Immigrant: Who Whom?
As Lenin said, the eternal question is always
"Who whom?" And when it comes to
understanding America's current immigration
policy, the old mass-murderer sure had it right.
It's time to point fingers.
More immigrants are admitted under the
"family-reunification" policy than for
any other reason. Unfortunately, the impact of
the family-reunification quota, especially the
harm it's done to African-Americans, is shrouded
by the American phobia about thinking honestly
about race. This purportedly idealistic
smokescreen is actually concocted by the clever
in order to wage class war on the clueless.
Maybe not intentionally, but isn't it funny how
people tend to come up with ideals that are in
their interests?
Serious discussions of immigration reform
have been off the table for years in America
precisely because the current immigration
policies provide America's verbal elite with a
new, improved servant class at no cost to
themselves in terms of greater competition.
Mexicans may be flooding into the U.S., but they
are not taking jobs away from American lawyers,
media people, politicians, business executives
and the like. The Mexicans with the verbal
skills to do these jobs stay home in Mexico
speaking Spanish. Instead, small, brown,
diligent, and submissive immigrants have
displaced large, black, unmotivated, and surly
native Americans as our auto mechanics, waiters,
gardeners, cleaning ladies, child-minders, and
the like. We consumers of these services get
better workers for less money.
The African-American elites go along with
this scheme. They sell out the black working
class on immigration because more immigrants
means more pressure for identity politics and
multiculturalism (i.e., quotas, jobs as
diversity sensitivity consultants, ethnic pride
educators, etc.), which means more easy money
for the black verbal elite.
There are two prominent intellectual
positions on immigration: The extremely
unpopular one is that ethnicity matters, and
that immigration policy should not be used to
change the current ethnic makeup of America. The
much more popular view, which dominates both the
liberal and conservative media establishments
(e.g., the Wall Street Journal editorial page),
argues that high immigration is good for the
country, and we should be color-blind in our
immigration policy, because America is a
"proposition" nation (e.g., "All
men are created equal", etc.) rather than a
nation of blood and soil.
The first view appears to be a political
nonstarter, because of the nonstop
indoctrination of whites against them personally
feeling any ethnocentrism.
The second view, colorblindness, hits all the
right notes in today's American zeitgeist but,
as we've seen, its effects are hardly
colorblind: the current system hurts Americans
on the left side of the bell curve in order to
help those on the right side. It damages
African-Americans and, at least economically,
Mexican-American citizens. For example, Cesar
Chavez volunteered his United Farm Worker staff
to patrol the border to keep out the Mexican
immigrants who were driving down the wages of
the Mexican-American stoop laborers in his
union. By cutting down the supply of farmworkers
competing for jobs, Chavez managed to drive up
their wages during the Seventies. But the
Mexican economic crisis of the early Eighties
and the lack of any real effort to keep new
immigrants out overwhelmed his efforts under a
flood of cheap immigrant workers. Stoop
laborers' wages stopped growing in 1981.
On the other end of the bell curve, however,
are highly intelligent whites with outstanding
verbal skills, who face little immigrant
competition (other than from the occasional
immigrant English magazine editor), but who
desperately want the government's help with
their servant problem.
I'll propose an alternative to these two
ideas, based on American patriotism. Let's set
up America's immigration system to maximally
benefit the people of whatever ethnic group who
are American citizens as of today. Further, the
bias in the system should be toward helping
those Americans less able to compete
intellectually with future immigrants.
To my mind, the fundamental goal of
immigration policy is to maximize the benefit to
existing citizens, just as the fundamental goal
of a public corporation's management is to
maximize the wealth of its current stockholders,
not of people who might buy stock later. Think
of the U.S. as an employee-owned corporation
like United Airlines. Immigration policy is thus
like United's hiring policy. The goal of United
Airline's hiring policy is to optimize the
benefits to the existing stockholder-employees
by hiring the new stockholder-employees who have
the most to contribute at the lowest cost.
Similarly, the goal of America's immigration
policy logically ought to be to brain drain the
rest of the world of the people who can
contribute the most to the welfare of current
American citizens.
Thus, we should be actively recruiting the
most intelligent and most entrepreneurial --
they'll produce the most new wealth and new jobs
in America, and the Americans they'll be
competing with can best afford the new
competition. In contrast, we should be
diligently keeping out run-of-the-mill would-be
immigrants who would merely add to the
competition faced by our less intelligent
citizens, since lower IQ American citizens can
least afford additional wage competition.
The most important part of our current
immigration law, family reunification, is the
equivalent of United Airlines letting its newest
employees nepotistically determine its next
hires. Obviously, UA would never even consider
such an absurd policy, but that's what the USA
does.
The second largest contributor of new
immigrants under the current law, the need of
American corporations for particular skills, has
worked well in itself, but when combined with
family reunification it just ends up lowering
wages for African-Americans and others who can
least afford it. Say, Intel imports the next
Andy Grove, who soon begins creating new jobs
for Americans through his brilliance. However,
Mrs. Grove2 is allowed under the law to bring
over her sister, who brings her husband, who
brings his deadbeat brother, who brings his
nothing-special daughter, who is married to Mr.
Nobody, etcetera etcetera. Regression to the
mean takes its terrible toll. Eventually, we've
brought in a bunch of people of no particular
talent other than they will no doubt work harder
for less money than current blue-collar white
and black Americans.
This will keep down wage inflation, which
today seems to be automatically assumed to be a
Good Thing. But shouldn't one of the goals of
America be to see the wages of the bottom half
of our bell curve rise over time?
