Must a Moral Nation Have Limitless Immigration?

May 25, 2016 • ART OF LIVING, POLITICS

 
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883

 

Budapest, 1940

Andras Grof was tired and ill when he was four. Very ill. Andras had scarlet fever. It almost killed him. He survived, barely, but it affected his hearing. Permanently.

Another four years on, Andras was tempest-tossed. The Germans invaded Hungary, sending his father and another half a million Jews to concentration camps around the country. While his father did forced labor, Andras and his Jewish mother were sheltered by friends, in hiding throughout the war. His father survived, however, and was reunited with his family.

Andras was young when he became homeless as he had to flee again, this time by crossing the border to Austria. He says this of his first twenty years:

“By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution,’ the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint … many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.”

New York, 1957

Now Andras Grof was part of “the wretched refuse” of the teeming shores of Hungary, and yearning to breathe free. He entered the U.S. as a refugee at the age of twenty-one. He became a busboy. He met Eva Kastan, a waitress, also a refugee. A year later, they married.

As of March 2016, after 58 years, Andras and Eva were still married, with two daughters.

Lovely story, and not that unusual an immigrant story. Sadly, Andras Grof passed away on March 21, 2016.

Perhaps you know him as Andy Grove.

Intel: The Andy Grove Years

Andy got a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1963. By 1967 he was Assistant Director of Development at Fairchild Semiconductor. Then that job offer came.

“When I came to Intel, I was scared to death. I left a very secure job where I knew what I was doing and started running R&D for a brand new venture in untried territory. It was terrifying.”

He was Intel’s employee on day one in 1968, when there were only three of them. Andy Grove took over as CEO of Intel in 1987. During Grove’s 11-year tenure as CEO, Intel grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 30%. A CAGR of 30% for 11 years makes something 18-fold bigger.

According to a VP at Intel, “When he [Andy] came to this country from Hungary in 1956, he didn’t speak English. Yet I learned spelling from him.”

In his fifties, Andy beat prostate cancer by tailoring his own treatment after copious research, a method most offensive to the FDA. Then he did the same to Parkinson’s disease, which afflicted him much later in life and forced him to retire as Chairman and CEO of Intel. This battle he was to lose, but he went down fighting.

RIP Andras Grof, the refugee who speak no English at all, who, as Andy Grove, would one day profoundly affect the way we all communicate.

The “Mother of Exiles”

Americans love to believe that this “… mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name, Mother of Exiles,” lives up to her name. Or that she did.

Since 1903, the lines of Lazarus’ sonnet have lain inscribed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, a symbolic beacon of the issue of immigration.

And yet the words have never been true. We will never know how many Andras Grofs were lost to the West because, for foreign nationals, the right to earn a living and stay indefinitely, let alone vote and hold public office, has always been tightly controlled by the State. Such policies have been justified on the basis that the glue that holds a nation-state together is the commonality of history, language, tradition, culture, and religion.

Nation-States

The question before us is whether a nation-state that secures individual rights for its citizens can disregard the unity offered by cultural traditions, language, race, and religion.

A nation-state is the product of the last two hundred years, a progressive evolution in human history—from tribes, city-states, and colonial and territorial empires to nation-states. Gone is the brutal dictator or the monarch who defines the national boundary—people come together, draw the lines, and form a sovereign. It is laudable.

Several modern economies are nation-states. The United States, too, is a nation-state.

The question before us is whether a nation-state that secures individual rights for its citizens can disregard the unity offered by cultural traditions, language, race, and religion.

Conservative camps, such as White Identity author Jared Taylor, say no, and go much further—see “White Survival: Beyond Left and Right” and Clement Astor’s “The Cult of White Extinction, and How to Reverse It.” They lament that declining birth rates skew the demographic “pyramid” into a square where too many old must be looked after by too few young, and raise an outcry for race preservation. Says Astor, “It is almost exclusively whites who have the bizarre desire to adopt children of other races.” Adds Taylor, “Whites know in their bones that a non-white America is not the country they want for themselves or for their children. That is why, when the part of America in which they live becomes an outpost of Africa or Mexico, they move away—to some place where whites are still the majority. And most white people still want their children to marry other whites.”

Says Astor, “It is almost exclusively whites who have the bizarre desire to adopt children of other races.” Adds Taylor, “Whites know in their bones that a non-white America is not the country they want for themselves or for their children.”

Now, before you dismiss Taylor and Astor as “right-wing extremists,” have a look at the burgeoning popularity of Donald Trump, and, as reported in the New York Times, of Norbert Hofer in Austria, of Marine Le Pen in France, of Frauke Petry in Germany, and many others in Europe.

Taylor makes one vital point: “The very people—white and Hispanic—who encourage the change in America’s population would rail against this [if the immigration shoe was on the other foot] as neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism. And yet when Hispanics come here with that intent and that effect [demanding language accommodation and linguistic privileges]—and when Muslims show up in Europe with the same intent and effect—any resistance is denounced as bigotry. Why? This question deserves an answer.”

It does, indeed. This is my answer, Jared Taylor, to you and to all those whom you represent.

For I conceive of a world where work contracts are negotiated solely between employers and prospective employees, no matter their current nationality, where one and all have the right to offer products, to own or rent property, to love and be loved … race be damned.

Chosen Values

Can we all dare foresee a nation-state united by chosen values, not by race, religion, or ethnicity?

Should such a nation-state have no limits on immigration?

Is the fight for such a nation-state unhampered by immigration per se?

Yes, yes, and yes.

The Culture of Government Diktat

But, first, was any country on earth ever this welcoming of the tired, the poor, the wretched refuse, the homeless, and the tempest-tossed?

Not in the least. Not even the United States, which, incidentally, has one of the finest records.

The U.S. has come a long way since doctors examined the eyes of immigrant women at Ellis Island to exclude the Asians, and mobs lynched the Chinese.

However, is it still, as the Colorlines magazine puts it, “… an uncomfortable truth: the policy discussion surrounding who deserves to be let through the border is endemically exclusive. As long as national boundaries align with divisions of race, culture and class, policies on border control, visa lotteries, green cards and work permits are all bound up in an inherently racialized project of social engineering”?

The social engineering is the perceived demand of the populace, always has been, and any political party in the West that ignored it quickly perished in the next election. No nation-state has ever been readied for a redefined commonality—a shared value system.

Can we all dare foresee a nation-state united by chosen values, not by race, religion, or ethnicity?

Prior to 1965, the U.S. had a national-origin based quota system.

History dot com says, “Though it abolished quotas per se, the system [the 1965 Act] did place caps on per-country and total immigration, as well as caps on each category.”

The country caps effectively eliminate what may well be billions of people, willing to work and trade in a free enterprise system. Any restriction on such an individual, who seeks to escape life in a communist, Islamist, or backward nation, is inherently aristocratic (linking rights to birth). Migration Policy Institute says, “It established an annual cap of 170,000 visas for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, with no country in the hemisphere allowed more than 20,000 visas.” In Asia alone, there live 4.5 billion people, so less than 0.000004% of those can be granted a visa annually. It’s tokenism, even when a cry rings out for a higher cap, unless we get into the hundreds of millions.

The real reason behind Government determination of “who shall, and who shall not, enter” is linguistic, cultural, and racial balancing. Such covert tactics are by no means limited to Republicans. In fact, the Republicans are open about it. Whereas, as he gets people to buy the rhetoric of “Us, the multicultural collective,” President Obama, covertly acting for his constituency of labor class protectionism, has deported more foreign nationals than any of the previous presidents. He is now on pace to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed the United States from 1892-2000.

To the Jared Taylors—Assert the Values!

The West lies in a state of disrepair, confused about what it stands for, not because of Mexicans or Chinese, but because the West let Existentialists, Marxists, Postmodernists, and other pseudo-intellectuals run amok, and overtake its academe, media, arts, and politics.

The United States no longer holds sacred free markets, freedom of speech, enterprise, heroism in life or literature, the separation of religion and state, or even the language or religion that originally united its peoples. It holds sacred … Nothing. Except one pseudo-value: Democracy. A democracy unconstrained by a Constitution—the mob rule of an elite, unnoticed by a people hollowed out intellectually.

It scarcely matters whether we provide another hundred million, or six hundred million for that matter—Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans—to the same elites, who, grinning from ear to ear, mouthing ever more platitudes of “Us, the multicultural collective,” demand apologies from citizens for crimes never committed even by their forefathers.

But what if a nation-state did assert its true values? Then the fears could be addressed.

The Valid Fears of Open Borders

With the values so inscribed, people may still fear:

The United States no longer holds sacred free markets, freedom of speech, enterprise, heroism in life or literature, the separation of religion and state, or even the language or religion that originally united its peoples. It holds sacred … Nothing.

(1) Loss of jobs
(2) Welfare dependency and crime
(3) Discomfort with race
(4) ISIS dirty nukes and Islamist Trojan horses
(5) Half the world will come!

None of these fears are unfounded. But an ethical nation must choose right over wrong.

People Create Jobs

If population increases reduced jobs, then why aren’t the highest unemployment rates in countries with the largest populations? In a free economy, the job market is dynamic; the number of available jobs is not a fixed number.

More people means more demand for food, clothing, real estate, and services. Actual demand, not the Keynesian-spurred false kind. More people also equals more labor. To produce. Higher populations facilitate higher specialization, which leads to a higher productivity of labor. In a free society, a bigger population leads to a higher standard of living. Anyone who doubts this should look at small, isolated island populations that do not trade freely.

But when the society is not free, immigrants tend to be brought in only for low-skilled and manufacturing jobs. The natives do lose their jobs. They don’t walk into higher paying supervisory jobs because there aren’t any in an economy decaying with a wanton reduction in interest rates and environmentalism fraud. The Atlantic says they end up on disability benefits.

Ted Cruz put the issue across well—“I will say, the politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande. Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press, then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation.”

Cruz is only partially right. Lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and accountants have a protectionist “local” qualification regime, blessed by regulators and governments. And the media does not award jobs to those with journalism degrees and experience from the non-Anglophone world, even if their English-writing skills are excellent. Investment bankers do likewise.

But, perversely, this situation can only be redeemed with a large influx that disrupts the old-boy-network hegemony. In the IT sector and in certain faculties of academe, there is no dominant majority by race, color, ethnicity, or national origin, and everyone’s pay scales and job security are held honest by immigration. Meritocracy wins. That needs to happen across every sector and every layer of job.

Welfare Dependency and Crime

Recently, libertarian John Stossel took on arch-conservative Ann Coulter on whether immigrants are more likely to go on welfare and commit crime (not so, says Stossel). Note how Coulter, termed by The Daily Beast as the “conservative blond avenger,” carries on about “European descent” versus “brown people.”

Both Stossel, and Dalmia here, and here, quote the Cato Institute study: “… the economic contributions of these immigrants dwarf their fiscal costs.”

To even become eligible for welfare, there is a waiting period of five years. This is worth stating—surely, they can’t simultaneously go on welfare, while also “taking our jobs.”

Discomfort with Race

Suspicion of foreigners is a survival trait with origins in human history. It should not be scoffed at, if it helped our ancestors survive violent aggression from other tribes.

The journal Frontiers in Psychology reported that “Both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent.” It’s disturbing that preschoolers can have such a bias, but the silver lining is that in-group racial differences matter little. Seen this video of Donald Trump hugging an African-American woman he hires on the spot? Yes, he is probably genuine here.

When they’re in, they are in, and they become just like us and part of our “gang.” You don’t buy it? Put a high-performing dark-skinned Cuban on “our” baseball team and watch “us” applaud as he whacks the white pitcher’s ball out of sight. The “your tribe, my tribe” instincts overwhelm race; those instincts are what sports entertainment is all about.

But a sound ethics demands we conquer our impulses with deliberative thinking, not give in to impulses, like a toddler. Preschoolers will eat cookies all day. You know you shouldn’t.

ISIS Dirty Nukes and Islamist Trojan Horses

Says Raymond Ibrahim of The Gatestone Institute: “Three facts are undisputed: 1) ISIS and other terrorist groups see Mexico as a launching pad for terrorist acts in the U.S.; 2) ISIS and other terrorist groups have bases of operations in Mexico; 3) Members of ISIS and other terrorist groups have been caught trying to enter through the border.”

One can have an electrified high wall across the entire Mexican border and still have open borders.

But one can have an electrified high wall across the entire Mexican border and still have open borders. Airlines do it all the time. They don’t prohibit passengers on the basis of race, gender, age, or national origin, but they require you to leave your weapons behind if you wish to board their aircraft. International flights require a visa for the destination, but that’s imposed by governments. The point is, one can let people in via a gate in the wall with a security check that would surely prevent nukes, dirty or otherwise, if airlines can even prevent pencil sharpeners from boarding with you.

The rise of Islamism is a different beast. This is the outcome of the Marxist-Existentialist and Postmodernist collectivists taking over the media, the Democrats, academe, the arts, the liberal arts, and denying the truths of the foundations of Western civilization.

Islamism cannot be defeated by denying refugee status to a handful of non-Christian Syrians.

Islamism must be identified as anti-civilization and brazenly attacked at a conceptual level. ISIS must be attacked with annihilating force and destroyed. Islamism cannot be defeated by denying refugee status to a handful of non-Christian Syrians.

Thankfully, Islam is the fastest dying religion in the world. The West must accelerate this process: by denying the Islam-apologists a haven in the fractured sun of the manufactured Islamophobia farce, by creating centers that counsel and protect Islam apostates, and by encouraging mass apostasy from a religion that requires intolerance and violence.

A United States with a Population of Three Billion

China (1.37 billion) and India (1.3 billion) make up more than 60% of Asia’s 4.5 billion; non-Muslim majority countries such as Russia (144 million, who are counted in the 4.5 billion). Japan (127 million), Philippines (103 million) and Vietnam (93 million) comprise another 10%.

Brazil (205 million), Colombia (49 million) and Argentina (43 million) comprise over 70% of South America’s 415 million; Mexico’s 121 million share the contiguous border with Texas, California, and Arizona.

In contrast, a few million Syrian refugees is not really a big issue by way of a feared cultural displacement. That said, if European heads of state and the U.S. president had a spine, they would force Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to the negotiating table, at the very least to create an Islamic home solution for those who want it.

Says Daniel Pipes in Middle East Forum, “To where, then, are they to go? One nearby, desirable alternative to Europe exists; indeed, it’s a destination so attractive that foreigners already constitute half the population: that would be the six Gulf Cooperation Council states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Let’s focus on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the largest of them in land size, population and economy. The KSA has many unique attractions for Sunni Muslims. To begin with, it has 100,000 high-quality, empty fiberglass tents that can house about 3 million people in Mina, just east of Mecca. Fireproof and air-conditioned, complete with toilets and kitchens, this unique resource is occupied a mere five days a year by pilgrims on the hajj.”
 

Pipes lists the advantages for Muslims:

(a) Geography: Much closer.
(b) Climate: Hot.
(c) Language: Arabic.
(d) Economics: An insatiable need for labor.
(e) Legal system: Reassuringly familiar.
(f) Religion: Islam, Islam, Islam.

But Pipes fails to make a distinction between the token Muslims who wish to flee Islam and the real Islamists. Giving the immigrants a choice of destination grants the West an extraordinary advantage. Come to the West if you wish to be free, not if you wish to insert Sharia Law into a multicultural farce. Period. The force of righteous will. Or of imprisoned lightning.

The 20^th Century Tempest

The Tempest, a time-traveler boat that carried Andras Grof, had also carried some then-unknowns like inventor Nikola Tesla, physicist Albert Einstein, astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, singer Bob Marley, and many others, including scientist David Ho—laughed at by classmates who thought he was stupid because he could not speak English.

There was a young woman on that boat. A tempestuously clever one; her vision for humanity neither tired nor poor nor wretched, quite the opposite. Her name was Alice Rosenbaum. Like Andras, she was tempest-tossed. Yearning to breathe free. Unlike Andras, she did speak English then, but very little. Yet she would go on to write two of the greatest novels in the pantheon of English literature. Alice who? You may know her as Ayn Rand.

Let’s not refuse those who share Rand’s and Grove’s values only because they don’t share their genius. Elitism is not in the value system.

Would anyone seriously consider denying only those born in Florida the right to a jury trial? And only those born in Massachusetts the right to bear arms? And only those born in Texas the right to an attorney?

Let the Mother of Exiles, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, lift her lamp beside the golden door. Once, for the first time in human history, let her do it.

No Common Cause

It’s the one issue, which unites the ideologically pure from strands as varied as left-liberalism, Marxism, Libertarianism, and Objectivism.

But let not the lamp be lifted at the cost of not defending what the house stands for. The valueless “multicultural” open-borders alliance with Marxists and “Islam is harmless” left-libertarians is much too dangerous.

Human rights should not depend on birthplace. It’s that simple.

Don’t fall for it. First, assert the new foundation of this nation-state unapologetically, exposing the Marxist pseudo-intellectuals as enemies of humanity.

Then the virtuous nation-state can, and must, open its borders. Human rights should not depend on birthplace.

It’s that simple.

 

 

Existentialism|Immigration|Marxism|Open Borders|Race

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