There is something interestingly compelling about the connection between the ongoing tide of illegal Hispanic immigration and the natural born citizen law (if you are born within the United States, you are automatically a citizen), that all of the sensational television and radio pundits, both liberal and conservative, aren’t mentioning and deliberating in the interest of the American public and good government. This prevailing undeclared nexus is, simply, that they go hand-in-hand, that the federal law stating that, regardless of the status of parentage, anyone born within the U.S. is an immediate citizen is a strong inducement and incentive for continued illegal immigration.
“Washington Examiner” columnist, Steve Chapman’s commentary on Wednesday, January 2, 2010, is an excellent example of a, supposedly, bright knowledgeable pundit deliberately not getting to the heart of a salient social problem, and law enforcement issue, due to the effect of political forces readily undermining truth and logic. Chapman’s statement that, “Xenophobes might fear that expanding legal immigration would produce a big jump in the foreign-born population. That’s unlikely because in this realm, the paradoxical often prevails,” was hardly a cogent reflection of current demographic reality. Nonetheless, I am pretty much assured that quite a few of the voting-age citizen population, those in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and others who frequent the Internet, were attracted to Chapman’s message, and swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. Unfortunately most of these federal, state, and local voters who read Chapman, and other commentators like him, on a daily, or weekly, basis don’t really understand the social science underlying their assertions and postulations, especially that of mathematical population studies, known as demographics.
It is not a well published fact that demographics, the statistical social science dealing exclusively with population analysis, is not normally taught in American high schools unless it is briefly mentioned by teachers in elective AP statistics courses. Even then, very little heuristic application of the science’s mathematical processes is taught to those aspiring high school students. An individual must go on to university study in the field of applied statistics or pursue the specialized study of demographics in order to understand and use the formulaic mathematical science. A PhD degree-level political scientist is not even required to successfully complete a graduate, or undergraduate, course in demographics or applied statistics in order to qualify for the advanced degree. Because of the foregoing facts, probably less than 15 percent of the U.S. population understands demographics well enough to know whether a political commentator is telling them the truth about a socio-political population projection or analysis. The talking heads who regularly present news and commentary about social and political issues on CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, public television, and in the newspapers, don’t usually know the first thing about demographic computations. While they talk like they know about the facts and figures underlying their representations, they are, in most cases, merely reading scripts prepared by someone else, whose knowledge of demographics might actually be quite dubious.