Excerpts from Unguarded Gates -
A History of America's Immigration Crisis
by Otis L. Graham, Jr.

Chapter 19: Dogmas of the Past

There are many signs that the Second Great Wave, which can in retrospect be discerned in the American Southwest in the 1920s and began in earnest in the 1960s, will not be controlled as was the first. Immigration momentum has been allowed to build up over decades, and mainstream politicians seem both intellectually and politically paralyzed. Sociologist Douglas Massey seemed to summarize the situation in 1999, when he declared that the United States was now "a country of perpetual immigration," because "a significant reduction in the immigration rates no longer can be legislated." There will be no pause, he thought; the stream will only grow. Any "migration flow," noted Myron Weiner, "once begun, induces its own flow" through networks of information and contacts. Western democracies, David North told an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (DECD) group in 1991, "cannot cope with illegal immigration." The unique porosity of America's borders made it the leading though not the only Western society struggling in the 1980s and 1990s with mass immigration. Having themselves launched the First Great Wave, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the rest of Europe were - with the neo-Europes, now the United States, Canada, and Australia - the favored destinations of the second wave, its annual size estimated by Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington as 130 million people (100 million legal immigrants, 19 million refugees, 10 million illegals) in 1990. A UN tally in 2002 raised that number to 175 million, a doubling since 1975. More were on the way across borders, and generally from south to north. We are "destined to be overwhelmed by people from the failed societies of the South," commented France's Pierre Lellouche. You are indeed, said Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohamad in 1997: "We do have the ultimate weapon. People are more mobile now. They can go anywhere.... If we are not allowed a good life in our countries ... we should migrate north in our millions, legally or illegally. Masses of Asians and Africans should inundate Europe and America." From his Malaysia back across the Middle East to Algeria, these "Asian and African masses" were Muslim masses, the prime minister might well have said, his phrase "the ultimate weapon" encouraging questions of whether they would come as migrants or settlers and warriors.

When the UN Population Division reported in 2002 that 175 million people currently live in a country other than where they were born, this was 3 percent of global population. The UN did not speculate on how many more might be driven or tempted into border crossing by the mounting disruptions of climate change, civil unrest, drought, or war. Failed states in Africa and the Middle East-and on the edge of Europe, where high fertility Albania had sent migrants north to further destabilize an unstable Yugoslavia-set refugee masses in motion. As the century ended there seemed an increase in stories of dislodging crises from teeming, 1.2 billion peopled China - reports of water shortages and blowing soils, massive rural displacement of labor, unrest, discontent, all generating a restless flow of perhaps 100 million, or one-tenth of the population, toward the cities, as China slipped from a controlled communist society toward the chaos of transition. Harbingers of a potentially immense overseas migration of Chinese began arriving in the 1990s in rusty steamers carrying smuggled immigrants again to the Golden Mountain - the rusty Indonesian tanker Golden Venture running aground outside New York harbor in 1993 with 286 Chinese would-be immigrants (most were given asylum) and other landings in Vancouver, Los Angeles, even Savannah, Georgia. Another potential source of even larger immigration pressures on the United States was nearby Mexico. That nation's population ended the century at 100 million and, despite downward trends in fertility rates, a doubling time of thirty-two years, massive unemployment, political unrest, and millions of channels to family and kinship anchors north of the border in what was often called Greater Mexico. "We are really just at the start," observed writer David Simcox, "of a worldwide phenomenon that is going to intensify and irrevocably change many countries." "Can either Europe or the U.S. stem the migrant tide?" Huntington asked, with considerable doubt revealed in his tone.

Unlike the First Great Wave that sent the full component of the excess populations of Europe spilling into the population-thin neo-Europes, the twentieth-twenty-first-century Second Great Wave out of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa will not solve the problems of the people exporting societies. Contemporary migratory flows amount to only 1 to 2 percent of the world's annual increase of population. There is no relief from population pressures here. Whether remittances from First World wages are a beneficial form of foreign aid to people-exporting countries is a contested issue, and even if helpful, they were matched or overmatched by the drain from the developing world of scarce professional and technical talent that decides to abandon the struggling homeland. The first of these modern mass migrations moved the surplus populations of Europe to regions with space. The second cannot similarly ease the epochal human crowding that is ahead for humanity but can only insure that all spaces fully share it.

Thus as we move deeper into this testing time when the human population finishes the surge through six billion to ten, and recalling Rostow's language about "a global crisis of Malthusian consequences," it is clear that migration pressures will be an increasingly central issue in the West.

In answer to Huntington's question, most Western elites continue to urge the wealthy West not to "stem the migrant tide" but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until the horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all, ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet. In this vision of human solidarity, immigration will have equally overpopulated and culturally altered every society. One result may well be the end of mass migration to the United States, because in that crowded place it will be risky to drink the water. Or perhaps it will be the former United States, its power for global mischief fragmented into successor regions in a post-nationalist, post-American future.

Or perhaps not. What are we to make of the signs that, whether or not this open-border instinct is wise advice, events may not quite stay on the track that Christian-sharing ethics or left-wing internationalism or corporate cheap-labor appetites prefer? Mass immigration seems in these times to meet with the approval of American and European elites, but it tends to have disruptive political effects among ordinary citizens in receiving societies. Already in Europe and in Australia at the hinge of centuries, the inability of established governments to limit immigration has produced fast-growing restrictionist factions or new parties. The swirl of Western politics is complex and much more is involved than immigration. But uncontrolled immigration has in the past been a reliable formula for generating a populist-nationalist politics.

Many have wondered how long the United States, the nation receiving more immigrants than all of Europe together, can avoid this pattern of populist churning and new leaders and parties combining mass migration backlash with other complaints against ossified and unresponsive governments. While there is little sign of this as yet in American or Canadian political life, events in Europe and Australia suggest that mass immigration in the face of passive or ineffective governments poses a hazard for those grouped around the cautious center. They can ignore complaints and suppress discussion and thereby cede the issue to nationalist parties of order, which may mean invigorating populist, possibly rightist politics and parties within the West, with all of the dangerous consequences that history suggests.

Or moderate political leadership in the West can respond to public resentment of expansive immigration regimes and summon the political will to bring immigration down to modest numbers selected by the nation to forward its own interests. Nothing prevents a small-immigration policy from including commitment of larger amounts of aid for developmental and refugee assistance overseas. Indeed, nothing prevents it from taking left populist directions, stressing the protection of American jobs and labor standards. A politics that includes a small-immigration component will be a nationalist politics, and people with short memories may assume that the entire American left is on another track, irremediably two decades into a cosmopolitan antinationalistic internationalism. Yet there are at least intellectual stirrings of a new liberal-centrist nationalism, with a growing appreciation of the linkage between strong feelings of solidarity as Americans and the reform movements of the progressive era and the New Deal. A small but growing number of American conservatives have already broken with Reagan-Bush open-borderism.

In the American past, low levels of immigration, whether brought by global events or public policy, have reliably led to economic and social benefits, and also cleared the way for our politics to focus on homegrown economic and environmental problems from which ethnic politics steals attention. Given our place and time in global history, it is possible to see here a chance in the United States and across the West for visionary leadership, providing to the world models of appropriately sized populations with lifestyles so altered that at long last the developed nations are no longer making a disproportionately large negative contribution to global warming and planetary ecosystem abuse. Nations' responsibilities to pass on a sustainable ecology and economy to their posterity trump their obligations to foreigners, and will finally have been put first. When global flight, with attendant brain drain, is increasingly infeasible and even condemned, all nations will be obliged to face and fix the problems of overpopulation, poverty, and environmental decay where they are.

Significantly restricting immigration flows as part of new national paths in the West toward sustainability is not all that should be done in the West and would be morally and politically difficult to defend without a complement. Providing models for what nations should aim for instead of the endless growth that was the West's once-appropriate but in the long run disastrous trajectory is the highest challenge for the developed world at this transitional era. These models will repudiate large-scale immigration as a solution of the problems of any society, sending or receiving. The model is not Send Me Your Poor, but Liberty and Sustainability Enlightening the World. This was our original, now again timely, model, as an example, pointing the world where the high road ran. With that example should go increasingly generous birth control, technical and economic aid in helping poorer nations solve problems where they are, on their own paths to population stabilization and ecological sustainability. This promises to be a far better way to spend a dollar, pound, mark, or yen on impoverished peoples than relocating a small fraction but population-expanding number of them to the North, including much of their top talent.