Its apologists tend to utter the word with a pious unction, but there's nothing intrinsically good about immigration.
Like the outhouse, immigration is one of those ideas that can be good one day but bad the next. Something changes in the social setting and the idea, symbolizing a moral relation between men, starts to cause someone some unnecessary harm. A good idea goes bad.
We've seen this happen to many ideas -- the outhouse among them. Now it's happened to immigration.
What's happened that's turned immigration into a bad idea?
For starters, progress in our industrial arts, the closing of our frontiers, and increasing population have combined to produce an unlooked for change of enormous significance. Full employment -- by which we now mean most everyone hired into somebody's service for 40 or more hours per week -- has replaced liberal occupation as a goal of our economy. This has had the effect of transforming our division of labor into a desperate and relentless mercenary competition. And with this change one of the great promises of Western Civilization has been broken, setting in motion a landslide of other changes.
This change in economic goals occurred because we didn't figure out how to liberate the time that is being "saved" by our time-saving machines and production techniques. As it's turned out in America, a worker who is displaced by a machine in the headlong rush to high-productivity isn't liberated for some greater achievement, he's just jobless. If he wants to continue eating he has to find another job -- unless he owns the machine, and most workers don't.
This relentless pressure to create new jobs for folks to make money at has brought with it another relentless pressure. We must buy what these new jobs are producing, in addition to buying what the machines are churning out. If we don't buy all the new stuff and services, the machine-displaced workers lose their new jobs.
Thus was born the Consumption Society, a society in which high-productivity has translated into nothing but urgency to buy more and more.
And with this birth came death in many forms.
As our population grew, and the means of production of our material necessaries fell into fewer and fewer hands -- how many farmers are there today compared with a century ago? -- the problems of keeping money circulating became too much for business to handle on its own.
Taxation and redistribution was added to the economic picture. To the Consumption Society we added the Provider State.
Unfortunately for working stiffs, a substantial chunk of the money collected in taxes for the purposes of creating government jobs and keeping money circulating has been taxed away from working stiffs and not from the men who own the means of production. This added tax burden has offset the reduction in the cost of goods achieved by our industrial artistry, and then some. And this "and then some" has been a real killer.
For a significant stratum of wage earners this "and then some" has meant that their take home pay has ceased to be adequate to support a family. And this significant stratum has been becoming increasingly significant. Along the road to hyper-productivity machines have taken over so many semi-skilled tasks that the low-skill labor market has been flooded. Wage competition has had its effect, and more and more men have been finding themselves unable to get work that pays enough to support a family.
This has had the effect of driving many women into the mercenary labor market and further smashing up the traditional division of labor within the family. One tentacle of the Provider State scheme -- obligatory government controlled schooling -- having already stripped the family of much of its traditional educative function.
From this rocky soil no-fault divorce was just one of a passel of bad ideas that sprouted and sucked away more and more opportunities for folks to find valued places and stability in our society.
And while all these changes have been taking place, other tentacles of the Provider State scheme -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. -- have been draining away the vital mutual aid functions from the neighborhood and the church, weakening folks' allegiance to these institutions.
In these circumstances, with children looking more like a burden than a blessing to more and more folks, there was little to prevent us from stepping into the abortion chasm. So we did.
And so it's been that the birth of the Consumption Society has brought death to America on a scale we've never before seen here. Death to persons. Death to institutions.
Which brings us to the present.
Rampant crime. More than a million murders a year. More than 2 million convicts behind bars. Rampant addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, video games, pornography, you name it. Social pathology on an enormous scale.
Oh yes, and a rapacious appetite for natural resources that lie beyond our territorial borders.
Our appalling appetite has made us increasingly unwelcome intruders in many parts of the world. And it's become pretty obvious that our unwelcome intrusions have had a part in events that have made our nation considerably less secure than it was during the Great Depression.
So, things have changed in America, in many important ways they've have changed for the worse -- no matter how cheaply you can purchase a plastic bust of Elvis at the mall these days. And these changes in our social setting mean we've got to change some of our libertarian policies.
Libertarian policies? Certainly. The entire machinery of what has become known as the American Way of Living is set up along libertarian lines. That's the source of our social catastrophe.
The basic problem is that libertarian philosophy -- introduced by some inky loobies during that singularly mis-named epoch of moral philosophy, the Enlightenment -- is based on the notion that independent of his experience with his environment each man naturally possesses a set of instincts, a recurring and powerful desire to be reasonable, and a stability of personality that makes it possible for him to become self-sufficient in his pursuit of happiness.
The Enlightenment philosophers got this idea because they saw around them many stable and rational men, and they assumed this was the natural state of man. For some reason they hastily dismissed the possibility that this stability and rationality flourished in large part because of the stabilizing institutions in which the men they were observing lived.
This hasty dismissal was a grave error. We now know that the radical individualism peddled by libertarian apologists for the competitive market way of life is poison to humane society. The court of experience and rational reflection has settled this beyond cavil. More than a million murders per year. Quite beyond cavil.
The high court's verdict means unequivocally that this bit of ancient wisdom, disregarded during the Enlightenment darkness, has got to be our guide to policy: The setting in which a man lives his life bears greatly on his character and on his prospects for happiness. Throughout his life a man needs to be surrounded by good example and formal harmonizing institutions; to have a multiplicity of valued attachments and stabilizing associations; to have access to adequate wealth; to have ample opportunity for liberal occupation; to be secure against predation; and, to be charitably coerced.
Which brings me back to immigration, and why the changes in America have made it a bad idea.
The derangements of our economy are debilitating our setting for life, and immigration exacerbates these derangements in several ways.
1) Continuing immigration puts us under pressure to buy more labor, immigrants' labor, than we are already under pressure to buy -- thereby forcing us to consume time and wealth we need to be liberating for truly liberal occupation. To paraphrase Proudhon -- immigration is theft.
2) It also puts us under the pressure of paying for the care of the children born to those immigrants who are not able to afford to care for them without help. And in our present state this help all too often means "government financed" help -- thereby consuming in taxes many folks' already inadequate wealth, further cutting into our opportunities for liberal occupation. More theft.
3) It puts America under increased pressure to aggressively intrude into foreign territories and carve out greater access to natural resources in order to fuel our consumption-driven economy -- further degrading our prospects for security.
If we need to start reducing these deranging pressures in order to get on the road to recovery, and we do, then the wise course for us is to place a moratorium on immigration until we regain our equilibrium.
By doing so we lose nothing essential to our prospects for happiness, and spare ourselves a burden that might very soon crack our spine.
THE END
Eastport, Maine
October, 2003