According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 503, 104 people have naturalized this fiscal year, meaning this Fourth of July will be their first as citizens of the United States. While this ought to be a proud moment for them, the anti-immigrant movement accuses them of destroying their adoptive country. As the nation prepares to celebrate its birthday, it’s worth taking a look at just how little faith the anti-immigrant movement has in its survival. 
Of course, there is nowhere better to start than with Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), and its firebrand founder, William Gheen. A “nation-destroying amnesty” is among the milder epithets thrown by Gheen at the path to citizenship currently before Congress. Of citizenship supporters, Gheen has charged nothing less than treason.“Those of us at ALIPAC monitoring the national media have known that Sean Hannity has been an embedded asset for the Globalists for a long time now,” Gheen said in a post that was quickly scrubbed from his site before it was re-posted by Imagine2050. “But the fact that this nation and freedom destroying cabal is exposing their deep assets like Hannity shows they are putting all their chips on the table for this new amnesty assault on the borders and citizens of America!” Other apocalyptic visions of Gheen’s are of the “ethnic cleansing of Blacks” and of a president who is concocting a plot to destroy “White America.”
Gheen is certainly not alone in being concerned with the demographic destruction of the United States. Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), writing in the white nationalist Social Contract Journal, an essay titled “Grand Delusions – Open Borders Will Destroy National Identity,” Mehlman said that “If the social bonds that hold the nation together are shattered, we will become slaves to destiny instead of masters of it. When people no longer believe that their nation and their society is loyal to them, social order will inevitably break down.”
In a piece titled “Why Amnesty Will Destroy America – Immigration and Occam’s Razor,” Michael Cutler writes that “We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hangs [sic] in the balance.” Cutler is a former Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and a current Senior Writing Fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization.
Few would argue that allowing more people to naturalize would shatter the social bonds of the United States. In fact, ensuring that as many people as possible have full and equal protection under the law ought to support social cohesion, not undermine it. That is, of course, only true if you aren’t trying to exclude a specific group of people from being part of this country; in that case, you want to undermine their rights as much as possible.
Joe Miller, who is running for the Republican nomination for Senate in Alaska, has made even bolder, if not more indirect claims about how immigration will destroy the country he hopes to help govern: “As Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America has recently observed, making such individuals citizens will hasten the demise of the Second Amendment, a concept wholly foreign to many illegals who came here not for constitutional freedoms, but for the dollar.” The Gun Owners of America recently weighed in against immigration reform, calling it an “anti-gun amnesty.” Miller, using the same language as Gheen, claims that the bill is a “globalist-inspired approach” that should be rejected.
Despite the sky-is-falling messages from the anti-immigrant movement that are poisoning the debate, immigrants are not going to destroy the United States. Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and supporter of immigration reform, argues that it has always been a source of strength. “Historically, the U.S. identity as a nation of immigrants has been one of our best competitive advantages,” he said last week in an op-ed to the Indianapolis Star. “Now that the Senate has acted on reform, the country has an opportunity to build on this strength.” Enjoy your Fourth of July, especially is this is your first as a citizen. If you are fighting for your chance to become one, you know now who not to let stand in your way.