Best of 2024: More People, Fewer Problems
This week, I’m posting highlights from The Tracinski Letter: some of my favorite articles that I wrote in the last year.
Below is an article from October 26 about an issue that will be front and center in the new year: immigration. In fact, over the Christmas break, some of Donald Trump’s top supporters have already begun setting upon one another in a civil war over H-1B visas and a nativist smear campaign against Indian-Americans.
Since trade will also be the focus of the new administration in the new year, see also my examination of exaggerated concerns about US manufacturing and my suggestions for the right way to encourage US manufacturing.
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Trump’s Worst Idea
I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist looking in some detail at Donald Trump’s worst idea—which also happens to be the central promise of his campaign: mass deportations targeting 20 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, with some native-born American citizens thrown in for good measure.
The good thing about having this published at The UnPopulist—which was not my first plan, but that’s another story—is that Shikha Dalmia knows the immigration issue well and was able to provide some extra facts that reinforce my case. For example, we already have some idea how many US citizens get wrongly deported under existing immigration policy.
Jacqueline Stevens, a political scientist at Northwestern University and an expert on deportation law, estimates that 1% of the inmates in immigration detention nationwide are American citizens. Between 2003 and 2010, even before President Obama kicked his own deportation program into high gear, more than 20,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens. And that is a conservative estimate.
This was in years when the number of deportations was relatively low. So deporting 20 million immigrants all at once could mean deporting hundreds of thousands of US citizens—and let’s be honest, they would mostly be US citizens from a few specific ethnic groups. To put this in context, this is several times more than the number of Japanese-Americans unjustly interned in the war panic of 1942.
Mass deportations would be a disaster all around, and not just for immigrants and their families. (Another statistic: There are about 11 million illegal immigrants in America—and about an equal number of US citizens, their spouses and children, who share a household with them.) I look at what mass deportations would do to the construction industry, which has a particularly high percentage of immigrant workers, especially in some of the skilled trades. Anyone who knows the field knows that a vast anti-immigrant sweep would grind construction to a halt. I also link to an analysis of a similar effect on the food industry.
In short, if we deport anywhere close to 20 million people, we could expect an immediate and sharp economic downturn, including shortages of food—think of what the covid pandemic did, then multiply it—a worsened shortage of housing, and even a big hit to manufacturing. We would all be worse off.
And then there would be the political crisis. I don’t mention this in my piece, because there was enough to deal with already, and because this point is a bit more speculative. But Trump’s supporters have talked about taking the National Guard from conservative states like Missouri—presumably because they assume these troops would have the proper political loyalties—and sending them to enforce anti-immigrant sweeps in liberal states like New York. But what happens if New York contests the legality of the deportations and seeks to block them, as they almost certainly would? Could we see a convoy of the Missouri National Guard being met by the state police at the New York border and denied entry? And then what happens? As with everything else proposed by Donald Trump, this is a plan for constant constitutional crisis.
If we are going to put ourselves through such a vast national crisis, there had better be an equally vast problem we are supposed to be solving. But there isn’t. There is no basis in reality for the idea that immigrants are hurting America. In fact, immigrants are building America, as they always have. I offer some statistics about that and reach this conclusion.
The evidence shows that immigrants enrich this country as we all grow together, that a new American’s gain is not some other American’s loss—and this is how it has always been in our history.
This is why the right has to invent preposterous stories, as I described in my previous post on this issue, in order to justify an anti-immigrant pogrom. But if we vote for this, we won’t have the desperation of an actual crisis as an excuse. We’ll be doing it in cold blood, motivated solely by fear and hatred of people who are different from us.
All of this brings me back to question I raised in that previous installment: “What is the immigration issue really about? What are its deepest philosophical roots?”
The Overpopulation Hysteria, But for the Right
This question was prompted by an online seminar on immigration that I did with Richard Salsman for The Atlas Society.
This was an interesting session, because Richard and I usually clash horribly the closer we get to electoral politics, where he still clings to the notion that the Republican Party is in favor of free markets. Yet on this one issue, we largely agreed on our vision of what the optimal policy would be: The US should permit many more legal immigrants but do so in an orderly way by setting up large Ellis Island-style processing centers. I regret that I had to inform Richard that in the eyes of virtually all of today’s remaining Republicans, this would make him a wild-eyed “open borders” fanatic and one of the “globalist elites.”
Richard is trying to find a way to be pro-immigration while still supporting the Republican Party and its candidate, so he tries to square that circle by complaining about insufficient enforcement and specifically the fact that immigrants are not properly “registered” and some “sanctuary cities” refuse to aid the enforcement of anti-immigration laws. My answers were off-the-cuff but I thought they were illuminating. I pointed out that these are exactly the reactions you see on the right to issues like gun control, where they oppose registration of guns because they know it’s a step toward confiscation, and many local sheriffs create what you might call “sanctuary counties” where they refuse to aid the enforcement of anti-gun laws. In short, everybody resists laws they regard as unjust. So you can’t come up with a procedural reason to support the party that wants to do the wrong thing on the substance.
But here’s the thing that I realized after this discussion. I had led with facts showing the value of immigration to the economy and the culture, and while Richard agreed, he dismissed these as merely practical or pragmatic arguments, secondary to the moral principles involved. I’ve seen other Objectivists take this approach, so it led me to ask myself why I thought it was so obvious to lead with the value offered by immigrants. And it’s not to make a purely pragmatic argument for immigration. Rather, it is to make a metaphysical argument for immigration.
I think this actually addresses most clearly the reason people are opposed to immigration, certainly the way people are now whipping themselves up into a murderous frenzy over it during a time of peace and prosperity. Think of the words Donald Trump uses to describe this issue, words that are clearly resonating with his supporters: calling immigrants “garbage” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Is this a guy carefully making arguments about the morality of transnational migration or the proper role of government in managing borders? Obviously not! This is someone with a metaphysical horror of new and different people coming to this country. He is revulsed by their very existence.
That’s why I lead with the reality of the many and varied positive contributions of immigrants to this country. What I want to establish, in effect, is that people are good. Human beings should not be assumed by default to be a plague of locusts or a horde of marauding invaders. They are not poison or a cancer on the earth. Human beings are workers and builders and problem solvers. More human beings, new human beings, all varieties of human beings should be welcomed as positive additions to any society.
You might notice that this is the same issue we confront with radical environmentalists who obsess about overpopulation. So I was both appalled and also kind of delighted when someone in the comments section at The UnPopulist made the case against immigration in these terms: “Fewer people, fewer problems.” That sums it up. Immigration is the overpopulation hysteria, but for the right.
It’s no wonder that our current surge of anti-immigrant sentiment is coupled with a bleak, relentless pessimism. Trump’s supporters agree with him that America is “a failing nation.” There is a chicken-and-the-egg question here about whether an irrational fear of immigrants leads to an irrational pessimism, or vice-versa. But it doesn’t really matter, because the two ideas go hand in hand. When you accept a narrative of decline and collapse, you will naturally see humans as tribes fighting each other over limited and dwindling resources. And you will continue to believe this while living in the world’s most prosperous nation.
Obviously, when we say that human beings in general are good, this does not rule out the fact that some specific humans have proven themselves dangerous to others, which is why we can and should screen immigrants for known criminals—which would be a lot easier, by the way, if excessive restrictions on immigration didn’t create a huge black market for smuggling people across the border. (Though even then, in recent years most illegal immigrants have been legal visitors who overstay their visas, meaning that they were already screened and allowed into the country, just never sanctioned as permanent residents.)
Yet unless there is specific evidence against a person, our attitude should be: The more the merrier. After all, if more people meant more problems, America’s growth from 3 million people at its founding to 330 million today, swelled by wave after wave of immigrants, would be a story of relentless decline. Instead, it’s a story of relentless growth and progress.
We should all be acutely aware of this because virtually everyone reading this is descended from one of these previous waves of immigrants. Unless you look like this guy, you are an immigrant.
Actually, that’s true even if you do look like this guy, because he was Sicilian. “Iron Eyes Cody,” the actor who played the soulful Native American in that old ad, was actually the son of recent immigrants, born in Louisiana as Espera Oscar de Corti. He was yet another newcomer who enriched this country by going off to Hollywood and appearing in dozens of screen roles in American Westerns.
The metaphysical pessimism of the anti-immigrationists is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if we listen to them, we will have fewer people and more problems. The deepest answer to the anti-immigration hysteria is that humans are creators who solve more problems than we cause, that America’s history is grand-scale proof of this, and the rule we should actually follow is: more people, fewer problems.
Or we could plunge ourselves into a profound national crisis because we choose, instead of growing and creating, to vent our fear and hatred. This is the choice we all face in the next few weeks.