With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item:
Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses
Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.
Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.
“Human rights do not prescribe national suicide,” Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.
How about that! “National suicide”. Amazing that somebody can get away with calling a spade a spade like that in this day and age. As Dennis remarked (my emphasis):
Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.
Very unfashionable notion these days, that.
What say you, readers? Should Israel be allowed to define itself as home to “a people”?
If you say ‘no’, then why not? If you say ‘yes’, then you probably know what I’m going to ask next.
101 Comments
Does he mean something like “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein FÁ¼hrer”?
Without a doubt, yes. Now what’s that question you’re going to ask next?
Hi David,
I don’t know about the Reich and the FÁ¼hrer, but as for the Volk, why yes indeed.
DS, the question is the obvious one: if Israel, why not Sweden, Norway, France, Finland, Germany, England, Scotland, etc.? Why not America?
The difference between America, Israel, and the other countries is that the latter group is comprised of its indigenous populations, while America and Israel are not.
The American government had a state policy of genocide against its indigenous population, and is explicitly a nation of immmigrants.
Without getting into a lengthy argument about the provenance of the Israeli state, I think it is fair to say that most (some would say all) of Israeli land was expropriated from the Palestinians.
On the other hand, Sweden is comprised predominantly of … Swedes.
Having said that, if the Israelis choose not to give citizenship rights to Palestinian shikshas, I suppose it’s their right to do so. There is no a priori reason I can see which would mandate that all countries grant citizenship to each of its residents, even if they are married to one of its citizens.
Well, Peter, it seems you agree at least then that England, Scotland, and all those European nations would be justified in restricting immigration so as to preserve their indigenous culture and demography.
Regarding America, it appears you reject the legitimacy of the founding of the United States itself — and by your logic, the legitimacy of America’s having borders at all, or any immigration policy whatsoever.
And the Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel? Where do you think they originally came from, Scarsdale?
I do agree that England, Scotland, et. al. would be justified in restricting immigration if that is what they choose to do. The net result of restricting immigration is that you end up with a culture like Japan’s, which is stagnant and rigid. But it’s their call, not mine.
As for America: I’m not sure if one can apply 21st century values to a time when colonial expansion and the subjugation of indigenous populations was the norm. This is not to justify the genocide of American Indians, or what the British did in India, the French in North Africa, etc. However, I don’t think that those acts, regardless of how unjustified they were, necessarily call the government’s legitimacy into question.
Good, we’re making progress.
If you do then accept America as a nation, it was founded as a nation of colonists, not immigrants. There were various waves of immigrants who came later to join an already-existing nation, but at its founding, America was a British colony that severed its political ties with the mother country.
Jews are not indigenous to Israel. The land which is now Israel was predominantly Arab for about 1500 years. Jewish migration to Israel started at the end of the 19th century, and came predominantly from Europe, not Scarsdale.
Cute. If Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel, where are they indigenous to? Where is their homeland? They didn’t just fall out of the sky. The fact that the area was conquered by Muslims from elsewhere doesn’t alter the fact that this is where the Jewish people and culture — the Jewish nation — originated, and prevailed until its conquest.
Also, you make it sound as if there was a 1,500-year absence of all Jews from the region. Not so. Despite the oppression of the caliphs, there are many Jewish families — collectively known as the mustarabim — who have lived there since Biblical times.
The Jews left Israel when a revolt against the Roman Empire failed around one hundred years after the time of Christ, and then began their diaspora. Hence they were indigenous primarily to Europe and Russia until Theodore Herzl came around and migrations started on a small scale.
Considering that the population of what is now known as Israel was nearly exclusively Arab for nearly two millenia, the Arabs are the indigenous population. Historically speaking, the Jews are arrivistes.
I think you don’t understand what “indigenous” means. The coalescence of the Jews into a common people, bound together by blood and culture and homeland, took place in what is now Israel, and persisted for a very long time. To say that the Jews were “indigenous” in the far-off lands they were driven to, where more often than not they were crowded into ghettos and denied the basic rights and privileges of the ambient, indigenous culture, is absurd. The rootless Jews were “indigenous” to Warsaw? To Moscow? To Moorish Spain? Come on.
That the land we now call Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jews is represented in every Jewish tradition. (Next year in Jerusalem!) What about God’s covenant? The Promised Land?
You’re Jewish yourself, Peter. You know better than this. You don’t need goyim like me to tell you this stuff.
I understand all of that, but when you have a place which is over 95% Arab for nearly 2000 years, their claim to be indigenous to that region and have rights to the land is far greater than the claim of those who occupied it around the time of Christ.
So you reject Zionism, then, and as far as you are concerned the Jews, as Jews, have no homeland. The Arabs, on the other hand, have vast territories (including a 1,250,000-square-mile peninsula named after them!) that they can call home.
In theory, I would say that expropriating someone else’s land so your ethnic group can have a place to call home is wrong. There is no a priori right for every group of people to have its own homeland. The fact that the Arabs have lots of land is irrelevant, as there is also no a priori reason why land should be distributed equally among all of its claimants. It’s a situation where possession is nine points of the law.
However, in practice, I would have to say that the Jewish state has legitimacy. They started there, they occupied Galilee continuously, they were the victims of history’s worst persecution, they are good stewards of the land, and they have built an admirable country.
So I don’t reject Zionism, because practice trumps theory. As Yogi Berra observed: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”
Well, when it comes to human affairs, there is no a priori “right” to anything, as far as I’m concerned; rights are a human creation.
So: practice trumps theory, and so you accept the legitimacy of Israel, as well as the British and European nations, as homelands of their people?
I do.
Well, that’s good, and we agree; that’s most of the world covered.
How about America? Will you agree also that it exists as a legitimate nation and as the homeland of its founding people?
If you define its founding people as the 20% of the population which were slaves from Africa, as well as those who left France and other non-British countries to come here, then I would.
Yes. The slaves were brought here by the colonists, and were here at the founding. It is America’s original sin, and has led to a great deal of woe ever since, but there it is.
It’s gratifying to come to such general agreement with you, and this will make a good basis for future discussion.
Well, my opinions are invariably buttressed with unassailable facts and impregnable logic, so on those instances when we are in agreement, you can be satisfied that your views are astute and correct.
(snort) Yeah, right. Good to know.
And as you’ve already said above, a people living in their national homeland can legitimately take an interest in preserving their ethnic and cultural distinctness and cohesion, right?
It depends on what you mean by “taking an interest.”. Ethnic cleansing by the Turks against the Armenians, the Bosnian Serbs against the Muslims, and lots of countries against Jews and gypsies, are all instances of majorities trying to preserve their ethnic and cultural uniquity, but I certainly would not support that.
Nor would most civilized people. How about an immigration policy designed to preserve the national ethnic and cultural character, and strict enforcement of that policy?
They didn’t just “leave”; they were either killed or driven out by the superior forces of Rome. Be that as it may, the Diaspora did not negate their “indigenous to Israel” status.
arriviste: An ambitious or ruthlessly self-seeking person, esp. one who has recently acquired wealth or social status
Nice characterization of the Holocaust survivors, who desperately sought refuge in their historical homeland, after losing everything but the clothes they wore and a few mementos they managed to preserve along with their lives.
self-loathing Jew: A Jew who labels Jewish Holocaust survivors as “arrivistes”
If a society chooses to have a restrictive immigration policy, they certainly have the right to do so.
Should a society be exclusionary and xenophobic? I don’t think so.
Is Israel wrong, then, in your opinion, to be concerned about Arab immigration?
No – I think it is a very valid and legitimate concern.
Israel is sui generis for a lot of reasons. Chief among them is the basic fact of the Arab-Israeli conflict: if the Arabs laid down their arms, there would be peace. If the Israelis laid down their arms, they would be dead. So the issue of Arab immigration is different for them than it would be for people to emigrate from France to Spain or Canada to the US.
There is also the fact that they are a Jewish state surrounded by Muslim countries, which I believe entitles them to restrict immigration. Paradoxically, by standing in the way of a Palestinian state, they are likely preventing an exodus of Palestinians from Israeli territory to Palestinian territory, thus diluting their Jewish identity. You could say it is the ironic opposing the irenic.
However, when the spouse of a citizen can’t get her own citizenship: that sounds pretty extreme to me.
Leaving aside the existential threat of Muslims who seek their destruction, does it make sense to you that Israel wants to restrict immigration of non-Jews in general, in order to preserve the Jewish character of their nation?
Do you agree in general that mass immigration of people from alien cultures tends to stress and fray and break down an indigenous culture? Take for example Tibet. The Chinese are trying to destroy traditional Tibetan culture by settling huge numbers of Han Chinese in the region. What do you think about that? Should the Tibetans care?
Ignorant on both counts. They are neither “standing in the way of a Palestinian state”, but simply not acceding to all their enemy’s demands; nor are they diluting their Jewish identity, since they are also not standing in the way of an Arab exodus from Israeli territory, any time the Arabs wish to do so. The reason there isn’t an Arab exodus from Israel is because an Arab-Israeli citizen enjoys a life he couldn’t dream of if he were among his “Palestinian” brethren.
It does make sense for Israel to restrict immigration to maintain its Jewish identity.
Certainly what is going on in Tibet is an outrage. It refers back to your earlier question, and falls under the rubric of what the state may legitimately do to preserve its “national ethnic and cultural character.”
Do I think that social upheaval accompanies mass immigration? I do. Does that mean that mass immogration is therefore undesirable? No.
The reason America has become the preeminent country – aside from abundant natural resources and two oceans protecting us from invasion – is the successive waves of immigration. The great thing about immigrants is that they tend to be the go-getters who build things, whether they are named Goldman, Sachs, or Brin.
Riots, discrimination, and social unrest has accompanied mass immigration since the Irish and the Germans came over in the 19th century. Cue Tom Lehrer singing National Brotherhood Week. It is human nature that the people whose grandparents were beat up for speaking only Italian or Yiddish are now the ones who are steaming mad about dialing one for English. But what would we be if we shut the gates right after the Civil War?
By contrast, a monoracial and nationalistic country like Japan is harmonious at the cost of social rigidity and economic stagnation. While it is easy to get facile about these things, I think that you can also draw a straight line between its single race xenophobia and events like the rape of Nanking. Do you have any personal recollections of the Bataan Death March you would like to share with us?
Do people like to live with their own kind? Yes. Do they get upset when alien cultures intrude? They do. Does the dialectic between immigration and assimilation make a society healthier and stronger? I believe that it does. Is it therefore worthwhile to encourage immigration? I believe so.
Are there any other questions?
Le petit Henri finally graces the room with a somewhat intelligible remark, albeit one lacking in fact or logic.
Of course it is the Israelis who are “standing in the way of a Palestinian state.” You implicitly acknowledge this by stating that the reason they do so is because they are not “acceding to all their enemy’s demands.” Whether they are justified or not in meeting Palestinians’ demands is a separate question – but to insist that it is someone else who is blocking Palestinian sovereignty is nonsense.
You may recall that recently the Obama administration blocked a UN vote which otherwise would have unanimously approved a Palestinian nation. If it is not the US and America who are standing in the way of a Palestinian state, then who is?
As for the migration of Arabs: if Palestine were to become a free state, it is certainly reasonable to assume that a large number of Arabs would choose to relocate there to build the new nation. Wouldn’t you rather live in a free state than an occupied territory?
Lets review. Israel’s mortal enemy will deign to accept statehood, provided Israel accedes to the enemy’s demand that Israel commits suicide first. Israel will not accede to such a demand. Therefore, it is your considered opinion that Israel is standing in the way of Palestinian statehood.
You expect a serious person to buy your excuse for logic?
Your claim that Israel is diluting its Jewish identity, by not acceding to the Arab demands for the so-called “right of return” and for pre-1967 indefensible borders, is risible.
The flaccidity of your position is due to your difficulty in distinguishing “is” from “ought.”
Your premises that negotiating an agreement constitutes suicide and that the Palestinians do not have the right to a country of their own are arguable, but for the purposes of discussion let’s assume that they are correct. Basically your position is that although Israel is blocking Palestinian statehood, it is justified in doing so. The fact that it may be acting in accordance with its best interests is irrelevant to the fact that they are, in fact, standing in the way of Palestinian sovereignty.
Jewish identity is diluted to the extent that goyim populate Israel. If the percentage of Arabs living in Iarael diminishes, then Jewish identity is enhanced. In the event that Palestine becomes a free country, it is sure to draw some Arabs from Israel to the West Bank and Gaza. This is not an argument for or against Israeli policy. It is simply recognition of basic facts.
We have reached the point in any “discussion” with you when only a person with the patience of a saint, like Malcolm Pollack, is willing to persevere.
I urge you to get your dementia checkup without delay. Also, the next time the Arabs in Gaza provoke a retaliatory strike from Israel, please consider volunteering for human shield duty. Your asshole alone is sufficient to protect Hamas headquarters.
With great gusts of oratorical flatulence, notre pauvre Henri spews and sputters, and then thankfully leaves the room.
Actually, I do have more questions, if you don’t mind. There’s a lot to unpack in your last response to me, and I’d like to come back to it. But first:
I completely agree.
I agree with that also. I also think that it makes sense for Britain to restrict immigration to preserve its British ethnic and cultural character, for Sweden to restrict immigration to preserve its Swedish ethnic and cultural character, and so on.
Well, I agree with that too. Right you are, and a person would have to be utterly ignorant of both history and current events to think otherwise. Indeed, ethnic and religious heterogeneity — dissimilar people jammed together in the same place — has led to endless war and strife and woe, always and everywhere. I could sit here and cite examples both historical and contemporary until my computer’s battery failed, and still not exhaust the list. Again, I’m glad we agree about all that.
And of course we’d probably agree that the degree of all that social strife and disruption depends on many factors: the ratio of aliens to natives, the rate of immigration, and so forth. It can be delightful for a generally homogeneous culture to have small numbers of aliens in its midst; it adds an exotic flavoring to the mix. But will you agree that beyond certain limits, the tradeoff becomes excessive?
Let’s say Sweden were to replace two-thirds of its population with, say, Somalis. Would you agree that the effects of the “social upheaval” you mentioned on the public and cultural life of the Swedes would likely outweigh, as least as far as the average Swede is concerned, the “strengthening” benefits you mention?
I realize this is rather an extreme example. But would you agree that the Swedes themselves would be less happy under such an arrangement?
Well, sure. There is a tipping point beyond which the destructive consequences of upheaval outweigh the constructive benefits of immigration and assimilation. I don’t know where the tipping point is – and it would vary from culture to culture – but it is a lot less than two thirds.
Right, I think so too. Would you also agree that the tipping point would vary, depending on how similar the the new arrivals are to the host culture? That Sweden could more easily absorb the same number of, say, Norwegians, than Somali Muslims? This seems reasonable enough to me, but I wonder if it does to you too.
I am reduced to typing on my cell phone, because the space bar and several keys on my laptop are not working. (Note to self: no more eating jelly donuts over the computer!). So I must be brief.
Yes.
Pete, you can enter a space by typing Alt + 032 (you might have to toggle the Num Lock key). Other characters you can look up here.
Back to our conversation: it seems to me that once the “tipping point” you mentioned has been reached, it is very hard, perhaps impossible, to put things back the way they were previously, without resorting to such horrors as genocide, ethnic cleansing, civil war, and so on. Indeed, it seems that all the effects of large-scale immigration, both good and bad, are in practical terms very difficult to reverse.
Can I secure your agreement on that point as well?
Regrettably, the amount of schmutz which is encrusted in and around my computer – not just jelly donuts, but the residue of Ring Dings, circus peanuts, and God knows what else – is there in perpetuity, which led me to Costco, where I got a nifty wireless keyboard and mouse.
I’m not so sure about the effects of immigration being necessarily irreversible of the result of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Take the Jews. (Please. Take the Jews.) Some of the Jews who emigrated after the turn of the century did so to escape pogroms – which qualifies as genocide – but others did so because America seemed much more hospitable than a shtetl in Eastern Europe. Sergey Brin’s parents left Russia not because the Russians were massacring Jews, but because Russia is an oppressive environment for members of the tribe.
The Pilgrims and the Huguenots left Europe in search of religious freedom. Many Tibetans left for Dharamsala when the Dalai Lama left, also in search of religious freedom. There has been a mass migration of Hong Kong Chinese to British Columbia for passport and asset protection reasons. While they are also Han Chinese, this is an example of voluntary emigration which is not only reversible – they could move back if they want – but also which has been a notably successful integration into the Canadian culture.
These are examples of both indigenous and migratory peoples who were minorities and left for somewhere else, which effectively returns the mother country to status quo ante. However, they did so not in response to violence, but because the grass looked greener elsewhere.
Yes, that’s true. But because a nation can’t control how the grass looks elsewhere, all it has at its own disposal is to deliberately make things so miserable at home for the unwelcome aliens that the grass elsewhere starts to look better by comparison. That may not rise to the level of ethnic cleansing or genocide (though it often has, throughout history), but it is certainly an unpleasant situation all round, and likely to be characterized by tension, oppression, ostracism, and outbreaks of violence — not a happy environment for anyone, native or alien, and hardly as pleasant a home-life as before that “tipping point” was reached.
Or perhaps the host nation could simply bribe the newcomers to leave, but obviously that’s costly and unpleasant also.
So – for a nation past the “tipping point” to put things back to pre-immigration status is, if not actually impossible, at the very least painfully difficult. Agreed?
It’s certainly possible that you can have a situation where a large group of people move from one country to another without causing pain or difficulty. The Hong Kong Chinese moving to Vancouver or the Hmong being adopted by communities in Minnesota might be two such examples.
The oldest continuously occupied city on Earth is Damascus. I don’t claim any expertise here, but my (limited) understanding is that lots of ethnicities, including Jews, moved there and then moved somewhere else, without having first been shown the door by the Syrians.
I will grant you, however, that mass migration is usually, or perhaps nearly always, accompanied by pain, difficulty, or both.
No, I want to be clear what I’m asking here: I’m not talking about whether people can move from one place to another without causing pain. I agree that is obviously possible.
Instead, I’m following on our discussion above — about what a nation (say Sweden in our example above) can do, once it realizes that it has passed the demographic “tipping point” you described, to put things back the way they were — in other words, to return the demographic balance to what it was originally.
A nation in this unhappy situation can’t make the grass greener elsewhere for its unwelcome immigrants, because it has no control of circumstances outside its borders, and it can’t just hope they decide to leave on their own, because they probably won’t, anytime soon at least, if they aren’t made miserable. (Yes, populations do move around on their own as you point out, but just waiting and hoping that happens has no guarantee of success.) The over-stressed host nation wants them gone; what can it do?
It seems to me there isn’t much that a nation in that predicament, and determined to take action about it, has at its disposal: either there will be a costly carrot (actually paying the unwelcome immigrants to leave), or there must be a stick (ostracizing and oppressing them, or physically evicting them, or worse).
I can’t think of anything else. Can you?
Let’s make sure that I have this concatenation properly concatenated.
1. A country admits a large group of foreigners.
2. Said country is aghast that they are living amidst a bunch of wogs, and it’s a real buzzkill for them.
3. Said wogs, having taken up residence in their new host country, don’t want to leave.
4. Nativists warn that those halcyon days of harmonious yore are gone forever, and the indignant indigenous population are pissy that they admitted the wogs in the first place.
Under these circumstances, it would be painfully difficult to do much about it.
An excellent recap, and I think a summary was getting rather overdue, as this is now a long thread. I wouldn’t have phrased it all in quite the way you did, though.
How about this set of points instead:
1) There are benefits — I believe you described them as “strengthening” — for an indigenous and relatively homogeneous culture that admits some percentage of outsiders to live amongst them. I fully agree, as I said above:
2) There are also drawbacks, however. People are generally happier living among their own kind, as you also reminded us:
You reiterated this point a little later on:
3) Another point in which we were in agreement, after considering our example of an imaginary Sweden in which Somalis had come to outnumber Swedes, was that if the immigrant-alien population increases without limit, there must come a point at which the resulting social downside — dilution of the native culture, lack of commonality in the public square, new tensions and stresses of various sorts etc. — clearly outweighs the benefits, at least as far as the happiness of the indigenous people is concerned. (It becomes, as you say, a “buzzkill”.) The everyday public life of the native population has become a good deal less simple, familiar, traditional, cohesive, enjoyable, and agreeable than it was before, and they begin to wish, regretfully or even angrily, that things were more like they used to be. You called this a “tipping point”:
4) We also agreed that how soon that “tipping point” is reached depends on how dissimilar the new arrivals are to the host society; we noted that Sweden, for example, would likely be able to absorb more Norwegians than it would Somalis before reaching it.
5) Finally, we noted also that once the “tipping point” has been passed, and more and more of the natives begin to wish that it hadn’t, it’s probably going to be very difficult (perhaps very unpleasantly so, if history has anything to teach us), for them to put things back the way they were.
Does this seem like a fair summary of our conversation so far?
It is.
So: we agree that once a nation has passed the “tipping point”, it has irreversibly diminished the happiness of its people.
Can we say, then, that a nation with a concern for the happiness of its own people, and for the preservation of its native culture, must take care not to let itself pass, or even approach, that tipping point? Because, as we’ve established, once it gets there there’s no going back.
But as you point out, it’s difficult:
How is a nation to know in advance where that tipping point is?
I think that it is helpful to determine whether the short term issues which accompany immigration are outweighed by long term advantages.
If you were to ask this question in 1920, when foreign speaking Jewish immigrants were living in squalor on the Lower East Side – which at the time was the most densely populated area on Earth – and regularly getting into violence with Irish and Italian street gangs, then you would probably answer in the negative. I’m guessing that today you would answer the question in the positive.
There is also the question of scale. We can both agree that if Sweden had a majority population of Somali goatherds, there’s no turning back. If you have a situation like we have today – where visas are issued to a small percentage of the existing population base – then the scale tilts the other way.
I think this is one of those things where it is better to form judgments about individual situations than to try to establish a general rule to fit all situations.
That’s reasonable. But how will you go about that? How will a nation know in advance where that tipping point is going to be? Consider the case of England, which has arguably already reached it. The same is true all over Europe, where there is a tremendous groundswell of dissatisfaction with the results of mass alien immigration. At this point, and consistently with the points we’ve agreed on, these nations now have no easy way to put things back the way they used to be. Their indigenous people are just stuck with this new reality, and large majorities of them are not at all happy about it. How could they have prevented all that?
There is no way to know in advance if immigration will be a curse or a blessing (or, more properly, how much of one versus the other).
There’s also no way to quantify it. If British lager louts beat up Pakistanis, it will be in the news. If Pakistanis start successful enterprises, it is less likely to get noticed. So how do you really know? You could survey the current population to see what they think, but their children may have an opposite view once the new arrivals have assimilated and become productive.
This all argues for a measured approach where the flow of immigrants is regulated and increased at a measured pace if appropriate.
Excellent! This is exactly what I think, too.
So we have, then, made clear that it would be wrong to imagine that “more immigration is always better”. We have also agreed that a certain wariness about immigration is a reasonable and prudent attitude, and is not simply evidence of “reclusiveness” or “xenophobia” (not that those mightn’t be factors as well, of course) — because once you’ve gone too far, there’s no going back, and the happiness and cultural cohesion of one’s own people are at stake.
We’ve also established, it seems, that a nation has a better chance of staying out of the danger zone by adjusting its immigration policy so as to prefer admitting those aliens whose own culture and traditions most closely resemble those of the host.
We have. Perhaps we should write a book together.
I think we just did!
I think it’s safe to say that none of the nations in Europe, nor America since 1965, have been guided by anything remotely resembling the principles we have so painstakingly elucidated above. The operating principle, rather, seems to be exactly what we have rejected in this discussion: that more immigration is always better, and that any of the sort of caution we have shown here to be prudent and rational must instead be motivated by morally reprehensible, nativist “xenophobia”.
Because many of the nations in question have already approached or passed the “tipping point”, there are naturally political groups forming in opposition; these are customarily reviled in the press, and by the ruling class, as “extreme right” movements. (Which some of them, of course, may be — but the broad and growing public sympathy for these groups generally shows that most people are simply motivated by the rational concerns we have outlined in this conversation.)
There was a best-selling book about business management many years ago that this discussion has reminded me of. It argued that people who do well at their jobs tend, quite naturally, to be promoted. If they do well in their new position, they get promoted again. Eventually they reach some position that they don’t do well at, and there they stay. The author called this “rising to one’s level of incompetence”, and I think the idea is very persuasive indeed.
It seems to me that this is how the modern liberal nations of the West have arranged their immigration policies in the post-World-War-II decades. The Nazis demonstrated, to everyone’s horror, what an excessive concern with cultural and ethnic homogeneity can lead to, which in turn led to a terrified over-reaction in the opposite direction. All discrimination, and any concern whatsoever for defending the ethnic and cultural makeup of one’s homeland, came to be seen as carrying the odor of Nazism, and had to be definitively rejected. So any care about the “tipping point” went by the board, and the new ideology was much like the management principle above: just keep bringing people in, from all over, until it becomes obvious to all that you’ve gone too far. But as we’ve seen, and as the ordinary people of the West are now finding out to their dismay, once you get there it’s too late.
The name of that book, by the way, was The Peter Principle.
It strikes me in particular that in light of all we have just discussed above — particularly the wisdom, given the irreversibility of the effects of excessive immigration, of erring on the side of too little rather than too much — the United States would do well to reconsider its present approach to immigration and immigration enforcement. Many in this country feel we are already at or near a “tipping point” of our own, and that our national character, traditional culture, and general social cohesion are quickly melting away.
The American government had a state policy of genocide against its indigenous population, and is explicitly a nation of immmigrants.
Every nation on Earth is a nation of immigrants. If Americans don’t know this it’s because they are ignorant of history. The people currently called “French” have been in the place we call France for a long time, but not forever.
There is no way to know in advance if immigration will be a curse or a blessing (or, more properly, how much of one versus the other
It’s easy enough to know, as long as you ask the question “A blessing or curse for who?”
Importing Somalis and Palestinians to America is a blessing, for them. It’s a curse for Americans.
Let’s make sure that I have this concatenation properly concatenated.
1. A country admits a large group of foreigners.
I don’t recall us ever “admit[ting]” them.
It would still be a bad idea if we had admitted them, but in fact they (the “immigrants”) are colluding with the government in lawlessness on an epic scale. There has not been a population shift on this scale since the Angles and Saxons “were admitted” to Britain in the fifth century.
Riots, discrimination, and social unrest has accompanied mass immigration since the Irish and the Germans came over in the 19th century. Cue Tom Lehrer singing National Brotherhood Week. It is human nature that the people whose grandparents were beat up for speaking only Italian or Yiddish are now the ones who are steaming mad about dialing one for English. But what would we be if we shut the gates right after the Civil War?
A better country?
But half a point for your expert recitation of the liberal talking points on immigration.
If Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel, where are they indigenous to? Where is their homeland? They didn’t just fall out of the sky. The fact that the area was conquered by Muslims from elsewhere doesn’t alter the fact that this is where the Jewish people and culture – the Jewish nation – originated, and prevailed until its conquest.
That was two thousand years ago. Modern Jewish culture is 99% European. Gefilte fish and latkes are not ancient middle-eastern fare. The current Jews have as much in common with the Jews of the time of Christ as the current Greeks have with the Greeks of the Iliad.
There’s more to Judaism than food.
Seriously? I don’t know what fraction of current Greeks are familiar with Homer’s Iliad, but one would be hard put to find an Israeli Jew, including those who eat gefilte fish and latkes, who is not familiar with the Torah. These Five Books of Moses comprise, in the broadest sense, all of Judaism.
One of the most interesting and provocative conservative voices is that of National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru. I pass along without comment questions 2 and 3 from today’s column, as well as the response from a poster.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/questions-republicans-must-answer-in-debates-commentary-by-ramesh-ponnuru.html#disqus_thread
“Is there any REAL evidence that immigrants are assimilating slower than they ever have been? Mexican immigrants are assimilating FASTER than Irish, German, or Polish immigrants ever did. Universal education is part of it, and the internet, television, and music is another.”
One of the most interesting and provocative conservative voices is that of National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru.
You did not pass along questions 2 and 3. I’ll do so here.
2. All of you have talked about getting illegal immigration under control. What about legal immigration? Should we devote fewer slots to reuniting extended families and more to recruiting the highly skilled?
3. Are there any additional steps that should be taken to encourage or help immigrants to assimilate successfully?
You should also have mentioned question 12.
12. In recent years, wages haven’t grown even when the economy has. Why do you think that is? What, if anything, should the federal government do about it?
The answer is that wages are held down by the surplus of labor, aka by massive immigration.
Mexican immigrants are assimilating FASTER than Irish, German, or Polish immigrants ever did.
I have no idea how to quantify that, and your commenter (you?) did not even attempt to do so. But let us suppose, hypothetically, that Hispanic immigrants will follow a similar trajectory to that of European immigrants. That is, that they will climb the socio-economic ladder and start voting Republican. (There are good reasons to suspect that they will actually follow the case of blacks and become a permanent part of the left)
It took 60-70 years for the “white ethnics” from Europe to make their transition. Even if Hispanics do make the transition, and do so in “only” 50 years, the result will be an unmitigated disaster for the American right and triumph for the American left.
Seriously? I don’t know what fraction of current Greeks are familiar with Homer’s Iliad, but one would be hard put to find an Israeli Jew, including those who eat gefilte fish and latkes, who is not familiar with the Torah.
Seriously? The modern “Jew” is notable for his strident atheism. Religious Jews make up perhaps ten percent of the total population. As many Jews themselves have remarked, the religion of the modern Jew is politics. Left-wing politics, as a rule.
There’s more to Judaism than food.
Yes, there’s the belief in Jews as a “Chosen People”, a belief which has survived the Jewish rejection of their historical religion.
But other than that, and such cultural markers as food, what is there?
Severn, I agree with you that theistic Jews are a minority these days. But it is a mistake, especially for the purposes of this discussion, to focus so narrowly on theism as the chief feature of Jewish cohesion. Even urban liberal non-theistic Jews are overwhelmingly likely to identify themselves with the Jewish cultural and ethnic community, to express that identity by participating in central Jewish rituals and traditions (seders, bar/bat miztvahs, etc.), to have read and understood the Torah, to belong to a synagogue, and so on.
@Severn:
Your earlier assertion, which I quoted, was that modern Jewish Israelis had little in common with the Jews of 2 millennia ago. That is prima facie false. The defining characteristic of Judaism continues to be the ethics, traditions, history, and wisdom of the Torah.
Jews, whatever their level of religiosity, are the “People of the Book”. That is indeed what has maintained their individuality during the Diaspora. And the Ashkenazi who invented gefilte fish and latkes, which you seem to think is the defining character of European Jewry, were not only disinclined to assimilate within their “host”, pardon the expression, European countries, but were violently forbidden to do so until the end of World War II (with a few minor exceptions).
Given that Jewish Americans are predominantly supporters of the leftist agenda is a separate issue. It is perplexing and lamentable to those of us who are not so inclined. But your gross generalizations about Jews (i.e., “strident atheism”) are unsupportable and offensive.
Peter,
At the end of our discussion we agreed that a cautious approach to immigration is what best defends the happiness and cultural integrity of the host society; we also agreed that those immigrants who are most similar to the native population in ethnic and cultural terms are likely to add the least stress.
So, from the perspective of maximizing the positive effects of immigration as far as the host culture is concerned, and minimizing the negative effects — which I think ought to be the paramount objective of any rational immigration policy — the answer to 2) is clearly yes, especially because “chain” immigration often becomes an open door to large numbers of people who would never have been admitted otherwise, and whose presence benefits nobody but themselves. (It is also notoriously subject to fraud.)
One answer to 3) would be to insist on English as the national language. Language is one of the primary factors of cultural cohesion (or division).
As for the commenter’s question, I’ll suggest that what is happening over large swaths of the US, particularly along the southern tier of states, is not “assimiliation”, but “displacement”. Formerly Anglo-European communities are now majority Mexican, and English has become a minority language. Even here in the Northeast, low-wage jobs that used to be occupied by native-born white and black teenagers and young adults are now filled by Mexicans, many of them here illegally, who cannot even speak English well enough to conduct business. (Try stopping at a fast-food place along the Connecticut Turnpike and asking a question about some item on the menu, for example.)
If you have any doubt that we are at or near the tipping point as regards Mexican immigration, read this grim item by Victor Davis Hanson.
The proper question should be: have the traditional American people and culture been made happier and better off by mass Mexican immigration? Is American society more tranquil and cohesive as a result? It seems to me that the main beneficiaries of our laissez-faire attitude (other than businesses who can take advantage of artificially low expenses for wages and benefits) have been Mexicans, and Mexico itself (Mexican immigrants siphon off enormous sums to send back to Mexico). The LAPD’s Top Ten Most Wanted are, with one exception, Mexican, as are California’s. And so on.
Given your own conclusion that “this all argues for a measured approach where the flow of immigrants is regulated and increased at a measured pace if appropriate”, would you not agree that the very fact that there is such heated discussion on the subject of Mexican immigration is evidence enough that it would be wise to reduce it or block it altogether, for now at least? (This never used to be an issue at all; now we fret and worry and bicker endlessly about it. Is that an improvement?) Surely the American nation isn’t suffering, at this point in its history, for lack of additional low-income, semi-literate Mexicans.
Interesting question – regrettably, I am far too busy with work today to participate. I will strive mightily to think this through and respond with the celerity to which I aspire.
Your earlier assertion, which I quoted, was that modern Jewish Israelis had little in common with the Jews of 2 millennia ago. That is prima facie false.
If it is in fact prima facie false, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to cite some facts to support that view. I’ve already noted that modern Jews share neither their religion nor their cultural customs with the Jews of Israel 2000 years ago.
Jews, whatever their level of religiosity, are the “People of the Book”.
Do you seriously intend to try to argue that rabid atheists (which many Jews are) are “People of the Book”?
the Ashkenazi who invented gefilte fish and latkes, which you seem to think is the defining character of European Jewry, were not only disinclined to assimilate within their “host”, pardon the expression, European countries, but were violently forbidden to do so until the end of World War II (with a few minor exceptions).
That is an entirely fictitious account of Jewish history. Those European Jews who were “violently forbidden to assimilate” somehow managed to pick up both the genes and the ideas of their European hosts.
your gross generalizations about Jews (i.e., “strident atheism”) are unsupportable and offensive.
It is not my intent to give offense, but it is also not my intent to allow your incorrect views of Jews current and past to stand.
Even urban liberal non-theistic Jews are overwhelmingly likely to identify themselves with the Jewish cultural and ethnic community, to express that identity by participating in central Jewish rituals and traditions (seders, bar/bat miztvahs, etc.), to have read and understood the Torah, to belong to a synagogue, and so on.
I know a lot of urban liberal non-theistic Jews, and it’s safe to say that the number of them who have “read and understood the Torah” are few and far between. The synagogues in my area are closing down and consolidating.
Now, the whole “identify themselves with the Jewish cultural and ethnic community” part is true. But that’s just ethnocentrism. Blacks in America also identify themselves with their cultural and ethnic community, but it does not mean that they think and act as their ancestors did in Africa. For various reasons, some of them good and some of them bad, blacks and Jews are very into seeing themselves as “apart”.
An addendum: I’m sure that what I’ve just written would be seen by some as an expression of “hate”, or “xenophobia”, or “fear-mongering”; it is nothing of the sort. I don’t hate or fear Mexicans, or for that matter anyone else. I’m simply asking basic, reasonable questions about our immigration policy, from the (nowadays) highly unusual perspective of making our primary concern its effect on traditional American society and culture, on our nation’s public happiness and social cohesion, and wariness about all the issues we have discussed above.
Well, I disagree with that; it isn’t my experience at all, and the synagogues in my area are doing just fine. This is not to say all the secular Jews I know have the Torah memorized, but pretty much all of them read it as children (in Hebrew) in preparation for their bar and bat mitzvahs, have taught their own children to do the same, refer to it at seders and other rituals, and so on. Most of them have also made a point of going to Israel at one time or another.
American blacks may feel a general connection to Africa, but it is usally little more than that; I don’t know any, for example, who can speak the tribal languages of their ancestors. One big difference is that Jewish tradition is deeply rooted in the study of sacred texts, and this literary aspect makes for a far more detailed and coherent cultural, linguistic, and scholarly connection with their ancient roots, and to their ancestral homeland, than anything one commonly sees in the black community.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to cite some facts to support your assertions. “Noted” is another way of saying “asserted”, and assertions are nothing more than opinions, none of which rise to the level of facts.
No, I would not try to argue that rabid atheists are People of the Book. But I would argue that your estimation that many Jews are rabid atheists verges on a rabid antipathy of some sort.
Well, sure, such genetic pickups could not be entirely avoided, what with pogroms in which many Jewish women were raped, some of whom ended up raising offspring who became Jews despite the gentile ancestry of their rapist fathers.
As for the transfer of ideas between unassimilated neighbors, it is arguable which direction predominantly the important ideas flowed. A cursory glance at a compilation of Nobel Laureates by ethnicity will give you a clue.
I bet some of your best friends are Jewish too. Nevertheless, we are all accountable for the things we do and say, regardless of intent.
I do appreciate your interest in setting me straight about my ethnic heritage, but I prefer to get my information from reputable sources. One such source is “A History of the Jews” by Paul Johnson. And before you hasten to dismiss Johnson’s credentials, note that he is neither a Jew nor an American, and not even a rabid atheist, but a British historian of the Christian persuasion.
The many areas where we agree should not obscure those things about which we disagree. To wit:
1. In order to have a rigorous argument, the statement that “many of the nations in question have already approached or passed the ‘tipping point’” has to be substantiated and not merely asserted. These are subjective judgments which are highly dependent on the mindset of the observer. A country may have a noisy nativist minority which is convinced that their society is well past the tipping point where an insouciant majority doesn’t much care. The recent defeat of an anti-immigration bill in Mississippi, of all places, is an example of the conventional wisdom about popular sentiment being off the mark.
2. The statement that “the United States would do well to reconsider its present approach to immigration and immigration enforcement” fails to acknowledge the fact that during the Obama administration, illegal immigration is markedly down and deportation of aliens is at an all time high.
3. There are only four countries I can think of which are nations of immigrants: Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and America. Of these, the immigration was predominated by a single ethnic group for all except America. It is part of the American ethos to accept huddled masses from teeming shores, as a rather large statue near where you live exemplifies. So to say that discontinuing what has been an integral part of American tradition and practice for the last 150 years would somehow make America more American is a curious notion.
4. Some people emigrate to seek economic opportunity or a better life, while others do so to escape oppressive regimes. You could make the argument, as Reinhold Niebuhr does, that men as individuals are moral, while societies are amoral (he uses the word immoral). This suggests that countries have no obligation to act in a humanitarian way by accepting people in distress. Perhaps this is so, but I think societies can rightfully be evaluated based on the extent to which their actions reflect something loftier than mere self interest. It is this quality which I think is integral to American exceptionalism.
5. As to Ponnaru’s question: if it is a finite pie, I would like to see more slots go to skilled brainiacs from India or China than manual laborers from Latin America (where I suppose they are called Manuel Laborers). I think it is sinful that your tax dollars pay to educate the best and brightest at MIT, and then we send them back to their home countries because we won’t give them visas.
6. As to whether “the traditional American people and culture been made happier and better off by mass Mexican immigration:” the latest census reports that 25.4% of San Mateo country, where I live, is Persons of Latino or Hispanic origin. They are just ahead of Asians, at 24.8%. So we’re a majority immigrant population – well beyond the spot on the dial you would probably mark “tipping point.” While these things are indeed subjective – as noted above – I’d say unequivocally that we’re happy and better off, and at no loss of tranquility or cohesiveness. I was in the supermarket today and the checkout guy checked me out in English and the next guy in Spanish. You hear Chinese all the time. It’s no big deal. It just is. I think that my child is having a much richer experience growing up in a multi-racial enviroment than my youth in the age of Donna Reed.
7. The fact that there is a “heated discussion” counts for little. You do what is right, not what may irritate an agitated minority. The post Civil War migration of blacks to the North caused a lot more ruckus than mere heated discussions, but to say that they should have been confined to the South because it would cause some people in Chicago or Boston to be upset is probably not an argument you would choose to make.
Peter,
As we agreed above, it is hard to know when a nation has passed the ‘tipping point’ until it has clearly already been passed. Throughout Britain and Europe, a growing number of people already feel that point has been reached, and nativist political parties are gaining traction with every passing year; your “noisy minorities” are rapidly becoming majorities. The subject is now a matter of harsh discord and bitter tension in almost all European nations, and very much so in Britain.
This alone — that people in these places now have this totally unnecessary, self-created problem to worry and divide them, when they never did before — is sufficient indication that things have already changed dramatically for the worse as far as cohesion and harmony are concerned. When my father and mother were growing up in England and Scotland, it wasn’t even an issue at all, let alone a divisive, politically polarizing crisis.
If you have, on one hand, an ever-larger percentage of the population that cares very much about mass alien immigration, and thinks it’s a real problem, and another percentage who are, in your words, “insouciant” and “don’t care” — then if you keep in mind that the effects of immigration are largely irreversible and so merit “a measured approach”, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that a moratorium is warranted, at the very least. I think the same applies here.
2) Illegal immigration is down in large part because of the rotten economy, and because of laws being put on the books in places like Arizona that make it harder for illegals to settle in comfortably. Americans are much more agitated about illegal immigration than they were, and it’s beginning to have an effect. The Obama DOJ, meanwhile, has done everything it can to harass the states that have tried to do something about the problem when the Federal agencies wouldn’t. Expect Mr. Obama now to put on a get-tough show for us until November, then revert to form, with bells on, should he actually win.
3) “There are only four countries I can think of which are nations of immigrants: Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and America. Of these, the immigration was predominated by a single ethnic group for all except America.”
As I pointed out before, America began as a nation of colonists, not of immigrants. At the time of its founding its population was roughly 80% whites and 20% blacks (almost all of whom were slaves). Of the white population, 85% were of British extraction (including Scots and Irish), with about 9% German and 4% Dutch. So that’s your original American culture.
Various periods of greater and lesser immigration ensued. But as recently as 1950, the nation was roughly 90% whites of European extraction, close to 10% black, with less than a single percent going to everyone else.
For three-quarters of its history, then, America has been composed more or less entirely of white British, Europeans and their descendants, and the families of black slaves. As recently as the 1960 census, this combined white and black population made up 99% of the US population. So – a “nation of immigrants”, if you like, but up until our own childhood only a particular kind of immigrants, namely white Christian Europeans, were gradually layered onto the original stock. Keep in mind that, as we agreed in our discussion above, the stress of mass immigration on a native society depends on how dissimilar the new arrivals are to the host culture. (Keep in mind also that almost all of this prior immigration was before the introduction of the modern welfare state.)
Things changed very quickly after that. In our lifetimes the Hispanic population of the US has gone from a small fraction of a percent to 16 percent. You said you don’t know what the “tipping point” is, but that it’s “a lot less than two thirds”. Well, just how much less, exactly? Given all that we’ve said about the difficulty of putting things back the way they were, where do you think the line ought to be? What would be the harm of starting that “measured approach” you recommended, now?
As for that statue: Emma Lazarus, who wrote that poem, was herself firmly committed to the Zionist cause of an all-Jewish homeland. She was far more concerned about the Jews having a place all their own than she was for the Anglo-Europeans who started this country, I guess.
4) Yes, we should under some circumstances accept refugees who are genuinely fleeing persecution. This has become an enormous, scandalous racket, however, and is riddled with fraud.
5) We agree on this. You mentioned Goldman, Sachs, and Brin as examples; I’ll point out that they are all highly intelligent Jews. I consider it far less likely that the next Google is going to spring from the brow of an uneducated Guatemalan Indian or Afar goatherd. But I’ll suggest also that there is more to a nation’s well-being than mere economics.
6) Again: where you live, cocooned in an affluent coastal city, you might not notice much. Victor Hanson’s experience not so far inland from you, as cited above, has been very different indeed. Also, language is second only, perhaps, to religion as a unifying or dividing factor in human societies (just look at Quebec, for example), and the fact that California effectively no longer has a common tongue does not bode well for the future. Do you really think that San Mateo was less cohesive, or worse off, before it became so Balkanized? How much common ground, how much real social cohesion, do you imagine there is between those Asians on the checkout line and those Spanish speakers?
Another issue: schools. Hispanics drop out of high school at twice the rate of whites. As schools become more Hispanic, grades drop, English proficiency drops, and the general level of the system sinks. (And this pattern persists even into the third and fourth generation.) Affluent people flee the district, driving it down even further. You can say what you like about all that, but there it is. This problem for these schools has occurred, and is accelerating, as a direct result of mass Hispanic immigration. These uncomfortable facts are usually brushed off as “challenges” we “must” accept as the price of life’s summum bonum, rapidly increasing Diversity — but it was never explained to any of the people originally living in these places just why they “must” accept these “challenges” to begin with; they never asked for them, and weren’t consulted. They are simply the result of a titanic increase in Hispanic immigration, which didn’t have to happen in the first place. Are these communities really happier or better off than they were in 1960? Has the persistent “challenge” of black-white racial tension in America been so insufficient that we needed to introduce entirely new challenges along similar lines?
7) Here we come to the gist of it. You do what is “right”? Right for whom? Right by whose criteria? A lot of people (count me among their number) would say that the role of a nation’s government is first and foremost to do what’s “right” for the people whose government it is, and to care for the survival and well-being of the society and culture with whose public affairs it has been entrusted.
I have gobs of work today, so I can respond briefly and that this is it for me.
1. I don’t follow immigration issues in Britain and Europe, so I can’t comment there.
2. If the flow of illegal immigration was levered to the economy, it would have gone down in 2008 and 2009, when the economy was collapsing, and it would have gone up in 2010 and 2011, which had continuous economic and job growth. As far as I know, Arizona is the only border state to pass an immigrant harassment bill — and probably an unconstitutional one at that — but this is less likely to diminish the flow of illeaglas than to divert it to more immigration friendly states like New Mexico and California. A simple application of Occam’s razor shows that the reason illegal immigration is down is because more resources are devoted to border control and deportations are at record levels. While it is anathema for Obama’s opponents to acknowledge that any good could possibly come from the Obama administration, this is no different from other examples of right wing dogma which are equally incorrect.
3. Your data are suspect. In 1960, Hispanics were included under the rubric of Whites. The immigrants might have been predominantly white and European (especially if you count Russia as part of Europe), but there were lots of non-Christians. The ethnic composition of the US at the time of its founding is completely irrelevant. To paraphrase John Lennon: our national life has changed in oh so many ways.
4. Not sure if this is an “enormous, scandalous racket,” but whatever.
5. Not sure how many Afari goatherds we’re letting in these days, but probably not very many.
6. Re language: I don’t know what the percentage of New Yorkers who did not speak English one hundred years ago is, but I doubt it is any less than the percentage of Californians who do not speak English today, as later generations assimilated and ditched the mother tongue. The lingua franca of the Lower East Side at the time — Yiddish — is now an extinct language, as subsequent generations ditched their mother tongue for English. The polyglot of languages didn’t doom us then and does not doom us now.
Re San Mateo: Like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Palo Alto, San Mateo has a Spanish name — so I imagine the “balkanization” you refer to happened quite some time ago. Probably around the same time Anglos came East in the Western expansion, Italian fishermen populated Monterey and SF, and Chinese labor was imported to build the railroads. So it’s not as though there was a peaceful town of Saint Matthewville which was overrun by Hispanics. It was always thus.
Re education: if I had the time and inclination, I would compare high school dropout rates of Hispanics with blacks, to see if there were exogenous reasons besides race and ethnicity which account for them. My daughter’s high school is 20-30% Mexican, and it is a top ranked school. Another weakness in your argument is the unusually high percentage of academic overachievers in California who are from Asia, Iran, and India.
7) Here we arrive at the crux of our disagreemnt. I believe that mass immigration, at least for the US, is unequivocally a huge net positive. It is what has made us what we are. You disagree. So my view is that it is right both for those who live here and those who come here.
To quote Porky Pig: that’s all, folks.
1) Well, I do.
2) You obviously don’t follow domestic immigration issues, much, either. Several states have passed such laws. The results have been salubrious indeed. They stanch the flow of future Democratic voters into the country, though, so our administration has sicced the DOJ dogs on these states.
3) Even by the most liberal estimates, the Hispanic population in 1960 was only about 3% of the population. It is now 16% and rising fast. That is an incredible rate of change.
I fail to see why the composition of the US at its founding is irrelevant, as this nation’s founding documents instantiate principles that are a direct reflection of the founding population’s cultural heritage. (And for that matter, the composition of the nation’s population and culture were more or less unchanged from the Founding until as recently as the time of our own birth.) The Anglo-European whites who have made up the vast majority of the population in this country from its founding to the time of our childhood are about to become a minority in their own homeland. The blitheness with which you trivialize all of this is astounding.
4) … nuff said.
5) Plenty of Somalis, however. They blend right in in Minnesota, though, you betcha!
6) The US is far more bilingual now than it has ever been. Yiddish was only ever spoken by a vanishingly small percentage of the population, and it had no impact on the general culture. You can downplay the importance of a common language as regards social cohesion all you want, but when I can’t even walk into a rest stop on Route 95 in Connecticut and communicate with the person serving me, it’s symptomatic of a significant breakdown of our cultural unity.
Blacks drop out of school a lot too. So adding huge amounts of another group with the same problem is helpful?
7) This comment reveals how compartmentalized your thinking is on this topic. After our long and careful examination of the question, in which you agreed a) that a nation has legitimate interest in preserving its native culture and demographic composition (in this case that would be the mainstream Anglo-European culture and population that defined America from its founding until recent decades), b) that mass immigration always entails social upheaval, c) that there is a point at which whatever vague benefits accruing from bringing large numbers of aliens into an existing culture are outweighed by the detrimental effects of said social upheaval and fragmentation, d) that it’s difficult to know in advance when that point has been approached, e) that once mass immigration has disrupted a culture it is almost impossible to reverse the effect, and f) that all of the above warrants caution for the sake of not making irreversible, unwelcome changes — you are suddenly able to turn on a dime and revert back to your usual, mindless “more immigration is always better” multi-culti talking points, as if none of that painstaking investigation of these underlying assumptions had happened at all. It reminds me of this.
What a total waste of time.
Let me ask you this far simpler question, then:
Why should any native people and culture welcome being displaced and usurped by aliens, and made a demographic minority in their own homeland? Why in God’s name should should they be expected to aid and abet such a process?
I think less.
If Israel should be allowed to exclude gentiles, why can’t gentile nations exclude Jews?
They can, if that’s what they decide they want. A nation ought to be able to do whatever it likes as regards immigration policy; it’s a purely internal matter.
Plenty of Muslim nations already do exclude Jews.
I don’t disagree. I just have yet to come across a Jew who reciprocates on this principle.
Well, not Emma Lazarus, for one. For what it’s worth, I think our ‘one-eyed-man’ did, somewhere up the thread.
Looking over the thread, I can’t find where he does.
But any rate, he doesn’t seem to strongly support that principle for Israel itself. He acknowledges the principle, but seems somewhat uncomfortable with it.
So it’s not really a case of him failing to reciprocate or holding a double standard.
I had in mind stridently Zionist types.
I had in mind where he said:
Yeah I guess that’s what I meant when I said that he acknowledges the principle, but seems somewhat uncomfortable with it, including as it applies to Israel. So he appears to be universal in his discomfort or concern about it. He doesn’t seem to be failing to reciprocate or holding double standards on this account.
He doesn’t seem to be like a strident Zionist type who strongly maintains Israel’s right to exclude gentiles while denying gentile nations, especially Western nations, the right to exclude Jews.
No, that isn’t what he is. Intellectually, he seems to understand very clearly the problems we analyzed in this thread in such painstaking detail, as summarized by me just above — but then at the end just reverts to a general Utopian, warm-and-fuzzy emotional hand-waving about it all, like none of it really matters and it will all just work out.
Heart vs. head, or something.
I am a Jewish American (naturalized) citizen (hence a former immigrant), as well as a Holocaust survivor, and I agree unequivocally that every nation-state has the right to formulate whatever immigration policy its governmental process chooses to enact. That is, in my view, one of the intrinsic pervues of a sovereign state.
I don’t pretend to be “like a strident Zionist type“, but I do admit to being a strong supporter of Israel.
Hope this helps.
Right now I am lacking in the bandwidth or brain cells to respond in any depth – or probably much clarity – so I will respond by simply noting that there is no contradiction between the things we agreed to and my view that America is sui generis and the usual rules do not apply. Unlike other countries, we may once have had a single culture, but starting with the immigration of Germans, Irish, and Italians in the 19th century, we have developed a multiplicity of cultures. Norway, Korea, and Saudi Arabia are all circles. We are a Venn diagram.
There is no “mainstream Anglo-European culture” which defines “America from its founding until recent decades.” For starters, some would say that the only truly indigenous American art forms are blues and jazz, neither of which are Anglo or European. There are regional differences which are almost as stark as ethnic differences – someone growing up in Vermont probably doesn’t have a whole lot in common with someone who grew up in Alabama. Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen are all equally American, but they are hardly alike and represent completely different versions of American culture(s).
I did not especially feel this way until I lived in Asia, when I came to realize how incredibly multifaceted and robust America really is. You don’t appreciate the richness of diversity until you have lived in a society which lacks it, and I don’t think that one can really understand his own culture until he has lived in a different one.
If Japan were to expand its population by ten per cent in the next year with gaijin, it would totally freak out the Japanese to a point where they would not recover. Hence the points of agreement which we have. However, the uniquity of the American experiment has allowed it to absorb successive waves of immigration such that each new wave was accretive, and not dilutive, to the culture at large. That is why we are sui generis.
As for your question: I live in an area where non-Hispanic whites have already been “displaced and usurped by aliens, and made a demographic minority in (our) own homeland.” Here in Silicon Valley, “the Anglo-European whites who have made up the vast majority of the population in this country from its founding to the time of our childhood” is already a minority. However, it is perhaps the most robust and fascinating place to live in America, if not the world. As the old joke goes: the Valley was built on IC’s. Not integrated circuits: Indians and Chinese. The phenomenal success and vitality here in the Valley owes as much to its continual embrace of new arrivals as to anything else.
(One shudders to think of the length of the “comments” this one-eyed guy would be posting were he endowed with sufficient bandwidth and brain cells.)
Peter, a culture that is all cultures at once is no culture at all. The rootless hodge-podge you imagine America to be is no foundation for the homeland of a common people — and for all that I know you personally to be a decent and well-intentioned man, if you are the model of the modern American citizen then I don’t believe this country will last much longer. You haven’t described a nation: you’ve described a patch of real-estate, an unlocked pantry.
Bring in your hordes from anywhere and everywhere. Have them all speak a fragmented Babel of mutually incomprehensible tongues. Make sure that all they understand about the cultural root-stock of this great, fading nation is a set of high-sounding abstractions, a rule-book for defending your gang’s place at the trough.
Light the blue touch-paper, stand well back.
Ah well, this thread has about reached its end, I think. Not the only thing, I fear.
What I find interesting is the amount of attention given to the legitimacy of Israel as a nation in the context of the original 1800s zionism movement and/or a biblical context.
If looked at practically you have 4 or 5 (sometimes more) generations who have built the country into a first-world power/economy/culture.
The majority of anti-Israeli (I’m loathe to call it pro-Palestinian considering the Palestinian ghettos in Lebanon that get no attention) stances offer no solution beyond exile for the Israeli people.
Two states seem like a fair idea and would be viable if not for the continued sponsorship of Palestinian terrorism by the Arab League.
I can understand why Israel restricts movement from Gaza/WB in that context even though it sucks.
Well, as you often hear said: if Israel laid down its arms, it would be wiped out. If the Arabs did, there would be peace.
It’s not robust at all. It’s a hot-house flower and an artificial creation. As for “fascinating”, that’s a value judgement. You are one of those xenophiles for whom a majority non-white place will always be more fascinating than a majority white one. (With the implicit proviso that somewhere out there these is still somebody to enforce such Anglo-European notions as rule of law, freedom of speech, and security of property, notions which are completely alien to the Chinese and Indians inside and outside of SV )
There is no “mainstream Anglo-European culture” which defines “America from its founding until recent decades.” For starters, some would say that the only truly indigenous American art forms are blues and jazz, neither of which are Anglo or European.
If you are under the impression that “American culture” is principally defined by such nonsense as the music we listen to or the food we eat, then it’s no great surprise that you have zero attachment to America or its culture.
Right on both counts, Severn. I began to write a reply along those lines, but just ran out of energy. Time to move on.
I agree. I only add this comment to bring the total number to an even 100.
Why, thank you, Henry!
…ooops.