Open Immigration: Yea & Nay

Alex Nowrasteh, Mark Krikorian

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781594038211
• eBook ISBN: 9781594038228
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Immigration Law
• Index: Law

Open Immigration: Yea by Alex Nowrasteh Extensive immigration restrictions are an attempt by the U.S. government to centrally manage the demographics, labor market, and culture of the United States instead of letting those facets of our society develop naturally – as they have throughout most of history. Many objections have been raised against a return to America’s traditional free-immigration policy, but they are without merit and ignore immigration’s tremendous benefits.In this Broadside, Alex Nowrasteh explains how a policy of open immigration is consistent with America’s founding principles, the ideals of a free society, and the foundation of a free-market economy. Immigration restrictions should be based on protecting the life, liberty, and private property of Americans from those who are most likely to infringe upon them. A freer immigration system would not only be economically beneficial to the United States, but it would also be consistent with American values. Open Immigration: Nay by Mark Krikorian Immigration has always been an important part of America’s story. Over the past century, however, the United States has seen drastic changes – in government spending, the economy, technology, security, and assimilation – and the needs of the nation have changed. Mass immigration is no longer compatible with those needs. In this Broadside, Mark Krikorian argues that the federal immigration program needs to adjust to the realities of modern America by scaling back the number of newcomers who are allowed to settle in the country. While this doesn’t mean zero immigration, it does mean that we must evaluate and permit only the most compelling cases. What worked in the past will not work today, and our immigration policies must change in response to new circumstances.

OPEN IMMIGRATION: NAY

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

FOR THE PAST five decades, America’s immigration policy has been based on poetry. It needs, instead, to be based on prose.

Immigration is a federal government program, like farm subsidies or the Small Business Administration. As such, it must adapt in response to changing circumstances. What worked in the past may not work today.

Prior to the immigration-law changes shaped by Senator Edward Kennedy in 1965, the United States had experienced high levels of immigration in one period of its history: from 1848 (the year of the Irish potato famine and the suppression of revolutions in various European countries) to 1924, when Congress restricted immigration. This is a long time, to be sure, marked by major developments in our history, but only about one lifetime – before and after which our history is marked by other equally momentous accomplishments.

So immigration has been – and will continue to be – an important part of America’s story. We are, indeed, a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of pioneers, inventors, explorers, slaves, slaveholders, horse thieves, and teetotalers. No one facet of our national experience captures the totality of it, and no aspect of our past can dictate the shape of future policies.

Even John F. Kennedy, nominal author of A Nation of Immigrants, the book that helped his brother pass the 1965 Immigration Act, understood that policies have to change with the times:

We no longer need settlers for virgin lands, and our economy is expanding more slowly than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. … [My proposals] will have little effect on the number of immigrants admitted. … The clash of opinion arises not over the number of immigrants to be admitted but over the test for admissions.

Unfortunately, the changes passed in JFK’s name have roughly tripled the level of immigration, from about 300,000 a year during his administration to 1 million today. Thus, in the 21st century, we are running a 19th century level of immigration. The mismatch between our modern society and the horse-and-buggy-era policy of mass immigration is the subject of this Broadside.

***

Before exploring that mismatch, it’s important to outline the goals we seek for our society that might be affected by immigration. While there are obviously sharp differences over means, the broad middle of American society agrees on goals that the government should help cultivate – or at least not undermine. Among them:

➢ Physical security of our persons and property

➢ A strong sense of shared national identity

➢ Opportunities for upward mobility, especially for the poor, the less-educated, and generally those at the margins of the society

➢ The availability of high-wage jobs in knowledge-intensive, capital-intensive industries

➢ A large middle class, with a smaller gap between rich and poor generally being desirable

➢ A functional, responsible, and affordable system of social provision for the poor

Mass immigration undermines all of these goals.

But why should this be so? A century ago we permitted mass immigration, and it seems to have worked out. Putting aside the fact that mass immigration in the past was much more disruptive than we now remember, times have changed. The changes that distinguish a modern, mature society are hard to miss, and all of them – good or bad – point to the same fundamental break with the past.

In short, it’s not 1914 anymore. Some examples:

ECONOMY. A century ago, what economists call the primary sector of the economy (farming, fishing, hunting, herding, etc.) still employed more Americans than any other, as it had since the dawn of man. Today, only 2 percent of our workforce occupies itself in this way. Meanwhile, the tertiary sector (service industry) now employs 80 percent, and climbing, of working Americans.

EDUCATION. Along with the change in the economy, education has become more widespread. Nearly a quarter of American adults had less than five years of schooling in 1910; now fewer than 2 percent have that amount. And the share of college graduates increased tenfold, from 2.7 percent to 27 percent.

TECHNOLOGY. In 1915, the first transcontinental phone call from New York to San Francisco cost about $487, in today’s dollars, for three minutes; the same call in 2000 cost 36 cents; and today, via Skype, it is essentially free. In 1908, a Model T cost more than two years’ worth of the typical worker’s wages; a Ford Focus today (a much better car) costs about six months’ work.

GOVERNMENT. Total government spending (federal, state, and local) per person in 1900 was about $500 in current dollars; today it is about $18,000. All levels of government combined took about 8 percent of GDP in 1900; today the government takes 36 percent of GDP.

These and other changes have brought both benefits and woe, but modernization itself is irreversible. Whatever steps we take to accentuate the positive aspects of modern life and ameliorate the negative, the basic features of modern society are not subject to fundamental change. The developments briefly outlined above are inherent characteristics of a mature society; we cannot say that mass immigration would be fine if only we got rid of (fill in the blank), when what we fill in the blank with is an inextricable part of how we live today.

Mass immigration, despite all its difficulties, suited us during our national adolescence.

No one facet of our national experience captures the totality of it, and no aspect of our past can dictate the shape of future policies.

But maturity has changed our national metabolism, and what was once beneficial is now harmful.

As St. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Mass immigration is one of those childish things that we as a nation must put away.

THE BROKEN MELTING POT

The most important long-term measure of success in immigration is assimilation. The U.S. model of immigration has been based on turning immigrants and their descendants fully into Americans. This is unlike the experience of other countries, such as Germany or the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, and even our own historical lapses (the slave trade, the Know-Nothing movement, and the bracero program for Mexican guest workers), which all have one thing in common – the willingness to import foreign workers without admitting them to membership in the society.

This process of Americanizing immigrants was tumultuous and wrenching for everyone involved, but it was eventually very successful. This has been possible because American nationality is not based solely on blood relations, like a biological family, but is more like a family growing partly through adoption. Immigrants attach themselves to their new country and embrace the cultural and civic values of their native-born brethren as their own.

But this offer of complete adoption into the American nation was always based on the requirement that the immigrant “assimilates himself to us,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it. Such assimilation is more than the surface changes that are easily observed. Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it well in a 1915 speech, when he said that an immigrant is not fully assimilated until he comes to “possess the national consciousness of an American.”

This is what Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte calls patriotic assimilation – an identification with Americans as the immigrant’s new countrymen, “converting,” in a secular sense, from membership in one national community to membership in another.

Unfortunately, the conditions of modern society make such assimilation increasingly difficult. This is not because of any intrinsic differences between immigrants past and present: the simple fact that most immigrants now come from Latin America and Asia, rather than from Europe, is of less importance with regard to assimilation than some observers seem to think. Instead, it is we who have changed.

Our modern society differs from the past in two major ways that relate to assimilation – one practical, the other political.

The first difference is technology. Easy and cheap communications and transportation over very long distances make it easier for immigrants to maintain ties with the old country, making it less likely that such ties will atrophy over time and thus focus the attention and affections of the newcomer (and his children) on his new country. This can lead to what scholars call transnationalism – living in such a way as not to be rooted in one nation but rather living across two or more nations, with one’s emotional attachments similarly divided.

The desire to retain ties with family and friends back home is perfectly natural. But it was exceedingly difficult to act on in years past. Princeton University sociologist Alejandro Portes summed up the situation: “Earlier in the twentieth century, the expense and difficulty of long-distance communication and travel simply made it impossible to lead a dual existence in two countries. Polish peasants couldn’t just hop a plane – or make a phone call, for that matter – to check out how things were going at home over the weekend.”

But now they can. As a New York Times article put it: “Armed with cut-rate phone cards and frequent-flier miles, with modems, fax machines and videocameras, immigrants can participate in the lives of their families back home – be they in Barbados or Tibet – with an immediacy unknown to any previous generation.”

The second, and perhaps more important, difference relevant to assimilation is the political change from the past: elites in all modern societies, including ours, come to devalue their own nation and culture and thus recoil from the very idea of trying to assimilate newcomers. This loss of confidence expresses itself in an ideology of multiculturalism, which rejects Americanization and promotes a kind of tribalism, with ethnic-group membership defining one’s relationship to other Americans.

A century ago, the robust promotion of Americanization was a hallmark of all institutions, public and private, that immigrants encountered. The elites who run those same institutions today – in government, business, education, religion, philanthropy, journalism, etc. – might be most accurately described as post-American. They’re not necessarily anti-American, but they lack the visceral emotional attachment to the national community that is the mark of patriotism. Instead, they see themselves as “citizens of the world” and thus are unwilling to cultivate in immigrants the patriotism that they lack.

Note that this resistance to patriotic assimilation does not come from the immigrants. Today’s newcomers are no less or more interested in Americanization than their predecessors a century ago. Rather, it is America’s elites and institutions that are ambivalent – at best – about assimilation. And this ambivalence is not a superficial phenomenon that we can change simply with the passage of a new law; it is deeply rooted in every institution of our society.

Because of multiculturalism, schools today are utterly failing to pass on the history, heroes, and legends of our past. In fact, schools are

Mass immigration, despite all its difficulties, suited us during our national adolescence. But maturity has changed our national metabolism, and what was once beneficial is now harmful.

more likely to engage in a deliberate policy of de-Americanization, having become a battleground in a “conflict between those who want to transmit the American regime and those who want to transform it,” as John Fonte notes.

Research has actually documented our schools’ de-Americanizing effect on children from immigrant families. Sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut studied thousands of children of immigrants in San Diego and South Florida over a period of several years. When first surveyed, a majority of students identified themselves as American in some form, either as simply American or as a hyphenated American (Cuban- or Filipino-American, for instance). After several years of American high school, barely one-third still identified as Americans, the majority choosing an identification with no American component at all, opting for either a foreign national-origin identity (Cuban, Filipino) or a pan-racial identity (Hispanic, Asian).

As the authors sum up...

Table of contents

• Cover: Yea
• Table of Contents
• OPEN IMMIGRATION: YEA
• Cover: Nay
• OPEN IMMIGRATION: NAY
• The Broken Melting Pot
• Copyright