The general attitude towards immigration emanates from a place of fear. Many people like the way that America is and are afraid that immigrants will change our culture for the worse. Well, those people would be wrong. This argument has been made over and over throughout the history of America.
The Germans, Irish, Chinese, Italians and others were all looked upon as threats to “The American Culture”. Well, were they threats? Are they now? No. And people fail to grasp the reality that most immigrants are coming here to become part of us and not change us. There is no evidence that if you allow immigrants to assimilate into your country that they change the national identity in any significant way. They want to learn to speak English, they want to be American. We won’t let them. Isolating people in a black market underworld prevents them from being assimilated; welcoming them is the answer.
Other than the American Indians, everyone here is the descendent of an immigrant and yet we somehow think the immigrants today are different. Look at the early part of the 20th century, dirt poor and starving immigrants with no education came over in droves from Ireland. They had nothing and were dying like flies in their home land. The people already here thought they were going to ruin America. What could those uneducated poor Irish do? Well, a hell of a lot actually.
Turns out that they didn’t want to be uneducated and poor but needed the fertile soil of freedom to prosper. How about the Germans? We went to war with them twice and threw a bunch of them into camps and last time I checked the masses of German born immigrants did pretty well too. The same with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Jews, the Italians and the list goes on. Most all of these groups were met with fear as outsiders, but it was irrational and unsustainable fear.
America prospered and our culture only strengthened. Now we are focused on the Hispanic world immigrating here. We hear the same noise we did 100 years ago, but it’s still an irrational fear. These people want to Americanize and be part of our culture, the vast majority of them anyway, and we are not letting them.
Think about this. People all over the world are begging to come here. They vary from the highly educated who come to our Universities, to the skilled worker looking to start their own business, to the unskilled worker trying to end the cycle of poverty they’re stuck in back in their home country. We have the opportunity to take the cream off the top of other nations around the world and we squander it. To use a sports analogy, imagine if you have a pretty decent sports team, and you find out that the best players from every other team wanted to come play for your team. In fact, they want to play for your team so badly that they will go to great lengths to do so. What fan turns around and says, “No we don’t want all the great players?” That would be stupid. Having the best team possible is the American Way.
Unlike a sports team where there are finite positions, the beauty of a capitalist economy is that there are almost unlimited positions. There isn’t a finite pie, where your piece becomes smaller as more people come in. The pie gets bigger and prosperity overall increases.
Philosophically we just don’t seem to learn. America dominated the world because of free markets, small government and open immigration. So instead of continuing to ride our Triple Crown winning stallion, we saddled up our current system of high regulation, big government and a tight immigration policy. We need to go back to the stallion that won all those races for us.
Does anyone really think if we went around the world and picked 10 million people that are hard working, good at what they do, and would love to live in America that America and its people overall wouldn’t be better off as a result? Can anyone answer no to that question with a straight face? No China, you keep your best engineers. Sorry India keep all those well educated technology minds. Mexico you guys keep your best farmers, carpenters, day laborers and small business owners. That is so idiotic if you want “Team America” to be a winner!
We have people come over here and get a world class college education only to force them out when their student visa is up? So they can make their own nation richer? It’s a broken logic. In fact it’s not logical at all. It’s driven by fear. Fear of the idea that there is a finite amount of spots on the team and you may lose yours. I understand how someone feels that way but history doesn’t teach us that. It teaches us the pie expands and there is more prosperity. In the last part of this series we’ll examine what our system should look like.
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