Contra Samuelson on amnesty

Paul Nachman has sent this letter to economist Robert Samuelson about a column he wrote on immigration in the Washington Post:

Dear Mr. Samuelson,

I often describe you to friends as “one of the wisest people in our public life.” (Of course, you could complain that this isn’t saying much, but I really do think of you as notably wise!)

And your column about immigration is mostly wise. But not the part about amnesty. What you say about it sounds sensible and might be sensible——-if we didn’t know the disastrous history since 1986. But we do know it, and we have been burned so badly on this subject by the myriad non-wise but influential people in public life that there is no reason to be anything less than 100% cynical about your proposal. (I’m not calling your proposal cynical. I’m saying you’re wrong.)

If we build the fence and start serious workplace enforcement, the influx will become a trickle and our present crop of illegal aliens will be steadily extruded from our society. (I also disagree with you that we owe them anything.)

The next thing I hope you’ll think about is Dick Lamm’s question: Why should we permit any immigration at all?

Take as your criterion that our immigration regime is to be for the benefit of the American people. Or if you don’t think this is suitable, please make your starting point explicit.

To spur your considerations, you might glance at my list of what mass immigration (both legal and illegal) is doing to the country, distilled from my observations while living in Redondo Beach, California, 3/96—8/05:

1. The flood of immigrants drives wages and living conditions in our central cities toward those of the Third World.

2. The influx imposes both sprawl and gridlock on our metropolitan areas.

3. Immigrant families needing services overwhelm our schools, taxpayer-funded healthcare facilities, and other public agencies.

4. Those requiring services don’t assimilate and, instead, expect to be served in their native languages.

5. American civic culture frays as each ethnic group establishes its own grievance lobby and pushes for preferences.

6. Communicable diseases such as tuberculosis (new, drug-resistant strains) return.

7. Shortages of water and other resources loom, especially in immigration-blitzed California.

If it were up to me——-a physicist, an environmentalist, and a partisan of Western civilization——-we would permit only superstars to immigrate, surely no more than a few thousand people per year. (For example, we would admit physicists of stature comparable to Enrico Fermi. I’m under no illusion that I would meet this standard myself.)

Sincerely,
Paul Nachman
Bozeman, Montana

VFR reader Mark writes:

In the course of his letter to Mr. Samuelson, Mr. Nachman writes:

“Take as your criterion that our immigration regime is to be for the benefit of the American people. Or if you don’t think this is suitable, please make your starting point explicit.”

This statement is problematic, because a liberal and a traditionalist will interpret it in different ways.

A liberal finds his validation—his very being—in liberal acts, that is, in being a liberal. Thus, as you have pointed out, liberalism requires unassimilable aliens in our midst.

Therefore, to a liberal, the phrase “for the benefit of the American people” translates to: the inclusion of masses of unassimilables throughout the nation.

Liberalism is both an ideology and an event. It is an event for the individual liberal and an event in history (for a large group of people, a nation). Liberalism requires an enactment, a performance. A liberal cannot be a liberal unless he enacts his liberalism, and adopts liberalism as the criterion for all behavior. In this sense, liberalism is similar to an addiction; it has a single pathway of behavior, which includes no options for learning or self-correction, and it disregards the negative consequences of its behavior.

Therefore, the negative consequences of mass immigration are meaningless to the event of liberalism. Within the context of the event of liberalism, the negative consequences of mass immigration are merely one epiphenomenon. Those consequences will have zero effect on the fundamental phenomenon, which is the event of liberalism itself (just as the negative consequences of an addiction have zero effect on the primary phenomenon of the fact of the addiction itself).

In this sense, liberalism tracks all the mass secular fanaticisms of the 20th century. Although described in the textbooks as “ideologies,” they were primarily events to be enacted in history, regardless of consequences (National Socialism, Marxism, Socialism).

We can expect Liberalism to have a similar dreary fate.

LA replies:

The key sentence in Mark’s comment is: “A liberal cannot be a liberal unless he enacts his liberalism, and adopts liberalism as the criterion for all behavior.” I think this is correct. To a liberal, the criterion of the rightness and truth of all acts is the extent to which they represent and enact liberalism. Just as, for a Muslim, Islam is the only criterion, for a liberal, liberalism is the only criterion. Therefore liberals will interpret the phrase, “the benefit of the American people,” purely in liberal terms. However, I think Mr. Nachman was reasonably assuming that Samuelson has at least some non-liberal criteria for the well-being of the American people.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 08, 2006 08:04 AM | Send