Untangling Immigration's Double Helix

Wall Street Journal: Arizona’s new immigration law is only the latest in our nation’s long history of conflicted feelings about the undocumented among us.

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin described the influx of German immigrants who were moving into Pennsylvania as "a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion." The effect, he warned, was that "even our Government will become precarious." Those words could have been written yesterday about Hispanics. The issue of immigration has long troubled Americans. Arizona’s new law, which gives police the power to detain those they suspect of being illegal aliens, is only the latest chapter in centuries of intermittent efforts to slow immigration, or stop it altogether. Yet mixed with those doubts has been endemic ambivalence: the tension between the need of a huge unsettled continent for people to clear land, work factories, fields and mines, and build canals and railroads, and the fear of what those workers would bring.