IMMIGRATION'S REAL VICTIMS
ALL AMERICAN GROUPS SUFFER BECAUSE OF IMMIGRATION
whilte their corrupted politicians play the violin and delay necessaryactions...
by Samuel Francis
One of the more remarkable aspects of the continuing debate over Americanimmigration policy is that the nation's liberal elites seem, ever so gradually,to be finally catching up with the people. For years opinion polls haveshown that a large majority of the American people, of all political persuasionsand all ethnic backgrounds, want less immigration. Yet year after year immigrantscontinue to flood across our borders as "opinion molders," electedofficials, business executives, and professional eggheads insist that massimmigration is really beneficial and its dangers are much exaggerated by"nativists" and "racists."
Only in the last couple of years have a few books been published that dissentfrom that view, and the appearance of these books, published by major NewYork houses, suggests that the elites are finally beginning to grasp whatuncontrolled immigration means for the people and the country they rule.What began as a popular protest against elite policies and preferences hasnow started influencing the elites themselves, even if the elites stilllike to imagine that they thought of it first.
Roy Beck's *The Case Against Immigration* is the most recent example ofa book published by a major publisher that challenges the conventional wisdomabout immigration (Peter Brimelow's *Alien Nation,* published last year,was the first), and although Beck has been actively engaged in the movementto restrict immigration for some years, he has done so as a card-carryingliberal. A former newspaperman in Washington, DC who has been deeply involvedin the social activism of the Methodist Church, Beck has seen firsthandwhat immigration means for ordinary Americans, not only underclass blacksbut also middle and working class whites. His book is an exhaustive documentationof the evil consequences that immigration is causing for these groups aswell as for the nation as a whole.
Beck's liberalism, however, is by no means of the polemical or partisanvariety, and the impression that his book gives is that he is a man deeplyand genuinely concerned about the injustices endured by the real victimsof immigration. He avoids most of the cultural arguments against immigrationthat conservatives tend to use, his main concern focusing instead on theeconomic effects of immigration on workers and on the social consequencesfor those Americans whose jobs and communities have been savaged by increasedpopulations they are unable to handle and ethnic and cultural conflictsthey neither wanted nor anticipated. Because he deals in detail with theimpact of immigrant invasions on several local communities in the Midwestand South, he winds up building a more credible and concrete case againstimmigration than many conservatives who have written on the cultural aspectsof the issue. As a result, his book is not only persuasive in its artfulcombination of facts, statistics, and analysis, but also is emotionallywrenching, as the reader is introduced again and again to communities thathave been destroyed or stand on the brink of destruction because immigrationhas served the private interests of the few.
WHO BENEFITS?
Beck's thesis is that "The federal government's current immigrationprogram primarily benefits a small minority of wealthy and powerful Americansat the expense of significant segments of the middle class and the poor.Attempts to protect the current level of immigration by wrapping it in thelanguage of tradition or humanitarianism generally distort both historyand the practical realities of our own era while diverting attention fromimmigration's role as a tool against the interests of the broad public."Put somewhat differently, Beck has discovered that elites make use of liberalismto justify policies that accrue to no one's interest but their own.
He makes clear that current immigration policies are the result of lawsand policies deliberately adopted by the federal government over the last30 years. Since 1970, some 30 million people, "the numerical equivalentof having relocated within our borders the entire present population ofall Central American countries," have been added to the U.S. populationbecause of immigration, and this influx has largely been the result of asingle legislative measure, the Immigration Act of 1965. During the congressionaldebates on that legislation, which was seen at the time as part of the civilrights revolution, its liberal sponsors argued repeatedly that it wouldnot result in large increases in immigration and that the immigrants whoarrived because of it would not alter the traditional ethnic compositionof the American population from its historic European base to a Third Worldbase. This was explicitly stated by Edward and Robert Kennedy, its chiefsponsors in the Senate, as well as by Representative Emmanuel Celler inthe House, President Lyndon Johnson, and various Cabinet officials. Withina decade, however, they were proved to have been wrong, as conservativecritics of the act predicted, and the consequences are with us to this day.
The 30 million immigrants who have arrived in the last quarter century areoverwhelmingly from non-European Third World societies, and as a whole theybring with them many of the ideas, habits, and manners that make their nativecountries Third World in character: the lack of a work ethic, an inclinationtoward authoritarian and often violent political behavior, and an unfamiliarityand uneasiness with the religious, educational, hygienic, scientific, andmoral conventions of the West that most Americans take for granted.
The U.S. Census Bureau has published at least two reports showing that bythe middle of the next century less than 60 years from now the United Stateswill cease to be a nation with a majority of its population descended fromEuropeans and will acquire a non-European majority. The conclusion is simple:Because of uncontrolled immigration, the United States is in grave dangerof becoming a Third World country within the next half century.
Of course, if immigration were halted now, there might be time for non-Europeanimmigrants to assimilate, both by acquiring Western habits of work and socialrelationships and by moving upward in the economic scales. But because immigrationis continuous because its apologists refuse to consider any reduction inthe number of immigrants the constant flow virtually insures that unassimilatedimmigrants will keep coming faster than those already here will begin adaptingto our culture and that America will assimilate to them rather than theother way around. That, after all, is why police departments, schools, andbusinessmen now find it necessary to train their personnel in Spanish, Chineseand various other languages, and a polyglot babble of other tongues virtuallyunknown in this country outside anthropology and linguistics departments.
HARMFUL TO WORKERS
While Peter Brimelow in *Alien Nation* concludes that even advocates ofimmigration do not argue that immigration is necessary for continued Americaneconomic growth, Beck goes him one better, arguing that immigration hasbeen demonstrably harmful to the middle and working class. It has been harmfulbecause by making available to employers an inexhaustible supply of cheaplabor, immigration has destroyed the bargaining power of workers. Middleclass wage levels and living standards have certainly declined since massimmigration began in the 1970s, but, not content with pointing to this curiouscoincidence, Beck also argues that the decline has been in part the resultof immigration. Thus, he cites a study of various large American citiesby a team of economists that compared wage levels before and after largewaves of immigration. According to Beck, the study "found that theaverage wage increase (not factored for inflation) was 26 percent lowerin high-immigration cities than in the average U.S. city and lagged a whopping48 percent behind wage increases in low-immigration cities." In California,state government studies have shown that "during the 1980s, under theheaviest immigrant influx of the state's history, California blacks lostmuch of their economic advantage." In Los Angeles, wage increases lagged31 percent behind Birmingham, Alabama and 47 percent behind Pittsburgh,both of which were low-immigration cities.
Mr. Beck also points out that it was during the era of restricted immigration,between passage of the 1924 Immigration Act and its effective repeal in1965, that black Americans made the most economic progress. Cut off frombottomless supplies of cheap foreign labor, employers were able to hireblacks, who moved from the South to the North by the millions in those decadesand were able to find rewarding work in a restricted labor market. It wasonly when alien labor again became easily available after passage of the1965 act that black Americans again started sliding toward their presentunderclass status. And, of course, for every American displaced from hisjob by immigrants, other Americans must pay through higher taxes for unemploymentcompensation and other benefits, as well as for the costs of controllingthe crime and dislocations that result from an immigration policy that hashelped impoverish both middle class whites and blacks and destroyed theirsocial institutions.
Beck's most compelling chapters are those that recount the effects of massimmigration on small towns and cities in the Midwest and the South, whereindustries like meatpacking and poultry processing have abandoned the Americanworkers who traditionally filled those jobs and have deliberately importedcheap and often inadequately trained foreign workers to replace them. Theresult has been unemployment for American workers, the disruption of theircommunities at every level, an increase in crime and ethnic tensions, theerosion of local education, uncertainty about the future, distrust of neighbors,and conflict between classes and races. Nor do the big corporations whoimport the foreign workers care much about them either. Workplace injurieshave increased as foreign workers who lack the training to cut meat havetaken over. The companies don't need to be too concerned about the safetyof their new peons since there are always more to replace them.
IT'S ALL LEGAL
It is important to Beck that readers understand he is not talking mainlyabout illegal immigration, a phenomenon that today almost every politicianassures us he is against. The workers who mainly take jobs from Middle Americansand urban blacks, and increasingly from managerial and technically skilledworkers in high-tech industries, are largely legal immigrants, as are thevast bulk of the 30 million who have arrived over the last generation. Thecurrent political chatter about "controlling the borders" andstopping illegal immigration is merely a sop to make voters worried aboutthe immigration crisis think that their leaders are really doing somethingabout it. But the truth is that despite public opinion and despite overwhelmingevidence as to its real consequences, this year's immigration bill did nothingto reduce or halt legal immigration.
It is precisely the refusal of the political, business, and cultural elitesin the United States to take any measures to control or stop immigrationthat is so frightening. The evidence for the real meaning of immigrationthe lowering of wages, the displacement of workers, the increase of crime,the heightening of ethnic and racial conflict, the disintegration of thebonds of nation and culture, and the sheer burden of numbers on naturalresources and an eroding infrastructure is now overwhelming, and still thepolitical leadership of both parties regurgitates the cliches about "anation of immigrants" and our "global responsibility."
Of all the books that have now been published on immigration, none makesmore clearer the deep division between elites and Middle Americans overthis issue than Beck's. Despite his profession of a continuing adherenceto liberalism, the book he has written ought to be at the fingertips ofevery citizen and every political leader who thinks or talks about immigrationand its consequences for this country.
* * Mr. Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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