politics
Immigration and the return to American greatness
Center for Immigration Studies
Cato Institute
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
February 2nd, 2022
Ronald Reagan once said, "Whether we come from poverty or wealth, we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans that is not enough. We must be equal in the eyes of each other."
American greatness lies not in having the biggest tanks and missiles, but in our embracing each other as fellow members of this national community, one where prosperity is broadly shared, where the poor have opportunities to rise, where the threats abroad in the world are kept at bay, where children are taught to honor their forebears, warts and all.
Mass immigration into today's post-industrial, knowledge-based economy is much more problematic than in our agricultural or industrial past. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in a magisterial 2016 report, found that most Americans do, in fact, enjoy a small boost to their incomes from mass immigration. Unfortunately, that benefit comes at the cost of further impoverishing those of our compatriots who compete most directly with the unceasing flow of one million-plus new foreign workers every year.
What's more, the entire benefit most Americans enjoy from that cheaper labor is wiped out by the extra social-service costs that less-skilled immigrants impose on society. The problem is not that immigrants come here for welfare; rather, because so many of them are a mismatch for our modern economy, the jobs they do (and they're no less likely to work than the native-born) pay less, meaning they contribute less in taxes and use more in government services. This is not a moral failing, but it's an unavoidable reality of modern life.
Not only does mass immigration facilitate the "othering" of our less-skilled countrymen economically, but it complicates the promotion of a sense of shared community in other ways, too. The advances in communications and transportation technology that have shrunk the world are a boon in so many ways. For immigrants, they create the ability to maintain deep, ongoing ties with loved ones back home. But they also mean that the necessary re-orientation of an immigrant's psychological and emotional connections toward his new country, that is so necessary for genuine assimilation, is less likely and less thorough.
Finally, America is no exception to the phenomenon seen in all modern societies, where leadership classes—in business, academia, media, even government—are ambivalent, at best, about their own countries. When an immigrant parent brings her child to an American school, she isn't demanding her child be taught to hate America and its history—and yet that is too often the message delivered by the very big-city school districts where most immigrants find themselves.
This doesn't mean zero immigration—just turning the dial down from 11. Senator Jeff Sessions summed it up nicely: "What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together. "
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