Why America is better suited to absorb immigrants today
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How seriously do people take the cultural-style arguments against immigration? My natural tendency is to be pro-immigration, mostly because of the huge benefits it confers on the immigrants themselves. I also have some notion that immigration is good for American society as it renews the idea that what it means to be an American is to subscribe to a creed rather than to be of a particular tribe. That said, I don’t want America to be like Mexico. What I don’t know is whether a large number of Mexican immigrants is likely to cause that to happen. Clearly we have been extremely successful in absorbing immigrants in the past, which leads me to think that things will work out fine here too. But maybe we’ve just been lucky in the past. Is the answer to have high immigration but to seek to diversify the sources?
Immigration today is radically different because of the 1965 act. It is much more focused on a few countries to our South. Chain immigration took the focus off of language and educational skills in favor of family relationships and this current wave of immigration brings millions of uneducated, unskilled, people who don’t know our common language. I think the example of California shows what massive immmigration in a short period of time will bring. The state is in a fiscal mess because of its elaborate welfare state and large number of people who need it to stay afloat.
There has to be some limit to how many people this country can comfortably hold before our standard of living declines. Does the author believe in any limits to an immigration policy or just open borders for tens of millions more to come. The basic problem is population density. Yes, we have more roads but people have to drive further and futher to their places of employment. The traffic problems will only get worse.
Immigration is a positive policy when done correctly. The sources should be diverse in language and culture and a point system like Canada or Australia would be good economic policy too.
The cultural arguments are probably the weakest when it comes to favoring less immmigration. Environmental and economic arguments are the real question here. It seems to me the American people should be able to decide how much they want their citizenship diluted by immigration. The polls overwhelmingly show people think the current system is out of control and they want less immigration (legal and illegal). Politicians better wake up because a viable 3rd party is not far off if the government continues its current policy.
“Actually, the amount of forested land in the U.S. has been increasing.”
Come on now. I don’t care about the statistic you cherry picked; you simply can’t deny the relationship between an increasing population and increased land development.
It is not an open immigration policy or our country’s ability to physiologically sustain them that I take issue with, rather it is that such a large percentage of these immigrants are coming from one source, most illegally (but leaving that issue aside). As well, it does not help that this source is in close proximity to the place of immigration. This proximity provides close contact with the mother country, (even more so with modern telecommunications) and allows for the continuation of many major elements of the immigrants culture beyond simply language and food. It also inherently includes those elements that aided in the creation of the appalling circumstances that caused them to leave their home country in the first place (conscious of this or not). This issue is all the more worrisome with the recent advent in leftist political circles of advocating a policy of “multiculturalism†. Never mind that said cultures were an implicit cause for the person to leave their homeland to begin with, rather just bring all of that baggage with you because we advocate a philosophy of, “no one culture has any superior elements than any other† and that the host country will simply adapt to your needs and social norms. It provides for a mindset of being here (western nations) only for the economic benefits without any real thought as to the adoption of the principles of that country. We have already seen this play out to some degree in France where the large numbers of North Africans and their mother country’s close proximity to France have allowed them to remain largely married to their own cultural norms back in Algeria (specifically in terms of political and philosophical ideologies), Morocco, etc.
My wife (who is an immigrant from a non-western country) is upset when she sees people who have not assimilated into society beyond some simple token gestures. Her entire family has retained their language, food, and to a lesser extent religion (though even that has shifted on her paternal side), but they certainly have adopted the ideals of democracy, respect for the law, volunteerism to varying degrees, separation of church and state, and cultural norms (method of dress, personal hygiene, no haggling for prices, etc). She comes from a small country and grew up in a small city where there were few other people from that country. However, with recent immigration patterns there is a very substantial concentration of people in several geographic locations where they can resist these influences and due to the collective accommodations that the political and economic establishments make for appeasement and/or profit.
“Only three percent of the land space in the U.S is developed so what is your apprehension here?”
I didn’t say that we shouldn’t allow increased land development or that the negatives of paving over nature and adding more cars and roads and houses outweigh the positives; I am just saying that those things *will* happen with increased immigration and population.
The article said, “None of this is causing America to be “paved over” as some people fear”. People in this crowd are being wildly irrational in believing this. It’s true that we currently have a very low population density compared to many other countries and that doubling our population won’t cause the world to end. But if you think that large increases of immigration and population growth won’t lead to increased land development and a decrease in nature, you’ve really gone off the deep end.
“Besides new immigrants and people in general perfer to situate themselves in close proximity to one aother. Therefore major population centers, urban cities and large suburbs are responsible for making the most efficient use of space as possible.”
This is true, but only while they are new immigrants. Beyond the very short term, that population will develop very normal resource use patterns.
Making the comparison to a century ago, there is one factor that the article ignores that turns immigrants from friends into foes: the welfare state. Government handouts a century ago were trivial in comparison to today. When immigrants come to American and work, they are like a technological innovation: they displace some workers, but enlarge the national economic pie. But when immigrants come to tap the myriad of public assistance programs, their impact on the size of the national pie is no longer unambiguous. If we want to attack the disease and not the symptom, it is the welfare system that we should decry and not immigration.
“Come on now. I don’t care about the statistic you cherry picked; you simply can’t deny the relationship between an increasing population and increased land development.”
Sure I can. At the turn of the 20th century a huge fraction of Americans lived and worked on small farms, and today the fraction of farmers is tiny. You could think of family farms as the ultimate form of ‘sprawl’. In the past 100 years, not only have most of people moved to much more dense urban and suburban areas, but millions of acres of marginal farm land have been abandoned (in the Great Plains, for example, and in New England, and in the northern part of my state of Michigan).
People have the idea that the past was pristine. But here, 100-125 years ago, it was anything but–pretty much the whole state of Michigan had been clear-cut and denuded. Since 1900 the population has increased by a factor of 4 (from about 2 1/2 million to 10 million) while the amount of forested land has increased dramatically. That doesn’t mean there aren’t areas of Michigan experiencing suburban sprawl, because there are. But the overall pattern has been one of increasing forest area.
Solutions to the immigration problem:
1) Reduce the welfare state, thus allowing economic survival with greater numbers of immigrants
2) Reduce the amount of zoning restrictions and implicit building permit limits to encourage denser housing and development near cities, which also will increase the utility of public transportation and cause less pressure on undeveloped wilderness.
3) Allow for freer immigration, which will make it less penalizing for immigrants to temporailly move back home if they find the cost of living goes up too much in the US, because they know they can get back in if the situation improves. Today immigrants (especially illegal ones) are afraid to leave, lest they never get back in.
4) Remember that today’s no-skill worker who barely speaks english could be the great-granfather of a Ph.D. researcher (mine was)
Mr Econotarian,
On your point #4, see Randall Parkers post: Benthamite Libertarian Collectivists Wrong On Open Borders” at http://www.parapundit.com/archives/003344.html, has great bearing (Tyler has linked to it before, though he didn’t endorse it).
You seem to be basically saying that open borders would maximize the absolute number of Ph.Ds in the country. But doesn’t the proportion of Ph.D researchers/MDs/Other Super Achievers as a percentage of the population matter, as Randall Parker argues? It seems likely that if population A with a good Ph.D. researcher track-record is mixed with population B with bad Ph.D researcher track-records, many people from pop. A who would have been Ph.D researchers would instead be lured by the free market to become MDs, as population B does not provide enough MDs to cover it’s own demand for MDs. Would this effect be enough to slow research down, despite a higher absolute number of PH.D/MD level achievers, as Randall Parker argues? It depends on the details of relative pop. numbers, relative propensities to do well in universities, etc.
You seem to be saying that everyone’s great grandchild *could* possibly be a Ph.D no matter what thier ethnicity, because of socio-economic and cultural convergence, but people whose great-grandfather was an unskilled, non-english speaking ashkenazic jew have a much higher probability of being a Ph.D researcher today than others (Jews as recent immigrants had quotas put on them to keep them out of Universities! Contrast that with hispanics needing Affirmative Action today). Convergence in the past hasn’t always happened according to a text-book formula. We shouldn’t be betting America’s future on it happening in accordance with a text-book formula today.
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