4/28/15, "The Strange Case of Modern Immigration," Victor Davis Hanson, National Review
"Is immigrating from less-developed countries to the West a good or a bad thing, for host and guest? Is the immigrant angry at, or nostalgic for, the country he left? Is he thankful to or resentful of the country he has come to? Does the Westerner know why the other seeks him out or why he himself chooses not to emigrate to the non-West? These questions and dozens like them are not so much never answered as never even asked. The result is chaos....
The failed Arab Spring, the Balkan unrest, and the Islamic wars in
the Middle East have created a sort of chaos in which millions of people
have no desire to stay home and face violence and death. What the
non-Westerners see on cable television and the Internet are scenes of a
carefree, wealthy West where things seem to work in a way they do not at
home — and without any editorializing on why that is so....
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The downtown of almost any European city is full of impoverished
non-Western immigrants. Yet in ten years, some of those same Middle
Eastern immigrants will demand space for new mosques, while they would
never have allowed a church to be built in their homeland, and many
newcomers will have complaints against their hosts about their own lack
of parity with the established citizenry. Such is the strange effect of
contemporary Westernism upon immigrants.
In other areas, recent war and revolution are just the latest
chapters in an old book of endemic poverty, high birthrates, and failed
governments that incite their poor to seek entrance by any means
necessary into Europe. The migrants’ assumption is that being a poor
visitor inside Europe is preferable to what they had at home. Someone
with a menial job in Paris or on public assistance in the United Kingdom
feels lucky because of what he knows housing, medical care, public
safety, and nutrition are reduced to in India, Pakistan, Libya, the
Philippines, or Syria. The most zealous Muslim often chooses to live
among Christians, agnostics, and atheists rather than under an Islamic
theocracy at home — even as he sometimes damns his host and praises the
country he will never return to.
Something similar is snowballing on the southern border of the
United States. Illegal immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin
America has been a challenge for the United States for over a
half-century. Many of the symptoms are similar to Europe’s experience
with unlawful immigration — as we saw last summer, with busloads of
children heading northward across the border.
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Government has abjectly failed in Latin America. These governments are
at most indifferent to their people’s departure, and often encourage
them to leave. Elites callously see multiple advantages in losing their
own people, especially when remittances arrive in the billions of
dollars and provide sustenance for those whom the government cannot or
will not assist.
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Within the United States, communities of poor immigrants can serve as
powerful lobbying groups for even more immigration — as they do now in
Europe as well. Amnesties and blanket naturalizations eventually create
bloc voters. In the United States, anchor children draw in more
immigrants. The home government is never blamed for forcing out its own;
the new host is always faulted for not being more welcoming....
Given the role of high tech and massive government aid in redefining Western poverty, the endless argument for ever more massive expansions of social services becomes more difficult without new populations of desperate Asian, African, and Latin American poor. Indigent immigrants ensure statistical imbalances and lead to charges of Western failures in fairness and equality. To take one example, without constant illegal immigration, the diverse Latino population in the U.S. would soon reach parity with the majority population — in the pattern of the past Italian-American immigration experience. But somehow, if an Oaxacan immigrant has inadequate access to health care, education, and legal representation in his first year of unlawful residence in the United States, he then can become fodder for a blanket indictment of Western nativism, racism, and xenophobia— and he and his advocates are acutely aware of that anomaly....
Westerners accept that these one-way correspondences are true.
Nonetheless, they are incapable of articulating the social, economic,
and political causes for the imbalances, namely the singular customs and
heritage that make the West attractive: free-market capitalism,
property rights, consensual government, human rights, freedom of
expression and religion, separation of church and state, and a secular
tradition of rational inquiry. Much less are they able to remind
immigrants from the non-West that they are taking the drastic step of
forsaking their homelands, often rich in natural resources, because of
endemic statism and corruption, the lack of the rule of law, religious
intolerance, misogyny, tribalism, and racism — the stuff that does not
lead to prosperous, safe, and happy lives.
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From such ignorance — or moral cowardice — bedlam arises, of the
sort we are seeing in the Mediterranean and on the United States’
southern border. Sheepish Westerners ask little of immigrants while
providing them low-paying jobs or public assistance. Newcomers as a rule
seldom learn promptly the language of their adopted country; they are
not expected to act as guests who strictly respect the laws and mores of
their hosts rather than demanding to implant their own, which they have
just rejected with their feet. They sense that trashing the West stokes
the guilt of the Westerner and works far better than emulating his
habits.
They also detect in Western diffidence about European and American
culture a sort of cowardice, and they understandably massage that lack
of confidence, as if the reasons why thousands leave the Middle East,
Pakistan, or Mexico were neo-imperialism, colonialism, and corporatism —
that is, Western culpability — rather than self-inflicted pathologies.
They are confident that such charges will resonate in the West,
providing some strange sort of psychological penance to Western elites
ambivalent about the sources of their own wealth, leisure, and
privilege. These are the ingredients of a disastrous salad bowl, as
opposed to the successful melting-pot culture of the past. Admitting
only legal immigrants on ethnically blind criteria of education and
skills is seen by the nervous Westerner as discriminatory and therefore
unfair.
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Still, all this dishonesty puts open-borders advocates in a dilemma.
In theory, any restriction of immigration, any insistence that it be
solely legal, any secure border enforcement is pilloried. But here
follows a disconnect. Why would critics of Western governments’ supposed
insensitivity demand that they extend such insensitivity to the
multicultural “other”? To take one American example, why would
ethnic-studies programs on the one hand teach largely the racism and
nativism of America, and the forgotten glories of indigenous
civilizations in Mexico, while on the other hand politicizing our
immigration policies as largely a racist attempt to keep people of color
out? Is the U.S. then toxic or attractive? Is it because Mexico is so
wonderful that millions choose to leave it?
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Or, in longer-range terms,
why would Mexican nationals emigrate and wish to stay unassimilated,
only to replicate the Mexico they have forsaken? One of the most
disturbing aspects of the promotion of illegal immigration is the
left-wing advocate’s visible anger at the U.S. — as if to say, “Millions
from superior non-Western societies have a right to live in an
unattractive West.”"
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Immigration to the West will remain a moral and intellectual
embarrassment until Westerners insist that newcomers arrive in numbers
that can be assimilated, that they meet meritocratic criteria that are
ethnically blind, and that they come legally and on the terms
adjudicated by the host. Europeans and Americans need not be
chauvinistic, but they do need to be candid about why people leave one
country for another. From such knowledge comes realization that the best
way to stop mass, illegal immigration is for other societies to emulate
Western paradigms so that there is no need to emigrate — after all,
Japanese and Singaporeans do not hide in cargo boats to reach
California.
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But to do all that, Westerners need first to understand
their own culture and then to defend it.
Europeans and Americans need not think that the West must be perfect to
be good. And they should recognize that millions in the non-West
increasingly are certain that the West is far better than their own
alternatives — even if they are as unsure why that is so as they are
careful to keep quiet about it."
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