Justifying the Restriction of Immigration

Jockey Street, responsible for the end of Tom Delay's career, has placed me in his crosshairs:

Essentially, I read them as John saying that he enjoys his privileged position and doesn't want to see the culture that he enjoys so much changed (or destroyed-- but cultures are rarely destroyed, generally only modified) and so he wants unappreciate, non-assimilating immigrants kept the hell out.

Yes, that's pretty much it. Jockey Street [in my reading] then goes on to say that it is a legitimate desire to retain majority status -- up to a point. The severity of the steps taken to ensure that cultural homogeneity should not morally exceed the actual harm done by its loss. I agree with that statement in principle.

Wants -- and I would say that the desire to maintain a certain lifestyle, a sense of privilege, a particular flavor of culture is in every way a "want"--are legitimate. We have every right to act on our wants, to seek the fulfillment of our own desires...up to a point. And that point, most of us would agree, comes when the fulfillment of our want conflicts with someone else's need. My desire to get loaded up and drive real fast so I can watch the colors go by in neat ribbons and swirls, for instance, is less important than the need of everyone else on the road to make it home alive, so I can't do that sort of thing. Even though sometimes I'd like to. That sort of thing. When weighing wants vs. needs or life vs. lifestyle, needs and life get priority, want and lifestyle have to be content with the back seat.

Driving out illegal immigrants would be an ugly business. It would, regardless of method, harm the immigrants in question. The harm that we should be willing to inflict would induce a moral cost which should not exceed the consequences of failing to drive them out. If the illegal immigrants were flesh-eating zombies trying to kill us all, that moral cost would be justified. However, our problem is primarily with Mexicans, a fairly civilized people who are coming here not to devour us but to work their way out of poverty:

If the immigration issues that you were discussing here were about life and safety, you'd have a lot of room to argue. To ask for secure borders in effort to keep bad people from hurting you is pretty rational. But that's not where you seemed to be going with these posts. That seems to be a different discussion altogether. You didn't express fear that a Mexican might come to your house and kill you, only that he might come to your country and force you to read signs written in Spanish or take away your privileged position in the culture.

Making these kinds of moral cost-benefit decisions is tricky because their variables are subjective and cannot be reduced to numerical form. What is the cost of not acting? Jockey Street is skeptical:

So I guess if your interest in keeping poor brown people from other countries out of your neighborhood is really all about enjoying the privileges you have and not wanting to see the things that you like changing, it's not entirely alright. To want to see some sort of regulation, to have an expectation that in some ways people assimilate (ways that will allow society to keep functioning), is understandable. But again, that doesn't seem to be what you were getting at.

Before I go (I've been rambling)--how different is what you're saying here from the rhetoric of racists not too long ago? "I have privileges, I enjoy them, I want to keep them." "I like my culture the way it is, I don't want it to change." Those words could have easily come out of the mouths of people opposed to civil rights (or even to the abolition of slavery) not so terribly long ago. Certainly, when the civil rights era (and the abolition of slavery, and women's suffrage) brought about significant changes in the culture and took a certain degree of privilege away from people who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying it. Would those people have been justified in opposing integration, abolition, suffrage? And I'd be willing to guess that you and I--both white, male, educated, privileged--live in very different worlds, have different takes on culture. Can your arguments for opposing immigration be applied to keeping people like me out of your neighborhood? If me and twelve of my friends were to move into your neighborhood and change the local culture, could you kick us out?"

This isn't about race. It's about culture and language. Multicultural countries rarely hold together or function with national unity and multilingual countries do even worse. If America has too many divergent cultures, it will not function effectively as a country. And given that many of the Mexican immigrants (legitimately) see the land that they are inhabiting as stolen from their country and that they are engaging in a reconquest, America will not survive as a polity in the future. The problem is not that there are a lot of brown people coming into our country. The problem is that there is a massive tidal wave of people (regardless of color) moving here from a nation immediately bordering ours who consider the land to which they are moving to be stolen from their own homeland and that their intention is to displace our national culture there with our own. They're colonizing us and even say it, openly and brazenly.

I get Jockey Street's point: is it moral to sacrifice the lives of innocent Mexicans for the sake of preserving our culture? I'm uncomfortable saying 'yes', but I'm going to -- within limits. I base that yes out of an extended view of the fundamental human right to property. A person has a right to preserve his house and belongings* from thievery. If a family -- even a poor one -- occupies the house of another without consent, it is stealing. A person has the right to declare his house his castle and determine the rules for guests who seek admission into it. He should help the poor, but it is reasonable for him to say "Yes, homeless man, I will help you find food and shelter and possibly a job, but you cannot live in my house." The body politic is a collective house that we live in which has property (territory) and rules for admission (immigration and visa laws). We have a moral impetus to help other, less fortunate nations, but also a propertarian right to set and enforce boundaries.

So by all means, let us permit Mexicans to immigrate to the US. As Jockey Street says, it is fair to set rules and regulations for such immigration. Sassimilationuld require assimiliation into American culture and language.

Why are the Mexicans not assimilating? Because there are so many of them that they do not need to assimilate. Our problem is not that we have Mexicans; our problem is that we have so many. The present population will never assimilate such vast numbers. We are like a snake trying to swallow too large an animal. The Mexican population is simply too huge for us to digest, as we did with European immigrants a century ago. I am not calling on us to get rid of brown people. What I am suggesting is that we only permit in as many immigrants as we can absorb.

The consequence is that many impoverished Mexicans will never be able to come to America, not to speak of the hundreds of millions of other people around the world who would love to come here and make money. Does that make me a cold-hearted SOB? Yeah, kinda. We could be more charitable and open up our hearts and resources to others, like homeless shelters do. But even homeless shelters have rules. They have only X number of beds and Y number of meals, and if demand exceeds supply, too bad. Well, America only has a certain amount of room before it ceases to be America. Take a number and wait in line.


*Yes, yes, Jesus said give all of your stuff to whoever wants it. But then again, if there is no right to property, why are we commanded "Thou shall not steal"?