Abstract Immigrants
by Thomas Sowell
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One of the
many sad signs of our times is the way current immigration issues
are discussed. A hundred years ago, the immigration controversies
of that era were discussed in the context of innumerable facts about
particular immigrant groups. Many of those facts were published
in a huge, multi-volume 1911 study by a commission headed by Senator
William P. Dillingham.
That and other
studies of the time presented hard data on such things as which
groups' children were doing well in school and which were not; which
groups had high crime rates or high rates of alcoholism, and which
groups were over-represented among people living on the dole.
Such data and
such differences still exist today. Immigrants from some countries
are seldom on welfare but immigrants from other countries often
are. Immigrants from some countries are typically people with high
levels of education and skills, while immigrants from other countries
seldom have much schooling or skills.
Nevertheless,
many of our current discussions of immigration issues talk about
immigrants in general, as if they were abstract people in an abstract
world. But the concrete differences between immigrants from different
countries affect whether their coming here is good or bad for the
American people.
The very thought
of formulating immigration laws from the standpoint of what is best
for the American people seems to have been forgotten by many who
focus on how to solve the problems of illegal immigrants, "living
in the shadows."
A recent column
in the Wall Street Journal titled "What Would Milton Friedman
Say?" tried to derive what the late Professor Friedman "would no
doubt regard as the ideal outcome" as far as immigration laws were
concerned.
Although I
was once a student of Professor Friedman, I would never presume
to speak for him. However, he was a man with the rare combination
of genius and common sense, and he published much empirical work
as well as the analytical work that won him a Nobel Prize. In short,
concrete facts mattered to him.
It is hard
to imagine Milton Friedman looking for "the ideal outcome" on immigration
in the abstract. More than once he said, "the best is the enemy
of the good," which to me meant that attempts to achieve an unattainable
ideal can prevent us from reaching good outcomes that are possible
in practice.
Too much of
our current immigration controversy is conducted in terms of abstract
ideals, such as "We are a nation of immigrants." Of course we are
a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of people who wear
shoes. Does it follow that we should admit anybody who wears shoes?
The immigrants
of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived
here a hundred years ago. Moreover, the society in which they arrive
is different. The Wall Street Journal column ends by quoting another
economist who said, "Better to build a wall around the welfare state
than the country."
But the welfare
state is already here-- and, far from having a wall built around
it, the welfare state is expanding in all directions by leaps and
bounds. We do not have a choice between the welfare state and open
borders. Anything we try to do as regards immigration laws has to
be done in the context of a huge welfare state that is already a
major, inescapable fact of life.
Among other
facts of life utterly ignored by many advocates of de facto amnesty
is that the free international movement of people is different from
free international trade in goods.
Buying
cars or cameras from other countries is not the same as admitting
people from those countries or any other countries. Unlike inanimate
objects, people have cultures and not all cultures are compatible
with the culture in this country that has produced such benefits
for the American people for so long.
Not only the
United States, but the Western world in general, has been discovering
the hard way that admitting people with incompatible cultures is
an irreversible decision with incalculable consequences. If we do
not see that after recent terrorist attacks on the streets of Boston
and London, when will we see it?
"Comprehensive
immigration reform" means doing everything all together in a rush,
without time to look before we leap, and basing ourselves on abstract
notions about abstract people.
June
4, 2013
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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