Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column for National Review Online ignores the immediate debate about “amnesty” and “comprehensive immigration reform” to ask some deeper questions that impact more than just the United States.
Is immigrating from less-developed countries to the West a good or a bad thing, for host and guest? Is the immigrant angry at, or nostalgic for, the country he left? Is he thankful to or resentful of the country he has come to? Does the Westerner know why the other seeks him out or why he himself chooses not to emigrate to the non-West? These questions and dozens like them are not so much never answered as never even asked. The result is chaos.
Thousands of refugees from the mess in North and East Africa are hiring smugglers to ship them across the Mediterranean into the southern ports of Europe — often with tragic results, as boats sink and passengers drown. Any visitor to Athens quickly notices that tens of thousands of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Albanians have arrived illegally in Greece in hopes of reaching more prosperous Western European countries. In fact, the downtown of almost any European city is full of impoverished non-Western immigrants. Yet in ten years, some of those same Middle Eastern immigrants will demand space for new mosques, while they would never have allowed a church to be built in their homeland, and many newcomers will have complaints against their hosts about their own lack of parity with the established citizenry. Such is the strange effect of contemporary Westernism upon immigrants. …
… Something similar is snowballing on the southern border of the United States. Illegal immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America has been a challenge for the United States for over a half-century. Many of the symptoms are similar to Europe’s experience with unlawful immigration — as we saw last summer, with busloads of children heading northward across the border.
Government has abjectly failed in Latin America. These governments are at most indifferent to their people’s departure, and often encourage them to leave. Elites callously see multiple advantages in losing their own people, especially when remittances arrive in the billions of dollars and provide sustenance for those whom the government cannot or will not assist.
The exodus is sometimes seen as a safety valve: Potential dissidents and revolutionaries head northward rather than going to Mexico City to demand social justice and reform.
Within the United States, communities of poor immigrants can serve as powerful lobbying groups for even more immigration — as they do now in Europe as well.
