Is our nation in peril from immigration?

A fellow I know who reads a lot about national affairs sent me an article about immigration featuring a speech given by a fellow named Victor Hansen Davis and Dick Lamm, the governor of Colorado at the time. I really don't wish to quote it, because it's pretty violent and distasteful in some subtle ways, so I'll see if I can find a URL for it...

Well, I suppose that it was a widely-circulated article, because here it is on Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp

And here was my considered opinion about it:

I'd be lots more impressed if we, as a nation, hadn't heard precisely the same dire warnings about every thirty to fifty years throughout our history.

The first group that threatened our national stability and identity came from a nation whose major traits, we were told, were alcoholism, starvation, and fist-fighting. We were told that their families were huge, they were willing to live on utterly nothing, and they were, to a man, woman and ragged child, pledged to a foreign church whose rituals were purposely kept mysterious. They took over major Eastern cities, New York and Boston, with their corrupt politics, and found their way into organized crime as easily as they did boxing, their other principal talent.

Yet we seemed to survive the influx of Irish, though there are still Irish in organized crime--even Irish street gangs in Boston continue to flourish. Of course, they also became civil servants, teachers, engineers, builders, and the Kennedys.

That was in the 1840's. The Chinese who came to work on railroads a bit later simply terrified the Western states. They, too, had an unrestricted birthrate, and it was useless to try to understand the language and culture. The Chinese, of course, brought in drugs, particularly opium, and prostitutes. Their gangs, the Tongs, were utterly ruthless, favoring beheadings as a method of enforcement. Most Chinese preferred to live apart from the rest of the nation, and you'll find precisely this situation in many of the old Chinatowns in the big cities.

Yet we've survived them, too. Their major threat is to our school grading curves: every bright kid seems to be Chinese these days.

The Jews came in from Russia and Poland from 1890 to 1930. They were neither Christian nor English-speakers, which put them at about the level of the Chinese in terms of desirability. Their vaunted financial cleverness didn't help their poverty, and they were carriers of tuberculosis in every big city in the East. Their social problems--illegitimacy, crime, and domestic violence--were bad enough to foster the development of the first settlement houses in New York and Chicago. And yet they became our lawyers, physicians, scientists, and the entire entertainment industry.

Christian Poles flooded into the Midwest by the millions, along with Hungarians, various Slavs, and Lithuanians, pushing the locals right out of the auto and steel industries. Then the Italians, with their Mafia connections that went back through the centuries, their large families, and their tribal loyalty to family and church and little else, essentially emptied out the southern (i.e., poverty-stricken) half of their ancient peninsula. Enough of them came to New Orleans that there were riots, and the Little Italies that formed in every other city were not places of peace and prosperity--after which they moved out to turn into industry managers, artists, college professors, judges, and ordinary citizens with better-than-average recipe collections. (I'm married to one.)

We've survived all of these, and now they've apparently been included under the category of 'Americans,' the sort of Americans who Victor Hansen Davis tells us should be terrified of Mexican immigrants.

Prof Davis may be brilliant, but he has not a clue where the wealth of the United States came from. It was brought here by the immigrants, who worked three jobs each, took over neighborhoods that nobody else wanted, took over businesses that nobody else wanted, and made enough money to embarrass themselves for a generation or so, after which they became old money and began to endow colleges. Because we are who we are, we attract the ambitious kids from every nation, the ones that they should be desperately trying to hang on to.

The economy, economists will be the first to tell you, is infinitely elastic: more people generate more jobs. While it is true that the nation's natural resources are certainly finite, that is something we all must deal with, regardless of nationality.

I read something once that I rather liked, and which I'll try to paraphrase, from James Michener. There are two nations separated by a river. On one side of the river, the farmland is well-supplied with water, and the soil is better. There's a bit of a 'weather line' along the river, and so it rains better on one side. Cattle like it better. Natural resources of all sorts are more abundant in that favored area as well.

The river is the Rio Grande, as it runs through Texas. And the favored side, the one favored by nature in every way, is the southern one. It's in his novel "Texas."

None of this is to say that it's easy to assimilate immigrants. But it's something that we do very well, and it's always been to our benefit.

The problem with racism (not racial hatred, but nationalism based on genetics) is that it doesn't work. It works with seagulls, whose identity as seagulls is never in question, and they never marry outside of their race, or get interested in non-seagull music, or journey to nations where there aren't any seagulls. But it doesn't work with people and never did. The 'races' are about as permanent as that of the ancient Greeks [extolled in the article as the most successful of nations], who disappeared without a trace not long after their days of glory.

The ancient Romans understood this, and had surprisingly wise procedures in place that granted citizenship to all of its conquered territories. The Ottoman Empire did much the same, as did the British Empire. All were quite successful, none were race-based, at least not to the extent that Prof Davis (what was =his= family name changed from?) would recommend. The Nazis thought otherwise, but it was an experiment that was doomed to failure if for no other reason than the Aryans he favored thought Hitler was a nutcase.

M Kinsler