October 22, 2007
New York Times
Comment -Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.
We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities and is based on good sense and fairness. But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide, and a national mood of frustration and anxiety that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear. Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately on an entire population of people, documented or not, who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor. By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.
The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions. And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.
In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones. In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like “spoiled, rich-kid brat” and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers. Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.
[ what might be done? ...]C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.
And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.
The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers. They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions. And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed.
In economic hard times, it is all too common to focus on those getting the jobs that are left, not on those who set what policies in place that led to us having so few jobs in the first place. It's closer and easier to stereotype and rally around.
Historically, this has often led to hatred against precisely the latest group of people we just attracted and imported, or even "Shanghai-ed" and virtually enslaved, to do dirty work at low pay that no one else wanted to do. Many groups have held this spot - Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Irish, Chinese railroad workers in the mid 1800's, Italians (Sacco and Vanzetti), and currently it seems to be "Hispanic-surnamed" that have become the focus of hatred and blame for economic hard times and pain and frustration and job losses that they had nothing to do with creating.
It seems it's not enough that they are subjected to working conditions in migrant labor or meat-packing that are nightmares, (Like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) but then we have to get angry at them for having taken on such work in the first place and done it for us and in our name.
I think the actual causal loop that slowly deepens is this: first some random group of powerless people is exploited, then we can't live with ourselves and the fact of our being exploiters of decent human beings, so we solve that by "dehumanizing" the group we're currently exploiting which lessens the pain and justifies the sub-minimum wage, which makes them easier to exploit if not actually "deserving" of being exploited to "get even" with them for some never-named crime.
It is a feedback loop where our own guilt and actions lead to beliefs which lead to actions in a downward spiral - driven by a mistaken attempt of our own minds to reduce the conflict between our actions and our self-image as being "good decent people" who would never harm innocent people.
A generation later we snap out of this hypnotic trance, and can't figure out why we thought that particular group of people were "bad" when it now is obvious they aren't ... it's this OTHER group of people who are now "obviously bad."
So a few cases of "bad people" are magnified and echoed by TV and media until we think these represent the norm, and that all "those people" are "that way" - whatever it is this time. It seems to take a generation or longer to undo the damage caused by these successive waves of hatred-as-national-policy - a sort of "genocide-lite".
But so long as attention focuses on some target of choice, it distracts us from getting back upstream to the root-cause problem, and fixing it. We should be asking "Why are there so few jobs left?" and one that is so common we don't even ask it "Why do I and my wife have to work three or four jobs when my grandparents could make do and get by on just one?"
Put another way - "Why is my life going downhill when the TV says things are getting better? Who can I blame for this? It must be someone's fault!"
Well, it's not the fault of other people who are in the same boat as you, for starters.
There are two larger forces at work here. First, a basic law of economics or pressure of any kind - in an open world, "real wages" will tend to even out around the globe. It it is as easy to order a widget to be made in Thailand as next door, and they charge much less abroad, money will flow to Thailand, raising their average wage and standard of living, and lowering ours. That's huge and dominates what's going on around us and has been going on for the past 50 years.
Globalization and arrangements like NAFTA may speed it up, but it will happen regardless, one way or another. The pressure just finds some way to leak out and equalize.
So one fact of life we can count on is that Asian standards of living will go up, and our own standards of living in the USA will go down, regardless what policies we follow, unless we figure out how to make the "pie keep growing." Lately, this shows up as wages and bank accounts grow by 2 percent a year, and the global purchasing value of the dollar falls by 8 percent a year - we earn slightly more, viewed locally, but it and our pension savings are all worth a lot less so we can afford to buy fewer things for even more money.
The only escape clause is if we can make the "pie keep growing." We'll get back to that.
A second fact of life is that the very rich are more or less addicted to the "pie growing" life and tend to make sure that their total income continues growing.
In the US then this produces a whipsaw effect, as the rich have to extract even more and more wealth from the poor in order to keep their own income rising in a falling world. So not only is there less and less real wealth to go around, but most of us get a smaller and smaller share of it to keep. Again, it is not likely that any human force will change that trend.
A third and scary trend is that the very rich see the USA in decline and are moving their bases of operations off the sinking ship, and moving their headquarters offshore to someplace like Dubai, as Halliburton did recently. Since much of the world has rising standards of living, there are some pretty nice places out there now, with way more open space and better and cheaper health care than the US can provide.
The effect of that is equivalent to the rich pulling their kids out of public schools - which then lose the students, the income, and the influential parents caring what happens to the schools, and leads to yet another downward spiral of schools getting worse and more rich parents pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools.
All three of these changes are "structural" not "cyclic" - which means the past is not a good guide to the future, and these changes will just keep on going, not reverse and return to some mythic equilibrium if we just wait long enough.
In short, the dismal picture is that, unless the pie can be made to grow, the average person in the USA will lose on all three fronts - falling in health, education, and welfare, let alone their paycheck and job quality. We can't ever cure this by shutting some group out with immigration policy, because these changes aren't due to something that immigrants do or did.
In fact, it is the immigrant populations that tend to keep revitalizing the nation and providing the new growth that finds the one way out - new growth of innovative new approaches and industries.
As I've discussed in numerous other posts, the real hope is in "synergy" or the unlimited upward power of collaboration. It is precisely in the niche-space created between our own culture and other cultures, interacting creatively, that new life and new growth and new hope are born and flow into this world.
Here's the problem. For that to happen, for creative power to exceed the normal power of decline and decay, we need to have the largest "angle" possible between our own culture and each other culture. If you think of an angle as the point of a piece of pie, the amount of pie goes up as the angle at the point goes up. More angle = more pie.
If we interact well with another culture, we want the largest angle (most pie) we can get, which means we want them to be as different from us as we can stand and still interact.
We need, in other words, "unity in diversity". If they are identical to us, the angle is about zero and the slice of pie will barely matter.
So, the only policy that will work in the scenario I just described is one where we are very open and specialize in finding and dealing creatively and cooperatively with as many diverse other cultures as we can, treasuring their difference from us as our joint asset, which it is.
The worst possible policy in that model would be to (a) shut our borders and cut down interactions with others, and (b) avoid dealing with people who are different, or try to make everyone the same as us.
Parochialism, inter-group hatred, conformity, and higher walls of isolation are the opposite of what we need to be doing as a national policy.
True wealth decays away, regardless, everywhere. It is a living thing. Some strategies regenerate new wealth faster than the decay rate, and those groups will grow. Building a wall around the US and cutting off the living interactions that generate new growth will not, and cannot possibly "sustain" our wealth -- those policies will simply guarantee that no new growth will occur and hasten our decline.
The statistics are plain to see. Other countries have passed the US and are pulling further and further ahead in health of their populations, in skill and knowledge, in industry of all kinds, etc.
The last thing we need now is to cut off our interaction and ability to learn from them.
One measure of health of a population is simply average height, which reflects how healthy, overall, our childhood was for us. Healthier people tend to be taller. This year the USA finally lost the place of tallest country, and the average Dutch males is now taller than the average US male by almost an inch. "Size doesn't matter" but the implications do.
We need to take down the barriers to embracing global unity in diversity, not put up new ones of hatred and fear, if we are going to start growing again economically.
I should comment that I don't support these ideas because the Baha'i Faith tells me to - I support the Baha'i faith because it has been preaching this "unity with diversity" message for over 150 years and I'm finally understanding why that is so important and how all the feedback loops and emergent system effects work together.
