Pulling Up the Ladder?

The Child of Immigrants Makes the Case for Moderate Restrictionism

I realize it’s odd that I’m the one making the argument for restricting immigration. After all, I am the child of immigrants. And I know many others will say, “You hypocrite! How dare you pull up the ladder that your parents were so fortunate to climb!” I sympathize with that perspective because it was one that I had for most of my life. My mom came to America over forty years ago to escape the dead-end streets of Communist China. Immigration has offered me the best life I could have possibly conceived of, in a nation that I could not be more proud to belong to. Indeed, I often paraphrase Cecil Rhodes, that in being an American, I have won first prize in the lottery of life. Who am I, therefore, to deny others the chance to enjoy the same journey?

But after careful and honest consideration of my rights and duties as an American citizen, I concluded that my own background cannot and should not preclude me from advocating for an immigration policy of moderate restrictionism. As an American, it is my duty to consider first and finally the interests of my fellow countrymen and the strength and unity of the American Nation to which I owe my sole loyalty. Undoubtedly, my family’s fairy tale immigrant story does make me more sympathetic towards the “tired, poor huddled masses” from the rest of the world “longing to breathe free”. But I must balance that sympathy with the recognition that the majority of Americans today are profoundly uncomfortable with the pace of demographic and social change taking place in their country. Their discomfort cannot be ignored or summarily dismissed as bigoted or unenlightened, because doing so would pour more fuel on the flames of right-wing populism and the forces that carried Trump to the presidency and destabilized politics across the Western World.  

While it is unfashionable to admit, the vast preponderance of empirical evidence assuredly demonstrates that the anti-immigration attitudes in America and nearly all Western Nations are driven by anxiety about demographic and ethno-cultural change. In many ways, America is experiencing the most extreme of these demographic changes. As a consequence of high levels of immigration, alongside somewhat higher levels of fertility among non-white women relative to white women, Census Bureau projects that by 2044, non-Hispanic White Americans will become a minority in their own country, a status they have never experienced throughout the Nation’s history. This “majority-minority” future stands in sharp contrast to the country most American adults knew in their formative years. In 1970 for instance, 88% of the population was non-Hispanic White.

The combination of this looming lose of the majority status, alongside an aggressively multicultural idealogy pushed by elites, has displaced the ethno-cultural security of a great many White Americans. A poll by the Pew Research Center showed that by a 23-point margin, White Americans expressed the belief that a non-white majority would weaken American culture. This explains the findings of University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz (2018), which concluded that Trump-support is best explained by a sense among White Americans that minorities are threatening their rightful status in American society. Logically, when presented with projections about their impending loss of majority status, most White Americans reacted in anger, adopted more conservative political views, and perceived minorities as more of a threat (Craig and Richeson 2014, Myers and Levy 2018). Indeed, the number one predictor of Trump support among White Americans was a strong identification with white identity. Social psychologists Eric Knowles and Linda Tropp (2018) found that White Americans who said that being white was “very important” to their identity voted overwhelmingly for Trump and voiced the most restrictive views on immigration. In fact, seventy percent of White Trump voters in 2016 wanted to lower immigration. Another leading indicator of Trump support is agreeing with statements such as “things in America were better in the past”, indicating a nostalgia for a past when White Americans were a preponderant majority. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” not so subtly appealed to this nostalgia.

The political correctness and anti-racist norms that have prevailed in American society since the Civil Rights era are so strong that concerns about ethnic and racial composition are summarily dismissed as bigoted and illegitimate. Before Trump, even the vast majority of conservative Republicans abided by these norms. As former Republican Senator Phil Gramm once said “I am not ready to tear down the Statue of Liberty…if we can preserve freedom, we don’t ever have to worry what America’s going to look like.” I used to concur with that indifference because I believed that Americans were an exceptional people bound together by creed and not by blood. After all, unlike European and East Asian nations, America has a robust tradition of civic nationhood based upon what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion”, of commitment to the universal values embedded in the Declaration of Independence and fidelity to our liberal democratic Constitution. But while nearly all Americans identify with this civic conception of nationhood, most White Americans and a large proportion of minorities also cherish what University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann (2019) calls America’s White “ethno-tradition”. Ethno-traditional nationalists do not condition being White as an individual membership criteria for being American. But they do feel ardently attached to the myths, symbols, and memories associated with the White ethnic majority; a saga that spans from the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower to the pioneers who engaged in westward expansion and conquered the American frontier. They cherish this story, and the cultural markers in the form of holidays, museum exhibits, and statues that enshrine them, not out of some cartoonishly evil notion of White racial chauvinism, but because they perceive them to be distinctive features of the American Nation, which distinguishes it from other nations of the world.

Ethno-traditional nationalism explains why White Americans are not alone in their desire to preserve America’s traditional ethno-racial composition. A poll conducted by the University of Virginia, in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots, found that Hispanic and Asian Trump voters for instance, were nearly as if not more likely as White Trump voters to concur with the propositions that “Whites are under attack in the US” or that “America must protect its White European heritage. Morover, these Hispanics and Asians were more likely than White Democrats to voice sadness over the loss of a White majority.

The identitarian left often dismisses these attitudes as “self-hatred” or “internalized white supremacy”. Kenly Kato, a Biden-nominated federal judge once wrote that conservative Asian Americans “internalize the dialogue of oppressors”. But the reality is not quite so simple. Many minorities have a vicarious attachment to America’s White ethnic majority, because in their minds, White Americans serve as the custodians of the particularistic national identity of their adopted homeland which they celebrate. This phenomenon is quite akin to the sense of loss White hippies feel when they move into Harlem and erode its African American majority. These White hippies are hardly self-hating Black supremacists. But like Trump-supporting minorities in America, they feel attached to the neighborhood’s African American ethno-tradition, and the Black demographic majority that underlies it. To use a more personal example, my mom’s hometown is a Chinese city called Guangzhou. Guangzhou is historically a Cantonese-speaking city and the capital of Cantonese culture, tradition, and cuisine. When I walked the streets of Guangzhou as a kid, I could speak to everyone in Cantonese. Nowadays, in some districts, I can hardly buy boba without switching to Mandarin. Although we are both fluent Mandarin speakers, people like my mom and I feel like strangers in our own city. We therefore wish to protect Guangzhou’s Cantonese-speaking majority from the pressures of migrants from other parts of China.

I offer these examples to demonstrate that despite the identitarian left’s reflexive condemnation of anything to do with “whiteness” or white interests, there is nothing racist or morally dubious about Whites (or minorities) being attached to their group’s ethno-traditions, or being concerned about their country’s ethno-racial composition. The traditional definition of racism is the belief that one man is superior to another on the basis of his race and hostility towards other races. Yet, as social psychologist Marilynn Brewer (1999) showed in her research, there is absolutely no correlation between a person’s attachment to his or her in-group and a person’s antipathy towards his or her outgroup. The data from the American National Elections Survey (ANES) confirms this. Whites who rate themselves as feeling very warm toward other Whites, feel no less cold towards Blacks than Whites who feel more cold towards their fellow White Americans. I acknowledge that there are risks to a society characterized by the aggressive mobilization of majority group interests. But practicing what Kaufmann calls “asymmetrical multiculturalism”, whereby we suppress majority (though not for much longer) ethnic expression while making sacred the recognition of minority interests, often makes for an even more perilous political environment.

To understand why this is, it is essential to understand that support for ethno-traditional nationalism is rooted in basic psychological predispositions that are either hereditary or forged by early childhood experiences. People who score highly in the Big Five personality trait known as “openness to experience”, find diversity and novelty stimulating. They enjoy nothing more than living in dense urban areas with ethnic restaurants on every block. Yet people highly open to experience are a minority of the American population. The majority of Americans are more conservative and order-seeking. They prefer greater homogeneity and stability. They instinctively prefer the company of people they consider their own, view diversity as disorienting, and experience change as a form of loss (Stenner 2005, Haidt 2012). Increased diversity through ethno-demographic change activates these negative emotions and leads them to adopt more restrictive views on immigration.

While diversity is lionized today by the identitarian left, and the professional-managerial class elite that run America’s corporations and the commanding heights of cultural production, it is, in and of itself, just as often a vice as it is a virtue. The left-liberal Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam (2007) found in his research that increased diversity reduces communal bonds and social trust as people, in his words, “hunker down” like turtles. Increased diversity is also correlated with zero-sum intergroup battles for material and symbolic resources (Fukuyama 2018), which makes it more difficult for the state to engage in provisions for public services. Harvard University economists Alberto Alesina and Ed Glaeser (2001) found that America’s more ethnically heterogeneous society is the principal reason it has a less generous welfare state compared to more homogeneous European nations. It is only common sense after all, that people are more willing to share their wealth with those whom they consider their own, as opposed to newcomers or faraway others. It is completely legitimate for people who score highly in openness to advocate for more immigration to increase diversity. But what crosses the line is when they leverage their control over America’s cultural and economic institutions to delegitimize the contrasting preferences of their fellow Americans by labeling them racists and xénophobes. In doing so, they drive a great many Americans into the arms of Trump, who offers them and their preferences and group interests the recognition that elites and mainstream politicians refuse to give them.

The best way to undercut support for Trump and his fellow populist brethren is for mainstream politicians to moderately accommodate the majority of Americans’ desire for cultural unity and social cohesion without adopting his destructive rhetoric and assault on democratic institutions. Diversity increases through immigration and it declines through assimilation. Catholic and Jewish Europeans from Eastern and Southern Europe, or white ethnics as they were called, once faced fierce discrimination at the hands of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), ethnic majority. To defend the congruence between its WASP ethnic majority, and the American nation-state, Congress passed the 1924 immigration act, which virtually shut down immigration from outside Britain and Northern Europe. As President Calvin Coolidge, the man who signed the legislation declared “We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American”. This legislation, alongside the homogenizing influence of World War II, helped facilitate the assimilation of white ethnics into the American mainstream. Linguistic retention, for instance, fell drastically as these white ethnics no longer had to maintain proficiency in their heritage languages in order to communicate with new immigrants fresh off the boat. As a result, these white ethnics are today seen as full members of the White majority rather than foreign strangers, as they once were. In contrast, today’s Hispanic Americans, who represent by far the largest share of America’s foreign-born population, have far higher rates of Spanish retention compared to the European immigrants of America’s yesteryears. Indeed, a majority of Hispanic Americans today are Spanish-dominant. Typically, the European immigrants of the 20th century lost proficiency in their heritage language by the third generation (Veltman 1983). Asian immigrants today largely mirror this trend. Only about 8 percent of third-generation Asian Americans can speak their heritage language. In contrast, about 24 percent of third-generation Hispanic immigrants continue to be proficient in Spanish. This is primarily because their large group size, geographic concentration, and unremitting inflows of Hispanic immigrants created a “critical mass effect”, a context whereby the Spanish-speaking population becomes large enough to foster powerful incentives for Spanish maintenance (Linton 2004). Speeding up the assimilation process for Hispanic immigrants requires, therefore, that we restrict immigration from Latin America.

Advocates of immigrants, conscious of the unpopularity of multiculturalism, often make the case for a liberal immigration policy on the basis of economic reasons. Yet while immigration, even under the system we currently have, is a net positive for the economy as a whole, it has uneven distributional effects that hurt the most vulnerable members of American society. The Harvard University economist George Borjas (2003), who is a Hispanic immigrant himself, found that large influxes of unskilled labor, most of it from Latin America, bid down the wages of unskilled native-born American workers. Running an immigration system with this effect is difficult to justify, especially in an age when the wages of unskilled American workers are already under so much pressure from the twin forces of globalization and skill-biased technological change. The economic case for skilled immigration, however, is much more unambiguous. Skilled immigrants increase America’s stock of human capital which enhances the productivity of native-born American workers through knowledge spillovers and higher rates of business formation. For instance, 55 percent of American companies worth over a billion dollars have at least one immigrant founder (Anderson 2018). We should therefore drastically increase the quota on H1B visas for skilled immigrants while eliminating family reunification for family members outside the nuclear family. We should crack down aggressively on illegal immigration by implementing and enforcing an e-verify system whereby employers who hire illegal immigrants are punished severely. When job opportunities dry up, illegal immigrants will stop coming to America. As Mitt Romney crudely put it, the most effective way to deal with illegal immigration is to create conditions that encourage self-deportation. We should also seek to outsource the problem of asylum seekers and refugees in a manner akin to Australia’s Pacific Solution, and Britain’s Rwanda Scheme. This means engaging in partnerships with other nations whereby we pay them handsomely to set up humane refugee camps and send asylum seekers there. The cost would no doubt be exorbitantly expensive. But it would be worth it because the truth is that Americans resist immigration for ethno-cultural and demographic reasons. An outsourcing solution would give refugees peace and safety without altering America’s ethno-racial composition. An immigration system as outlined, would maximize the benefits of immigration while minimizing its costs. 

I want to end by reaffirming that I do believe in immigration and America's capacity to absorb and assimilate newcomers who arrive at our shores. I myself am a living testament to that enduring reality. I am convinced that by embracing moderate restrictionism and slowing the pace of social change, conservative and order-seeking Americans will cease to see immigrants as a hostile threat or at its worst, a demographic invasion; so that the assimilation that was possible for myself will be possible for immigrants of today and tomorrow. 

Citations:

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Anderson, S. (2018). Immigrants and Billion-Dollar Companies. NFAP Policy Brief

Brewer, Marilynn B. “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate?” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 55, no. 3, 1999, pp. 429–444

Craig, M. A., & Richeson, J. A. (2014). On the precipice of a “majority-minority” America: Perceived status threat from the racial demographic shift affects White Americans’ political ideology. Psychological science, 25(6), 1189-1197.

Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. Profile books.

Mutz, Diana C. “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 19, 2018

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage.

Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. Simon & Schuster, 2005. 

Kaufmann, E. (2018). Whiteshift: Populism, immigration and the future of white majorities. Penguin UK.

Knowles, Eric, and Linda Tropp (2018). “The Racial and Economic Context of Trump Support: Evidence for Threat, Identity, and Contact Effects in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

Parker, K., Morin, R., & Horowitz, J. M. (2019). Looking to the future, public sees an America in decline on many fronts. Pew Research Center, 21.

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Politics, U. C. for. (n.d.). Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Sabatos Crystal Ball. https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-poll-some-americans-express-troubling-racial-attitudes-even-as-majority-oppose-white-supremacists/ 

Linton, A. (2004). A critical mass model of bilingualism among US-born Hispanics. Social Forces, 83(1), 279-314.

Myers, D., & Levy, M. (2018). Racial population projections and reactions to alternative news accounts of growing diversity. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 677(1), 215-228.

Stenner, K. (2005). The Authoritarian Dynamic (Vol. 10). New York: Cambridge university press.

Veltman, C. (1983). Anglicization in the United States: Language environment and language practice of American adolescents. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 44, 99–114Alesina, A. F., Glaeser, E. L., & Sacerdote, B. (2001). Why doesn't the US have a European-style welfare system?.

YouGov-Policy Exchange survey, August 17-18, 2016