Graham panders to fringe

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) should be ashamed. Pandering to a rising nativist fervor by suggesting repeal of birthright citizenship, he aims his faux indignation at the babies who can help his country regain its competitive edge.

With sinking birthrates and longer life spans, much of the industrialized world grows grayer every day. But, as several economists have noted, the United States has an advantage: We're still having babies. Some of them are born to women without papers. Rather than change the law and kick them out, we should celebrate them.

In The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, Joel Kotkin forecasts that the United States will prosper because the country will "maintain a youthful, dynamic demographic" through "a resourceful stream of ever-assimilating immigrants."

In 2007, Graham supported a path to citizenship, declaring, "We're not going to scapegoat people. We're going to tell the bigots to shut up, and we're going to get this right." Last month, however, he took up with the right-wing fringe, which would reverse tradition and rescind long-held principles in order to reject illegal immigrants and their children.

"Birthright citizenship I think is a mistake. ... We should change our Constitution and say, 'If you come here illegally and you have a child, that child's automatically not a citizen,"' Graham told Fox News last month.

Opponents of birthright citizenship claim that pregnant women penetrate our borders illegally just to "drop a child" - as Graham crudely put it - who will enjoy the rights of U.S. citizens. There's little evidence for that claim.

According to a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center, about 8 percent of the babies born in the United States in 2008 - 340,000 out of 4.3 million - had at least one parent who was here illegally. The study's authors also disputed the claim that most of those parents were recent arrivals. More than 80 percent of mothers had been here more than a year - and more than half five years or more.

Many of their children consider themselves full- fledged Americans. They speak English, earn good grades and hope to attend college. They're like metro Atlanta's Jessica Colotl, who has attended Kennesaw State University, or Maryland's Yves Gomes, who hopes to go to the University of Maryland.

Both Colotl and Gomes were brought here illegally as children, but they are among the upwardly mobile young folks who underscore one of this country's virtues - its tradition of assimilation. As Kotkin writes, "In the next decades the fate of Western countries may well depend on their ability to make social and economic room for people whose origins lie outside Europe."

In a time of layoffs, foreclosures and crippling household debt, Americans tend to become less generous and more resentful. Illegal immigrants didn't cause the recession, but are easy to blame.

Political leaders, though, have a responsibility to lower the temperature rather than raise it, to trade in facts rather than stereotypes. So I'm disappointed in Graham.

Surely, he's aware of the demographic trends elsewhere. Surely, he understands that the nation needs younger workers to fund his retirement and pay his Medicare bills.