The border with Mexico. Credit: Nick Ut/Getty
I liked George W. Bush. There, I’ve said it. He had a twinkle in his eye and a self-deprecating style that warmed a room. I came across him a few times during his presidency, when I was based in Washington, and they were cheerful occasions.
He also killed a lot of people, or at least his policies did. Of course, all presidents kill people, by commission or omission, but to some the sins of George W. Bush are egregious, unforgivable. I told some jolly stories about him at a conference once and a young woman came up to me afterwards to object, “how could you say such things of a war criminal?”
I assume she will not be buying Mr Bush’s new book, Out of Many, One. Or she’ll at least give the autographed deluxe edition, retailing for $250, a miss. (It will be clothbound, we are told, and contained within a slipcover.) She will miss, then, pictures of dozens of oil paintings Mr Bush has fashioned. His subjects are immigrants to the United States, sensitively and lovingly portrayed, celebrated and humanised.
“Bush’s painting style is inelegant,” as one review in Art in America elegantly put it. “His subjects’ eyes are often misaligned … and even though he attempts to create depth and shadow, the facial features ultimately fail to convey anything resembling human warmth.” But of course it’s not really about the art. It’s about the politics, which are met with approval. “The book, providing an honorific framing, bestows a dignity upon his subjects that his presidential policies did not.”
Out of Many, One doesn’t tip-toe around the subject of immigration or suggest there are good people on both sides of the argument. It comes out, instead, 100% in favour; it tells anyone who opens its pages that immigration made America, and will continue to make it, and anyone who doesn’t believe that is wrong. Brown and black faces stare out, proudly: safe in the knowledge that the author, the 43rd president of the United States, wants them to belong.
George W. Bush is taking on the nativists in his party, the cruel wing of Republicans. Taking on Donald Trump. Calling them all out. Introducing his book in the Wall Street Journal last month, he wrote: “We should never forget that the desire to live in the United States — a worldwide and as powerful an aspiration as ever — is an affirmation of our country and what we stand for. Over the years, our instincts have always tended toward fairness and generosity. The reward has been generations of grateful, hard-working, self-reliant, patriotic Americans who came here by choice.”
“My hope,” says Bush, “is that this book will help focus our collective attention on the positive impacts that immigrants are making on our country.”
Which is good. And because (I am relieved to say, given my previously lonely affection for him) it is no longer eccentric to take a generous view of George W. Bush, the book will contribute to the debate about immigration in America from a humane perspective. It will bring people together and that, in the modern United States, is no mean achievement.
But it misses the point. And the risk is that it encourages others to miss the point too. These bromides about the decency of immigrants may well be important correctives to the un-American hostility of the Trump era but they fail totally to address the perfectly reasonable question that Trump raised. A question that hangs over the Biden administration as it tries to work out its immigration policy, but more important a question that hangs over the whole United States.
Midway through his term of office, not in a tweet or a campaign rally but in the calm of an almost conventional speech, Donald Trump said: “America is a cutting-edge economy but our immigration system is stuck in the past.” Many Americans, including some who cannot stand Trump, would agree with that. The immigration question of the next decade is not, “should America be welcoming to immigrants?” Or even “what do we do about the southern border becoming overwhelmed by desperate people?” No, the question is whether America welcomes the wrong type of immigration and needs to change. “Is it time to favour computer programmers over gardeners?” That’s the question. Same numbers — a million a year, legally — but different people.
But the question is not posed. Not because Americans fear people speaking other languages or cooking with strange ingredients or praying to other gods. The problem is not them, many Americans say: the problem is us. Our society, our community, has become — with the best intentions — a more dangerous place. The anti-Trump campaigner and former Bush aide David Frum made the point in a piece in The Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago: “More and more of the people who live among Americans are not on equal legal footing with Americans. They cannot vote. They cannot qualify as jurors. If they commit a crime they are subject not only to prison but to deportation. And because these noncitizens are keenly aware of those things, they adjust their behavior. They keep a low profile. They do not complain to the authorities if, say, their boss cheats them out of some of their pay, or if they are abused by a parent or partner at home.”
This is the result of the array of an immigration policy that broadly allows family ties — and ingenuity in hopping across the southern border — to trump skills. A policy that brings in adult siblings of already poor, semi-legal residents. As a result not everyone in America gets the full right to stay: some will be legal temporary residents, some students who should not be working, some came illegally but can stay (like the Dreamers whose parents brought them to America illegally as children) on some kind of sufferance.
Of course, there are plenty of wealthy Americans to whom this doesn’t matter much. They lead lives insulated from the masses. They have cheap gardeners on tap: cheap labour — desperate labour — which enables the low-wage America that keeps so many people so poor. Bernie Sanders used to point out that open immigration policies were very much the plaything of the rich — of faceless, placeless corporate America. There are sociologists who point out, too, that a nation desperate for labour, having to pay more for it, might not have incarcerated so many black men so readily in recent decades.
What is unquestionably the case is that America a few decades ago was almost entirely filled by citizens with equal rights. It has morphed in recent years into a place with graded citizenship; in some big states, like California, fully 10% of residents are not full citizens. As Frum put it, “No intentional policy has led the US to accept more low-wage low-skill labourers and fewer cancer researchers. Yet that is what the United States is doing.”
Here we get back to George W Bush. Because although he avoids it in his picture book, he knows all of this. He knew it back in 2007 when he tried to get Congress to agree to act and do so in exactly the direction Donald Trump wanted. He brought together the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, and the Republican John McCain. In exchange for the decent treatment of people already in America they proposed that future immigration be limited by skills not family ties.
The effort failed. Among those who scoffed was the then presidential hopeful Barack Obama. “How many of our forefathers would have measured up to this points system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”
The answers were a surprise. On the points system, “almost all of them.” And on Ellis Island: “virtually none.” The reason is that the whole “bring me your huddled masses” schtick is a bit of a con. Nearly 30 years ago, a taskforce led by then congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a hugely respected African American Democrat, blew it apart with a detailed study of the people who actually came to Ellis Island. Jordan pointed out that they were in fact more skilled than the average American at the time. They were seamstresses and stonemasons, tailors and bricklayers. They had, in other words, the skills the nation needed. They were the cancer researchers of their time. This was not charity; it was nation building.
Now, the argument goes, American immigration is the opposite of nation building. The immigration system actively pulls at the threads of community. It overburdens services and it underserves the wider causes of the nation. It’s lovely that George Bush’s book contains such an array of faces but they may be — to be brutal — quite often the wrong faces.
Bush knows this, and Biden does too. The current President is fast becoming a president of consequence. Above all a president who understands community and place. If Biden moves on immigration — goes for big reform — at least one former president will have his back. Even if he can’t paint.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast and Today on Radio Four. His Panorama documentary “Trump the Sequel”, is available now on Iplayer
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SubscribeI am a skilled tradesman in construction, I make my money with tools in my hands, cutting fastening, forming, building – and the trades have been destroyed by unskilled masses. It used to be the work sites were Americans, Black and whites, and it paid a wage you could get by on, and there was room to grow up in pay. (changed in 1990 big time)
Now the vast majority of residential construction is Mexican workers, most low skilled, just do a limited range of specialized tasks fast and for hours for low (ish – not bad pay for young single men, not proper money to have a family) pay. Most without any health benefits, or paying into Social Security, so in no way shouldering their real costs to the nation AT ALL.
Immigration of unskilled (and not the brightest) is the most destructive thing you can do to a Modern country. The costs of these ones who do not grow their skills is huge over their life. They take the work from the less employable Americans (as the Mexicans are more amenable to hard conditions because where they come from this is fantastic here)
So what you have done is create a large unemployable and under employable class of natives who are very expensive indeed to subsidize by government money, and by being unemployed they turn to self destructive or antisocial ways out of the frustration of having nothing to do with their energies, and no money. Meth, Opioids, crack, heroin, alcohol, flourish with under employed men displaced by cheaper and more controllable migrants.
Immigration should be for the high IQ, high Skilled, High wealth. There are a million of those wanting to get in, but instead we do everything to block them (WE Really DO) and let in the unskilled to increase poverty, to give more votes to Democrats on one side, and for exploitable labour for the Right.
No excesses of Rome in its decline were as stupidly destructive as the USA is inflicting on its self! And the result will be the same.
It’s the same story across other developed nations.
You can’t blame (legal) immigrants themselves at all. Why wouldn’t you as a Polish low paid worker come to the UK in 2004 and earn 3x more on minimum wage? Why wouldn’t you as a Romanian bricklayer come to the UK and earn 5x more?
But what about the indigenous workforce? Obviously they are lazy and feckless. Nothing to do with the fact that bricklayers are now paid 2/3 less per course, or that their rival workers come single, time-rich and unburdened with awkward things such as mortgages or families. Nope.
If graduate jobs had been hit as hard as skilled manual and low-skilled, low paid jobs – I think we all know that the conversation wouldn’t be about racism and bigotry – but how we can work our way out of this mess.
Also the ones who make these decisions seem to have purposely put thousands of new people in areas of already high unemployment in the north of England. The ones who lost out the most had fairly low-paid low-skilled jobs which nevertheless gave them a position in society-they now are the disgruntled (generally unemployed ) class who the higher classes mock for their unhappiness.
Kathleen, you are quite correct.
Having lived in the greater Manchester area for 75 years, I can recall the initial Jamaican immigrants in the 1950’s settling into the Moss Side and Hulme area’s followed in the late 50s, the 60’s onwards by mainly Pakistani immigrants who tended to live in the connecting area of Rusholme. I grew up in Moss Side until my parents could no longer put up with the ‘new’ neighbours drug taking, partying at all hours-they didn’t work my parents did. The Chief Constable-James Anderson refused to take any action against the black people (young men mainly) despite their law breaking. It was ever thus. We reluctantly gave up the fight and moved out, as did many of the white people who had lived there for decades.
In north Manchester ie Middleton and Heywood there has been an obvious increase in the number of black Africans arriving during the last 5+ Years. As always it is the working class areas which receive low skilled immigrants who add to the already over burdened, under performing schools and medical services, plus transport, welfare and housing.
Perhaps the politicians could redirect immigrants to the areas in which they have their homes where, I would suggest, there would be less of a burden on the infrastructure as they tend to live in the more affluent areas of the country.
I quite agree-if they would just build a new housing estate on Hampstead Heath or whereever the well-heeled live who dream up these schemes.
I think the song ‘My forgotten Man’-sung by Joan Blondell sums it up well
I know, the Mipruri migration. “Britain’s promise of support, as 250 Mirpuri villages were flooded by the British construction project. In 1967, the British invited a displaced Pakistani community of thousands to establish themselves in Britain. It also served the labour shortage in Britain’s textile mills.”
Well this fails to mention that within about a decade these mills were all closed, moved to China! Leaving the unskilled, non-English speaking people to join the welfare rolls, and still today…..
I can talk of Mills and China – In the Deep South of USA I spent a couple years in the 1990s working on a construction crew which updated wiring on cotton mills (and other factories), I learned a lot – they are in scattered towns, ‘Mill Towns’ where they are The foundation.
They would have 3 kinds of looms, the old which used bats to kick a shuttle (weft) through the warp, very fast, but very slow by comparison, old, but still worked good, took more attendants, made fabric slower, fine. Second was two metal tapes which shot from each side too fast to watch and passed the weft thread through the warp, very fast, but still slow compared to the new. Third Kind, a blast of air shot the weft thread through the warp fast as a bullet! (that is right, shot the thread 14 foot through the warp to the other side, Pfft, Pfft, Pfft, and the warp and weft moving at a dizzy speed!.) They also took fewer attendants, like one per 12 looms.
They paid low, the workers were third and fourth generation, they were the economic basis of the area. About as my crew did the last updates they began closing like dominoes! See, China built masses of new textile mills, and every machine was the new ones. Although the USA mills with old and new loons made money, they could not compete with 100% modern mills! They closed, just the same as the Northern UK Mills did soon after bringing in huge numbers of displaced Mirpuri agricultural people.
I was from UK, and saw the closing of the Northern mills and move to China, (and the closing of the Mines, and everything else in the 1970s) and thus the lost jobs (and the unskilled migration), then in USA I saw the mills close and move to China, and the destruction of the communities which had done them for generations. The Mill is the heart of the town, when it goes the town’s soul is killed. And it is crazy! The USA Mill worker could compete with the Chinese in cost, they were REALLY hard working, low paid, and dedicated, if only they had gotten all new machinery – the jobs could have stayed, the town kept alive.
I don’t blame the immigrant, just like I don’t blame the person who chooses unemployment because the govt checks are more lucrative than available jobs. I blame the people who created these self-evidently idiotic systems that incentive the wrong behavior.
My country, Portugal is a great example. Portugal is simultaneously a contributor of emigration and an immigration destiny. Our “right thinking” classes say that we need immigrants to do the jobs Portuguese don’t want to any longer. However Portuguese do those jobs, just not in Portugal. We are brick layers in Britain, waiters in France, truck drivers in Germany, etc we just don’t do those jobs in our country for shity wages.
Importation of relatively high skilled people brings it own issues. The big tech companies campaigned against Trump because he cracked down on their abuse of the H1B visa category to import thousands of Asians to displace Americans from these jobs.
Yes, any mass immigration into a high-skill, high-wage economy is going to cause problems.
Ever heard of Canada?
Can you be more specific?
George, mine was a reply to Simon Newman’s post, where he argued that “any mass immigration into a high-skill, high-wage economy is going to cause problems”.
Canada is a clear example of successful mass importation of labor into a high-skill, high-wage economy. I am living proof…
I immigrated with my family when I was 40, via skilled-labor class immigration track. I am a Civil Engineer, wife is an Ophthalmologist. We’re doing fine, and happily paying a bunch of taxes, in exchange for world-class public services. Our son is a gifted student well on his way to doing the same. And here we’re not afraid of the police, or some wacko gunning us down for his personal grievances, taking advantage of his sacred gun rights.
I also know Canada very well, been to every Provence, lived in a couple, been going staying in Vancouver every few years for several decades. Richmond actually, HongCouver. You are correct, the selling of Canada to the Chinese has been 100% better than USA and its mass unskilled, South of the Border, migrants. (Hong Kong has the highest IQ in the world by a google search)
Thing is Canada was pretty much Monocultural (If you count French in) (and skipped over the Natives). Europeans and so the European mores – and lacking in areas of extensive poverty as it never had the Multicultural Rust Belt Cities – and so has always been pretty crime free.
Do not knock the USA 2nd Amendment! USA is 100X more crime filled than Canada – without the armed citizen acting as a crime deterent, and the tough police, USA would resemble Columbia in great swaths.
Canada is not USA. They have great similarities in the Middle classes, but Not in the underclasses.
I think mass high-skill east-Asian immigration to Canada has certainly caused problems. I’d certainly accept it causes less problems than US style low-skill-worker illegal/undocumented & family-chain immigration, or European style Human Rights/Refugee/Asylum-Seeker based immigration.
Yea, well these tech wizards are not moving drugs for the cartels on the side, getting facial tattoos and forming gangs, and getting welfare.
If you think H1B visa programmers are ‘high skilled’ you have obviously never worked with outsourcing companies or the kind of engineers they employ.
Studies show that a person has to earn at least 48K in the UK before they pay more in taxes than they take out of the system so why would we let in unskilled immigrants and who benefits
I would really appreciate a link to these studies… £48K seems massively high to me. The average household (I assume in most cases 2 working people) income is around £37K.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householddisposableincomeandinequality/financialyear2020
And what right does the US have to take all the skilled when they are needed back in their own countries? The whole world cannot live in north America and north-western Europe. The US education system should start producing its software engineers or whatever. The whole thing is disgusting.
As for the army of exploited workers without rights, people like styxhexenhammer666, Jimmy Dore and Tim Pool have been talking about this for years. Moreover, the current system, within which Biden has opened the floodgates, is a dream for the child traffickers, drugs cartels and terrorists etc. Two wanted Somali terrorists were apprehended at the border recently but how many others got through?
As for George WMD Bush being likeable I have no words. I will therefore paraphrase Jimmy Dore, who said in one his podcasts just today that Bush belongs in the deepest pit of hell with the people whose names will cause my post to be categorised as ‘Awaiting for approval’.
America is not taking anyone, those people are choosing to go there. Your last paragraph typifies people who will ignore what is said, regardless of the content, because they do not like the person. I expect you could take several lines or comments from Obama, Bush Jr and Sr, Trump, take away the name of the person who said them, and agree with the statement. But the personal animosity will always get in the way.
Come off it! Bush Jnr went to war on a lie, by the standards of the civilised world he is a War Criminal, pure and simple.
You are trying to defend the indefensible, it never works.
Bush went to war with the near-unanimous approval of Congress, to include this woman named Clinton, her husband, his 2004 opponent in John Kerry, and most other Dems.
What lie? I was not in favor of going into Iraq, but what is the lie? Saddam had WMD. This is known because he used it. At least twice. It’s more likely than not that we helped him to acquire it because he was a more palatable option in the region than the ayatollahs.
Firstly the whole WMD “ catch all “ thing is a disgrace!
There is only one weapon of mass destruction, the Atomic Bomb and its variants.
Next ‘you’ will be telling me that CS Gas is a WMD, or worse the dreaded C-19 even.
In the event no WMD’s were found, not even a waterpistol !
Then there was deliberate disinformation ‘story’ that the Saddam beast was the master mind behind 9/11! What utter bo*****s!
So it was “off we go to War” not on one, but two lies.
Such banal barbarism sickens the rest of the world, bit the US ‘gets away with it’ because at least they are better than the Dog-eating Chinese, just.
Again, Saddam had poison gas and used it. On the Kurds and against the Iranians, so “never found” is not the same as non-existent. Whether you call it WMD or not doesn’t matter.
I did not favor that war and no one believed Saddam masterminded anything. He provided safe haven for some bad people but that hardly makes him unique.
When does ‘the rest of the world’ get sickened by the barbarism that defines radical Islam, the type of thing that kills more Muslims than anyone else? Oh, that’s right; can’t blame the West for that. I’m happy to let them all kill each other; we should have been gone from that region long ago.
Touché,
Poison gas is NOT a weapon of mass destruction, nor for that matter is Napalm, or even ‘your’ favourite Agent Orange.
Yes Saddam had gassed the intransigent Kurds, Marsh Arabs and Iranians as he was perfectly entitled to do. The US probably supplied it for use on the ridiculous Iranians.
However if you fabricate a WMD myth and then do not find ‘them’ you do look rather stupid! Agreed?
All very frustrating when you know he DID have them I concur.
Aha! Those wonderful words ‘bad people’! You’re right Saddam was not unique in harbouring such people, but I would guess that the US harbours far, far more, of every size & shape.
However you do agree Saddam didn’t ‘do’ 9/11?
However to end on an amicable note. You are perfectly correct about Islam, an absolutely worthless ideology that gave up thinking as far back as the 12th century.
Why on earth the US is wasting blood and treasure dealing with these people is beyond me.
‘Your’ Client State, Israel, if fully equipped with latest Nuclear technology to “bomb Islam back into the Stone Age*” and should be encouraged do so with the utmost despatch, as a precursor to the Great China War that will soon be upon us.
(*Apologies to the late, great, USAAF General Curtis E LeMay).
Well, there was the million killed in the trench war with Iran, the rape of Kwuait, the plan to invade Saudi, with the goal of cornering the world’s oil. Then the beastly treatements of everyone, like Stalin almost, and the genocide of different peoples (Marsh Shia and Kurds).
And then there was the VERY good reason to believe in WMD,s, and his refusal to cooperate with the UN’s order to allow inspections –
NO, the invasion and war against Iraq was reasonable. It was LOSING THE PEACE which was the crime! And it lays at Paul Bremmer’s feet, and thus at Bush’s as the captain of the ship.
No one denies Saddam was a “nasty piece of work”, and ‘you’ had already correctly boxed his ears in Gulf War I.
However Gulf War II was an absolute disgrace. An unprovoked attack on an innocent party, the sort of brutality we expect from people like Hi***r, Stalin or Moa.
As for the seven year Iran v Iraq War what is the problem?
A secular Muslim state trying to exterminate the raving mad Ayatollahs, and thus emasculating themselves in the process. A perfect solution from the West’s point of view, do you not agree?
Kuwait had been prised out of Ottoman Mesopotamia in 1908 by the UK. No Iraqi as you well know will forget that, and they want it back. If someone had pinched let us say Texas in 1908 you would still want it back.
As to the KSA the sooner it is overthrown the better, it is a living cesspit of barbarism in almost every department. A one megaton Nuke on Mecca would be a vast improvement.
No, the Iraq War was disgrace, dishonest from the outset, and result in the needless deaths of thousands.
“You made a desert and called it chaos”*
(*apologies to Tacitus)
Impossible to reply due to pathetic censorship.
However Gulf War II was an absolute disgrace, a completely unprovoked attack on an innocent party, worthy of Ghengis Khan himself.
The fact both Congress & our putrid House of Commons voted overwhelmingly for it makes it even worse, if that is possible.
Saddam was “perfectly entitled to” use poison gas on his domestic and foreign enemies? (He started the war with Iran, remember?) Gee, that’s a rather extreme version of raison d’etat. I imagine that Hitler was “perfectly entitled” to impose the Final Solution on European Jewry by that reasoning.
That WMD rathole was simply stupid justification. Better was Blair’s speech regarding the massive cheating of sanctions which was corrupting the French and Germans along with others enjoying the graft. The money was allowing a re-building of the scientific core toward those nuclear weapons. Funding continued research. Many wanted those sanctions lifted for oil revenue. Bush’s bluster on Iraq’s border seemed to have no deterrence ability. Thus, the trigger pulled.
America and Europe are ‘taking people’ , every time a skilled person leaves one country for another the doner country loses a skilled person. How will countries every increase their wealth if all the doctors, nurses, engineers, programmers, scientists, etc move to the west. It just cements the Wests power base.
Immigration is complex and has wider ranging implications than just for the country where people move too.
The NHS is a Social Engineering Organization which does health on the side. Pillaging the developing world for educated is one of its missions. Its other missions are much worse, but they take too much time to explain, NHS is not good.
USA, Just like France, Italy, Germany, and USA, have outsourced their immigration policy to ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATES! That is the Case!
Chain Migration is almost the only real way of legal migration now, the skilled are kept out mostly, and with illegal migration to make the first link of the chain! SNAFU, FUBAR, and run by REMFs who have no interest in doing their job.
It’s very interesting that with all of the appeals to emotion by the neoliberal open borders crowd, they never seem to worry an iota about what mass emmigration does to the countries of origin.
Fraser-
Your idea that human beings “belong” to the country of their birth reminds me of the way that Cuba “rents” Doctors and baseball players. They are indentured servants, and aside from a little stipend, their compensation is paid to the country that “owns” them – Cuba.
Do you perhaps think that is a good thing?
America’s problem is that this has a lot of immigrants who have come in illegally. As suggested this leaves them outside the system and so open to exploitation. The same happens in Europe, with illegal immigrants ending up in sweatshops, work-gangs or sex trafficked, or use as cheap (often untaxed) labour to drive down wages of working class citizens. Illegal immigration leads to bad consequences. In contrast, legal immigration can be a boon – new skills and determined workers transforming the economy.
Countries could move to remove immigration laws, but that massively encourages economic migration creating a whole range of social problems from housing to welfare to wages, and I don’t think it would be socially acceptable (could have a vote on it though).
So that means laws and restrictions of some type – how and what, and what pathways to citizenship should be part of an open and ongoing debate. Once you have laws there is an expectation that they will be implemented, at least to be fair to those who do take the legal route to immigration.
The challenge currently for the US is what do to about those who have already come in illegally. The good samaritan approach would be to legalise existing all long-term immigrants. The problem this brings is that it acts as a draw for further waves of illegal immigration with all of the problems described, including human-traffickers running the show.
So for the US to address its long-term ‘undocumented’ problem, the first step should be to stem the in-bound flow. Once you’ve established a method to stop or greatly reduce new illegal immigration, then you can take the second step, which is to regularise those already in the US long-term. This then lifts a vulnerable group out of exploitation, without creating downstream problems because there is no way a flood of new people can come in without going through proper channels. Stopping the flow is then a key first step to enable legalising those currently in the country.
Which means Trump was right.
Trump is always right, WWG1WGA
Is Trump the new Caesar and Biden, the burnt out old Pompey? It’s beginning to look like it.
These bromides about the decency of immigrants may well be important correctives to the un-American hostility of the Trump era but they fail totally to address the perfectly reasonable question that Trump raised.
Perhaps that latter point is far more salient than the requisite cheap shots lobbed at 45 for being, well, 45. The only “hostility” is toward illegal immigration, which is an actual thing that only sophists and the dishonest ignore. No society benefits from the mass importation of low-skilled, poorly educated persons.
One can easily understand what motivates those people to come here, but it’s a bit harder to understand the willingness of the elected class to usher them in, as if bringing millions from over there to over will not eventually turn over here into over there. Immigration must first and foremost benefit the host country, and our current practice is well outside what Barbara Jordan’s commission found.
Any same persin is against ANY CHAIN MIGRATION which stems from a, now legal, migrant who takes ANY form of government assistance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Uptake of gov benefits is almost genetic like in how it fallows family lines.
I wonder if the fact that the US stole vast tracts of Mexico has lead to many mexicans feeling that they have some entitlement to ‘visit’ the old country ??
You don’t want to go down that road.
The Spanish conquistadors stole “vast tracts of land” from indigenous peoples. They had no more entitlement to that land than did the Americans who eventually took it from them. And their descendants have no more entitlement to it than current Americans do.
That’s not the reason they’re immigrating, anyway. It’s the higher wages, better policing, better education, better standard of living, better social services, and better health care. All the things their own nation seems incapable of creating, despite having had at least as much time as the American colonizers to figure out how. Most would have very little attraction to “the old country” were it not for the riches it promises.
Isn’t the more salient point that many”Mexicans” are native to the USA and are more American than many Americans.
Canada has many immigrants. Toronto feels as cosmopolitan as any U.S. city but their immigration policies favor people with skills that Canada needs, very similar to Bush’s proposals from 2007. Many public policy problems are intractable with no good answers.
Immigration policy in the U.S. has obvious solutions, just no political will to implement them. At a time when we are competing with a formidable adversary in China, too many politicians in both parties use the immigration issue to posture and fund-raise with no interest in the future of our country.
Canada also favours family reunification. Not too long ago it welcomed a 90+ year old as it’s newest immigrant. What possible benefits did that person add to the economy?
It grants Canada the precious perception that it is a humane country, not just a money-making machine. As Bertie pointed out above, immigration has multiple facets. One of them is the impression would-be immigrants get from your country as a potential destination. The miseries I listed in my post above (murderous racism, police terror, bigotry, gun “rights”, etc.) are ensuring that none of the immigrants the US would like to attract chose it as a destination. More than ever before, only the desperate do so.
Not sure if things have changed very recently but the immigrants that have come from Asia, Europe and Africa seem to be doing very well. Nigerians, for example, have a higher median income than European Americans. These incomes are likely bolstered by being high paying, high skill tech jobs and the like in contrast to the low skilled illegals.
There doesn’t appear to be any genuine shortage of skilled, useful and productive people willing to give the American dream a crack. I don’t believe the problem of being murdered is putting people off, the well paid immigrants are unlikely to be living in high crime neighbourhoods. The non Hispanic immigrant groups are proportionally a lot lower, both as victim and perpetrator, in the crime stats than European Americans and way lower than American born Africans.
So your logic is that the problems I listed magically disappear if one goes live in a segregated neighbourhood? I regret to inform you that a host of my colleagues would not consider living in a place like the current USA, and it has nothing to do with “picking the right neighbourhood”. The problem is precisely the matters I listed (bigotry, racism, etc.) which drive the “need” to pick the right neighbourhood, as your solution advertises.
And if I was a black Nigerian immigrant in the USA, I’d live in fear for my life from the very real murderous police. All it takes is a mundane traffic stop to risk being shot. Plenty of recent examples available – for those that still need evidence.
We have a meritocratic immigration policy here in New Zealand, it works well, a little too well perhaps. There’s no shortage of applicants despite a relatively low median income and despite having high crime neighbourhoods and people such as yourself raving non stop about racism.
People, native or immigrant simply avoid high crime areas. I bet it’s the same in Canada. It’s not a general solution but it works for them.
Interesting sequence of posts. You lined up hispanic, “european” and africans in your post and ranked them, associating specific ones with “bad neighbourhoods”.
I point out the obvious racist overtones of your suggestion (non-whites = bad neighborhood). Then you make yourself the victim of people who “rave non stop about racism”.
Well its just too bad that it annoys you, but perhaps you would care to consider just why the discussion touched the racial prejudice issue. Like, read what you wrote in your first post?
The only one “raving” here is yourself.
To say that Nigerian Immigrants to the USA (doesn’t seem to be quite the same in the UK) who are universally evinced as achieving high economic and educational status , are in constant danger of being yanked out of their Mercedes and shot by the police for no other reason than pigmentation, seems a bit extreme.
Everyone, black and white , shot under circumstances was committing some sort of traffic violation, or driving a stolen vehicle. Most refused to get out of the car, or appeared to be preparing to arm themselves. This contrasts with the police murdered during traffic stops without warning.
Have you considered actually talking to a black Nigerian immigrant in the USA about his or her experiences there?
Black people in the USA have no more need than anyone else to “fear for their life” in a “mundane traffic stop”, as long as they do everything the cop tells them to do. That’s really all it takes.
And an immigrant faces a far higher likelihood of being murdered by an American civilian there, than by a cop.
The US gets a different class of African immigrants than many European countries typically get, and most are legal immigrants, not illegals or asylum seekers. That makes a big difference.
Well, s/he won’t breed any more, at the age of 90+. Which is quite an economic advantage for Canada over the reproductive-aged migrants from certain ‘cultures’.
When you see presidents from the other side of the Atlantic, you don’t see what the Americans see. Here we do tend to have a more international view and to me Bush looked like one of the most sinister and evil murderers of the last couple of centuries. His internal policies, vis-a-vis immigration, I am not sure about.
Everybody seems to have a clear view of immigration – I think it is a chicken-and-egg thing. In the UK at the beginning of the Blair time, the country looked OK. There was a whole new middle class after Thatcher and parents wanted better for their children, jobs where you didn’t have to get dirty. So children were encouraged to work in white-collar jobs and leave the dirty jobs to someone else. Who should come along but a bunch of immigrants who would work for low wages – the answer to a prayer. Now, another generation has been reared not to get dirty hands and we have come to rely on those immigrants. So it is not really a question of laziness but … upbringing.
Today, if you doubled the wages for the dirty jobs I believe that no-one would want them because they have been brought up not to even realise that the jobs are there. I doubt if some teenagers in London even know that fruit has to be picked and that it doesn’t just fall into the plastic packaging.
You, as they say, cannot be serious. More evil than Stalin? Hitler? Polpot? Mao? Amin? And so on and so on and so on. For fighting to save the people of Iraq from a dictator that had killed a million of his own people, threatened his neighbours, invaded Kuwait, was more than hinting he had dangerous weapons for more of the same? Get some perspective!
Who is talking about a league table of evil people? Do you have to have a record like Stalin to be considered evil?
Since WW2 the United States has created a series of enemies to justify their expansion in the world economy. Communists, Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese, all of Central America, Chinese, Russians, Iraqis, Iranians, North Koreans. But we think that the USA are the ‘goodies’ because they look like us and sound like us. Arguably, the whole of the world refugee crisis today is caused by the USA – if not directly then just by supplying arms.
We think the Americans have saved the world because…. they tell us that. No other reason. I think maybe you are the one who needs some perspective.
JFK was the head of this really – He was the President who looked at USA and said ‘We are hidiously White, I’ll fix that’ and opened the borders to migrants, check out the demographics from his reign on…it has continued.
Well he got his just desserts didn’t he?
As off course did his brother
All rather reminiscent of the Graccchi brothers.
Who seriously believed Saddams’ ludicrous insinuation that he had a nuclear capability?
Not the CIA for one! It was blatant Mossad propaganda, surely even you spotted that?
I was taught never to mock the afflicted but in the case of George Bush Jnr I shall make an exception.
He appears and acts like a brain dead moron. I gather he cheated his way through Yale, joined the Texas National Guard Airforce to avoid the draft to Vietnam and has spent the rest of his life as a muppet or glove puppet.
How on earth such a creature could clamber to the pinnacle of the greatest dung hill in history is beyond me.
The US needs immigration to maintain our population since our birth rate is below the 2.1 children per female needed to replace our population. That said, the country has every right (and an obligation to its citizens) to scrutinize who it lets in. If you wake up some morning to find someone has broken into your house and taken up residence in you guest room, they don’t get to stay just because they made the bed. Our government has an obligation to keep out undesirable people and by that, I mean criminals and the like. We have enough home grown criminals; we don’t need to import more. With the chaos on our border now, that is impossible. We need to secure the border and then have a more streamlined legal immigration system. We also need to deport those who break our laws. (I wish we could deport our native criminals by alas, it’s not possible.)
Why does the US or any other country need to maintain its population? Haven’t you heard of global warming, let alone AI? Merkel used this as an excuse to bring millions of people from the middle east to Germany. The UK population has increased by 8m since 2000, with a falling birth rate. This cannot be right surely.
All government policy is to make it too expensive for Middle class to have more than one or two children, and pay the poor and unemployable to have many children. The government wishes to genocide the Middle classes as they want a return to Feudal times, and poor are so easily controlled – wile Middle class are not.
It certainly means you can’t drive anywhere (except during lockdown, of course, what bliss that was! Although everywhere was shut, so not much point….)
There are many prosperous countries in the world – Japan and Korea being two of the most obvious examples – that have a much lower birthrate than the USA does, but are still not even contemplating mass immigration as a solution.
Immigration as a means of “maintaining” a population has always seemed like a stupid idea to me anyway. It makes far more sense, if governments are worried about a declining birth rate, to invest in providing stronger incentives for people already there to have more children, than to sink billions into a mass immigration program and just hope that it pays for itself in the long run.
And nowhere have I seen good evidence that excessive immigration has macroscopically improved an economy. Excessive immigration in NZ has left us with an enormous deficit for infrastructure catching up, a ridiculous housing market, education and healthcare in chaos (plus teachers and nurses unable to live near their jobs ) and a rapidly growing underclass who can no longer keep up jumping over hoops to survive…..
Does America have a shortage of natives willing to ‘learn to code’ at a pay rate the employers can afford? My impression is more that native-born coders are already being driven out of the market in preference for cheap Indian coders, either immigrants or still in India.
The reality is that Capital wants cheap Labo(u)r. Bush certainly represents Capital; Trump represents the Labor interest. More working immigrants means lower wages; bad for Labor, good for Capital.
I respect Justin Webb a lot, I may hate George Bush myself for his Iraq War atrocities and general incompetence, but Webb has always been an independent-minded BBC staffer which has to be worth something. But I don’t think this article is particularly insightful.
Does America have a shortage of natives willing to ‘learn to code’ at a pay rate the employers can afford?
No, not even remotely. Whatever “issue” exists within tech is the perceived shortage of women and minorities, a shortage driven mostly by the lack of women and minorities who are interested in the field. You’re about the impact of the H1-B program, a now-indefensible mechanism that has its defenders, most driven by what you cite – the desire for cheap labor.
I do not know I agree. I wonder if the Indians (say) have not got a propensity for coding. Higher caste Indians have exceedingly high levels on international IQ tables – and IQ is a weird thing, it is not the same. For some it is mathematical, for some linguistically, for others I would suspect coding. Brains work on odd ways, one 140IQ may not code, but sees structural things in their head, others see social, and so on.
I wonder if the Indians just have a knack for it in their brain networks.
You cannot take 100 people and train them to be equally good at coding by giving the same training.
The Bush family were always “Progressive Lite” – going back to Prescott Bush. George Walker Bush pretended to be a conservative to get the nomination – but in office it was the Progressive Agenda of “No Child Left Behind” Federal messing with education, Medicare Part D, and (of course) wars overseas and de facto open borders at home. Donald John Trump was the opposite – for years he had pretended to be a Progressive (in order to get along with the New York elite), but turned out to be a conservative (in private his family always had been – they supported Barry Goldwater in 1964). Part of the intense hatred the left had (and have) for Donald John Trump is that he conned them in New York for years – they will never forgive him falsely pretending to be one of them. Remember as recently as 2012 DJT was attacking Mitt Romney (of all people) for talking too tough on immigration.
Like so many pundits who discuss American immigration, Justin ignores the elephant in the room, how legal and illegal immigration is changing the US from basically a unilingual country into a bilingual country with Spanish as its second language. In 2015, the American Community Survey estimated that 13% of American residents speak Spanish as their home language. There is good reason to believe this was an underestimate as there has been concern about Hispanics being undercounted in the census and in surveys for decades, and those with poor English skills are more likely to refuse to respond or have difficulty responding to the ACS.) In any case, the Spanish-speaking percentage of the US population is beyond any doubt higher now than it was six years ago. With the Biden administration essentially erasing the border with Mexico, the percentage of Spanish speakers in the population may already be about twice the 8.5% of the Swiss population that speaks Italian, and close to the 22% of the Swiss population that speaks French. (Of course, both Italian and French are official languages in Switzerland.) The state of New Mexico is already officially bilingual, and if Puerto Rico is granted statehood it too will be bilingual, with English as the minority language rather than the majority language.
Mark Krikorian, an economist specializing in immigration, noted that: “when President Obama announced the DACA program—which provides deportation relief and work permits for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. before age 16—he characterized beneficiaries as English speakers who might not even know the language of their ancestral countries. But DACA has no English requirement; the application form even has a space for the name of the translator who helped non-English speakers complete it.” Krikorian views the limited English of many DACA immigrants as a serious problem for an America based on assimilating immigrants into the English-speaking mainstream. Of course, things look different if you simply think of a DACA immigrant living in the US SouthWest as speaking what is, or what should be, one of the official languages of his state. Being fluent in English would be an asset, but should not be a major concern.
Historically, of course, all of the US SouthWest was part of Mexico before the 1830s or 1840s, so even the historicist argument for keeping states like California and Texas unilingual English are not strong. Ultimately this strong Hispanic immigration may do more than change the nature of the United States. It could break it apart. Even if it doesn’t, it is understandable that a Californian or an Arizonan who grew up in a state where English was a unilingual English state might not want to see their state become bilingual, mainly through immigration.
We have the same problem here- the group coming in annually through ‘family reunion’ is much the biggest, ( can’t recall the figures, sorry, but around 100k I think ) yet attracts little comment. What we should do is set an annual limit- say 30 k- and anyone wanting to come this way just gets in the queue. That way, large numbers of elderly parents would never come in to burden the services, unwilling brides never be married off to cousins wanting to get in etc. The new immigration act is under debate right now so write to your MP with your thoughts…
So many problems with this analysis. Where to begin?
I have been a resident of California – ground zero and the testing laboratory for the effects of “immigration” – for 56 years. It is safe to say that I have an informed opinion.
The point in this debate is not whether there are “good” immigrants and “bad” immigrants, “compassionate” and “mean” wings of the Republican Party, or even whether immigration is a net “positive” or a net “negative”.
I often see photographs of pro-immigration rallies and protests where participants are holding up placards emblazoned with misguided slogans, such as “No Human Being is Illegal”, and “America is a Nation of Immigrants”. What these slogans elide from the discussion is that America was – up until the social justice zealots became involved – a nation of legal immigrants.
When the vast majority of people entering your nation are doing so by breaking the law, you as a nation are powerless to determine much of anything regarding such immigrants. You simply get what shows up on your doorstep… and enters without bothering to knock or be invited in. All the rest of the debate is mere window dressing, Kabuki theatre.
Now, let me tell you what 56 years of observing the effects of illegal immigration in California have shown me: it’s an unmitigated disaster. Californians have looked the other way, and are utterly two-faced when it comes to illegal immigration. They want their lawns mowed cheaply, the cost of their grocery store produce and fast food kept as low as possible, and their hotel rooms cleaned by faceless, nameless nobodies. And with those “benefits” of illegal immigration, have come huge social costs. But no one dare speak of those without being labeled a bigot.
So there you have it. Debate all you want about the peripheral aspects of immigration in America. The problem is neither immigration or immigrants: it’s illegal immigration and what it says about the inability of America to make any reasonable choices anymore about any policies.
And, for the record, all this claptrap about Presidents killing people and George W. Bush being a “war criminal” is just that: claptrap. Hyperbole. Armchair opinionating.
Why did Trump get almost twice as many votes from immigrants as Bush?
Most migrants who have any sense do not want masses of low income, unskilled, low income, people arriving to lower their position. Mass Immigration by unskilled and not too bright is mostly a desire of white Liberals who want to ‘Rub the Right’s Nose In It’ as Blair said.
But the law of unintended consequences has hit Blair and the Labour Party hard as ‘rubbing the Rights’ noses’ in diversity led to the alienation of its core voters, culminating in its near obliteration at the last General Election. (BTW it was Andrew Neather, a former Labour speech writer, not Blair who said it).
interesting article
Ya lost me at “I like George W. Bush.” The man is a war criminal.
Justin..Your article though very observant was spoiled at the start by the lame ‘joke’ that ‘Bush killed people’..it degraded everything else you wrote.
This reminds me of the “war on drugs”, where americans are mortified by the misery & violence associated with the problem (cocaine, etc.) but never stop to consider that it is 100% driven by drug consumption (by americans).
Heads-up: it is impossible to have just the portion you want from everything in life. You will never get to enjoy “recreational” (but illegal) drugs and be isolated from its human cost, just like you will never be able to tell which ones in a mass of immigrants will become beggars and which ones will become CEOs (or whatever else your culture values at the time). The US is full of CEOs whose parents were poor immigrants. Are you sure that you want to rely on your magic powers of forecasting, by barring the ones you “know” won’t be profitable?
Wouldn’t it be more intelligent to invest in the real education (i.e. not “political sciences”, interior design, etc.) of anyone with the drive to succeed, be it immigrant or native, of whatever color? And how about making your country less dangerous (murderous racism, widespread gun violence, etc.), so that you can actually attract these people you “know” will succeed?
And now I will be downvoted and labelled “woke”, which is the automatic label given to anyone espousing uncomfortable ideas these days…
Mexico is the largest source of migrants to the US. Name ten CEOs who migrated from Mexico or are the children of migrants from Mexico or, even more easily, grandchildren of migrants from Mexico.
OK, that too hard for you. Could you name 5?
Could you name 1?
So the deciding factor for you is in a number? If I fail to find an example to inform you now, you are happy to conclude that everything I pointed in my post is non-existant? Wow…
Also, ain’t that a perfect way to conclude that Mexicans are all born either incompetent or with a propensity for crime? I suspect you have one of those MAGA hats, right? Don’t worry, I won’t bother asking if you are a CEO, or whatever title it is that is required for you to detect value in a person…
Answer the question
Ok, so having seen my home town turned into a cesspit of crime, drugs, unemployment, homelessness and dysfunction as the population has gone from 10% to 60% Hispanic, I’m a little touchy when people make up absolute nonsense about the benefits of immigration. But the tacos are great! Just ignore that guy dying on the sidewalk you have to step over to get in.
Andrew, can you tell for sure that the Mexican immigrants you pointed are the real cause of the problems you described? That you would surely act that much differently, if given the exact same circumstances and opportunities?
If so, I’ll have to agree with your arguments that Mexicans are the problem. Otherwise…
“just like you will never be able to tell which ones in a mass of immigrants will become beggars and which ones will become CEOs”
You can tell with very strong likelihood which groups will produce More of one kind or the other!
Actually you can, with a high accuracy.
Taking a look at the general state of the place which produced the migrant is a pretty good predictor. Of course there’s always the odd atypicals and outliers, but the statistical chance of those occurring amongst a mass is negligibly small. Chances of getting one illiterate thicko in a mass of 100 Danes or Japanese is as small as getting an articulate academic in a mass of 100 Ugandans.
There is no “murderous racism” in the US. A lot of murder, yes, but the vast majority of it is intra-racial. Black people (mostly, to be really specific, non-elderly black men, the near-gutting of a young black woman by an enraged knife-wielding black teen girl a week ago being a bit of an outlier, as was the stabby teen’s death by police gunshot) make up a hugely disproportionate number of both murder victims and murderers. This is terrible and tragic. But indicative of “murderous racism”, it ain’t.