October 23, 2023

No matter which prominent side wins in our immigration debates, the U.S. loses for a simple reason: the contest pits people who hate the point against people who miss the point.

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On one side are the large-I Immigrationists, individuals who behave as if immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned, and must be the one constant in an otherwise ever-changing universe of policy.  They’re usually identified as “leftists.”  On the other are small-i immigrationists, people who believe immigration is generally good, generally necessary, should never be questioned in principle, and must in some form be the one constant in an otherwise ever-changing universe of policy.  They’re usually identified as “conservatives.”

The debate between the two sides often goes like this: leftists welcome inundation with even uneducated, unskilled foreigners (as long as the aliens aren’t sent to their neighborhood; see Martha’s Vineyard, et al.) with the argument “our strength lies in our diversity!”  Conservatives counter this by reassuring all and sundry that “I’m all for immigration!”  “But,” they add, “it should be done legally and be merit-based, with possession of economically valuable skills a prerequisite for entry.”

The problem with this is that it’s the battling of a nonsensical argument with a one-dimensional argument.  After all, there’s a name for entities defined merely by the job-related role they can perform: robots.  There’s also a name for thus characterizing people: a Marxist mistake.

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I’ll explain this by beginning with a story.  Many years ago, during a dinner-table conversation, a quite wonderful man I know remarked that the dissolution of the black family was all caused by government welfare, by the funding of single motherhood.  While such policy is destructive and surely exacerbates problems, is it really true that it’s entirely responsible?  If it were true, how could it be that some Hasidic Jews accept the same government assistance but keep their families wholly intact?

You may now say, “Of course!  They’re radically ‘religious.’”  But that’s the point: man is not just an economic creature.  He also has intellectual, emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual dimensions.

The late Pope Benedict XVI mentioned this when critiquing Karl Marx, saying that the latter’s mistake was his viewing of man as a purely economic being.  Human behavior was explainable, and problems remediable, the thinking goes, solely via an economic approach (e.g., eliminating economic inequality will end human strife).

The point is this: any time we ourselves instinctively treat man as a purely economic being — as even that intelligent, conservative man I mentioned did — we are unwittingly repeating Marx’s mistake.

Yet this is common today, even among conservatives.  Do you see now how easily such errors can be mainstreamed and inform (read: deform) our thinking?

Now let’s return to immigration.  Do the work skills and ethic newcomers bring with them define them?  Are those qualities the most important things they bring to our shores?  Since they’re not robots and won’t actually just be cogs in the economy, no.  Rather, the most important things they bring are their beliefs.