Ellis Island Kitsch: Jeb Bush And Robert Putnam Blame Americans For Modern Immigrants` Failure To Assimilate
It`s
funny how, in the woozy minds of America`s elite,
celebrating Independence Day has turned into celebrating
Immigration Day. For a particularly ripe example of
Ellis
Island kitsch, let`s review this July 3, 2010
Washington Post op-ed by former
Florida
governor
Jeb
Bush and Harvard political scientist
Robert D. Putnam:
“A
better welcome for our nation`s immigrants
“On our national
birthday, and amid an angry debate about immigration,
Americans should reflect on the lessons of our shared
immigrant past.”
By the
way, have you noticed how the word
“angry” has come
to mean “Any person
who is
winning a debate with an immigration enthusiast?”
Putnam and Bush then add a topical
Independence Day note:
“We
must recall that the challenges facing our nation today were
felt as far back as the Founders` time. … Today`s
immigrants are, on average, assimilating socially even more
rapidly than earlier waves.”
Why
haven`t today`s immigrants assimilated enough not to default
on their mortgages? Well, what kind of angry person even
notices
hatefacts?
“One important
difference, however, that separates immigration then and
now: We native-born Americans are doing less than our
great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.”
See? It`s all
your fault.
Who are
Jeb Bush and Robert D. Putnam and why are they saying these
foolish things?
In the
past, Putnam and Bush have both made themselves conspicuous
over immigration to a comical degree. So let`s review their
history.
Professor Putnam is still reeling intellectually from
the Politically Incorrect results he found in his big study
a decade ago of social capital in 40 communities across
America. As
he admitted to John Lloyd of the
Financial Times in
2006:
“In the presence of
diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect
of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it`s not
just that we don`t trust people who are not like us. In
diverse communities, we don`t trust people who do look like
us.”
Lloyd
explained why Putnam himself had hunkered down with his
unpublished data for five years:
"Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had
delayed publishing his research until he could develop
proposals to compensate for the negative effects of
diversity, saying it `would have been irresponsible to
publish without that.`"
[Study
paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity October 8,
2006]
When
Putnam finally published his
paper
on his expensive study of diversity in 2007, he wrapped the
beginning and end in peppy bromides. Yet the quantitative
middle section was entitled
Immigration and Diversity Foster Social Isolation.[PDF]
A
leftwing Guardian
columnist reported:
"What
makes Putnam nervous now is how this could be seized upon by
rightwing politicians hostile to immigration. So he insists
his research be seen in the context … that `hunkering` can
be short term and `successful immigrant societies create new
forms of social solidarity.` In conversation, he emphasises
the latter …"[Immigration
is bad for society, but only until a new solidarity is
forged:,
By Madeleine Bunting , June 18, 2007]
But how are we supposed to get beyond the
“short term”
hunkering caused by immigration if you
never
halt the immigration?
Putnam`s plans for solving the problems
created by diversity, such as
“We should construct
a new
us“, seemed lame three years ago.
But now,
he`s teamed up with the former President`s smarter brother
and come up with some even lamer new bright ideas, such as:
“Invest in public
education, including civics education and higher education.
During the first half of the 20th century,
schools were critical to preparing children of
immigrants for success and
fostering a shared national identity.“
Oh, man,
why didn`t anybody ever think of that before?
All
we have to do
to make
up for the harm that the children of unskilled illegal
immigration do to overwhelmed public schools is to
Fix The Public Schools!
It`s
that simple!
Or how
about this conceptual breakthrough?
“Assist communities experiencing rapid increases in
immigration, which is
traumatic for
those arriving here and for
receiving communities.
Schools and
hospitals bear disproportionate costs of immigration,
while the
economic and fiscal benefits from immigration accrue
nationally.”
Er…why don`t we assist the communities
traumatized by rapid increases in immigration by
decreasing immigration?
Enough
fun with Putnam—what`s Jeb Bush`s motivation for putting his
name on this nonsense?
Now,
needless to say, you know and I know why Jeb co-signed this
op-ed. It`s transparent, even if nobody else seems to be
able to remember it.
It`s not as if all the Bushes get together
at
Kennebunkport, Maine every Fourth of July and recount
treasured tales of how
Grandpapa
Giorgio Busheroni passed through Ellis Island. As
Brandeis historian
David Hackett Fischer, author of the landmark
Albion`s Seed,
told me:
"The
family
tree of George W. Bush is as close to pure Yankee
Puritan as any Presidential candidate`s in many decades.”
No, Jeb is plotting the
future of the Bush Dynasty He wants to
“dissolve the people and
elect a new one“ so that his
half-Mexican son George P. Bush will become the third
Bush in the White House. (I`ve
argued that was the motive, along with envy of the
lifestyle of the Mexican oligarchs, for George W. Bush`s
otherwise inexplicanble amnesty obsession.)
This
realization offers an interesting perspective on Putnam`s
and Bush`s complaint that Benjamin Franklin was an
immigration restrictionist:
“Consider what
one leader wrote in 1753: `Few of their children in the
country learn English. The signs in our streets have
inscriptions in both languages. . . . Unless the stream of
their importation could be turned . . . they will soon so
outnumber us that we will not preserve our language, and
even our government will become precarious.` Thus Ben
Franklin
referred to German Americans …”
Now, you might think that the amnesty
advocates would want to keep it quiet that Franklin, whom
Walter Isaacson calls
“the most accomplished American of his age and the most
influential in inventing the type of society America would
become”, opposed mass immigration. (Indeed, the colonial
Pennsylvania legislature had passed laws effectively
preventing the
immigration of poor and criminal Germans.)
But, no,
immigration enthusiasts like as Bush and Putnam are so smug
that they can`t help themselves from pointing out that
Franklin was skeptical of the impact of immigration—so
you`re just as big a moron as Ben Franklin, nyah-nyah-nyah.
Since this comes up all the time, much to
the disgust of Peter Brimelow who thinks he provided the
definitive refutation in
Alien Nation
back in 1995, let`s for once examine why Franklin opposed
German immigration in the 1750s.
-
First, he was English-American and he wanted to help his
people more than he wanted to help foreigners.
Scandalous!
He also
had carefully thought-out micro and macro reasons.
-
The
micro reason: the complicated internal politics of
Pennsylvania in the mid-18th Century.
Franklin emerged as a leader of the
Pennsylvania middle class. He initially opposed the
Quaker party,
who were bolstering their numbers at the polls by recruiting
pacifists in Germany to immigrate.
When the already declining pacifist
ascendancy was politically devastated by the French and
Indian war, Franklin took over their old party and turned it
against his other opponent, Pennsylvania`s proprietors. The
Anglican heirs of William Penn were attempting to rule
Pennsylvania in a feudal manner, while Franklin wanted to
end the Penns` exemption from property taxes. To thwart him,
Thomas Penn
recruited Germans to bolster his Proprietary Party at the
polls.
In other
words, the Penns were doing then just what the Bushes want
to do now: recruit a new people to perpetuate their family
power.
-
Franklin`s macro reason for opposing unlimited
immigration: incipient land shortage. This extended far
beyond Pennsylvania and the 1750s.
Why
didn`t Franklin realize there was plenty of land in America
from sea to shining sea?
Because
in the 1750s, there wasn`t plenty of land for future generations of American. The
English colonies were confined to the narrow Atlantic
seaboard. The rich croplands of the Mississippi watershed
were
within the French sphere of influence.
As Franklin tried to explain to London,
France controlled the fate of the interior of North America
because it held chokepoints on its two greatest rivers:
Quebec on
the St. Lawrence and
New Orleans on the Mississippi. (Not surprisingly, where
the two watersheds nearly overlapped at the southeast corner
of the Great Lakes, a mighty city eventually grew up:
Chicago.)
It took a
world war between England and France in the
later 1750s for the English to wrest Quebec from the
French and trade New Orleans to the less dangerous Spanish.
And even then, after Wolfe defeated Montcalm in the 1759
Battle of Quebec, Franklin felt he had to
propagandize against the bright idea of England trading
Canada back to France in return for the rich sugar island of
Guadeloupe. He pointed out that if the French maintained
control of the northern route to the interior, they could
fire up Indian tribes to attack against British settlers.
Franklin`s geopolitical grand strategy was underpinned by a
landmark theoretical advance he made in economics and
sociology.
In 1751, Franklin wrote an essay entitled
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind that
deserves to be remembered as the first and most important
insight into the central question of American social
analysis: Why were American, on the whole, happier than
Europeans? (Franklin`s essay is seldom taken seriously
today, however, in part because of its Political
Incorrectness about immigration.)
This
Founding Father gave a humble answer that remains subversive
of the chest-pounding national arrogance that insists that
having the most immigrants shows we`re the best, the
childish pride that makes us fall for the simple tricks of
the Bushes. In contrast, Franklin suggested that we are
better off primarily because we have more land per person.
By allowing too much immigration, we could forfeit that
advantage.
In describing the Old World, Franklin
anticipated economist
Thomas Malthus` insights of a half-century later:
“In countries full
settled, …all lands being occupied, … those who cannot get
land must labor for others that have it; when laborers are
plenty, their wages will be low; by low wages a family is
supported with difficulty; this difficulty deters many from
marriage, who therefore long continue servants and single.”
In
contrast:
“America is chiefly
occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by hunting. But as
the hunter, of all men, requires the greatest quantity of
land, the Europeans found America as fully settled as it
well could be by hunters. Yet these, having large tracks,
were easily prevailed on to part with portions of territory
to the newcomers.”
Therefore, America in the 18th Century was a cheap land /
expensive wage society. In other words, a happy one:
“Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a
laboring man [who] understands husbandry can in a short time
save money enough to purchase a piece of new land sufficient
for a plantation, whereon he may subsist a family; such are
not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough
forward to consider how their children when grown up are to
be provided for, they see that more land is to be had at
rates equally easy, all circumstances considered.”
Franklin had figured out in 1751 the theory of
Affordable Family Formation that I haltingly worked out
more than a quarter of millennium later:
“Hence, marriages in America are more general, and more
generally early, than in Europe.”
This
is not to say that Americans have no national talent besides
the luck of inhabiting a huge country. You can say in our
favor: while we don`t do a lot with a little, we do
do a lot with a lot.
We aren`t good at subsisting on a pittance like Asian
peasants. And we aren`t good at crowding in with our
extended relatives. But give us a lot of land and a lot of
resources, and we`ll do a lot with it.
Consider California, which Spanish conquistadors first
explored in 1542. By 1846, more than three centuries later,
the
Spanish-speakers of California had done so little with
this grand province that they
“were easily
prevailed on to part with portions of territory to the
newcomers”, to adapt Franklin. The Americans turned
California into the
Promised Land of the Common Man … for a while.
We keep going farther and building more. If we run into a
problem, we`ll move away, out into the open country, and
construct anew.
Still, this American way of life, always moving outward, is
expensive. We need people who can make enough money to pay
for it. In the last decade, we ran into a bridge too far,
trying to reproduce Los Angeles in the Inland Empire,
Arizona, and Nevada.
In our
naïve and childish pride, we assumed that people who
couldn`t pay back small mortgages if
they were in their home countries could
pay
back huge ones because they were in America.
And now supposed leaders like Jeb Bush and Robert D. Putnam
want more of the hair of the dog that bit us.
Old Ben likely wouldn`t have made that mistake.
He sure wouldn`t have made it twice.
Not
even if he had thought the Franklin family (remember, his
son was
the
last Loyalist Governor of New Jersey) could benefit
dynastically.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA`S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA`S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available
here.]
