Posted on 02/11/2002 6:27:23 AM PST by Love America or move to ......
Ben Wattenberg: Immigration Is Good Many leading thinkers tell us we are now in a culture clash that will determine the course of history, that today’s war is for Western civilization itself. There is a demographic dimension to this “clash of civilizations.” While certain of today’s demographic signals bode well for America, some look very bad. If we are to assess America’s future prospects, we must start by asking, “Who are we?” “Who will we be?” and “How will we relate to the rest of the world?” The answers all involve immigration. As data from the 2000 census trickled out, one item hit the headline jackpot. By the year 2050, we were told, America would be “majority non-white.” The census count showed more Hispanics in America than had been expected, making them “America’s largest minority.” When blacks, Asians, and Native Americans are added to the Hispanic total, the “non-white” population emerges as a large minority, on the way to becoming a small majority around the middle of this century. The first thing worth noting is that these rigid racial definitions are absurd. The whole concept of race as a biological category is becoming ever-more dubious in America. Consider: Under the Clinton administration’s census rules, any American who checks both the black and white boxes on the form inquiring about “race” is counted as black, even if his heritage is, say, one eighth black and seven eighths white. In effect, this enshrines the infamous segregationist view that one drop of black blood makes a person black. Although most Americans of Hispanic heritage declare themselves “white,” they are often inferentially counted as non-white, as in the erroneous New York Times headline which recently declared: “Census Confirms Whites Now a Minority” in California. If those of Hispanic descent, hailing originally from about 40 nations, are counted as a minority, why aren’t those of Eastern European descent, coming from about 10 nations, also counted as a minority? (In which case the Eastern European “minority” would be larger than the Hispanic minority.) But within this jumble of numbers there lies a central truth: America is becoming a universal nation, with significant representation of nearly all human hues, creeds, ethnicities, and national ancestries. Continued moderate immigration will make us an even more universal nation as time goes on. And this process may well play a serious role in determining the outcome of the contest of civilizations taking place across the globe. And current immigration rates are moderate, even though America admitted more legal immigrants from 1991 to 2000 than in any previous decade—between 10 and 11 million. The highest previous decade was 1901-1910, when 8.8 million people arrived. In addition, each decade now, several million illegal immigrants enter the U.S., thanks partly to ease of transportation. Critics like Pat Buchanan say that absorbing all those immigrants will “swamp” the American culture and bring Third World chaos inside our borders. I disagree. Keep in mind: Those 8.8 million immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1901 and 1910 increased the total American population by 1 percent per year. (Our numbers grew from 76 million to 92 million during that decade.) In our most recent decade, on the other hand, the 10 million legal immigrants represented annual growth of only 0.36 percent (as the U.S. went from 249 million to 281 million). Overall, nearly 15 percent of Americans were foreign-born in 1910. In 1999, our foreign-born were about 10 percent of our total. (In 1970, the foreign-born portion of our population was down to about 5 percent. Most of the rebound resulted from a more liberal immigration law enacted in 1965.) Or look at the “foreign stock” data. These figures combine Americans born in foreign lands and their offspring, even if those children have only one foreign-born parent. Today, America’s “foreign stock” amounts to 21 percent of the population and heading up. But in 1910, the comparable figure was 34 percent—one third of the entire country—and the heavens did not collapse. We can take in more immigrants, if we want to. Should we? Return to the idea that immigrants could swamp American culture. If that is true, we clearly should not increase our intake. But what if, instead of swamping us, immigration helps us become a stronger nation and a swamper of others in the global competition of civilizations? Immigration is now what keeps America growing. According to the U.N., the typical American woman today bears an average of 1.93 children over the course of her childbearing years. That is mildly below the 2.1 “replacement” rate required to keep a population stable over time, absent immigration. The “medium variant” of the most recent Census Bureau projections posits that the U.S. population will grow from 281 million in 2000 to 397 million in 2050 with expected immigration, but only to 328 million should we choose a path of zero immigration. That is a difference of a population growth of 47 million versus 116 million. (The 47 million rise is due mostly to demographic momentum from previous higher birthrates.) If we have zero immigration with today’s low birthrates indefinitely, the American population would eventually begin to shrink, albeit slowly. Is more population good for America? When it comes to potential global power and influence, numbers can matter a great deal. Taxpayers, many of them, pay for a fleet of aircraft carriers. And on the economic side it is better to have a customer boom than a customer bust. (It may well be that Japan’s stagnant demography is one cause of its decade-long slump.) The environmental case could be debated all day long, but remember that an immigrant does not add to the global population—he merely moves from one spot on the planet to another. But will the current crop of immigrants acculturate? Immigrants to America always have. Some critics, like Mr. Buchanan, claim that this time, it’s different. Mexicans seem to draw his particular ire, probably because they are currently our largest single source of immigration. Yet only about a fifth (22 percent) of legal immigrants to America currently come from Mexico. Adding illegal immigrants might boost the figure to 30 percent, but the proportion of Mexican immigrants will almost surely shrink over time. Mexican fertility has diminished from 6.5 children per woman 30 years ago to 2.5 children now, and continues to fall. If high immigration continues under such circumstances, Mexico will run out of Mexicans. California hosts a wide variety of immigrant groups in addition to Mexicans. And the children and grandchildren of Koreans, Chinese, Khmer, Russian Jews, Iranians, and Thai (to name a few) will speak English, not Spanish. Even among Mexican-Americans, many second- and third-generation offspring speak no Spanish at all, often to the dismay of their elders (a familiar American story). Michael Barone’s book The New Americans theorizes that Mexican immigrants are following roughly the same course of earlier Italian and Irish immigrants. Noel Ignatiev’s book How the Irish Became White notes that it took a hundred years until Irish-Americans (who were routinely characterized as drunken “gorillas”) reached full income parity with the rest of America. California recently repealed its bilingual education programs. Nearly half of Latino voters supported the proposition, even though it was demonized by opponents as being anti-Hispanic. Latina mothers reportedly tell their children, with no intent to disparage the Spanish language, that “Spanish is the language of busboys”—stressing that in America you have to speak English to get ahead. The huge immigration wave at the dawn of the twentieth century undeniably brought tumult to America. Many early social scientists promoted theories of what is now called “scientific racism,” which “proved” that persons from Northwest Europe were biologically superior. The new immigrants—Jews, Poles, and Italians—were considered racially apart and far down the totem pole of human character and intelligence. Blacks and Asians were hardly worth measuring. The immigration wave sparked a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, peaking in the early 1920s. At that time, the biggest KKK state was not in the South; it was Indiana, where Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, as well as blacks, were targets. Francis Walker, superintendent of the U.S. Bureau of the Census in the late 1890s, and later president of MIT, wrote in 1896 that “The entrance of such vast masses of peasantry degraded below our utmost conceptions is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. They are beaten men from beaten races. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes such as belong to those who were descended from the tribes that met under the oak trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chiefs.” (Sorry, Francis, but Germany did not have a good twentieth century.) Fast-forward to the present. By high margins, Americans now tell pollsters it was a very good thing that Poles, Italians, and Jews emigrated to America. Once again, it’s the newcomers who are viewed with suspicion. This time, it’s the Mexicans, Filipinos, and people from the Caribbean who make Americans nervous. But such views change over time. The newer immigrant groups are typically more popular now than they were even a decade ago. Look at the high rates of intermarriage. Most Americans have long since lost their qualms about marriage between people of different European ethnicities. That is spreading across new boundaries. In 1990, 64 percent of Asian Americans married outside their heritage, as did 37 percent of Hispanics. Black-white intermarriage is much lower, but it climbed from 3 percent in 1980 to 9 percent in 1998. (One reason to do away with the race question on the census is that within a few decades we won’t be able to know who’s what.) Can the West, led by America, prevail in a world full of sometimes unfriendly neighbors? Substantial numbers of people are necessary (though not sufficient) for a country, or a civilization, to be globally influential. Will America and its Western allies have enough people to keep their ideas and principles alive? On the surface, it doesn’t look good. In 1986, I wrote a book called The Birth Dearth. My thesis was that birth rates in developed parts of the world—Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, nations where liberal Western values are rooted—had sunk so low that there was danger ahead. At that time, women in those modern countries were bearing a lifetime average of 1.83 children, the lowest rate ever absent war, famine, economic depression, or epidemic illness. It was, in fact, 15 percent below the long-term population replacement level. Those trendlines have now plummeted even further. Today, the fertility rate in the modern countries averages 1.5 children per woman, 28 percent below the replacement level. The European rate, astonishingly, is 1.34 children per woman—radically below replacement level. The Japanese rate is similar. The United States is the exceptional country in the current demographic scene. As a whole, the nations of the Western world will soon be less populous, and a substantially smaller fraction of the world population. Demographer Samuel Preston estimates that even if European fertility rates jump back to replacement level immediately (which won’t happen) the continent would still lose 100 million people by 2060. Should the rate not level off fairly soon, the ramifications are incalculable, or, as the Italian demographer Antonio Golini likes to mutter at demograph-ic meetings, “unsustainable…unsustainable.” (Shockingly, the current Italian fertility rate is 1.2 children per woman, and it has been at or below 1.5 for 20 years—a full generation.) The modern countries of the world, the bearers of Western civilization, made up one third of the global population in 1950, and one fifth in 2000, and are projected to represent one eighth by 2050. If we end up in a world with nine competing civilizations, as Samuel Huntington maintains, this will make it that much harder for Western values to prevail in the cultural and political arenas. The good news is that fertility rates have also plunged in the less developed countries—from 6 children in 1970 to 2.9 today. By the middle to end of this century, there should be a rough global convergence of fertility rates and population growth. Since September 11, immigration has gotten bad press in America. The terrorist villains, indeed, were foreigners. Not only in the U.S. but in many other nations as well, governments are suddenly cracking down on illegal entry. This is understandable for the moment. But an enduring turn away from legal immigration would be foolhardy for America and its allies. If America doesn’t continue to take in immigrants, it won’t continue to grow in the long run. If the Europeans and Japanese don’t start to accept more immigrants they will evaporate. Who will empty the bedpans in Italy’s retirement homes? The only major pool of immigrants available to Western countries hails from the less developed world, i.e. non-white, and non-Western countries. The West as a whole is in a deep demographic ditch. Accordingly, Western countries should try to make it easier for couples who want to have children. In America, the advent of tax credits for children (which went from zero to $1,000 per child per year over the last decade) is a small step in the direction of fertility reflation. Some European nations are enacting similar pro-natal policies. Bur their fertility rates are so low, and their economies so constrained, that any such actions can only be of limited help. That leaves immigration. I suggest America should make immigration safer (by more carefully investigating new entrants), but not cut it back. It may even be wise to make a small increase in our current immigration rate. America needs to keep growing, and we can fruitfully use both high- and low-skill immigrants. Pluralism works here, as it does in Canada and Australia. Can pluralism work in Europe? I don’t know, and neither do the Europeans. They hate the idea, but they will depopulate if they don’t embrace pluralism, via immigration. Perhaps our example can help Europeans see that pluralism might work in the admittedly more complex European context. Japan is probably a hopeless case; perhaps the Japanese should just change the name of their country to Dwindle. Our non-pluralist Western allies will likely diminish in population, relative power, and influence during this century. They will become much grayer. Nevertheless, by 2050 there will still be 750 million of them left, so the U.S. needs to keep the Western alliance strong. For all our bickering, let us not forget that the European story in the second half of the twentieth century was a wonderful one; Western Europeans stopped killing each other. Now they are joining hands politically. The next big prize may be Russia. If the Russians choose our path, we will see what Tocqueville saw: that America and Russia are natural allies. We must enlist other allies as well. America and India, for instance, are logical partners—pluralist, large, English-speaking, and democratic. We must tell our story. And our immigrants, who come to our land by choice, are our best salesmen. We should extend our radio services to the Islamic world, as we have to the unliberated nations of Asia through Radio Free Asia. The people at the microphones will be U.S. immigrants. We can lose the contest of civilizations if the developing countries don’t evolve toward Western values. One of the best forms of “public diplomacy” is immigration. New immigrants send money home, bypassing corrupt governments—the best kind of foreign aid there is. They go back home to visit and tell their families and friends in the motherland that American modernism, while not perfect, ain’t half-bad. Some return home permanently, but they bring with them Western expectations of open government, economic efficiency, and personal liberty. They know that Westernism need not be restricted to the West, and they often have an influence on local politics when they return to their home countries. Still, because of Europe and Japan, the demographic slide of Western civilization will continue. And so, America must be prepared to go it alone. If we keep admitting immigrants at our current levels there will be almost 400 million Americans by 2050. That can keep us strong enough to defend and perhaps extend our views and values. And the civilization we will be advancing may not just be Western, but even more universal: American.
The Western countries are the world's wealthiest. It does not make sense that people don't have children because they can't afford them. Money isn't the issue. There is something else at work, perhaps people are more career minded or want more time to themselves rather than spend it raising children. A survey of current attitudes toward child bearing in these countries would reveal a lot.
Actually, it is--just not in the way you're thinking.
In an agrarian society, children are a net asset, because those children become your workforce.
As a society transitions from agricultural to industrial to post-industrial economics, children represent a net drain on assets, as they cannot bring in substantial income until they reach the age of majority.
Nixon did a speech about it in '69, Rockefeller's commission said No More People in '72, and we had 'The Year of Population' in 1974. It's all still in the consciousness of a generation. Buchanan talked about it in his book.
The net effect of it was that they convinced all the people in the developed world to stop breeding, but not the third world.
Makes you wonder how smart we really are.
Though largely true, skyrocketing taxes (fed, state, local, and business) have progressively taken more of the "net" wealth of individuals and families and transferred it to the state. This has decreased the financial resources for families to have more kids. Other factors include what Regulator said about the hysteria of over-population in the 1970s, more women in the work force, the rise of radical feminism which drove a wedge between the sexes, the decline of religion in America and soaring educational costs. The combination of these factors created a perfect storm against the incentives for large families.
This is so much tripe. A classic case of backward reasoning. He should wonder why the Europeans and especially the Japanese have survived as cultures for as long as they have given their immigration polices. Wattenburg has a warped opinion about unlimited immigration and like Bob Bartley of the WSJ, he tries to find reasons to justify it instead of critically reviewing the basis of such opinions.
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