By Reihan Salam
Monday, January 04, 2016
A new culture war is breaking out in America. Unlike the
culture wars of the recent past, this one isn’t about the place of
Judeo-Christian values in our public life, the regulation of abortion, or the
recognition of same-sex unions. Those conflicts are still with us. But they’ve
been overshadowed by the fight over the future of American national identity in
the face of rapid and accelerating demographic change. This new culture war
will define the contest for the Republican presidential nomination in the months
to come, as it has for the better part of the last year. And in all likelihood,
it will shape our politics for decades to come.
The most visible manifestation of this new culture war
has been the rise of Donald Trump. By focusing his candidacy almost entirely on
immigration, the billionaire entertainer has energized millions of voters who
love him as a bold truth-teller or damn him as a vicious and dangerous bigot.
Trump’s recent, opportunistic discovery of an interest in illegal immigration
is ironic, as Trump has been quite comfortable with the use of unauthorized
immigrant labor on his various mega-projects.
But Trump and his clownish provocations aren’t really the
issue. His emergence as the voice of the anti-immigration Right is a reflection
of the failure of the Republican establishment to grapple with lawlessness at
the border and half a century of mass immigration. Consider the events of the
past two years. Child migrants have surged into the United States from Central
America, and working-class cities and towns across the country are struggling
to absorb them. Before the federal courts stepped in, President Obama signed an
executive order shielding roughly half of all unauthorized immigrants in the
U.S. from the threat of deportation, a move he had previously suggested was out
of bounds. And now the U.S. is experiencing yet another wave of Central
American arrivals. Border Patrol officials report that many unauthorized
immigrants believe that the U.S. is going to welcome them with open arms, and
who can blame them given the president’s rhetoric? The ongoing crisis in Syria
has prompted a fierce debate over Muslim refugees, and the San Bernardino
attack has shone a bright light on our immigration bureaucracy’s decision to
admit one of the killers, Tashfeen Malik, an Islamic radical from Pakistan.
For years, elite conservatives have ignored grassroots
opposition to mass immigration, and Trump’s rise is their reward. That GOP
primary voters are in revolt over immigration, and that so many of them are
spurning elected Republicans they no longer trust, should come as no surprise.
Does this mean that all conservatives need to do is call
for closing the borders, and then all will be well? Not by a long shot. If
Republicans who favor mass immigration have been blind to its downsides, many
of those who are opposed to it have themselves been blinded by nostalgia — they
have failed to recognize that the more culturally homogeneous America of the
1980s, when many older conservatives came of age, is gone.
The result is that anti-immigration conservatives have
alienated potential allies. Many centrist and liberal African Americans share
conservatives’ skepticism about immigration, yet they are reluctant to join
forces with a movement they see as racially exclusive. Many Hispanics and
Asians, whether foreign- or native-born, see the virtue in reducing
less-skilled immigration while easing the way for skilled workers. Political
scientists Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins have gathered considerable
evidence that support for such a policy is widespread among Americans of all
backgrounds. Yet immigration advocates have deliberately framed the immigration
debate as all-or-nothing, and conservatives have let them get away with it.
To win this new culture war, conservatives must do more
than embrace a new approach to immigration. They must offer a new conception of
American nationhood. Just as the melting-pot nationalism of the 1900s forged a
new American identity that natives and immigrants of various European
nationalities could embrace, a new melting-pot nationalism is needed to counter
the ethnic and class antagonisms that threaten our society today.
***
Regardless of where you stand on immigration, there is no
question that the post-1965 immigration wave has transformed American society.
Roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born, up from 4.7 percent
in 1970. And this share is set to increase substantially in the years to come.
If anything, this number understates the impact of immigration on American
society. Had the post-1965 immigration wave never come, the U.S. population
would today be 252 million rather than 324 million. Over the next 50 years,
demographers at the Pew Research Center anticipate, new immigrants and their
descendants will account for 88 percent
of all population growth. Part of the reason is that the birthrate among
native-born Americans has fallen to unprecedentedly low levels, so immigration
is a much bigger part of our demographic picture than it would be had the
birthrates of the post-war decades persisted into the present. This confluence
of falling birthrates and surging immigration explains why the cultural character
of America is changing so rapidly.
Many of the more strident immigration advocates style
themselves as fighters for civil rights or racial justice — they suggest that
calls for reducing immigration are driven by racial animus. So it is worth
keeping in mind that regardless of what happens to our immigration policy,
non-Hispanic whites will become a minority of all Americans in the decades to
come. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the U.S. population will become
majority-minority in 2044, a projection that factors in an ongoing immigrant
influx. Yet America’s majority-minority future is already with us in
majority-minority states such as California and Texas, and also in younger generations.
The population of Americans younger than five is majority-minority today, and
the same will be true of the population of Americans younger than 18 by 2020. A
disproportionately large share of this rising generation is composed of
immigrants, but the native-born children of immigrants are the chief drivers of
demographic change.
What kind of majority-minority society will we become?
Will we live in a racially divided America characterized by high levels of
segregation and inter-ethnic distrust? Or will we become a more cohesive
society united by language, culture, and a sense of shared fate, with ethnic
distinctions blurred by ties of friendship and kinship?
***
America’s current immigration policy serves the interests
of low-wage employers and immigrant voters looking to bring family members to
the U.S., yet it fails to account for the challenge of integrating immigrants
and their descendants into American life. The challenge is not that today’s
immigrants come from Latin America, Asia, and Africa rather than Europe. It is
that the United States has absorbed far more less-skilled immigrants than any
other affluent market democracy, while the children of less-skilled immigrants
often struggle to climb into the middle class. Countries such as Canada and Australia
have admitted more immigrants per capita, but they cherry-pick skilled ones. In
contrast, the U.S. has welcomed large numbers of less-skilled immigrants just
as global economic integration and automation have put the wages of
less-skilled workers under intense pressure, and as the family lives of
college-educated and non-college-educated adults and their children have
sharply diverged. Had the post-1965 immigration wave consisted solely of people
with higher-than-average levels of literacy and numeracy, its effect on U.S.
society would have been markedly different, even if we had admitted the same
number of people from the same countries.
To be sure, today’s immigrants have a higher level of
educational attainment than those who arrived in 1965. Specifically, the Pew
Research Center reports that while only half of newly arrived immigrants in
1970 had at least a high-school diploma, by 2013 that share had increased to
over three-quarters. And while only a fifth of immigrants had graduated from
college in 1970, 41 percent had done so in 2013. Immigration advocates often
point to such facts as cause for optimism, particularly when conservatives
express concern about immigrants’ skill levels.
Are the immigration optimists right — are the skills of
recent immigrants actually quite strong? The answer is no. Skilled immigrants
have fared extremely well in America in recent decades. But skilled immigrants
have been very much in the minority in the post-1965 era. Given that the U.S.
is a desirable place to live, the U.S. could quite easily use its immigration
system to raise its average skill level by recruiting immigrants with literacy
and math skills above the U.S. average, not below it. But we don’t.
So far, the policy debate over immigration has focused on
the question of whether less-skilled immigrants reduce native wages. This is
not the right question to ask. Given that the U.S. admits a finite number of
immigrants, the right question to ask is which mix of immigrants will most
serve U.S. national interests.
The most widely cited evidence we have on the impact of
immigrant labor on U.S. wages is from the economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and
Giovanni Peri, whose work is often invoked by immigration advocates. Their
findings suggest that immigrant workers have a modestly positive impact on
native wages and a modestly negative one on the wages of previous immigrants.
These numbers can be misleading, as much depends on the skill level of the
immigrants and natives in question. For example, many researchers believe that
less-skilled immigrants allow skilled natives to increase their productivity by
lowering the cost of child care, food preparation, and other services.
What about the notion that less-skilled immigrants
displace less-skilled natives? Here the story is more complicated, because
less-skilled natives often establish new economic niches that reflect their
skills. Broadly speaking, less-skilled immigrants with low levels of
English-language proficiency tend to specialize in jobs that don’t require them
to interact with English-speaking customers. Less-skilled natives, meanwhile,
often gravitate to jobs that make use of their language skills. These two
groups can be complementary, as in the case of the immigrant busboy working
alongside the native server in a restaurant.
There are other subtle aspects of the impact of
immigration on the labor market, however. The availability of low-wage
immigrant labor can obviate the need for labor-saving innovation. If
middle-class American families could hire chauffeurs at low cost, for instance,
as affluent families do in poor parts of the developing world, there would be
less effort devoted to the invention of self-driving cars. Machines can
substitute for low-wage workers, but consumers and employers will make the
switch only if it makes economic sense to do so. Less-skilled immigration
ensures that for many routine tasks, it is cheaper to hire a low-wage immigrant
worker than to invest in technology. This helps explain why firms in societies
with a more restrictive approach to immigration, such as Denmark, Japan, and
South Korea, are often quicker to deploy labor-saving technology than their
U.S. counterparts.
What immigration advocates often gloss over is that
immigrants are not merely workers who can be just as good as machines at
performing certain tasks. They are also taxpayers and consumers of public
services. The low wages commanded by less-skilled immigrants are a boon for
parents who need child care or urban professionals looking for a cut-rate
manicure. The flip side is that families headed by less-skilled immigrants earn
extremely low incomes. There is a substantial gap between the incomes of
less-skilled immigrants and the level of consumption they need to lead lives
most Americans would consider decent. And it is the public sector that is
called upon to close this gap.
Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies has
carefully documented that immigrant-headed households are far more likely to
make use of means-tested safety-net programs, such as Medicaid and SNAP, than
are native-headed households. Drawing on data from the Census Bureau’s Survey
of Income and Program Participation, Camarota finds that 49 percent of
immigrant-headed households access these programs (as opposed to 30 percent of
native-born households), and that the share rises to 72 percent for
immigrant-headed households with children. This high rate of immigrant reliance
on safety-net programs is not a product of fraud or deception on the part of
immigrants. It simply reflects the fact that the U.S. immigrant population is
less skilled than the native population, and safety-net programs are designed
to give a lifeline to poor families that can’t provide for themselves.
The question immigration advocates haven’t seriously
considered is whether it is wise to welcome large numbers of new less-skilled
immigrants when millions of less-skilled immigrants already here find it
impossible to support themselves and their children without public assistance.
Indeed, one could argue that children of poor immigrants will need increasingly
expensive labor-intensive services in the years to come. In recent years,
liberals have embraced the cause of universal early-childhood education. They
argue that children raised by less-educated and less-affluent parents are often
poorly prepared for academic success, and so these children will need a series
of expensive interventions to have any chance of entering the middle class. Who
will pay for these interventions? It certainly won’t be less-skilled
immigrants, who already rely on safety-net programs in large numbers and who
earn wages so low that the tax revenues they generate are quite modest.
***
Why haven’t recent less-skilled immigrants followed the
path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s
and early 1900s? There are many contributing factors. The labor-market
prospects for less-skilled workers have greatly deteriorated in recent decades,
but we also have a more extensive safety net to support low-income households.
A century ago, immigrants who failed to flourish in the U.S. labor market or
who wanted to maintain stronger ties to their ethnic communities often returned
to their native countries. Today, safety-net benefits greatly ease the pain of
not earning enough to support a family, and new communications technologies
ensure that immigrants can easily retain ties to their ancestral homelands.
But the most important reason that today’s immigrants
have had such a different trajectory from those of earlier eras is that in 1921
and 1924, Congress passed legislation that sharply curtailed immigration. Take
the contrast between Mexican Americans, a community that has greatly increased
in size due to immigration over the past 40 years, and Italian Americans.
Roughly 35 percent of Mexican Americans were born in Mexico, and roughly
another third are the U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants. In contrast,
the vast majority of Italian Americans were born in the U.S.
In Replenished
Ethnicity, Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez argues that one of the main
differences between the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. and the
white-ethnic descendants of immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s is that
because mass European immigration ended more than 80 years ago, Italian
Americans do not generally find themselves in social worlds dominated by recent
Italian immigrants. The result is that Italian-American identity is largely
symbolic and optional, and Italian Americans are perceived as indistinguishable
from other white Anglos. The end of immigrant replenishment led to sharp
increases in inter-ethnic marriages for Italian Americans and other white
ethnics. Mexican Americans, in contrast, are part of an ethnic community that
until recently was constantly being replenished by new Mexican arrivals, which
in turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of Mexican identity.
This dynamic applies to other ethnic groups as well. In
2007, Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State and Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell found that
over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians marrying whites, and
Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply, a development they attribute to rising
immigration. As the size of an ethnic group increases, in-group contact and
interaction increases. This in turn strengthens in-group ethnic solidarity
while reducing intermarriage. Qian and Lichter found that the skills gap
between immigrants and natives also plays a role. For example, native-born
Hispanic women with a college education were more than three times as likely to
be married to whites as native-born Hispanics with less than a high-school
education.
What these differing rates of intermarriage suggest is
that ethnicity and class are merging. Several decades from now, the descendants
of educated native-born Hispanics will probably have blended into the American
mainstream — yet the descendants of the less educated may find themselves as a
separate and distinct population, isolated from the corridors of power and
concentrated among the poor and working-class.
For centuries, African Americans have been concentrated
in the bottom half of the U.S. income distribution while the top half has been
largely white. This has contributed to a sense of permanent outsider status
among many African Americans, who feel wounded and at times angered by their
exclusion from the American Dream, and for good reason. This black–white racial
divide is so familiar and so deeply embedded in our nation’s history that we
take it for granted. But could it prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, a
preview of other ethnic conflicts that could emerge as the children and
grandchildren of less-skilled immigrants face discrimination and economic
hardship? It is all too easy to imagine a future in which poor Hispanics and
blacks grow ever more resentful of white wealth and power, while wealthy whites
come to see poor blacks and Hispanics as members of rival tribes rather than
compatriots.
***
Conservatives must offer an alternative to clashing
ethnic tribalisms. Just as melting-pot nationalism helped forge a common
American identity in the middle decades of the last century, we need a new
melting-pot nationalism suited to our own time. And this new nationalism must
begin with a fresh approach to immigration policy. Anti-immigration rhetoric
tends to frame high levels of immigration as a threat to natives, not as a
barrier to integration, assimilation, and upward mobility for the tens of
millions of immigrant families that have settled here. That needs to change.
The ongoing influx of less-skilled immigrant workers puts economic pressure on
the less-skilled immigrants who already reside in our country, and it
reinforces their cultural separation from Americans who belong to other ethnic
groups. Moreover, less-skilled immigration strains the fiscal capacity of
government. By reducing less-skilled immigration, we could tighten the market
for less-skilled labor and increase the likelihood that immigrants will
interact with people outside their own ethnic groups.
Keep in mind that sharply curtailing less-skilled
immigration needn’t entail a drastic reduction in immigration levels overall.
While the U.S. has welcomed large numbers of less-skilled immigrants, Canada
and Australia have welcomed an even larger number of skilled immigrants. The
result is that the latter countries have immigrant populations that have
integrated far more successfully than America’s. The U.S. can learn from their
experience. Indeed, moderately increasing the influx of skilled
English-speaking immigrants who command high wages and reducing less-skilled
immigration could be complementary strategies. While less-skilled immigration
increases the number of Americans who need public assistance, skilled immigration
can ease the burden of financing these social programs. There will have to be
more to melting-pot nationalism than just conservative immigration reform. But
conservative immigration reform can serve as the foundation on which this new
nationalism rests.
Are any of the Republican presidential candidates capable
of talking about our fractured national identity in an intelligent and
compelling way? So far, two candidates stand out. Ted Cruz has gone the
farthest in outlining a detailed agenda for strengthening immigration
enforcement and limiting less-skilled immigration. For that, he deserves great
credit. Marco Rubio, one of the architects of the Gang of Eight immigration
bill, has much to answer for. The bill he championed would have sharply
increased immigration, including less-skilled immigration, and it would have
granted millions of illegal immigrants a path to legal status without first
guaranteeing that future illegal immigration would be reduced. Yet it is Rubio
who is best positioned to make the case for melting-pot nationalism, mostly
because of his optimistic and inclusive tone. If conservatives are to win the
war over our national identity, they will do so by appealing to a hopeful
vision of a more united and prosperous America, not by catering to fear and
resentment. If they fail to do so, if they allow bombast and chauvinism to
drown out the compassionate case for integration and assimilation,
conservatives won’t just lose elections — they will endanger the American
future.
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