July 30, 2010

Ideological Cancer

Filed under: Immigration — Tags: , , , , ,

Nativism is an ideological cancer that corrupts the principles conservatives claim to hold dear.  In order to defend immigration restrictions, conservatives must embrace arguments that are bitterly antagonistic to their vision of a free and self-responsible society.  And when conservatives embrace nativism, they drive away people sympathetic to their independent rhetoric.

First, any broad immigration restrictions will conflict with basic human liberties – the freedom to travel, the freedom to work, and the freedom to choose a place to live will all be infringed.  Whatever considerations conservatives use to justify immigration restrictions, they will have to suppose that individual rights are weaker than these considerations.  Conservatives may later find themselves incapable of defending supposedly weak rights against restrictions favored by progressives.

This is more than a theoretical problem.  The arguments in favor of forced unionization and trade restrictions are almost identical to the “utilitarian” arguments against immigration.  In all three cases, arbitrarily restricting the opportunities of some impoverished group – poor immigrants, unemployed workers, poor workers in foreign industries exporting to America – keeps the wages of other American workers higher.  These American workers are generally poorer than the consumers who would benefit from freer competition, but they are not as poor as those whose options are limited by regulation.  Immigration restrictions create a de facto “American Union”.

Conservatives sometimes try to distinguish these cases by insisting that American liberties are for Americans.  Things that can be legitimately done to foreigners cannot be done to Americans.  Americans derive certain special rights from their citizenship that foreigners do not.  This line of reasoning is antithetical to the traditional natural rights foundation of conservative thought.  Consider, for example, the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

The Declaration of Independence explicitly rejects the doctrine of special American rights.  It asserts that all people naturally have equal rights.  Governments do not create these rights, they merely protect them.  Furthermore, immigrants have no voice over the laws that govern their right to immigrate, so these laws are not “just powers”.  By espousing “American Rights”, conservatives have rejected the moral theory of the Declaration.

Instead, they implicitly accept some sort of communitarian ethic – in which rights are not natural, but a creation of the community.  Communitarian theories, popular among progressives, insist that rights are the product of, not the constraints on, legitimate democracies, because carefully constructed democratic institutions give people the ability to reason together carefully about difficult moral issues.  Conservatives should be very careful before they embrace communitarianism, because it ultimately supplants substantive morality with a supposedly moral process.  That process may produce immigration restrictions, but it will just as easily produce gun bans, progressive taxes, and the modern welfare state.

Finally, opposition to immigration makes the conservative movement attractive to people who are not conservatives, but merely bigots.  The nature of democracy may lead many conservative voters to unconsciously neglect the moral worth of immigrants, but other people are quite conscious of their vicious loathing for strangers.  They may hate Hispanics, foreign languages, people of color, or members of other religions, especially Islam.  It is politically infeasible for them to persecute these people directly, but they can put their prejudices into policy by supporting conservative immigration restrictions.  Creating a space for bigots within conservatism makes conservatism deeply unattractive to freedom-loving people who dislike bigots.

Immigration restrictions are not merely inconsistent with conservative principles.  They are an ideological cancer.  Political ideologies are not locked in stasis.  They shift with the conflicting pull of their competing components.  They grow or shrink in a marketplace of ideas.  Contradictions cannot continue indefinitely – they will either be expunged or take over completely.  Conservatism is no different.  Immigration hatred can drive people who love freedom out of the conservative movement, or it can drive the love of freedom out of conservatives.  Is this worth it?

said Wallace Forman @ 9:17 AM. Comments (1)

July 24, 2010

The Prudential Argument

Filed under: Immigration — Tags: , , , ,

The strongest argument that conservatives make against open immigration is the prudential argument.  This is the only uniquely conservative argument (applied to any topic) that I ever find particularly compelling.

Civilization, conservatives like to argue, is a mysterious, fragile thing.  Arguments about rights and utility are nice, but they presuppose a stable society whose roots we can never fully understand.  This implies cautious prudence.  Traditions and culture have evolved to safeguard civilization in ways we may not realize.  A massive influx of foreigners who do not share the American love of freedom and its self-reliant ethic could undermine our democracy.  If dominant American western traditions are diluted too suddenly, the cultural prerequisites for social cohesion may disappear, and America will be mired either in race wars or European style social democracy, depending on the doomsayer.

This has the form of a valid theoretical argument.  But none of its specific premises are particularly plausible.  For one, civilization is not as mysterious as conservatives like to argue.  When conservatives used this prudential argument to attack socialism, for example, they were missing the point.  The failure of socialist systems might have been mysterious to the socialists, but economists and classical liberal theorists from Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises had already given tangible reasons why planned societies would fail to match the dynamism of the free market.

What is mysterious to me is that conservatives believe America possesses a unique culture of liberty and self-reliance.  This view, inspired by a romanticized vision of the American past, is simultaneously blind to the American present.  As I see it, the United States is a run-of-the-mill bloated social democracy with all of the welfare state’s hallmarks – progressive income taxes, managed social insurance for the elderly and poor, heavily regulated public utilities, free public schooling through high school (perhaps soon through college?), guaranteed health care for the elderly and now for all citizens, consumer safety regulation.  What is left to be added to this cradle-to-grave behemoth?  These entitlements are guarded hungrily by an electorate that only pauses to decide which problem government should “solve” for it next.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about this government.  America today is only marginally different from other developed western democracies, the misconceptions of American and European leftists and rightists notwithstanding.  If immigration upsets the social democratic order, so much the better.  Why not suppose that determined immigrants would in fact import a culture of self-reliance now sorely lacking?  One of America’s truly unique features is its immigrant heritage, its history as the product of individuals who took their destiny into their own hands and worked to build a better future.  This, of course, is exactly the unique feature that “traditionalists” are trying to undo.

In point of fact, America’s immigration laws were not the product of any reasonable concern about democratic stability.  Beginning most significantly with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, they were the simple product of racist sentiment toward foreign groups Americans feared or (literally) could not understand.  A culture of xenophobia, evolved or no, is not worth maintaining.

What if it were in fact the case that immigrants intended to vote away notional American freedoms?  This would be unfortunate.  But could we stop it?  We were not able to stop the current 12 million illegal immigrants who came to this country.  Their children will be citizens whether conservatives like it or not.  If conservatives want to worry about the electoral problems of immigration, they should worry about the problem created by alienating a huge and growing chunk of the American populace.

said Wallace Forman @ 9:11 AM. Comments (0)

July 20, 2010

The Right is Wrong on Immigration

Filed under: Immigration — Tags: , ,

There are many things I like about the conservative movement.  The conservative Heritage Foundation, for example, espouses principles of free enterprise, limited government, and individual freedom.  These are principles I share all the way down to the core of my moral vision.  On many political issues I find myself agreeing with the rhetoric of conservatives and even sometimes the proposals of the main conservative political party – the Republican Party.

But on the single political issue I care most about, prevailing conservative opinion seems to me so audaciously, breathtakingly wrong that I scarcely believe that I truly have any principles in common with conservatives.  Or that c­onservatives have any principles beyond simple xenophobia and a national collectivism.

That issue is immigration.  In my hubris, I continue to hope that most conservatives simply haven’t thought the issue through.  Most, though not quite all, of their rhetoric, I believe, bears this out.  In the spirit of this somewhat bold assumption I wanted to take the opportunity to lay out in moderate detail why I think the arguments against open immigration are either badly wrong or wrongly bad – or both.  I will be posting a new section of my argument on this blog every day for the next week and a half or so.  It may take a while before I get to your favorite argument for walling foreigners off from America, but if I neglect it in this series altogether then please let me know.  If the arguments I do make are weak, sound off in the comments!  The sections of my argument, subject to possible revision, will be as follows:

* The Moral Obviousness of Open Immigration

* The Rule of Law

* National Security

* The Utilitarian Argument

* The Prudential Argument

* The Externalities of Immigration

* Fairness

* The Bad Analogy

* The Psychology of Nativism

* Ideological Cancer

* Systemic Forces

* Credit Where it is Due

* Conclusion: What Should We Do?

* Addendum: What About Citizenship?

said Wallace Forman @ 10:07 AM. Comments (3)

May 30, 2009

Worth Reading: Why I am Not a Conservative

Filed under: Worth Reading — Tags: , , ,

by Hayek

In this essay – apparently tacked on to some editions of The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek explains why he is not a conservative – and why he does not love conservatism.  Conservatism, says Hayek, is not an ideology, but an attitude.  As such, it has some practical value but no inherent validity.  Hayek prefers an ideology – of freedom, whatever it is called.

The essay is available here.

said Wallace Forman @ 5:41 PM. Comments (0)

September 12, 2008

Partisan Slanders

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , ,

Democrat accusations of religion-bating have persisted through the campaign.  It’s a well-established among progressives that Republicans exploit racial or religious bigotry by spreading false rumors about liberal candidates’ affiliation with various disfavored groups – Muslims, blacks, jews, homosexuals, etc.

Obama himself is so worried that he set up a “Fight the Smears” section on his website.  Recently, he complained about Republican intransigence in a television interview:

Mr. Obama, who is a Christian and often proudly speaks about how his faith has influenced his public service, said he finds it “deeply offensive” that there are efforts “coming out of the Republican camp to suggest that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith.”

The exchange came after Mr. Obama said that Republicans are attempting to scare voters by suggesting he is not Christian, which McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said was “cynical.”

Asked about it on ABC, Mr. Obama said, “These guys love to throw a rock and hide their hand.”

What has always bothered me about the race/religion/etc-baiting complaint, is that I have never actually met anyone who was race-baited.  Perhaps that’s only testament to the enlightened company I keep…

What I do see is the constant traffic in liberal horror-stories on leftist blogs, email lists, and among my Democratic friends.  They agree that identity baiting is a constant, organized tactic, a substantial portion of Republicans either are racist or employ racism, and that, specifically, Barack Obama’s candidacy has been hurt by widespread bigotry.

Since high school, and throughout college, most of my friends have identified casually as liberal, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, or libertarian.  When I pressed them to identify the root of their political affiliation, they usually pointed to revulsion at conservative homophobia, religious zealotry, nativist paranoia, and ethnic bigotry.  Only a few embraced redistributive principles; most defined themselves by what they opposed.

To them, conservatism was the evil in society.  Conservatives had been the racist bigots of To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved, the theocrats of Inherit the Wind and The Crucible, and the fascists of Number the Stars.  In history they had been the Inquisition in Spain, the Catholic Church that persecuted Galileo, the plantation owners in early Latin Americas, the British in the revolutionary war, and, again, the fascists.  It didn’t matter if the pigs of Animal Farm and the Roosevelt who had ordered the Japanese Internment were technically leftists.  Even if left governments could be bad, the badness in society was always conservative.

So if reports of isolated conservative intransigence do not bother me much, it is not because I believe the reports are false, nor because I think that conservative slanders are acceptable.  I do not.  They do not push me to the left because they seem to me to fuel a much more powerful slander: the leftist rhetoric that conservatives are by default bigots and fanatics, that an identification with the right is a mark of stubborn ignorance and an endorsement of arbitrary hatred.

As idiotic as rumors about Obama’s Muslim heritage may be, his counter-accusation that McCain would deliberately and explicitly appeal to racism was just as unfounded and immeasurably more potent.  Where Republicans turn against fellow partisans who hint at racist sentiments, Democrats can comfortably attribute the unholiest of taboos – racism – to their opponents without evidence or fear of consequences.

Ultimately, it’s all a distraction.  Rumors about Barack’s religion and Republican bigotry are irrelevant to the real policy questions.  They have no bearing on the merits of the welfare state, the importance of universal healthcare, or the proper vigor of our foreign policy stance.  If it all comes down in the left’s favor anyway, if half of the progressive ranks define themselves against an ugliness that is nine-tenths fantasy, then I’ll count the score as settled.  I’ll go ahead and vote for the policies I favor, rather than the bogeyman of the culture I oppose.

said Wallace Forman @ 4:12 PM. Comments (0)