Alan Greenspan Quotes
I would be very distressed if we were to try to shut our doors to immigration in this country. I frankly don't envisage that happening, but I understand that there's always that tendency on the part of people who are here who, having come here four generations earlier, want to shut the door. And I don't think that's a good idea.
Alan Greenspan, Chairman, Federal Reserve Board, Testimony, House Financial Services Committee
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
When he became a national candidate, he flip flopped and modified this position to accommodate the strong anti-immigration preference of most of the Republican right wing base.
The party is a neo-Nazi party for who, race was a major issue.
He was referring to North African and other third world immigrants. France’s second largest ethnic group had become Muslims from North Africa. But they were only 10 percent of the population.
He was reacting to the protests and riots of Islamic immigrants who had become a significant minority of France coming mostly from North Africa—especially the former French Colonies where French was spoken and the French educational and legal system were in effect. France, traditionally, has been one of the most open countries to immigrants and minorities however the unwritten cultural norm was that the immigrant would always identify first as a Frenchman, and adopt French language, manners, values and customs. Unlike the United States or Canada where immigrants could easily maintain most of their values, cultural traditions and languages, France required more assimilation to succeed. The Muslim immigrants at the turn of the millennium were not as malleable as other French immigrant groups especially with respect to the treatment of women and the freedom of expression that has always been so valuable to the French. The combination produced misunderstanding, discrimination and far less economic opportunity than other groups of immigrants had previously.
It was on this date that for the first time in American History, the number of minority babies born was greater than the number of majority--white, non Hispanic—babies.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. He wanted a uniformity of assimilation and not diversity.
Alan Greenspan is an American economist who served five terms as the 13th Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position (behind William McChesney Martin).
