New York Times (Opinion)
By Ross Douthat
January 13, 2016
My
Sunday column argued, fairly strenuously, that mass immigration on the
scale of the last two years will put more stress on the politics and
culture of Germany than
any prudent statesman should accept, and that the German government
should do everything in its power to not only limit migration but
actually restrict asylum rights and begin deportation for some of the
migrants who have already arrived.
This
is unlikely to happen; even less likely is the resignation of Angela
Merkel, which I concluded the column by suggesting would be appropriate
at this point. But whatever
comes in Germany it seems very likely that immigration, and with it
what the former National Review editor John O’Sullivan calls “the
national question,” will dominate European and American debates for at
least as long as the refugee emergency continues in
the Middle East and North Africa. And since the immigration debate has
long been dominated at the elite level by voices that blend an
economistic view of immigration as always and everywhere a net plus with
a cosmopolitan-utilitarian view of open borders (or
something close) as a humanitarian obligation, it seems worth laying
out some premises that I think ought to underly the conservative
alternative to that consensus.
First,
though, two links, one on the European debate and one on the American,
which I think provide a useful survey of the issues that ought to matter
to the right (and
not only to the right). First, this Ben Schwarz essay in the latest
issue of The American Conservative, arguing that mass immigration is
unraveling English customs and norms and identity with unforeseeable
results. Second, this Reihan Salam essay in National
Review on U.S. immigration policy, making a case for “a new melting-pot
nationalism … to counter the ethnic and class antagonisms that threaten
our society today.”
Now to my own premises:
1.
The nation-state is real, and (thus far) irreplaceable. Yes, the world
of nations is full of arbitrary borders, invented traditions, and
convenient mythologies layered
atop histories of plunder and pillage. And yes, not every government or
polity constitutes a nation (see Iraq, or Belgium, or half of Africa).
But as guarantors of public order and personal liberty, as sources of
meaning and memory and solidarity, as engines
of common purpose in the service of the common good, successful
nation-states offer something that few of the transnational institutions
or organizations bestriding our globalized world have been able to
supply. (The arguable exception of Roman Catholicism
is, I fear, only arguable these days.) So amid trends that tend to
weaken, balkanize or dissolve nation-states, it should not be assumed
that a glorious alternative awaits us if we hurry that dissolution to
its end.
Nor should it be assumed that immigration can save nation-states from their own internal difficulties, because …
2.
Immigration is a perilous solution to demographic decline. One of the
common right-of-center cases for mass immigration, offered by
politicians like Jeb Bush and optimistic
economists alike, is that in an age of falling birthrates the West
needs migrants to sustain its economies and support its welfare states.
(“New Germans who are today being fingerprinted as their asylum claims
are processed will tomorrow care for the elderly
and pay the taxes that fund a generous welfare state,” The Economist
promised last fall.)
This
is true up to a point, but its logic assumes that immigrant
assimilation goes reasonably well — that immigrants find it relatively
easy to learn the language, to
adapt (at least up to a point) to Western social norms, to find and
hold jobs in a post-industrial economy, and that they don’t simply
become another set of clients of the welfare state they were supposed
to save. And under conditions of demographic decline
the pressure to adapt will necessarily be weaker, because there are
simply fewer natives around to define the culture into the new arrivals
are expected to assimilate. (In the German case, as my column suggested,
a few more years of migration at this pace
could forge a rising generation in which Middle Eastern and North
African immigrants are actually a near-majority.) In which case the odds
of fragmentation and balkanization go up, because …
3.
Culture is very real, and cultural inheritances tend to be enduring.
Present-day America attests to that fact: We pride ourselves
(justifiably) on our success assimilating
immigrants, but centuries after their arrival various immigrant
folkways still define our country’s regions and their mores. The
Scandinavian diaspora across the upper Midwest still looks a great deal
like Scandinavia — hardworking, gender egalitarian, with
high levels of civic trust, higher-than-average educations and incomes,
etc. The cavaliers, servants, and slaves migration to Tidewater
Virginia obviously still shapes the Deep South’s entrenched hierarchies
of race and class. The Scots-Irish migration to
Appalachia and its environs is still heavily responsible for America’s
sky-high-by-Western-standards murder rate. And of course the wider world
is full of similarly striking case studies.
What
this implies is that accepting immigrants from a particular country or
culture or region involves accepting that your own nation, or part of
your own nation, will
become at least a little more like their country of origin. With small
or slow migrations this may only happen at the margins and it may be
swamped by other effects; with large or swift migrations it may happen
in more significant ways. But whether the immigrants
are coming from Asia or Latin America or the Middle East or North
Africa, you will be able to see in those regions at least some foretaste
of their impact on your own society. And what you see matters, because …
4.
Cultural commonalities help assimilation; cultural differences spur
balkanization. That is, the more a foreign-born population has in common
with the nation it’s entering
— in terms of everything from language to religion to family structure
to education levels to cultural habits — the more easily it can make
itself truly at home in its adopted country.
And
these commonalities are a complex, in which no single variable is
necessarily a trump. For instance, race and racism are obviously
potentially powerful obstacles to
assimilation. But as Schwarz points out, the English experience
suggests that racial differences need not preclude immigrant success in
cases where other cultural variables favor integration:
Take
a black immigrant from Jamaica in the 1950s. He—the first New
Commonwealth immigrants were overwhelmingly men—was probably Anglican,
likely cricket-playing, and quite
possibly a wartime veteran of the British armed forces or merchant
navy. Had he been schooled, he would have learned England’s history and
been introduced to its literature. (Probably owing to these
commonalities, today’s black Caribbean population has the
highest rate of intermarriage with British whites of any minority
group.) The cultural distance that separated him from a white British
native was almost certainly smaller than is the chasm that today
separates a white British resident of, say, Sheffield from
her new neighbor, a Roma immigrant. Yet that immigrant, having almost
certainly arrived from Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania, would be
classified by UK immigration authorities as a European Union migrant—EU
citizens enjoy the unfettered right to live and work
in Britain—and would therefore be presumed “white” by researchers
making extrapolations from immigration data.
Likewise,
immigrants whose ethnicity (or race or religion) looks similar on a
bureaucratic spreadsheet can have very different trajectories depending
on where they’re
actually coming from. A “South Asian immigrant” immigrant fleeing Idi
Amin’s purge of Uganda’s Indian petit-bourgeoisie is not a “South Asian
immigrant” from rural Kashmir. A “Muslim immigrant” from Istanbul is not
a “Muslim immigrant” from eastern Syria is
not a “Muslim immigrant” from Afghanistan.
This
means, in turn, that the “multicultural” vision of society beloved of
the contemporary left can take an almost infinite varieties of forms
—and the crucial question
for determining the shape and direction of that society is not
necessarily how many cultures are represented and welcomed, but which
ones, in what numbers, and at what pace. Which matters because …
5. Punctuated immigration encourages assimilation; constant immigration limits it. Salam’s essay makes this point well:
In
Replenished Ethnicity, Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez argues that
one of the main differences between the Mexican-origin population in the
U.S. and the white-ethnic
descendants of immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s is that
because mass European immigration ended more than 80 years ago, Italian
Americans do not generally find themselves in social worlds dominated by
recent Italian immigrants. The result is that
Italian-American identity is largely symbolic and optional, and Italian
Americans are perceived as indistinguishable from other white Anglos.
The end of immigrant replenishment led to sharp increases in
inter-ethnic marriages for Italian Americans and other
white ethnics. Mexican Americans, in contrast, are part of an ethnic
community that until recently was constantly being replenished by new
Mexican arrivals, which in turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of
Mexican identity.
This
dynamic applies to other ethnic groups as well. In 2007, Zhenchao Qian
of Ohio State and Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell found that over the
course of the 1990s, the
percentage of Asians marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites,
fell sharply, a development they attribute to rising immigration. As the
size of an ethnic group increases, in-group contact and interaction
increases. This in turn strengthens in-group ethnic
solidarity while reducing intermarriage.
This
effect is particularly strong, as Schwarz notes, when marriage itself
becomes a transmission belt for migrants, as it has been for many people
(especially women)
passing from the Muslim world to England:
Two-thirds
of British Muslims only mix socially with other Muslims; that portion
is undoubtedly higher among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis specifically.
Reinforcing this
parallel life is the common practice of returning “home” for a few
months every two or three years and an immersion in foreign electronic
media. Integration into a wider national life is further hindered—and
the retention of a deeply foreign culture is further
encouraged—by the fact that most Pakistani marriages, even if one
spouse is born in Britain, essentially produce
first-generation-immigrant children: the one study that measured this
phenomenon, conducted in the north England city of Bradford, found that
85
percent of third- and fourth-generation British Pakistani babies had a
parent who was born in Pakistan. (Incidentally, that study also found
that 63 percent of Pakistani mothers in Bradford had married their
cousins, and 37 percent had married first cousins.)
This
pattern applies to economic assimilation as well: The one place where
even the most pro-immigration economists generally concede that new
immigration drags down low-skilled
wages is among the previous cohort of immigrants. Thus the faster
immigrant populations replenish themselves, the more slowly they can
hope to gain ground economically relative to natives.
When
critics of open immigration raise this point, the rebuttal is often
that well, the immigrants themselves tend to favor more immigration, so
we should defer to their
ethnic solidarity rather than trying to impose our view of their
economic best interests. But deferring to their ethnic solidarity is a
good way to ensure that assimilation happens very slowly, because …
6.
Cosmopolitanism is unusual; tribalism comes naturally. The Western way
of life – economically individualistic, voluntaristic in religion,
defined by nuclear families
rather than extended clans – was already unusual (WEIRD, in the jargon
of sociologists) by human standards before the current era of mass
migration. But it did not aspire to a pure cosmopolitanism: the
“individualistic” Westerner in 1960 could still rely on
various commonalities (religious, linguistic, social, sexual) handed
down from the pre-liberal French or English or Teutonic past. (Schwarz
notes the fascinating research showing that English schoolchildren had
been playing the same games since the 12th century
A.D.)
Now,
though, there is a palpable sense in the liberal circles that in the
ideal society everyone would be a true citizen of the world, a
dilettante of culture and religion,
equally comfortable around neighbors of any race or faith or
background, with no unchosen preferences or loyalties.
One
need not delve into, say, Robert Putnam’s research on diversity and the
decline of social trust to see that this is not in fact how most people
wish to live. (The
recent statistic, somewhat shocking to the creative class, that even in
our highly-mobile and deracinated America most people live within
eighteen miles of their moms, should tell you something about the
resilience of tribe even in a late-modern WEIRDo society
like ours.) And if the only model of assimilation you offer new
arrivals to your society is a cosmopolitan ideal that’s both
unattainable and unattractive to many people, and if at the same time
your immigration policies make it relatively easy for them to
reject that ideal and build a permanent tribal enclave instead – well,
you shouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they choose to do.
Nor
should you be surprised that this, in turn, provokes greater tribalism
among native dissenters from a pure cosmopolitanism – be they stark
dissenters like Trump voters
or Le Pen supporters, or milder dissenters like the sixty-three percent
of German women who now feel that Germany’s has welcomed too many
migrants in the last year. Which brings us to the next point:
8.
Native backlash against perceived cultural transformation is very
powerful, and any politics that refuses to take account of it will fail.
Even if you suppose, that
is, that mass immigration would be an unalloyed good in a world where
Western populations could manage to overcome their (or what you think of
as their) bigotry and nativism and racism, in the world that actually
exists politicians have to account for those
forces and not simply assume that the right Facebook rules and
elite-level political conspiracies can perpetually keep a lid on
populism. If you make choices that very predictably empower the National
Front or Pegida or Trump, you cannot wash your hands of
those consequences by saying, “oh, it’s not my fault that my fellow
countrymen are such terrible bigots.” The way to disempower demagogues
is not to maintain a high-minded moral purity that’s dismissive of
public opinion’s actual shape; it’s to balance your
purity with prudence, so as to avoid handing demagogues issues that
might eventually deprive you of power entirely, and render all your
moral ambitions moot.
In
this vein, Tyler Cowen has suggested that because it courts backlash so
brazenly, the open borders movement might not necessarily be good for
open borders in the long
run. But one could go further and say that extremely liberal
immigration policies might not be good for liberal norms, period, in the
long run. Which matters because …
9.
Liberal societies are not guaranteed survival. Francis Fukuyama’s “end
of history” is an excellent descriptive frame for the contemporary
developed world, but it is
not an infallible prophecy. The liberal order has been remarkably
resilient, the alternatives still look deeply unappealing – but one
cannot assume that this pattern will continue indefinitely, or make
political choices as though liberalism, pluralism and
democracy are fixed features of the modern landscape, rather than
still-contingent things.
Which
does not mean that liberal societies should be governed in an
apocalyptic mood, or that a perpetual “one percent doctrine” should
guide leaders facing any policy
dilemma. But it does mean that political stability is not something
that statesmen can simply take for granted, or leave out of their
equations when they think through the long-term consequences of their
choices. And when you combine the factors discussed
above – the resilience of cultural identity, the power of tribalism,
the risks of backlash – then mass immigration on the scale we’ve seen
recently in Europe, particularly combined with what may be a long era of
relative economic stagnation, offers of the
most plausible drivers for a near-future breakdown in liberal norms. So
it’s an area where statesmen should proceed with greater caution than
they would in normal policy debates, rather than recklessly pushing the
fast-forward button on potentially destabilizing
trends.
But how much caution depends on context, and here it’s important to stress that …
10.
Europe and America are different. I’ve made this point before, but it
deserves reiteration: All of the reasons for caution about mass
immigration apply on both sides
of the Atlantic, but they don’t apply in the same way. America has a
longer history of successful assimilation, a melting-pot and mongrel
culture that makes hyphenated identities easier to integrate, a
geographical separation that (even now) makes it easier
to manage immigration flows, and a tradition of religious pluralism
that probably offers more room for, say, a conservative Islam to grapple
with modernity than does the post-Christian laicité that’s official in
France and unofficial elsewhere in Europe.
We
also aren’t just a narrow sea away from an array of broken, chaotic,
fundamentalism-ravaged societies, and we don’t face the kind of
demographic mismatch with Latin
America that Europe faces with Africa. Immigration enthusiasts on the
right often overstate and oversentimentalize the “Catholic values” that
Latin American migrants share with religious conservatives in the U.S.,
but there is no question, none, that much
of Latin America has more in common culturally with the contemporary
U.S. than the Iraqi hinterland has in common with contemporary England —
or at least the parts of England that haven’t become, as Schwarz puts
it, “metaphorical foreign encampments” within
a late-modern society.
As
someone who is (obviously) skeptical of the elite-level consensus on
immigration’s benefits, I’m glad to see the G.O.P. and conservatism
tilting away from George W.
Bush/Rubio-Schumer “comprehensivism” on immigration policy. But I also
think that the stampede to Trumpism is being unduly influenced by a
conflation of the American and European situations. Europe faces a real,
potentially deep and epoch-defining crisis —
a refugee problem that could threaten the very foundations of the
continent’s post-Cold War order. America faces a much more normal sort
of policy quandary, to which the ideal political response could reach
the destination that Salam proposes in his essay
— sharper limits on low-skilled migration and a more Canadian or
Australian approach to immigration as, effectively, recruitment —
without huge and wrenching shifts, mass deportations, religion-specific
entry bans, and all the rest of the Trumpian bill of
goods.
So
while we should be guided, no less than Europe, by a greater prudence
than our leadership has shown to date, we should also recognize that
what is (for Germany especially)
now a crisis Over There remains as yet an opportunity for us.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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