Let’s say the arguments presented have convinced me of the economics of the matter, generally. The broader cultural and political arguments remain unaddressed and arguing that the historical record or practice is irrelevant because we once had horses instead of cars is a non sequitur.
There is, no doubt, a considerable contribution to the whole illegal immigration issue and that of outsourcing due to government regulation, payroll taxes, restrictive labor laws and the like. No argument there. However, socialism and regulation are not the only factors at work here or abroad. Europe’s current experience, some aspects of which I referred to in my original post, provides overwhelming evidence that people can come to a country as part of a nominally economic arrangement and cause massive political problems in their wake. Kosovo provides an example. Over the last 30 years, it went from being the “cradle of Serbia” into a Muslim-dominated state through immigration and high birthrates. Now, the more numerous locals have declared independence. The entire issue of how immigrants can change the politics of a country represents the context that is being dropped. And, it isn’t just because the European states offer welfare. The London bombers all had jobs, were all native-born, were all middle-class, and they simply came to so despise the society in which they were raised (particularly its secular elements) one day they strapped on bombs, went down into the subways and climbed aboard buses and killed their fellow citizens. One example after another of this can be found as terrorist cells and plots are discovered. Economics does not trump culture. Holland, France, Britain and Germany have all learned this. They constitute a fully warranted “scare” story. La Raza and like organizations here are not at that stage…yet. But, they have their agendas too. The fact that those agendas are racist and irrational don’t change their reality.
I would suggest that the generally positive effects of immigration for our country has resulted from the willingness of people who came here to assimilate, the nature of the countries (and thus the cultures) from which they came, the fact that the countries from which most immigrants came were not right next door, the fact that immigrants did not come overwhelmingly from just one country, the greater cultural strength of our country at the time (i.e. greater agreement on the fundamentals of America’s identity), the significant difference in technology that essentially forced people to leave their homelands behind permanently, and the fact that we periodically all but suspended immigration in order to let these other factors work so that the immigrants were assimilated, and not just the economics. Today, most of these factors do not apply. People can arrive here in enormous numbers easily and maintain strong connections to the cultures that they left behind. And, yet we argue that the logic of market economics will trump all of those things, most especially the cultural baggage of the immigrants themselves. If economics were enough, we’d never have had any form of socialism in our country at all. Rand herself made this point repeatedly. There is no basis for assuming that that observation isn’t relevant to immigration.
As an historical matter, there was a significant German presence here at the time of the Founding, so much so that some consideration was given to German being the national language. The Scots, likewise, were here in force from the beginning. To my knowledge, the Germans were never held to be anything except white and the Scots were not deemed to be a risk. There were also Jews and Catholics here since the 17th century, albeit in smaller numbers. The 19th century hostility to immigration based on ethnicity applied primarily to the Catholic Irish and Italians, to eastern Europeans generally, and to eastern European Jews. The assimilation of the groups whose nature most aroused the suspicion of native Americans at the time took effort by both the native and the immigrant community. Many fundamental aspects of the Irish and Italian Catholic tradition as practiced in Italy and Ireland had to change for the full integration of those groups into the American cultural tradition, which was largely Anglo-Protestant. Understanding how and why this process took place is wholly relevant to this issue. Paranoids have enemies. Not all immigrants bring desirable cultural baggage. The fact that nativist views are usually unwarranted doesn’t mean that they always are.
Claiming that if all immigration were legal everybody would enter through the proper channels and that we could shoot whomever didn’t is, I would suggest, at best a half truth and decidedly silly, respectively. First, you can’t argue individual rights as the basis for someone coming here and then shooting them on the spot if they don’t come in where you want. Second, aren’t processing controls of any sort a violation of rights? Would we check people before letting them write or speak or exercise their other rights? What then is the basis for any controls if it’s a matter of rights? Either people can come here as a matter of right or they can’t. As to criminals, the diseased and so forth, why not simply jail or quarantine them once they’ve actually committed a crime here or it becomes evident that they have diseases? Of course, such an approach would also allow actual invasion by stealth. It is, however, at least as practical as shooting them on the spot or wiping Iran off the map.
Assuming that processing controls of some sort are acceptable and not violations of rights, how would they work? To perform background checks on people would require the cooperation of the governments from whom they are emigrating. In the 70’s Castro let loose scores of his criminals whom then came into our country. I’m sure he would have said, “They’re otherwise honest people who believe in your society” had he been asked because he wanted to cause trouble. One could expect similar “help” from the governments of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, amongst others. Even with complete honesty on the part of all concerned, it would be a lengthy process. So, we’d either require visas and controls through our embassies abroad (and quotas based on how many people could be dealt with i.e. what we have now) or holding pens/camps here until processing occured. This would require an enormous bureaucracy and would invite people to circumvent it. So, we’d be right back to where we are now. But, then, all of this would be a matter for legitimate political discussion, not a question of individual rights. It would be a political issue because how much money, manpower and resources anyone wanted to expend on legitimate processing would absolutely be within the scope of government’s responsibility to protect individual rights. And, so we’d be having a political debate on the numbers of people we could allow into the country. If there was enough data to suggest that immigrants from some countries posed greater challenges to this process than others, we might want to debate whether we should devote our legitimate processing efforts to those from other countries. Then, we’d be back to controls, quotas…and immigration as a legitimate political subject and not a matter of individual rights.
In addition to all of this, is the question of how things would play out given the current state of our culture and its political system. The fact is that we have a highly politically correct, heavily regulated, thoroughly politicized mixed economy. We have interest group politics and especially identity politics. We have a very strong religious element in our country and an extraordinarily nihlist and relativist but secular intellectual culture. Objectivism’s profile and influence has grown over the years, but not to the extent that it trumps all of those other things. So, arguing for greater immigration as a matter of principle will cause even many people who might agree with much of what Objectivism says to once again see us as people whose ideas are not practical and whose outlook is wholly and narrowly theoretical. No converts will be made there. Meanwhile, the processes at work will continue with an ever more ethnically balkanized population, something that Rand herself did discuss in some of her essays. Good luck with all of that.
You can’t ignore the details of the process just because they’re messy. Proper theory proceeds from a consideration of all factors and integrates all facts, not just some of them. I’ll acknowledge the logic and weight of the economics argument, but I see no evidence for dismissing the political and cultural ones.