The surest path to making America Great Again, the world’s unchallenged number 1, with its strongest economy, would be to support immigration. Immigrants fill jobs going begging now – both skilled and unskilled. They start new businesses, adding to shopping, dining, and entertainment diversity that pull people in to settle, stay and spend. As employees, employers, and business entrepreneurs they enrich our economy – for us all. Diversity adds to business growth in technical as well as service areas. A stronger economy with more technical prowess strengthens our national defense. Our population growth before World Wars I and II made us the powerful force we proved to be. A similar policy would make us much stronger with respect to India and China.
Immigration would be especially good for those who cry loudest about stopping it. Many protestors aren’t hurting economically – they just take pride in their skin color and ethnic origin rather than actual earthly accomplishments. And they don’t want to have to share.
Those who are hurting economically can and should be protected by tax and economic measures against any harm from immigration but I think the evidence is that they too would mostly benefit from immigration. Jobs are plentiful in thriving areas.
Nevertheless, America resists. Backlash is palpable, nationwide, even worldwide, though not universal. There’s plenty of evidence that people are willing to put up with a trickle of immigration but not willing to put up with more. And we’re confronting worldwide calls for a renewal of fascist dictators. Only fools could think that’s good but the world’s full of them.
Biden is obviously aware of the strengths of immigration, the backlash against it, and the risks both ways.
It’s hardly clear that quashing immigration would stanch the threat of fascism. Though many don’t realize it, the German people didn’t vote for Hitler or the Nazis. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg handed Hitler the keys to power anyway, partly because the pro-democratic forces in Germany were themselves disorganized.[1]
Suppose there were a chance that giving into anti-immigrant fever would stop modern Nazis, would it be worth it – would behaving like the devil be better than surrendering to it?
Stopping that danger requires those of us who support democratic government – human, imperfect but democratic government – to stick together to support it.
I grew up in an area with plenty of Jewish and Catholic institutions so that each group felt comfortable. At 14, my father took us to a Protestant run summer music festival in the western tip of New York State. Musicians come from all over, play music written across the world and play it together. When I grew up, folk music was a compendium of music from cultures all over the globe. Jazz pioneered in bringing Black and white together, though some have forgotten that history. Classical music ignored national boundaries but was much slower to ignore race. I’d been brought up in a family devoted to classical music but when my parents and I got to hear Marian Anderson, meet and shake her hand, we knew we were in the presence of genius.
Instead of a New York City or Jewish college, I intentionally went to a college with a different culture. And my law school was famous worldwide for its experts in international law, which brought together students of all colors and backgrounds.[2] To me, the solution was to make friends. They were interesting and worth getting to know. In the Peace Corps I functioned largely as a minority of one in Iran’s Islamic society. I continue to have and take pleasure and pride in friends around the country and indeed around the world. I’m not naïve about the world’s problems but the problems and the violence among us are largely driven by politicians anxious to make names for themselves.[3]
I choose not to be part of that.
— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Oct. 3, 2023.
[1] Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy 22–52 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press 2003); and see The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., 1984) (4 volumes).
[2] E.g., Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell, and Lung-chu Chen, Human Rights and World Public Order: The Basic Policies of an International Law of Human Dignity (Oxford Univ. Press, 2nd Ed, 2018); and see B. S. Chimni, The Policy-Oriented or New Haven Approach to International Law: The Contributions of Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell, International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches, 104 – 178, available through https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107588196.005 (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[3] See Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press 2002).
Constitutionalism and Democracy 