Your humble author has long held a view, with some refinement, regarding legal immigration and what ought to be America’s policy thereregarding. To wit: Since America is the civil and societal heritage we hold in common, rather than blut und boden bereft of a uniting ideal, we should not be opposed to augmenting our numbers with those who embrace and take to heart those fundamental pillars that make America superlative amongst nations. To this end, we ought to take in such who wish to become American, but no more than we are capable of assimilating and only amongst those who desire to assimilate. Complimentary to this, we should seek to export American ideals, the American way, and any other cultural aspects that can supplant those aspects in the foreign realm that run counter thereto. It is that core American essence that we hold in common that we should seek to maximize. The particulars, of course, can and will change, with reasonable people disagreeing therewith.
But it is that essence or unique civilization, even within the broader Western Civilization, that is the core dynamo of our innovation and prosperity. Sober and rational people can disagree as to what that is since it was not some proscriptive ideology, but a descriptive one over which people can disagree, again, over the particulars. If history is any true guide, than it has shown that what that is, however it may be described or explained, is far superior to any and all other civilizations, nations, peoples, cultures, or—most importantly—ideologies in the world, and has been since the very founding of the United States of America.
What, then, of immigration and it’s the effect on America’s vitality?
To say that immigration either causes or prevents cultural and economic stagnation is to engage in a false dilemma fallacy which begs the question whose answer revolves around the question of immigration. Yet, some foolishly insist on so begging said question, and quite laughably in the attempt.
Such is the begging from one Dr. James Allan who emphatically agrees with Vice-President J. D. Vance. But first, if you’d be so kind as to indulge your quite humble author, I’d like to note the usage of the title “Dr.” Unlike many, I have no objection to someone with any type of doctorate degree using the title “Dr.” even if they aren’t a physician, dentist, or vetrinarian. In a professional setting, it is even appropriate. Dr. James Allan is a professor of law (i.e. a Juris Doctor); though it is customary to indicate being lawyer who passed the bar with “esquire” after their name, it does not enrage me that Dr. Allan uses “Dr.” here. I point this out only to highlight how the potential reader would react to this based on the thrust of the opinion rather than as a general approach.
To return to the commentary by Dr. Allan in question, his conclusion is stated in the article title, specifically that “[t]he West is Stagnating Due to Mass Immigration”. Of note, your humble author is well aware that headlines are often chosen not by the author, but by the editor, so that will not be held either for or against him. But with that accurate conclusion in mind, which frames the entire narrative Dr. Allan lays out, several glaring leaps in logic and engagements in fallacies galore are presented.
In blaming “immigration” as the causal factor in “stagnation”, one must note that Dr. Allan cites evidence not of its impact on America, but on other countries. Rather than arguing from a place of ceteris paribus, he compares apples and oranges to come out tomatoes! At best he, and Vance, point out a correlation between immigration and stagnation of foreign countries, abet of Anglosphere countries, and declares immigration causative of stagnation, all while ignoring the far more plausible explanation: Immigration in the modern era isn’t the cause of stagnation, but that immigration is a consequence of a more endemic stagnation, at least as “endemic” is defined based on “Western Civilization”.
Ironically, Dr. Allan stumbles upon a sensible truth which somehow escapes him like time escaping from the temporary accuracy of a stopped clock. It isn’t “immigrants” but rather the “Keynesian overlords” that are to blame. Not immigrants, but an endemic economic ideology that caused stagnation.
But rather than even pause to contemplate that, it is used as an excuse to condemn rising GDP as simple an obsession over a number that can be manipulated by adding warm bodies via immigration. Dr. Allan treats immigrants as a diminishing return whereby any additional economic wealth they create comes, at least in part, from the economic wealth of the people already there. This is beyond ridiculous. Any person, native or immigrant, who produces wealth does not do so by stealing some birthright wealth from another. If there is competition, that competition can still happen regardless of whether it comes from a fellow native or an immigrant. On the contrary, by adding to the total wealth, more wealth overall can be created and more opportunities can arise. To disagree with this, ironically, is to validate anti-natalism views of economics: Whether it is from a growing native population or from immigrants, the effect is the same. Yet many of those people decrying immigrants due to more people “tanking” everyone else’s prosperity, nonetheless desire more people from the “native stock”, though would not more people from native stock do the same as from immigrant stock?
This very much seems like a rather lame attempt to justify the purity of blut for the sacred boden.
But Dr. Allan does point out that there is an effect from inviting in those who “don’t share our values”. Putting aside the fact that “values” are just “ideas”, which Vance has openly disparaged as detracting from blut und boden. This is why we see the near perpetual conflation of ethnicity (at least from a physiological/genetic point of view) and culture. It is quite possible for people of different genetically ethnic backgrounds to have a single overarching culture while those of the same or similar genetically ethnic background to have fundamentally divergent cultures; the founding of America as an independent nation is evidence enough of that, particularly since that ethnic divide was non-existent and the cultural one minimally so.
This leads into what is America’s greatest strength, and one we should bolster: Our ability to culturally assimilate other cultures from around the world, regardless of whether that assimilation happens on soil of fully incorporated American territory or if it happens far and abroad.
Of hilarious note, this critique seems to also involve a raging missive against Covid lockdowns, limitation of the freedom of speech, and other such attacks on American (and Anglospheric, more generically) culture and heritage… while blaming those who would embrace such things while ignoring the internal cause of such assaults on our heritage.
Upon all those aforementioned ironies, the most ironic is that those cited examples of our freedoms and heritage being lost and replaced, such as loss of freedom of speech, come not from immigrants from Asia, Africa, or Latin America… but from Europe!
Those core values, those things that we as Americans hold in common, are not threatened now by people from Japan or India or Brazil. Our cultural supremacy and strength is what attracts so many people, just as it attracted people back in the 19th Century with foreign religions from foreign ethnicities and foreign customs from places such as Ireland, Italy, and Poland—all of whom assimilated. The threat comes not from them, the hoi polloi, of the world, but from the very same elitist ideals and ideology that Dr. Allan so represents.
“Democracy in America” is a wonderful starting point to understanding the difference between America and Europe, even with the same ethnicities between them. The threat comes not from those who come to embrace that, but from those who wish to replace that with ideas and ideologies that arose and festered in Europe after America’s independence from the U.K. and from Europe more broadly. The past centuries, from Rousseau and the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 to everything beyond in Europe, is the true threat to America.
The threat, demonstratedly, had come from ideas and ideologies that stand at odds with America’s heritage, culture, and even the very pillars of our society. That demonstrated threat came from Europe. Thus, it is very telling that so many object not to the invasive ideology that gnaws away at America, but to the specifics of the DNA of those who are here as if in gross distraction to other machinations.
None of this, of course, is to take the manichean opposite, that vibrancy and avoidance of stagnation is somehow caused by immigration. Indeed, America even without any additional immigration can be great and prosperous. The problem is not about individuals who do or do not immigrate… but foreign ideas that supplant our own, and the demonstratedly destructive ones have come from post-Western Europe.
tl;dr: Immigration is not the cause of America’s loss of innovation; it is at most a symptom; the real cause is endemic, and if there is a root foreign cause, that root cause comes from Europe, and which Vance is not opposed to.
