— by Odysseus
Since the mid-term election drubbing received by the Democrats, there has been a great deal of talk about whether the now lamest-of-lame-duck presidents, President Barack Hussein Obama will seek to unilaterally change United States federal immigration laws on his own and outside the constitutionally-designed methods of legislation. It seems likely that the President seeks to continue a 40-year trend by which the United States’ immigration policy has weakened the country, rather than how it strengthened the country during the previous two hundred years. If the Republicans are to successfully oppose the President, they need to understand why and how this change has occurred and to be prepared to explain it to a torn public, which merely recognizes that something has gone wrong without understanding why.
The change in the impact of immigration has nothing to do with racial issues or even with direct ideological issues. It has to do with the changes that have occurred in the United States’ economic structure. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explained, you can either have an open immigration policy or a social welfare state, but you cannot have both at the same time. The American people need to hear this concept explained to them by their elected officials lest their gut feelings and reactions be turned into racism.
The typical arguments about immigration pit straw men arguments against each other. The shallowest arguments are the racial ones, decrying the national origins of this new wave of immigrants as compared to the national origins of previous immigrant groups. No serious person raises this argument on either side. The number of people who actually believe this argument is statistically insignificant. Those who defend open immigration policies by accusing their opponents of racial motivations are merely trying to demagogue and shut down any reasonable discussion of this important issue. Neither the racists nor the playground name callers should be heeded or their arguments repeated.
On a slightly more honest intellectual level, the two sides of the argument deal with the motivations of the immigrants themselves as a basis for their likelihood of being a positive influence on our society. One side’s argument, nominally the “conservative” side, is that previous waves of immigrants were motivated by a love of liberty and of America’s values as their reasons for coming here. While this may be true for some immigrants, the “left” side accurately responds that many previous generations of immigrants were primarily motivated by economic reasons. They came here seeking a better, more prosperous life than the one they could have hoped to achieve in their home countries. However, this commonality of economic motivation fails to address the changes in the political and economic structure of the United States since those previous waves of immigration took place. These disagreements can become deeply personal, as many of our political leaders come from families with immigration stories themselves. It is easy to generalize from the characteristics of one’s own family history of immigration to the immigrants of today, but this may be a fallacy.
The issue is further confused by the history of the political implications of past immigration. The Republican Party’s ranks increased by the waves of anti-communist immigrants during the cold war. Immigrants from Cuba and then Vietnam were mostly comprised of the educated and entrepreneurial classes fleeing from the incoming communist regimes. They continued their productive, freedom valuing lifestyle in the United States and became stalwarts of the Republican Party. Too many old Republicans are easily convinced that all immigrants will be the same hard working, law abiding, and productive immigrants of their past experience.
Existing immigration law still reflects these realities of the Cold War, and President Obama is exploiting the peculiarities of that period to achieve goals that are at odds with their anti-communist intent. To facilitate Cuban escape from their dictator Fidel Castro, Cuban exiles were granted legal status in the United States simply by arriving on the shores of Florida. This privilege was not extended to every former citizen of every foreign country on the planet. It was specifically set aside for the relatively small numbers of Cubans to encourage defection and help the United States’ ideological position during the Cold War.
Likewise, a more favorable immigration status was granted to refugees from Central America as part of the 1980s Cold War fight in that region. President Obama seeks to exploit this historical policy to encourage the arrival of children from Central America, rather than from Mexico, whose citizens do not enjoy this special historical exception. These lenient immigration laws existed to help America fight the Cold War, not to enable Obama to indulge his third world sympathies by attempting to radically transform America’s demographics.
Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) are both first-generation Americans whose families fled Castro’s Cuba. Other elected representatives in Congress or in the Senate may remember how their own family members fled Nazi Germany, Soviet communism or Ho Chi Minh’s communist Vietnam. They are naturally very reluctant to place new, restrictive immigration policies in place, recognizing the great cultural and economic boons that America has enjoyed by welcoming these immigrants. These liberty-seeking immigrants have been the backbone of American democracy for over 200 years. Each wave has refreshed our understanding of how precious our freedoms are, and they have fought valiantly to defend them, time and time again. No one can argue that an immigrant who comes to America because of his love of our ideals weakens our country.
The argument raised against this perception of the recent immigration wave is that the current immigrants do not seek to come to America for love of our liberty, language, and values, but, rather, merely for economic reasons. This view wrongly minimizes the value of previous generations of immigrants who came for economic reasons, as they have contributed entrepreneurs, settlers, farmers, and innovators, whose home countries were too ossified to allow them full development of their dreams and talents. By welcoming the industrious, the ambitious, and the innovators from around the world, America has received the benefit of other countries’ wasted talents.
Generally speaking, Senator Marco Rubio has been correct in pointing out how immigrants and an open immigration policy have, typically, strengthened America rather than weakened her. The difference between today’s immigrants and the immigrants of the past, that many of our legislators envision when thinking about our overall immigration policy, lies in the changes that have taken place here in America. The previous waves of immigrants came to America, expecting to be left to their own devices. America was known as a place where one would either succeed or fail, based upon his own skills, effort, and ingenuity. It takes a certain kind of individual to leave his homeland, his relatives, his friends, and his neighbors to travel to a faraway land that only promises to leave him to his own devices.
Previous waves of immigrants came to America because they so loved the idea of freedom that they were willing to take the risk of possible complete economic failure to gain it. Also, there were many who came for economic reasons because they saw America as the land of opportunity, where they could make it big, bigger than they ever could in whatever home country they left behind. However, both groups had to have tremendous courage and faith in themselves to make the trip and to prosper. Courage, self-reliance, and persistence are the gifts that immigrants brought. Obviously, this made them out-sized contributors to our society because they were self-selected for exactly the kind of people that we were looking for.
What has changed is the pervasive social safety net that America has erected since the 1960’s war on poverty. Even more so, what has changed has been the global realization that the social safety net exists. Milton Friedman warned both Europe and America, but they have failed to heed his warning, and are now suffering the dire consequences. Germany, France and Britain all sought to solve the demographic problems of their declining birth rates by loosening immigration standards. They thought that they could bring in foreign immigrants who would be happy with lower wage jobs that their own declining populations were unable to fill. After all, the wages and living standards in Western Europe, even for the lower classes, were so much higher than what the immigrants experienced back home.
Europeans observed the successful American immigration model and thought they could replicate it. However, the period that Europe implemented its new and more lenient immigration policies was after they had already implemented their cradle-to-grave social safety net. Germany, France, and Britain then experienced the problem of a having imported new citizens who were not the courageous, self-reliant, persistent, hard working immigrants that America had attracted throughout its history. Instead, they have imported a new poverty-level class of immigrants, who are happy to live on the subsistence level of the social benefits offered to them, and who, simultaneously, refuse to adopt the languages, customs, and culture of their new home country and integrate themselves into it. This is not because the immigrants come from inferior races or cultures than past immigrants, but, simply, because a pervasive social safety net invites not only the ambitious adventurer, but also the loafer who is looking for a free lunch. It is a very different thing to throw one’s door open to welcome any visitor when one lives on a mountain peak, which is only accessible by hardy souls after a dangerous, arduous climb than to do the same when one’s house is located next to a bus station.
Now, America, too, has a cradle to grave welfare state. If America and Europe wish to avoid economic and cultural suicide, they had best listen to Milton Friedman. If America and Europe wish to have an honest discussion about how to fix the comprehensive problems of their immigration policies over the past 40 years and to create something that is both fair and beneficial to their countries’ futures, this immutable aspect of human nature must be part of the answer. If our society does not naturally generate obstacles which discourage the importation of freeloaders, who do not share our values or a willingness to carry their own weight, then filters must be written into our immigration laws to separate the wheat from the chaff. Such legal filters are not, in any way, based upon race, religion, or national origin, but are desperately necessary to restore the intrepid character qualities that we welcome in our new neighbors.
Since we here at The Cassandra Times view all government-crafted social engineering as too tainted by the government’s incompetence, lack of foresight, distorted by political motivations, and shortsighted political and economic self interest to be successful in achieving its stated goals, we suspect that the more effective method would be to attempt the replication of the earlier natural filter on immigration. New immigrants should be barred from receiving any welfare benefits of any kind for a period of at least ten years after their arrival. Illegal immigrants should never be eligible to receive benefits of any kind, so long as they are in the country illegally, and for ten years following any achievement of legal status. Even a first world country like the United States cannot offer a guaranteed minimum standard of living to a world full of bare subsistence humans and not expect to soon lose its own living standards. A basic function of any nation-state is to secure its borders, culture, and language while protecting itself from a foreign incursion bent on eating out its wealth. No country in history ever has survived by welcoming foreign hordes. To prevent political chicanery, illegal vote casting by a foreign nationals should be made an offense resulting in mandatory deportation.
Comprehensive immigration reform is not a damnable idea, and, in fact, our immigration laws should be updated to reflect new world realities. However, these laws should be designed to re-create the immigration patterns that built the America that we know and love, not to be used as yet another subterfuge to fundamentally change it into some unrecognizable progressive socialist project. There are enough of those failed experiments around the globe that the United States does not need to become another.
