Settled, Not Immigrant
Big Difference
Virtually anytime someone talks about America and the topic of immigration, they will say, “We are an immigrant country”. I have been guilty of it myself. No more. I was pondering this as the dumb and misguided amnesty bill winds its way through Congress.
America is NOT an immigrant country. It is a “settled” country where immigrants decided to come. Without the Settlers, no immigrants.
There is a gigantic difference between what immigrants walked into and what the people on the Mayflower walked into. Post Mayflower, other settlers came. If I were categorizing immigration, I wouldn’t say it started happening until after 1700 at least.
Of course, there were several waves of immigration. Post Civil War, Germans came in great numbers, as did Scandinavians. The Irish came. Then the Italians. Virtually every country in the world can identify when there was a mass migration from that country to America. Our ideas of immigration in both popular television/cinema center on the early 1900s when people came through Ellis Island. But it happened before that, and it happened after that.
America was settled. Then it fought for independence. Once it was an independent country, people en masse took the risk to immigrate here. You don’t hear about a lot of immigration from 1620-1776 because it was so darn hard to scratch out a living in the New World compared to the Old World. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 also offered plenty of space for people to come and try their luck in America. But, it wasn’t until Lewis and Clark navigated it and reported back that the news spread.
The Settlers were the original risk takers. Immigrants certainly braved risks to come here, but at least what they were coming to had structure and cadence to it.
We have had a lot of illegal immigration over the last 50 years. I don’t care how long they have been here; if they came in illegally, they need to be deported.
That being said, I highly value immigrants, and I believe America needs a robust immigration system. Instead of the cultural norm being about “becoming American” the norm has been valuing where you came from.
When you immigrate here, you become an American first and foremost. Speak English. Learn and adopt American cultural values. The melting pot is exactly that. Singularity melts into America. I remember talking to my friend Leo Melamed about coming to America. He tried to Americanize himself as fast as he could. You read about people like Lou Gehrig, whose parents came over from Germany. They tried to Americanize themselves as fast as they could. There are billions of stories like that.
Many immigrant communities come here and then try to make where they are just like their home country they came from. Why? When I get in chats about cultural differences between Europe and America, if we get testy, I always tell them there is a reason our ancestors left Europe. It sucked. You weren’t free, and today, they still aren’t truly free.
We have also seen people bastardize the meanings of the 14th-16th Amendments. Those were for the former slaves whom we fought the bloodiest war in American history to secure freedom for.
I strongly say no to things like amnesty. It compromises the people who came here legally. It makes a mockery of the system. It sends out bad incentives.
Legal immigrants are a part of our country. Let’s fix the immigration system instead of finding easy ways out.
The whole problem with this debate is framing it as a binary. Immigrants are not uniformly good or uniformly bad.
Once upon a time "discriminating" was a compliment, e.g., discriminating taste. We need to be discriminating about immigration, and immigrants.
Some things should be no-brainers. EG, MS-13 members. The challenge is that the quality of discriminating depends on the amount of information. Ruling out entire countries is likely too crude, but national origin is correlated with desirable and undesirably characteristics and behaviors. Taking more information into account is more costly.
Which is another reason to go to a price mechanism. Willingness and ability to pay is strongly correlated with desirable characteristics and behaviors. Markets economize on information. Here is a perfect place to exploit that.
Well done again! I am the son of immigrants. My parents came, in the 1950s, in search of better lives (they were fleeing communism (Ukraine) and La Violencia (in Colombia.) They learned English - but my siblings and I we grew up trilingual - and they became citizens as quickly as they could.
For them, it was an absolute privilege to be able to live in the United States. They were super proud to be Americans. While we lived in housing that was partially subsidized, my parents never sought or received government handouts. They worked their tails off to make sure they could send us to Catholic schools. I thank them daily for their sacrifices, which were plentiful.
Illegal immigrants all should be deported. My parents would agree with me completely.