds of the economy depends on consumption, immigrants are a double boon. They’re ready-to-work employees in whom the state doesn’t need to invest a cent in education dollars. And they’re ready-to-buy consumers. They also explain why the economy since the early 1980s, when this latest immigration boom started, hasn’t stalled. Immigrants, including – if not especially – undocumented immigrants, have been its saving grace (see fact box). Without them, the economy would collapse…

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