|
March 2002 Issue
Immigration: a Cause of the Clash of Civilizations . . .Or a Solution To It? Patrick Buchanan vs. Ben Wattenberg In 1821, a newly independent Mexico invited
Americans to settle in its northern province of Texas—on two conditions:
Americans must embrace Roman Catholicism, and they must swear allegiance to
Mexico. Thousands took up the offer. But, in 1835, after the tyrannical General
Santa Anna seized power, the Texans, fed up with loyalty oaths and fake
conversions, and outnumbering Mexicans in Texas ten to one, rebelled and kicked
the tiny Mexican garrison back across the Rio Grande.
Santa Anna led an army north to recapture his lost
province. At a mission called the Alamo, he massacred the first rebels who
resisted. Then he executed the 400 Texans who surrendered at Goliad. But at San
Jacinto, Santa Anna blundered straight into an ambush. His army was butchered,
he was captured. The Texans demanded his execution for the Alamo massacre, but
Texas army commander Sam Houston had another idea. He made the dictator an
offer: his life for Texas. Santa Anna signed. And on his last day in office,
Andrew Jackson recognized the independence of the Lone Star
Republic.
Eight years later, the U.S. annexed the Texas
republic. An enraged Mexico disputed the American claim to all land north of the
Rio Grande, so President James Polk sent troops to the north bank of the river.
When Mexican soldiers crossed and fired on a U.S. patrol, Congress declared war.
By 1848, soldiers with names like Grant, Lee, and McClellan were in the city of
Montezuma. A humiliated Mexico was forced to cede all of Texas, the Southwest,
and California. The U.S. gave Mexico $15 million to ease the anguish of
amputation.
Mexicans seethed with hatred and resentment, and in
1910 the troubles began anew. After a revolution that was anti-church and
anti-American, U.S. sailors were roughed up and arrested in Tampico. In 1914,
President Woodrow Wilson ordered the occupation of Vera Cruz by U.S. Marines. As
Wilson explained to the British ambassador, “I am going to teach the South
Americans to elect good men.” When the bandit Pancho Villa led a murderous raid
into New Mexico in 1916, Wilson sent General Pershing and 10,000 troops to do
the tutoring.
Despite FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, President
Cárdenas nationalized U.S. oil companies in 1938—an event honored in Mexico to
this day. Pemex was born, a state cartel that would collude with OPEC in 1999 to
hike up oil prices to $35 a barrel. American consumers, whose tax dollars had
supported a $50 billion bailout of a bankrupt Mexico in 1994, got gouged.
The point of this history? Mexico has an historic
grievance against the United States that is felt deeply by her people. This is
one factor producing deep differences in attitudes toward America between
today’s immigrants from places like Mexico and the old immigrants from Ireland,
Italy, and Eastern Europe. With fully one-fifth of all people of Mexican
ancestry now residing in the United States, and up to 1 million more crossing
the border every year, we need to understand these differences.
1. The number of people pouring in from Mexico is
larger than any wave from any country ever before. In the 1990s alone, the
number of people of Mexican heritage living in the U.S. grew by 50 percent to at
least 21 million. The Founding Fathers wanted immigrants to spread out among the
population to ensure assimilation, but Mexican Americans are highly concentrated
in the Southwest.
2. Mexicans are not only from another culture, but
of another race. History has taught that different races are far more difficult
to assimilate than different cultures. The 60 million Americans who claim German
ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still
not full participants in American society.
3. Millions of Mexicans broke the law to get into
the United States, and they break the law every day they remain here. Each year,
1.6 million illegal aliens are apprehended, almost all of them at our bleeding
southern border.
4. Unlike the immigrants of old, who bade farewell
to their native lands forever, millions of Mexicans have no desire to learn
English or become U.S. citizens. America is not their home; they are here to
earn money. They remain proud Mexicans. Rather than assimilate, they create
their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines. They are
becoming a nation within a nation.
5. These waves of Mexican immigrants are also
arriving in a different America than did the old immigrants. A belief in racial
rights and ethnic entitlements has taken root among America’s minorities and
liberal elites. Today, ethnic enclaves are encouraged and ethnic chauvinism is
rife in the barrios. Anyone quoting Calvin Coolidge’s declaration that “America
must remain American” today would be charged with a hate crime.
Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, author of
The Clash of Civilizations, calls migration “the central issue of our time.” He
has warned in the pages of this magazine:
If 1 million Mexican soldiers crossed the border,
Americans would treat it as a major threat to their national security.... The
invasion of over 1 million Mexican civilians...would be a comparable threat to
American societal security, and Americans should react against it with
vigor.
Mexican immigration is a challenge to our cultural
integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.
Yet, American leaders are far from reacting “with vigor,” even though a Zogby
poll found that 72 percent of Americans want less immigration, and a Rasmussen
poll in July 2000 found that 89 percent support English as America’s official
language. The people want action. The elites disagree—and do nothing. Despite
our braggadocio about being “the world’s only remaining superpower,” the U.S.
lacks the fortitude to defend its borders and to demand, without apology, that
immigrants assimilate to its society.
Perhaps our mutual love of the dollar can bridge
the cultural chasm, and we shall all live happily in what Ben Wattenberg calls
the First Universal Nation. But Uncle Sam is taking a hellish risk in importing
a huge Diaspora of tens of millions of people from a nation vastly different
from our own. It is not a decision we can ever undo. Our children will live with
the consequences. “If assimilation fails,” Huntington recognizes, “the United
States will become a cleft country with all the potentials for internal strife
and disunion that entails.” Is that a risk worth taking?
A North American Union of Canada, Mexico, and the
United States has been proposed by Mexican President Fox, with a complete
opening of borders to the goods and peoples of the three countries. The Wall
Street Journal is enraptured. But Mexico’s per capita GDP of $5,000 is only a
fraction of America’s—the largest income gap on earth between two adjoining
countries. Half of all Mexicans live in poverty, and 18 million people exist on
less than $2 a day, while the U.S. minimum wage is headed for $50 a day. Throw
open the border, and millions could flood into the United States within months.
Is America nothing more than an economic system?
Our old image is of Mexicans as amiable Catholics
with traditional values. There are millions of hard-working, family-oriented
Americans of Mexican heritage, who have been quick to answer the call to arms in
several of America’s wars. And, yes, history has shown that any man or woman,
from any country on the planet, can be a good American.
But today’s demographic sea change, especially in
California, where a fourth of the residents are foreign-born and almost a third
are Latino, has spawned a new ethnic chauvinism. When the U.S. soccer team
played Mexico in Los Angeles a few years ago, the “Star-Spangled Banner”
was jeered, an American flag was torn down, and the U.S. team and its few fans
were showered with beer bottles and garbage.
In the New Mexico legislature in 2001, a resolution
was introduced to rename the state “Nuevo Mexico,” the name it carried before it
became a part of the American Union. When the bill was defeated, sponsor
Representative Miguel Garcia suggested to reporters that “covert racism” may
have been the cause.
A spirit of separatism, nationalism, and
irredentism has come alive in the barrio. Charles Truxillo, a professor of
Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico, says a new “Aztlan,” with Los
Angeles as its capital, is inevitable. José Angel Gutierrez, a political science
professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the UTA
Mexican-American Study Center, told a university crowd: “We have an aging white
America. They are not making babies. They are dying. The explosion is in our
population. They are shitting in their pants in fear! I love it.”
More authoritative voices are sounding the same
notes. The Mexican consul general José Pescador Osuna remarked in 1998, “Even
though I am saying this part serious, part joking, I think we are practicing La
Reconquista in California.” California legislator Art Torres called Proposition
187, to cut off welfare to illegal aliens, “the last gasp of white
America.”
“California is going to be a Mexican State. We are
going to control all the institutions. If people don’t like it, they should
leave,” exults Mario Obledo, president of the League of United Latin American
Citizens, and recipient of the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Former
Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo told Mexican-Americans in Dallas: “You are
Mexicans, Mexicans who live north of the border.”
Why should nationalistic and patriotic Mexicans not
dream of a Reconquista? The Latino student organization known by its
Spanish acronym MEChA states, “We declare the independence of our mestizo
nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before
all of North America…we are a nation.” MEChA demands U.S. “restitution” for
“past economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural
psychological destruction and denial of civil and human rights.”
MEChA, which claims 4,000 campus chapters across
the country, is unabashedly racist and anti-American. Its slogan—Por la Raza
todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.—translates as “For our race, everything. For those
outside our race, nothing.” Yet it now exerts real power in many places. The
former chair of its UCLA chapter, Antonio Villaraigosa, came within a whisker of
being elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2001.
That Villaraigosa could go through an entire
campaign for control of America’s second-largest city without having to explain
his association with a Chicano version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation
proves that America’s major media are morally intimidated by any minority that
boasts past victimhood credentials, real or imagined.
Meanwhile, the invasion rolls on. America’s
once-sleepy 2,000-mile border with Mexico is now the scene of daily
confrontations. Even the Mexican army shows its contempt for U.S. law. The State
Department reported 55 military incursions in the five years before an incident
in 2000 when truckloads of Mexican soldiers barreled through a barbed-wire
fence, fired shots, and pursued two mounted officers and a U.S. Border Patrol
vehicle. U.S. Border Patrol agents believe that some Mexican army units
collaborate with their country’s drug cartels.
America has become a spillway for an exploding
population that Mexico is unable to employ. Mexico’s population is growing by 10
million every decade. Mexican senator Adolfo Zinser conceded that Mexico’s
“economic policy is dependent on unlimited emigration to the United States.” The
Yanqui-baiting academic and “onetime Communist supporter” Jorge Casteñada warned
in The Atlantic Monthly six years ago that any American effort to cut back
immigration “will make social peace in…Mexico untenable.... Some Americans
dislike immigration, but there is very little they can do about it.” With Señor
Casteñada now President Fox’s foreign minister and Senator Zinser his national
security adviser, these opinions carry weight.
The Mexican government openly supports illegal
entry of its citizens into the United States. An Office for Mexicans Abroad
helps Mexicans evade U.S. border guards in the deserts of Arizona and California
by providing them with “survival kits” of water, dry meat, Granola, Tylenol,
anti-diarrhea pills, bandages, and condoms. The kits are distributed in Mexico’s
poorest towns, along with information on where illegal aliens can get free
social services in California. Mexico is aiding and abetting an invasion of the
United States, and the U.S. responds with intimidated silence and moral
paralysis.
With California the preferred destination for this
immigration flood, sociologist William Frey has documented an out-migration of
African Americans and Anglo Americans from the Golden State in search of cities
and towns like the ones in which they grew up. Other Californians are moving
into gated communities. A country that cannot control its borders isn’t really a
country, Ronald Reagan warned some two decades ago.
Concerns about a radical change in America’s ethnic
composition have been called un-American. But they are as American as Benjamin
Franklin, who once asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English,
become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us
instead of our Anglifying them?” Franklin would never find out if his fears were
justified, because German immigration was halted during the Revolutionary
War.
Theodore Roosevelt likewise warned that “The one
absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all
possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to
become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
Immigration is a subject worthy of national debate,
yet it has been deemed taboo by the forces of political correctness. Like the
Mississippi, with its endless flow of life-giving water, immigration has
enriched America throughout history. But when the Mississippi floods its banks,
the devastation can be enormous. What will become of our country if the levees
do not hold?
Harvard economist George Borjas has found no net
economic benefit from mass migration from the Third World. In his study, the
added costs of schooling, health care, welfare, prisons, plus the added pressure
on land, water, and power resources, exceeded the taxes that immigrants pay. The
National Bureau of Economic Research put the cost of immigration at $80 billion
in 1995. What are the benefits, then, that justify the risk of the balkanization
of America?
Today there are 28.4 million foreign-born persons
living in the United States. Half are from Latin America and the Caribbean, one
fourth from Asia. The rest are from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. One in
every five New Yorkers and Floridians is foreign-born, as is one of every four
Californians. As the United States allots most of its immigrant visas to
relatives of new arrivals, it is difficult for Europeans to be admitted to the
U.S., while entire villages from El Salvador have settled here
easily.
• A third of the legal immigrants who come to the
United States have not finished high school. Some 22 percent do not even have a
ninth-grade education, compared to less than 5 percent of our
native-born.
• Of the immigrants who have arrived since
1980, 60 percent still do not earn $20,000 a year.
• Immigrant use of food stamps, Supplemental
Security Income, and school lunch programs runs from 50 percent to 100 percent
higher than use by the native born.
• By 1991, foreign nationals accounted for 24
percent of all arrests in Los Angeles and 36 percent of all arrests in
Miami.
• In 1980, federal and state prisons housed
9,000 criminal aliens. By 1995, this number had soared to 59,000, a figure that
does not include aliens who became citizens, or the criminals sent over from
Cuba by Fidel Castro in the Mariel boat lift.
Mass emigration from poor Third World countries is
good for business, especially businesses that employ large numbers of workers at
low wages. But what is good for corporate America is not necessarily good for
Middle America. When it comes to open borders, the corporate interest and the
national interest do not coincide; they collide. Mass immigration raises more
critical issues than jobs or wages—immigration is ultimately about America
herself. Is the U.S. government, by deporting scarcely 1 percent of illegal
aliens a year, failing in its Constitutional duty to protect the rights of
American citizens?
Most of the people who leave their homelands to
come to America, whether from Mexico or Mauritania, are good, decent people.
They seek the same freedom and opportunities our ancestors sought.
But today’s record number of immigrants arriving
from cultures that have little in common with our own raises a question: What is
a nation? Some define a nation as one people of common ancestry, language,
literature, history, heritage, heroes, traditions, customs, mores, and faith who
have lived together over time in the same land under the same rulers. Among
those who pressed this definition were Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who
laid down these conditions on immigrants: “They must cast off the European skin,
never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than
backward to their ancestors.” Woodrow Wilson, speaking to newly naturalized
Americans in 1915 in Philadelphia, declared: “A man who thinks of himself as
belonging to a particular national group in America has yet to become an
American.”
But Americans no longer agree on values, history,
or heroes. What one half of America sees as a glorious past, the other views as
shameful and wicked. Columbus, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and
Lee—all of them heroes of the old America—are under attack. Equality and
freedom, those most American of words, today hold different meanings for
different Americans.
Nor is a shared belief in democracy sufficient to
hold a people together. Half the nation did not even bother to vote in the
Presidential election of 2000. Millions cannot name their congressman, senator,
or the justices of the Supreme Court. They do not care. We live in the same
country, we are governed by the same leaders. But are we one nation and one
people?
It is hard to believe that over one million
immigrants every year, from every country on earth, a third of them entering
illegally, will reforge the bonds of our disuniting nation. John Stuart Mill
cautioned that unified public opinion is “necessary to the working of
representative government.” We are about to find out if he was
right.
Ben Wattenberg: Immigration Is
Good
Many leading thinkers tell us we are now in a culture clash that will determine the course of history, that today’s war is for Western civilization itself. There is a demographic dimension to this “clash of civilizations.” While certain of today’s demographic signals bode well for America, some look very bad. If we are to assess America’s future prospects, we must start by asking, “Who are we?” “Who will we be?” and “How will we relate to the rest of the world?” The answers all involve immigration. As data from the 2000 census trickled out, one item hit the headline
jackpot. By the year 2050, we were told, America would be “majority non-white.”
The census count showed more Hispanics in America than had been expected, making
them “America’s largest minority.” When blacks, Asians, and Native Americans are
added to the Hispanic total, the “non-white” population emerges as a large
minority, on the way to becoming a small majority around the middle of this
century.
The first thing worth noting is that these rigid racial definitions are
absurd. The whole concept of race as a biological category is becoming ever-more
dubious in America. Consider:
Under the Clinton administration’s census rules, any American who checks
both the black and white boxes on the form inquiring about “race” is counted as
black, even if his heritage is, say, one eighth black and seven eighths white.
In effect, this enshrines the infamous segregationist view that one drop of
black blood makes a person black.
Although most Americans of Hispanic heritage declare themselves “white,”
they are often inferentially counted as non-white, as in the erroneous New York
Times headline which recently declared: “Census Confirms Whites Now a Minority”
in California.
If those of Hispanic descent, hailing originally from about 40 nations, are
counted as a minority, why aren’t those of Eastern European descent, coming from
about 10 nations, also counted as a minority? (In which case the Eastern
European “minority” would be larger than the Hispanic minority.)
But within this jumble of numbers there lies a central truth: America is
becoming a universal nation, with significant representation of nearly all human
hues, creeds, ethnicities, and national ancestries. Continued moderate
immigration will make us an even more universal nation as time goes on. And this
process may well play a serious role in determining the outcome of the contest
of civilizations taking place across the globe.
And current immigration rates are moderate, even though America admitted
more legal immigrants from 1991 to 2000 than in any previous decade—between 10
and 11 million. The highest previous decade was 1901-1910, when 8.8 million
people arrived. In addition, each decade now, several million illegal immigrants
enter the U.S., thanks partly to ease of transportation.
Critics like Pat Buchanan say that absorbing all those immigrants will
“swamp” the American culture and bring Third World chaos inside our borders. I
disagree. Keep in mind: Those 8.8 million immigrants who arrived in the U.S.
between 1901 and 1910 increased the total American population by 1 percent per
year. (Our numbers grew from 76 million to 92 million during that decade.) In
our most recent decade, on the other hand, the 10 million legal immigrants
represented annual growth of only 0.36 percent (as the U.S. went from 249
million to 281 million).
Overall, nearly 15 percent of Americans were foreign-born in 1910. In 1999,
our foreign-born were about 10 percent of our total. (In 1970, the foreign-born
portion of our population was down to about 5 percent. Most of the rebound
resulted from a more liberal immigration law enacted in 1965.) Or look at the
“foreign stock” data. These figures combine Americans born in foreign lands and
their offspring, even if those children have only one foreign-born parent.
Today, America’s “foreign stock” amounts to 21 percent of the population and
heading up. But in 1910, the comparable figure was 34 percent—one third of the
entire country—and the heavens did not collapse.
We can take in more immigrants, if we want to. Should we?
Return to the idea that immigrants could swamp American culture. If that is
true, we clearly should not increase our intake. But what if, instead of
swamping us, immigration helps us become a stronger nation and a swamper of
others in the global competition of civilizations?
Immigration is now what keeps America growing. According to the U.N., the
typical American woman today bears an average of 1.93 children over the course
of her childbearing years. That is mildly below the 2.1 “replacement” rate
required to keep a population stable over time, absent immigration. The “medium
variant” of the most recent Census Bureau projections posits that the U.S.
population will grow from 281 million in 2000 to 397 million in 2050 with
expected immigration, but only to 328 million should we choose a path of zero
immigration. That is a difference of a population growth of 47 million versus
116 million. (The 47 million rise is due mostly to demographic momentum from
previous higher birthrates.) If we have zero immigration with today’s low
birthrates indefinitely, the American population would eventually begin to
shrink, albeit slowly.
Is more population good for America? When it comes to potential global
power and influence, numbers can matter a great deal. Taxpayers, many of them,
pay for a fleet of aircraft carriers. And on the economic side it is better to
have a customer boom than a customer bust. (It may well be that Japan’s stagnant
demography is one cause of its decade-long slump.) The environmental case could
be debated all day long, but remember that an immigrant does not add to the
global population—he merely moves from one spot on the planet to another.
But will the current crop of immigrants acculturate? Immigrants to America
always have. Some critics, like Mr. Buchanan, claim that this time, it’s
different. Mexicans seem to draw his particular ire, probably because they are
currently our largest single source of immigration.
Yet only about a fifth (22 percent) of legal immigrants to America
currently come from Mexico. Adding illegal immigrants might boost the figure to
30 percent, but the proportion of Mexican immigrants will almost surely shrink
over time. Mexican fertility has diminished from 6.5 children per woman 30 years
ago to 2.5 children now, and continues to fall. If high immigration continues
under such circumstances, Mexico will run out of Mexicans.
California hosts a wide variety of immigrant groups in addition to
Mexicans. And the children and grandchildren of Koreans, Chinese, Khmer, Russian
Jews, Iranians, and Thai (to name a few) will speak English, not Spanish. Even
among Mexican-Americans, many second- and third-generation offspring speak no
Spanish at all, often to the dismay of their elders (a familiar American
story).
Michael Barone’s book The New Americans theorizes that Mexican immigrants
are following roughly the same course of earlier Italian and Irish immigrants.
Noel Ignatiev’s book How the Irish Became White notes that it took a hundred
years until Irish-Americans (who were routinely characterized as drunken
“gorillas”) reached full income parity with the rest of America.
California recently repealed its bilingual education programs. Nearly half
of Latino voters supported the proposition, even though it was demonized by
opponents as being anti-Hispanic. Latina mothers reportedly tell their children,
with no intent to disparage the Spanish language, that “Spanish is the language
of busboys”—stressing that in America you have to speak English to get
ahead.
The huge immigration wave at the dawn of the twentieth century undeniably
brought tumult to America. Many early social scientists promoted theories of
what is now called “scientific racism,” which “proved” that persons from
Northwest Europe were biologically superior. The new immigrants—Jews, Poles, and
Italians—were considered racially apart and far down the totem pole of human
character and intelligence. Blacks and Asians were hardly worth measuring. The
immigration wave sparked a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, peaking in the early
1920s. At that time, the biggest KKK state was not in the South; it was Indiana,
where Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, as well as blacks, were targets.
Francis Walker, superintendent of the U.S. Bureau of the Census in the late
1890s, and later president of MIT, wrote in 1896 that “The entrance of such vast
masses of peasantry degraded below our utmost conceptions is a matter which no
intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm.
They are beaten men from beaten races. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes
such as belong to those who were descended from the tribes that met under the
oak trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chiefs.” (Sorry, Francis, but
Germany did not have a good twentieth century.)
Fast-forward to the present. By high margins, Americans now tell pollsters
it was a very good thing that Poles, Italians, and Jews emigrated to America.
Once again, it’s the newcomers who are viewed with suspicion. This time, it’s
the Mexicans, Filipinos, and people from the Caribbean who make Americans
nervous. But such views change over time. The newer immigrant groups are
typically more popular now than they were even a decade ago.
Look at the high rates of intermarriage. Most Americans have long since
lost their qualms about marriage between people of different European
ethnicities. That is spreading across new boundaries. In 1990, 64 percent of
Asian Americans married outside their heritage, as did 37 percent of Hispanics.
Black-white intermarriage is much lower, but it climbed from 3 percent in 1980
to 9 percent in 1998. (One reason to do away with the race question on the
census is that within a few decades we won’t be able to know who’s what.)
Can the West, led by America, prevail in a world full of sometimes
unfriendly neighbors? Substantial numbers of people are necessary (though not
sufficient) for a country, or a civilization, to be globally influential. Will
America and its Western allies have enough people to keep their ideas and
principles alive?
On the surface, it doesn’t look good. In 1986, I wrote a book called The
Birth Dearth. My thesis was that birth rates in developed parts of the
world—Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, nations where liberal Western
values are rooted—had sunk so low that there was danger ahead. At that time,
women in those modern countries were bearing a lifetime average of 1.83
children, the lowest rate ever absent war, famine, economic depression, or
epidemic illness. It was, in fact, 15 percent below the long-term population
replacement level.
Those trendlines have now plummeted even further. Today, the fertility rate
in the modern countries averages 1.5 children per woman, 28 percent below the
replacement level. The European rate, astonishingly, is 1.34 children per
woman—radically below replacement level. The Japanese rate is similar. The
United States is the exceptional country in the current demographic scene.
As a whole, the nations of the Western world will soon be less populous,
and a substantially smaller fraction of the world population. Demographer Samuel
Preston estimates that even if European fertility rates jump back to replacement
level immediately (which won’t happen) the continent would still lose 100
million people by 2060. Should the rate not level off fairly soon, the
ramifications are incalculable, or, as the Italian demographer Antonio Golini
likes to mutter at demograph-ic meetings, “unsustainable…unsustainable.”
(Shockingly, the current Italian fertility rate is 1.2 children per woman, and
it has been at or below 1.5 for 20 years—a full generation.)
The modern countries of the world, the bearers of Western civilization,
made up one third of the global population in 1950, and one fifth in 2000, and
are projected to represent one eighth by 2050. If we end up in a world with nine
competing civilizations, as
Samuel Huntington maintains, this will make it that much harder for Western
values to prevail in the cultural and political arenas.
The good news is that fertility rates have also plunged in the less
developed countries—from 6 children in 1970 to 2.9 today. By the middle to end
of this century, there should be a rough global convergence of fertility rates
and population growth.
Since September 11, immigration has gotten bad press in America. The
terrorist villains, indeed, were foreigners. Not only in the U.S. but in many
other nations as well, governments are suddenly cracking down on illegal entry.
This is understandable for the moment. But an enduring turn away from legal
immigration would be foolhardy for America and its allies.
If America doesn’t continue to take in immigrants, it won’t continue to
grow in the long run. If the Europeans and Japanese don’t start to accept more
immigrants they will evaporate. Who will empty the bedpans in Italy’s retirement
homes? The only major pool of immigrants available to Western countries hails
from the less developed world, i.e. non-white, and non-Western countries.
The West as a whole is in a deep demographic ditch. Accordingly, Western
countries should try to make it easier for couples who want to have children. In
America, the advent of tax credits for children (which went from zero to $1,000
per child per year over the last decade) is a small step in the direction of
fertility reflation. Some European nations are enacting similar pro-natal
policies. Bur their fertility rates are so low, and their economies so
constrained, that any such actions can only be of limited help.
That leaves immigration. I suggest America should make immigration safer
(by more carefully investigating new entrants), but not cut it back. It may even
be wise to make a small increase in our current immigration rate. America needs
to keep growing, and we can fruitfully use both high- and low-skill immigrants.
Pluralism works here, as it does in Canada and Australia.
Can pluralism work in Europe? I don’t know, and neither do the Europeans.
They hate the idea, but they will depopulate if they don’t embrace pluralism,
via immigration. Perhaps our example can help Europeans see that pluralism might
work in the admittedly more complex European context. Japan is probably a
hopeless case; perhaps the Japanese should just change the name of their country
to Dwindle.
Our non-pluralist Western allies will likely diminish in population,
relative power, and influence during this century. They will become much grayer.
Nevertheless, by 2050 there will still be 750 million of them left, so the U.S.
needs to keep the Western alliance strong. For all our bickering, let us not
forget that the European story in the second half of the twentieth century was a
wonderful one; Western Europeans stopped killing each other. Now they are
joining hands politically. The next big prize may be Russia. If the Russians
choose our path, we will see what Tocqueville saw: that America and Russia are
natural allies.
We must enlist other allies as well. America and India, for instance, are
logical partners—pluralist, large, English-speaking, and democratic. We must
tell our story. And our immigrants, who come to our land by choice, are our best
salesmen. We should extend our radio services to the Islamic world, as we have
to the unliberated nations of Asia through Radio Free Asia. The people at the
microphones will be U.S. immigrants.
We can lose the contest of civilizations if the developing countries don’t
evolve toward Western values. One of the best forms of “public diplomacy” is
immigration. New immigrants send money home, bypassing corrupt governments—the
best kind of foreign aid there is. They go back home to visit and tell their
families and friends in the motherland that American modernism, while not
perfect, ain’t half-bad. Some return home permanently, but they bring with them
Western expectations of open government, economic efficiency, and personal
liberty. They know that Westernism need not be restricted to the West, and they
often have an influence on local politics when they return to their home
countries.
Still, because of Europe and Japan, the demographic slide of Western
civilization will continue. And so, America must be prepared to go it alone. If
we keep admitting immigrants at our current levels there will be almost 400
million Americans by 2050. That can keep us strong enough to defend and perhaps
extend our views and values. And the civilization we will be advancing may not
just be Western, but even more universal: American.
March 2002
The American Enterprise Online – taemag.org http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taem02c.htm |
- Re: [CTRL] Immigration: Cause of the Clash of Civilization... Archibald Bard
- Re: [CTRL] Immigration: Cause of the Clash of Civiliz... Dale Stonehouse
- Re: [CTRL] Immigration: Cause of the Clash of Civiliz... Don S. Brown
