With all the vitriol about immigration, what do you say we at least share some honest conversation about immigrants, whether legal or illegal?

First off, we are all, with the exception of Native Americans, immigrants. Some just got here earlier than the others. I guess late to the party makes you unwelcome.

The real issue is not about thugs, rapists or gang members. It is about the white population of the United States seeing the end to what they believe is their right of dominion.

The white race in the United States now constitutes approximately 61 percent of the 328 million population. The Brookings Institute projects whites will become a minority of 49 percent by the year 2045 and continue to decline from then on. It seems that projection is now much more optimistic (depends on your point of view of course) than many whites, particularly white Republicans, can stomach.

In the U.S., the current median age for whites is 43 and nonwhites 29. Do the biological math. Most child rearing is done by 43 and considered prime at 29. A report in the New York Times last week reported that in 26 of the 50 states, white deaths now exceed white births.

Here in Central and Eastern Oregon, over a third of our residents are over age 65, and natural population (births to deaths) is declining in most of our 20 counties. Combine that statistic with the continuing immigration from anywhere, and 2045 is starting to look more like 2035, and that is only 17 years away.

For many white Americans, this is a tsunami with no high ground. Rather than accept this inevitable event, and embrace the diversity that will make us in the end more tolerant, more successful and more human, Republicans are throwing up every roadblock they can to stop the flood.

So you can continue to remove legally registered voters from the rolls, as Ohio has recently done with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

You can gerrymander districts in every state to temporarily maintain your current hold on 33 governorships and state legislatures.

You can separate and foster U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants and deport their parents back to wherever, again as they did in Ohio just a week ago. You can build a wall (that can be scaled or tunneled under).

You can separate children at the border in order to frighten those who would immigrate here to save their families from the horrors and savagery of their own countries.

These very horrors created from the U.S. purchase and consumption of the drugs grown in those countries for export to the U.S. The horrors aided by the U.S. gun industry who unconscionably sell guns to whoever has the cash in these countries generated from drug sales to the U.S.

Yes, Republicans, you can do all this but, in the end, you will fail. Whites will become a minority. And millions of nonwhites will remember what you did to them. How do you think that is going to play out?

—Tim White lives in Bend