By Thomas Sowell
Despite controversies that rage over immigration, it is hard to see how anyone could be either for or against immigrants in general. First of all, there are no immigrants in general.
Both in the present and in the past, some immigrant groups have made great contributions to American society, and others have contributed mainly to the welfare rolls and the prisons. Nor is this situation unique to the United States. The same has been true of Sweden and of other countries in Europe and elsewhere.
Sweden was, for a long time, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. As of 1940, only about 1 percent of the Swedish population were immigrants. Even as the proportion of immigrants increased over the years, as late as 1970, 90 percent of foreign-born persons in Sweden had been born in other Scandinavian countries or in Western Europe.
These immigrants were usually well-educated, and often had higher labor force participation rates and lower unemployment rates than the native Swedes. That all began to change as the growing number of immigrants came increasingly from the Middle East, with Iraqis becoming the largest immigrant group in Sweden.
This changing trend was accompanied by a sharply increased use of the government’s “social assistance” program, from 6 percent in the pre-1976 era to 41 percent in the 1996-99 period. But, even in this later period, fewer than 7 percent of the immigrants from Scandinavia and Western Europe used “social assistance,” while 44 percent of the immigrants from the Middle East used that welfare state benefit.
Immigrants, who were by this time 16 percent of Sweden’s population, had become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the people receiving welfare payments. The proportion of foreigners in prison was 5 times their proportion in the population of the country.
The point of all this is that there is no such thing as immigrants in general, whether in Europe or America. Yet all too many of the intelligentsia in the media and in academia talk as if immigrants were abstract people in an abstract world, to whom we could apply abstract principles, such as “we are all descendants of immigrants.”
Read the rest here.
─ What Kind of Immigrant Are You? ─
ReplyDeleteI'm the kind that knows the difference between an immigrant - a person who voluntarily and peacefully moves from country A to country B - and a refugee imported by the US government. That kind.
─ Sweden was, for a long time, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. ─
Who cares?
─ Immigrants, who were by this time 16 percent of Sweden’s population, had become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the people receiving welfare payments. ─
Sucks to be Sweden. What does that have to do with immigration per sé?
─ The point of all this is that there is no such thing as immigrants in general, whether in Europe or America. ─
Sure, there are all sorts. Just like with everything else. Why is this relevant?
─ However congenial the idea of open borders may be to elites who think of themselves as citizens of the world, it is not even possible to have everyone come to America and the country still remain America. ─
This is an awful strawman. Nobody is saying that everybody alive today SHOULD move to America. Or anywhere else. Leaving aside the obvious casting of aspersions at people who believe in open trade to goods AND labor by calling them "elites", the fact is that Dr. Sowell is seriously misrepresenting the argument. Basically he's saying we should kill Bastiat because we need to protect our precious genetic "homogeneity", or our "culture" That much is being implied above.
I admire Dr. Sowell very much but just like Hoppe and others, he's making very bad arguments here. The point we free marketers make is that open borders merely means no undue impediments by the State on the movement of labor, be it towards the inside or to the outside. This argument is based on the NAP. The other argument is moral and based on Natural Rights: people have a right to migrate. That certainly does not entail moving to a place violently and so no such proviso is necessary or required. Immigrants migrate peacefully and voluntarily to all those places where they're invited. And people in a place have every right to associate with immigrants, to hire them, rent to them, marry them, etc. The preoccupation with homogeneity and 'culture' is evidence of chauvinism, not of good will.
"Nor is it the racial makeup of the country, which consists of races found on other continents. What is unique are American institutions, American culture and American economic and other achievements within that framework."
ReplyDeleteThe American institutions, based on the Anglo-Saxon values of limited government, that has only ever been valued and well functioning in White countries (until gradually destroyed from within).
No other race values individualism on the whole, all put the collective above it. I wish that wasn't the case, but to not observe this is delusion.
You can always count on Fransisco Torres showing up on an immigration thread, in his usual hyper defensive manner, completely failing to look at the Latin American world which he descended from. Aside from Chile or Panama, there is a long and rich history of socialism and destruction in the Latin world, and a population that simply does not elect governments that value liberty in the least.
Nor do they when they move here.