On Immigration Just Keep The Economy Growing - Road to the Middle Class

SO WHICH IS it? Robert Samuelson says that immigration is a problem because there’s a conflict coming between a burgeoning Hispanic immigrant population of the less-educated and retiring baby-boomers who are going to want their benefits.

The American Immigration Law Foundation says that the Hispanic immigrants are doing fine and that

Latinos experience substantial socioeconomic progress across generations compared to both their immigrant forefathers and native Anglos.

Let’s face it. There has been a conflict between established Americans and immigrants since the founding. The common school movement was founded in part to force assimilation of the dangerous Catholic Irish that were emerging in the 1830s. Then we were worried about Jews in 1900, blacks in the 1960s, and now Hispanics in the 21st century.

The problem is always the same. Will the uneducated, unadapted immigrants trash the America that we higher-toned Americans have so tenderly built?

Then answer always is: We can’t be sure. Up to now, immigrants have always assimilated into the spirit of democratic capitalism, more or less, sooner or later. But will they assimilate this time?

In The New Americans Michael Barone shows how Jews, Italians, and Irish were the problem immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, just as East Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks are the problem now. Their success in assimilation depended upon their exposure, before arrival in the urban economy, to the culture of the rule of law.

Then as now the Democrats latched onto the new immigrants for their votes and also because Democrats believe in race, class, and ethnic politics.

What will happen this time? We don’t know. But we can help things along by making sure that there are jobs, jobs, jobs. As long as there are jobs, then people can rub along.

It is when the economy goes seriously south, as during the Great Depression when the suits totally screwed things up, that you need to watch out.

So while it is sensible to worry about resentful immigrants and selfish baby-boomers, the big thing is to keep the economy in good shape. You do that and a lot of problems just look after themselves.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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