Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Does the Immigrant Make America, Or …
I’m genuinely sorry, fellow Ricochet readers. I lost control of myself today and read a Dana Milbank column. What’s worse, he sparked a discussible idea (not deliberately on his part, of course).
His argument is that immigrants improve America, by bringing their culture to ours. Each immigrant wave brings new wisdom from their culture to teach our culture. The world is improving us:
This is not merely about a fresh labor supply but about the fresh blood needed to cure what ails us. To benefit from such a transfusion, we not only need to welcome more immigrants but also to adopt pieces of their culture lacking in our own — just as we have done with other (mostly European) cultures for centuries.
Of course, I say he’s got it backward (as usual). They’re not improving us, we’re improving them. As each culture comes to America, they benefit from the individual freedom and range of opportunities in this country.
But it seems clear that Milbank, like most Leftists, assumes that each wave of immigrants improves us and that America is only great because we’ve enjoyed so many immigrant waves, each one improving us all the more. The Leftist attitude is that America constantly needs a shot in the arm, provided by new people from different cultures. The rhetoric is that immigration, really, is what makes America great. That pretty much implies that America is really a stale place, and we only survive by the rejuvenation of new blood. Call it the “vampire theory” of culture.
This is, of course, ridiculous. If immigrants’ cultural diversity sparks American success, why haven’t those same immigrants sparked the same success in other countries? Or sparked it in their own? Why do they come here in the first place? What makes America attractive is not that it gives them a chance to improve us; it’s that we give them a chance to succeed as individuals.
At least, that’s what I argue. What do you say? Does the immigrant make America, or is it America who makes the immigrant?
Photo Credit: Flickr user NIAID.
Published in General
I think you miss the point my friend. Any nation can have good high end Italian restaurants. But only Italy and America have good low end Italian restaurants. Plus the schools in the US that fail at educating third-world kids like myself also fail to educate everyone else.
What exactly where the cultural benefits of poor Irishmen, Sicilian, and Poles? What exactly was so appealing about uneducated Russian peasant Jews? I highly doubt that the IQ of these immigrants deviated much from the human mean. We have done this dance before in our history what exactly is so objectionable about this current round of immigrant that was not true of the last round?
I wonder though what you mean by American habits? Immigrants prospered in America because of the vast economic growth of our nation. Economic growth that they directly contributed to. We didn’t pick up immigrants and then decide what to do with them. They already knew what they wanted to do, which was take up one of the many jobs open to them in factories, or in farming. Integration was their means of getting further ahead and trying to avoid nativist discrimination and animosity.
I think you miss the point my friend. Any nation can have good high end Italian restaurants. But only Italy and America have good low end Italian restaurants. Plus the schools in the US that fail at educating third-world kids like myself also fail to educate everyone else.
This comment is almost a parody of the immigration enthusiast position. Apparently, this massive demographic wound we have inflicted on ourselves is something we should appreciate because a long-ago wave of immigrants into a vastly different America produced “good low-end Italian restaurants.” People who have had their local schools ruined by third-world immigrants are not grateful.
As for the schools “failing to educate everyone else”…no. We have bad students, not bad schools. Why are the Finnish schools so legendarily good? Because they’re full of Finns. Why are overwhelmingly black and/or Latino schools in the U.S. so bad? Because Blacks and Latinos go there. That’s the ugly truth about education in the U.S. Look at California’s test scores post-Mexican invasion, and then tell me how this has been a good thing for the nation.
First, the current round of immigration is objectionable because of its mammoth size; we have the highest proportion of foreign-born people in the U.S. since 1920, just before we had the great immigration cutoff. And they are immigrating into an increasingly automated, slow-growth and high-welfare economy that doesn’t have manual labor jobs available to practically anyone who wants one. The second problem is that the majority come from third-world Latin American states, and these are much less desirable immigrants than Europeans (a la Pat Buchanan’s old comment about Zulus and Englishmen).
Sample size of one, but for what it’s worth America was pretty transformative for me, and I can’t say that I really transformed America.
So if I understand you correctly our schools are bad because black people and Hispanics are stupid, but I though third world children ruined our schools? Here I thought it was a terrible government bureaucracy that rewards failure and success with the same level of pay and benefits. I guess if we just kicked out the darkies from our schools everything would be fine assuming we can also keep out the third worlders too just to be safe. No worse students out there than Vietnamese, Indian, and Romanians.
Yes but you are just one person though. It isn’t really a fair comparison to pit yourself against all of the US. Let me ask you though have you introduced any of your American friends to you distinctly British habits. Get anyone to celebrate Guy Fox day or Boxing day…things like that?
I guess mowing lawns, bussing tables, and cleaning hotel rooms isn’t manual labor. I see plenty of Latine Americans doing those things and doing them well. I know one Mexican who started off with a lawn mower and a truck who now has a whole business. My parents where some of his first costumers because they make enough money and have little time to mow their own lawn. What exactly is the difference you see between Mexico and Romania or Brazil and Ukraine? Presumably the the later are more preferable to the former in your eyes?
While I wouldn’t want to say that I’ve had zero impact on my friends, I think I’ve had less impact on them than America had on me. I believe that this is not unusual for immigrants. Note particularly how much more civilized America’s Muslims are than those found anywhere else in the world.
If anyone here is intending to claim that the positive influence of immigrants is zero, then I imagine they’re engaging in hyperbole. I understood the question to be about the predominant impact, which I believe to be most frequently felt by the immigrant.
It may be the case that the negative impact for America outweighs the positive, but I guess this doesn’t seem like a question honing thread in which to debate that.
Recognize in the first part the imigration has been relaxed to the point of where it has become a dead letter by intent or something else.
For all the rich history of inviting and folding the new into the American Idea, there comes a point where control has been lost via ideology rather than facts.
Simply look to the EU model and the current issues the Brits, French and Swedish politicians have wrought upon the native populations
with the promise of diversity and cultural enrichment.
In short, unrestrained kindness is a fools errand and will defeat any nations claim to soverienty.
The problem in Europe is that their nations are based upon ethnic identity, a characteristic that can not be acquired except by a slow process of crossbreeding over many generations. The genius of America is that it is not tied down in this manner.
that sounds like a subject for an essay.
There is abviously a symbiotic relstionship. As the ancient Romans integrated with their conquored people, as they let in Germanic “barbarians” on their borders it changed the nation. Of course too, the “others” the Romans came in contact with also adapted and changed. Culture will evolve. It is never static. My feeling on immigration is that they bring new ideas to the table. Ideas make it based on their usefullness. If old ideas are more useful, then they will survive. If new ideas are more useful, then they will take root and integrate into the culture at large. New ideas are almost always a positive. That’s a rather pragmatic dilaectic view of it.
One point to made is that what makes America “different” is not who we are (ethnic identity, h/t Valiuth) but what we do. Frenchmen are French because they were born in France; Americans are American because we’re committed to a market attitude, personal freedom, entrepreneurial risk-taking, etc.
As proud as we are of the Madisonian political ideas in the Constitution, I’d suggest that the commitment to a capitalist, free-market society is much more integral to the American Way of Life. The American Way is to expand the range of choices, and let an individual go where he wants. No experts or power mongers determining your choices; top-down impositions are not our Way (at least, not our traditional Way).
Now, it goes without saying that if other countries adopted that same attitude, we wouldn’t be so unique or exceptional … but that would be fine with us!
That’s why this whole immigration debate touches a nerve for me. I’m delighted to let as many immigrants in as want to come. But I worry that in the effort to “diverse,” we’re diluting and losing the country’s commitment to the American Way.
The root cause is the large differences in average IQ between different races/ethnicities, with native-born whites and Asians having a substantially higher mean than black and latinos. No educational intervention (Head start, pre k, etc) has ever been shown to have a positive lasting effect on IQ.
Whites and Asians do just fine in the same schools that “fail” blacks and latinos. Doesn’t Occam’s Razor suggest a very clear, if disturbing, explanation?
Alexander Hamilton thought that the genius of America was in its ethnic homogeneity. Over the long-term, I doubt that a proposition nation will engender the same kind of loyalty in its citizens as an ethnostate.