July 03, 2005
In Praise of Huddled Masses
Wall Street Journal, Jul 3,
1984
Amid the fireworks and picnics as
this nation celebrates its independence tomorrow, we
hope Americans stop to ask, what is the United States?
The question is especially appropriate at this moment in
the history of a nation of immigrants; upon returning
from its July 4 recess Congress will try to finish work
on the Simpson-Mazzoli bill.
The answer to the question is in
the first words of our Constitution, "We, the
people." It was the people, and especially new
people, who worked this land into a New World. We hope
today's gentlepeople, the descendants of the tired and
poor who sought refuge on these shores, can still spare
a thought for today's huddled masses, yearning to be
free.
Simpson-Mazzoli, we are repeatedly
told, is a carefully crafted compromise. It is in fact
an anti-immigration bill. Note well that despite its
grant of amnesty for aliens who have been residents long
enough, its most outspoken opponents are the Hispanics,
who would prefer to live with the present laws. Its
constituency is an interesting and perhaps portentous
alliance of the "nativist" Americans who still
dominate Mountain States politics and the "Club of
Rome" elitists of the Boston-Washington corridor.
We can hope that the bill will die
in the House-Senate conference, which still must resolve
such contentious differences as whether or not to have a
program of temporary guest workers for agriculture. If
it survives conference, President Reagan would be wise
to veto it as antithetical to the national
self-confidence his administration has done so much to
renew.
If Washington still wants to "do
something" about immigration, we propose a five-word
constitutional amendment: There shall be open
borders. Perhaps this policy is overly ambitious in
today's world, but the U.S. became the world's envy by
trumpeting precisely this kind of heresy. Our greatest
heresy is that we believe in people as the great
resource of our land. Those who would live in freedom
have voted over the centuries with their feet. Wherever
the state abused its people, beginning with the Puritan
pilgrims and continuing today in places like Ho Chi Minh
City and Managua, they've aimed for our shores.
They—we—have astonished the world with the country's
success.
The nativist patriots scream for
"control of the borders." It is nonsense to believe
that this unenforceable legislation will provide any
such thing. Does anyone want to "control the borders" at
the moral expense of a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall with
minefields, dogs and machine-gun towers? Those who mouth
this slogan forget what America means. They want those
of us already safely ensconced to erect giant signs
warning: Keep Out, Private Property.
The instinct is seconded by the
"zero-sum" mentality that has been intellectually
faddish this past decade. More people, the worry runs,
will lead to overcrowding; will use up all our
"resources," and will cause unemployment. Trembling no-growthers
cry that we'll never "feed," "house" or
"clothe" all the immigrants—though the immigrants
want to feed, house and clothe themselves. In fact,
people are the great resource, and so long as we keep
our economy free, more people means more growth, the
more the merrier. Somehow the Reagan administration at
least momentarily adopted the cramped Club-of-Rome
vision, forgetting which side of this debate it is
supposed to support. Ronald Reagan, we thought, marched
to different bywords—"growth," for example, and
"opportunity."
If anyone doubts that the
immigration and growth issue touches the fundamental
character of a nation, he should look to recent
experience in Europe. Some European governments are
taken in by the no-growth nonsense that economic pies no
longer grow, and must be sliced. They are actually
paying immigrants and guest workers to go home: the
Germans pay Turks, the French pay North Africans, the
British pay West Indians and Asians. It was this dour
view of people as liabilities, not assets, that led to
the great European emigration to the U.S. in the first
place. Meanwhile, Europe today settles into long-term
unemployment for millions while the U.S. economy is
booming with new jobs.
The same underlying difference in
vision applies in political ideals. The individual is
the lightning rod of 20th-century politics. The
totalitarians of the Communist Bloc don't allow their
people to leave. The foremost use of the machinery of
the state is to wall in the citizens. If we cannot
change their regimes, the least we can do is to offer
refuge to those of their peoples with the opportunity
and courage to arrive here. To do otherwise is to say
that the ideals upon which this Republic was founded are
spent, that what is left is to negotiate the terms of
surrender.
America, above all, is a nation
founded upon optimism. The Republic will prosper so long
as it does not disavow this taproot. The issue is not
what we offer the teeming masses, but what they offer
us: their hands, their minds, their spirit, and above
all the chance to be true to our own past and our own
future.
