Immigration, Freedom, Wealth, Corruption, and More Cool Maps

“Yeah. See, my cousin is getting married down at TJ, man, so he calls the immigration on himself.”

“But why?”

“So he can get a free ride, man.” – Up in Smoke

This will all make sense, baby, trust me.

This is the second post that I’ve really thought a very long time about, and read a lot about.  Illegal immigration is a difficult topic, and one that’s certainly one of the most polarizing topics in the country today.

I’ll start out with the end conclusion:  unrestricted illegal immigration is devastating both to the illegal alien and to the country entered, and is a phenomenon sure to cause amazing pain across the world.  Now that the Band-Aid™ is ripped off the wound, let me further note that illegal immigration is currently considered the top problem in the United States, and certainly is up there in many European nations.  I’m pretty sure it’s not considered a problem in California, since, you know, weed.

I won’t attempt to discuss specifics of this issue from a global situation – in reality, even though I read a LOT of news, I’ll admit my knowledge of the on-the-ground impacts in Europe is limited.  I could talk about it, but it would be the equivalent of a nerdy dolphin talking about hang gliding – sure I’ve read about it . . . .

“But,” you say, “John Wilder, this is a nation of immigrants!”

Nope.  Not even close.

What became the United States was a colony, specifically a colony of Great Britain.  A colony isn’t a group of immigrants, it’s the growth of the home country by extension.  In this case, the original colonies were founded by British companies operating under British law and eventually British colonies.  The British brought their independent legal system, common law, system of representative democracy, religion, and culture, or at least that’s what the Saturday morning cartoons said.

You may or may not like the British, but the places they colonized remain the most free places outside of Europe.  Here’s the Freedom House map of political freedoms in the world today (CC by SA, 4.0):

Thankfully, they didn’t mandate that you drive on the wrong side of the road to be free.

Groovy, baby.

And British culture and religion formed and shaped the politics that led to the American Revolution.  The belief in ordered freedom, that laws stood above all men regardless of birth (i.e., a King was subject to law as much as a commoner), that commerce should be fair, and corruption was to be frowned on.

Amazingly, you can see that lack of corruption is tied to . . . wealth!  Amazing!  Part of the way to being wealthy is to not be corrupt.  Who could have predicted that? CC-BY-4.0-DE, Transparency International

Here’s a map that shows where the wealth is, based on this website (LINK) by Theo Deutinger.

Let’s sum this up:  The British language, culture, and religion was the vat that held the Special Sauce® that became America.  In this particular “melting pot” it was British culture, plus the inheritance of Western Civilization that produced the slightly different culture we have here, and it fits in pretty well with the rest of the productive world.  The United States is not a nation of immigrants; it’s a former colony that has created a variation on the themes that have (so far) been the most successful the world has ever seen.  (Note to the Chinese instructor in the year 2230 making fun if this comment, it seemed to make sense at the time.)

So why not have immigration?

Well, I never said no immigration, even though immigration is by its very nature creates tension, and is part of the basis for the balkanized United States that I wrote about in (The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths) and still feel is likely.

Want me to prove that?

The reaction to the following ad, when it appeared in 2008 was, to put it mildly, relatively positive south of the border, and relatively negative north of the border.

The tensions are currently greatest with Mexico since that country is putting the largest number of unassimilated immigrants into the country, but at different times the tensions have run high with other ethnic groups – the Irish certainly, and around the turn of the last century immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe led directly to the Immigration Law of 1924.

This particular law mainly set ceilings that aimed to preserve the existing ethic makeup of the United States – of particular note, immigration of Hispanics was less regulated, as they were considered not as Hispanic, but as European.

Eventually this policy was reversed in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which led to an increasing proportion of the foreign born in the country – now at over 13%.  This was about the proportion that led to the Immigration Law of 1924.

But hey, if they’re legal, they’re American, right?

Well, no.  It takes more than just a stamp on a piece of paper to be an American.  Let’s run a thought experiment – The Wilder family decides to move to . . . someplace in Western Europe, say, Denmark, mainly because they love hot dogs and pastry.  We become citizens!  Are we Danish?  No.  We’re Americans who moved to Denmark and became citizens.  Well, our kids are Danish, right?  No.  They’re the “kids of the Americans.”  They’ve been raised by people whose culture is clearly not Danish.  Okay, their kids?

Maybe.  And that’s in Denmark, where we have genetic background from, and it’s a culture pretty similar in corruption levels and social standards to the United States.  I’ll note that Denmark has just put into place restrictions on immigrants who will have difficulty assimilating to Danish culture – Denmark isn’t a big country in either area or population, and the Danes like Denmark just the way it is, thank you very much.

Being a citizen is more than a piece of paper – it requires assimilation, it requires ties.  It requires buying into the culture and religion (not that you have to join that religion, but you have to respect the way that it forms and shapes the psychology of the country).

And that doesn’t mean that having the desire to “get to a better place” gives anyone the right to move to a new country.  That economic incentive would thus justify that 75% of the world would have the right to move to a Western country.  Also, if the immigrant is wanting to come here only for economics but is otherwise uninvested in the culture?  They will bring their old culture with them – the very same culture that strangled their economic opportunity at home – the borders of the United States doesn’t hold mythical properties that make those that show up prosperous – the culture and religion do.  The United States isn’t a magic bullet – it’s just got a great combination of freedom plus restraint, planning, and trust that derive from religion and culture.

And large clumps of unassimilated immigrants aren’t really Americans, regardless of where they were born or what their passport says.  Technology has allowed foreign-born populations to live with television stations from home every minute of the day – learning English is now not required.  And since they don’t learn English, the only jobs open to them are decidedly lower tier.  This keeps them on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and also displaces lower-skilled Americans.  The relatively recent immigration enforcement phenomenon has led to much lower unemployment.

An example of one such cultural enclave in the United States that must be rooted out.

People from different cultures also assimilate at different rates – back to the Denmark example.  Danish culture would be pretty familiar to the Wilder family, but if we were to try to assimilate into, say, Chinese culture?  We know nothing useful for assimilation there.  Literally nothing.  The Mrs. and I would be rather hopeless, The Boy and Pugsley less so, but every day for them would be a titanic struggle to assimilate to a 3,000 year old culture with vastly different norms.  But that’s unlikely to be an issue – China, a country of over a billion people, approved only about 1,500 green cards last year.  Like an invitation to arm wrestle Queen Elizabeth®, those green cards amazingly hard to get.

But let’s ignore reality: what happens if everyone in the world moved to China?

Well, if you desire diversity – that would be the death of it.  Diversity doesn’t flourish when you pull everyone from every culture into the same country – that’s the exact opposite of diversity, and the result (after the inevitable wars) is homogeneity – a single monoculture.  And diversity has huge value, because as different populations have time to grow in (relative) isolation, interesting genetic things can happen, like clusters of genius, or clusters of resistance to certain diseases, or the near superhuman powers of the Sherpas or the Wilder clan.

Here’s what I just said, put more eloquently by physicist Freeman Dyson from his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe:

It is not just an inconvenient historical accident that we have a variety of languages. It was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly. Rapid evolution of human categories demanded that social and biological progress go hand in hand. Biological progress came from random genetic fluctuations that could be significant only in small and genetically isolated communities. To keep a small community genetically isolated and to enable it to evolve new social institutions, it was vitally important that the new members of the community could be quickly separated from their neighbors by barriers of language.

So our emergence as an intelligent species may have depended crucially on the fact that we have this astonishing ability to switch from Proto-Indo-European to Hittite to Hebrew to Latin to English and back to Hebrew within a few generations.

It is likely that in the future our survival and our further development will depend in an equally crucial way on the maintenance of cultural and biological diversity. In the future as in the past, we shall be healthier if we speak many languages and are quick to invent new ones as opportunities for cultural differentiation arise. We now have laws for the protection of endangered species.

In many cases the smartest and most able people come on over to the United States.  That benefits the United States (in many cases), but what does it do to the country that sent those people over?  Does it make India better to send over people who are smart programmers and great leaders, or does India suffer from this? 

It destabilizes India, which, in turn, makes the world a less stable place.

The current mass-migration of peoples on the planet, regardless of their aims and difficulties, will end in violence and tears – there is no instance of a stable multicultural society in the history of mankind.  The longer it goes on, the more devastating the end will be.  But I’ve stopped worrying about that.  Too scary.  Now I just worry about fashion trends.