By Matthew Cochran
Monday, December 28, 2015
It’s good to feed the hungry. All other things being
equal, few would consider such charity to be ignoble. Unfortunately, things are
not always equal, and even ordinarily benevolent actions can either fall short
of true charity or be twisted into wrongdoing. Perhaps the corruptions of
charity most familiar to conservatives occur when people are generous with others’
goods instead of their own, or when they think voting for politicians is a
substitute for actually helping the needy they encounter.
However, charity can just as easily go off the rails
through a failure of practical wisdom. It would, for example, be foolish to try
and feed the hungry with seed corn—the grain reserved for planting next year’s
crops that will ultimately continue to feed the hungry for generations. No
matter how badly one might feel for the hungry, it would be wicked to impose
starvation on everyone to feed a few for a day.
Such an action would be sentimentalism rather than
compassion—more about making one feel good than actually helping the hungry.
Although it might feel loving at the time, it would be detrimental toward all
those who would be deprived of sustenance as a result. The kind of abundance of
food that can broaden the reach of generosity is not accidental. To disregard
the established patterns of sowing and reaping for the whims of sentiment is to
wind up without a crop.
Many Value Our
Wealth, But Not the Ideas that Create It
It is unfortunate that such logic—so obvious when it
comes to agriculture—has been lost among both the Left and the Right regarding
mass migration. Like an abundance of food, the kind of prosperity that attracts
people to the West is not accidental. It grew out of our traditions of placing
restrictions on the reach of government, allowing relatively broad personal
freedoms, and the sensible morality of Christendom that ultimately separated
such freedom from chaos. This is the seed corn of Western civilization, and we
dare not consume it.
Merely moving a human being from one location to another
does not teach him those traditions—not to uphold them, value them, or even
know them. The large subset of migrants who come simply to benefit from the
prosperity that our traditions have created do so immediately; and for the
narrower subset who are truly in dire straits, this is not only understandable
but right and proper.
Nevertheless, even if they may benefit, they are usually
not initially equipped to contribute to the West’s traditions of prosperity.
They are more likely to weaken them. Different cultures have different customs,
along with different expectations of neighbors, communities, and governments.
Many of these will be at odds with those that made the West a desirable
destination, and many of them will be the very same customs that made their own
society a place they wanted leave.
Most Immigrants
Are Accustomed to Socialism
For example, tens of millions of migrants from countries
such as Mexico, where two of the three major political parties belong to
Socialist International, are bound to impact a country like the United States,
where the leftmost major party still has to be cagey about its socialist
tendencies. Whether one views that impact as positive or negative depends on
his view of socialism, but the patterns are undeniable.
Taking all Hispanics in America as a group in 2012, the
Pew Research Center found 71 percent identify with or lean Democrat as compared
to only 21 percent Republican (with the rest not choosing a side for various
reasons.) While legal status was more likely to result in a leaning per se, it did not appreciably affect
that disproportion.
The Cuban preference for the GOP is very much the
exception among those from our south. Most overwhelmingly vote for the
political party that has been most effective in destroying our way of life—and
barely restricted immigration means they do so in election-swinging numbers.
It should likewise be unsurprising that American
traditions that seem peculiar to the global community are not suddenly lauded
when members of that community relocate. Take, for example, our right to bear
arms. The University of California at Los Angeles’s Adam Winkler argues at the Washington Post that demographic shifts
mean the end of this freedom. When 75 percent of Hispanics prefer “gun safety
over gun rights” and 80 percent of Asian American voters want stricter gun
control, things will inevitably change when these demographics become the new
majority.
In many places in the world where authorities restrict
access to firearms, experience with guns is uniformly negative—looking down the
barrels of criminals, drug dealers, warlords, or authoritarian regimes. Here in
the United States, many still realize that by criminalizing guns we will ensure
only criminals will possess them. However, in places where guns have long been
criminalized, that is already the accepted reality, and guns are perceived
primarily as tools of evildoers. That perception does not make the Second
Amendment less essential to America’s freedom from tyranny, but importing tens
of millions who have it does weaken our grasp on that freedom.
We Can Teach—If
Immigrants Want to Learn
To be sure, different people come for different reasons,
not just jobs and wealth. Some do so specifically because they love the
traditions that make us prosperous—many of those who fled to us from communist
oppression, for example. Others come because they love one particular feature
of the West—such as religious freedom—that trumps other concerns. In some
cases, they may even appreciate them far more than the average American,
because we take them for granted.
Nevertheless, appreciating a freedom is not necessarily
synonymous with maintaining it. After all, plenty of fools among us believe the
freest speech is only possible in the comfort of heavily thought-policed safe
spaces or that religious freedom is only possible by expunging religion from
the public square.
Maintaining the traditions that make us prosperous
depends on culturally entrenched ideas and know-how that will frequently be
alien to migrants. Although any given newcomer may or may not be hard-working
or possess universal virtues like courage in abundance, circumstance forces
most to be cultural freeloaders for a time when it comes to Western particulars.
How long a time depends on many factors, not the least of
which is whether the migrants actually want to learn. Open contempt for one’s
host is hardly uncommon, particularly among those who depart Dar al-Islam for Dar al-Harb (the House of Islam for the House of War.) However,
even apart from that can of worms, there are many other powerful factors.
Perhaps the clearest example is just how many people are
migrating at once. Humans from all tribes tend to seek out those most like
themselves. The larger the migration, the more they will be able to relocate
geographically without becoming part of a different community. If one requires
an example, he need look no further than many European cities whose
sub-communities seek to self-impose Sharia law over and against the secular
authorities.
Another hugely consequential factor is the hosts’
willingness to teach. In other words, how comfortable is the contemporary West
with the idea that its own culture is worth imposing? We are, unfortunately, in
the middle of our own identity crisis. Far too many among us believe, against
all evidence, that all cultures are basically equal—except for our own, which
is of course less equal than others.
The cultural self-loathing with which many of us have
been inculcated since childhood in the name of welcoming others has led to a
generation that often cannot distinguish between passing on their best
traditions and oppression. Likewise, recognizing and addressing any barbarism
that may exist among those we encounter has become more horrifying to us than
barbarism itself.
We Don’t Value Our
Civilization Enough to Transmit It
This was not always so. When the British encountered the
practice of Sati in India, its
practitioners defended it as customary. Nevertheless, General Charles Napier
was bold enough to reply:
Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral
pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them,
and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets
on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act
according to national customs.
My point is not to defend British imperialism, but to
recognize the value of cultural self-esteem grounded in natural law. One need
not approve of the British presence in India to recognize that their attitude
toward Sati was entirely appropriate.
Meanwhile, when our own military encounters pedophilia in Afghanistan, our
bureaucrats-in-chief are too pusillanimous to offend the locals by doing
anything about it.
Again, whatever one thinks of our presence in
Afghanistan, we might as well save some children from being raped while we’re
there. If we are too scared to even enforce a matter of basic humanity, how
much less fit are we to pass on our unique traditions to new arrivals?
Ironically, our infection of multiculturalism makes us less capable of
embracing those who come to us.
As Aristotle wrote in “Politics” (before listing numerous
revolutions unchecked immigration brought on), “A state is not the growth of a
day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident.”
Even in the best of circumstances, assimilation requires generations, not years
or even decades. As something that plays out over the long haul, it needs to be
done with deliberate care.
Allowing disordered immigration on the kind of scale
we’re seeing today in these worst of internal circumstances is utterly
foolhardy. Consuming the West’s seed corn in this way is cruel—not only to
Westerners, but also to those coming to us in the hope that their children’s
children will have a better life.
Of Course the Left
Doesn’t Recognize the Consequences
That the Left would have no misgivings about the
situation is unsurprising. Many of them deliberately seek to tear down the West
because they imagine it will be replaced by a secular utopia akin to what one
sees in Star Trek. What is truly sad is the way that conservatives—those who
supposedly seek to conserve what is precious—are taken in by the rhetoric of
false compassion just the same.
We tend to recognize the phenomenon of “Californization.”
When liberals begin leaving states their own policies have ruined, they tend to
vote for those same policies in their new homes, continuing the cycle. It’s
curious they do not recognize this same tendency when those from far more
different cultures migrate.
Some have no doubt bought into the arguments of political
pragmatism—that liberal immigration policies can win them points in the media
and eventually buy them votes among immigrants. Unfortunately, they are too
out-of-touch to realize that following the lead of a media that absolutely
loathes them is self-defeating.
Nor do they seem to realize they will never beat
Democrats at promising handouts. The Left will always promise whatever the
people let them get away with, and the willingness of many neocons to follow
their lead over the past few decades has done nothing but let them get away
with more and more.
Some will go on about how those coming from the south tend
to be part of the Church of Rome, which would supposedly make them natural
conservatives if only American conservatives are careful to avoid offending
them. Nevertheless, one would think that at the very least, the current pope
would be a pretty clear indication this not necessarily the case. Such
pragmatism has been anything but pragmatic. Its only success has been to
convince many principled conservatives that their future does not lie in the
Republican Party.
Sentimentalism
Isn’t Compassion
For other conservatives, supporting mass migration is a
religious matter. I’ve lost count of the number of conservative Christians I’ve
heard quoting Deuteronomy 10:18-19: “[God] executes justice for the fatherless
and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the
sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
To be sure, Christians ought to be compassionate to
migrants. God was compassionate to us, and we therefore ought to be
compassionate to all. However, feeding the sojourner with seed corn is not true
compassion. Being compassionate to all is a thoughtful task—not a matter of
reflexively giving people whatever they want in all circumstances.
For instance, too many Christians think it compassionate
to disrespect even the incredibly loose immigration laws we already have.
However, doing so leads directly to companies exploiting illegal immigrants in
hiring them for illegally low wages. It also leads to the loss of gainful
employment for all who would do those jobs if they didn’t exist in a
black-market economy operating with very different rules. Such disrespect for
borders may make Christians feel compassionate, but that is merely
sentimentalism at work.
Compassion for all also requires being cognizant of all
those who are not sojourners. Consider how more than 1,400 young girls were
raped and forced into prostitution in Rotherham—all while the “compassionate”
officials covered for them lest there be any negative opinion about the
Pakistani immigrants who were carrying all of this out.
Or consider how Sweden’s immigration policy led to a
1,400 percent increase in rape in the country. The Christian would do well to
consider the many and various ways false compassion affects their families and
friends. We generally condemn Abraham’s brother Lot for offering his own
daughters to be raped by the men of Sodom in an attempt to protect his guests—and
we are right to do so. It’s sad to see so many of us inadvertently turning such
action into a heroic example of loving the sojourner among us.
Broad-Brush
Immigration Policies Are a Failure
Some will say that all of this paints migrants with too broad
of a brush. However, the broadest brush of all is an immigration policy
composed of extremely loose rules combined with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink
attitude about abiding by them. Rose-tinted though its paint may be, America’s
extremely rare policy of birthright citizenship is an incredibly broad brush.
So is the disjointed quasi open-borders approach taken by
our politicians who catch vapors at the thought of actually enforcing even the
lax laws we currently possess. Confirming millions of illegal migrants in their
open disrespect for our country’s laws by joining them in it is hardly
conducive to passing on our traditions.
Narrower brushes require considering the many different
cultures that come to us—some of which are closer to our own than others. In
the past, when we absorbed large numbers of Irish, Germans, Italians, and many
others, they were coming from cultures far more familiar to us than those of
the global south. Even then, these had a significant impact.
The English who provided most of our founding fathers
have also given the world a disproportionate number of philosophers who
advocated limited government. I do not believe America’s move towards strong
central authority is entirely unrelated to historical immigration patterns from
cultures that do not value such limitations to the same extent. How much more
of an impact will even greater numbers from even more divergent cultures have?
Will the good changes outweigh the bad? These are questions we have largely
stopped asking ourselves since our immigration policy changed so radically 50
years ago.
Showing
Discrimination Isn’t Discriminatory
If we need a narrower brush, then that means being
discriminating—yes, discriminating—about who we welcome, how many we welcome at
a time, and whether we are actually willing to do the hard and deliberate work
of instilling our culture among them. If doing so requires blunt tools like
walls and repatriation, then so be it—even narrower brushes can only be so
narrow in matters of national policy.
Stricter policies do not mean hatred towards friends and
neighbors who have come from abroad. If a host is throwing a small gathering
for a dozen friends and one of those friends brings a hundred people with him,
that changes the character of the gathering into something very different than
the host intended. If the host does not want that, it does not indicate a
special animus against each of those hundred individuals. It’s the sheer volume
that’s the problem.
Accordingly, if that host decided to protect his next
gathering by, say, requesting that his friends ask before inviting anyone else
and by turning down some of them, it does not indicate some kind of hatred. If
done with care on a reasonable scale, immigration can be win-win for the West
and its guests.
On the other hand, if we cannot or will not be deliberate
about immigration, then the rest of our so-called compassion will ultimately be
a dead letter—even for true refugees who need help the most. If the West fails
to become deliberate about both receiving and rejecting those who come to us,
it will cease to be a culture to which anyone would want to come.
This is particularly difficult for Americans to accept,
given our own history and its idealization of immigration. The United States is
often called a nation of immigrants, and so we are. However, one would do well
to consider exactly what this meant for the natives who were here before us. A
nation of immigrants cannot help but supplant a nation of natives. Although it
would be an historical irony that we fall victim to the same kind of invasion
our forebears carried out all those centuries ago, compassion does not oblige
us to skip merrily into it.
No comments:
Post a Comment