Was Ayn Rand an illegal immigrant?
Earlier this month was the birthday of Ayn Rand, the controversial philosopher and novelist, who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1926. Regardless of what one thinks of her ideas, there is no denying that she was a great American. When the American intelligentsia was playing footsie with Soviet communism, Rand unabashedly defended liberty and individual rights, America’s core values, famously declaring: “[The] United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”
But this proud naturalized American, who arguably did more than any contemporary figure to restore the faith of Americans in America, might have been hounded out of the country if one of our current crop of Republican hopefuls had been president when she arrived. Why? Because Rand lied and bent every rule to gain entry into the United States.
When Americans talk about illegal immigration their mental image is not of a dissent Russian writer with staunch pro-freedom leanings, it's more of semi-educated Mexican and Central American peasants sneaking across the Rio Grande. Americans tend to be somewhat sympathetic to those escaping totalitarian regimes, thus the Cuban wet feet / dry feet policy. Defecting from the Soviet Union even became a staple of American movies during the Cold War. It's not immigration per se that irks, it's who the immigrants happen to be and why and whence they came.
In the abstract that shouldn't matter. Literary genius or goat herder, so long as the newcomer is productive and not a burden on the public fisc, it matters little what the person does. An economy, even an advanced one, requires a wide variety of skill sets, including very simple ones. There is also no knowing what the goat herder, or their descendants, might accomplishment. The penniless immigrant making good is more than just a historical myth.
Now look at the issue close up. Canadians, even many conservatives, tend to view American attitudes toward illegal immigration as somewhat paranoid. Then again Canadians don't have a near-banana republic, filled with desperately poor people, on our southern border. Not yet at least. Another four years of Obama and even the Toronto Star might be seeing the necessity of guard towards along the Niagara gorge.
Drive through areas you knew well as a child, now changed by people who look and sound very different from yourself, and it is hard not to feel a slight uneasiness. I say this as someone who saw his old ethnic neighbour gentrified by WASPs. More than once I've wandered down College Street annoyed at all these "Canadians" mucking up the sidewalks. It's an irrational prejudice and it goes no further that a momentary impulse, yet it is visceral: These people belong don't belong here.
Is Old Publius a bigot? No, I think my Anglophilic credentials are in good order. College Street has clearly improved over the last twenty years. Certainly the land values have gone up. It's more of a tribal instinct at work. These aren't the bunch I know. It's not bigotry, it's a defence mechanism. You prefer to work with people whose language, culture and customs you understand. Something alien is something potentially threatening.
That those here are suspicious of those coming in is not irrational, up to a point it's a perfectly understandable reaction. The Anglo-Saxon bits of the Anglosphere are among the best bits of real estate on the planet. When people ignorant of our ways and customs show up, particularly in large numbers, it is perfectly reasonable to ask if the new bunch are going to seriously muck things up.
This reasonable apprehension, which used to be second nature to most Canadians two generations back, is now termed bigotry. Multiculturalism has intellectually disarmed our thinking on immigration policy. In the United States it plays end point on a political spectrum that stretches all the way over to pure nativism. Either everyone is the same and should be welcomed, or anyone different should be kept out.
Contrary to the hyper-ventilating by the Left, most American conservatives are not nativists. They are, however, afraid. When I read Mark Steyn's demographic doom mongering, or John Derbyshire's occasional mockery of "open borders fanatics" the sense I get is fear. I'm not trying to be disrespectful to either gentlemen, both of whom are personal favourites. I do think they've got a point, just that they've become a bit myopic.
The Right, by which I mean conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals, has been at the losing end of about fifty years of cultural warfare. Leviathan's grasp extends, personal liberty retrenches and the fiscal and demographic outlook keeps getting worse. More problematic that simple malignant shifts in public policy, is a deeper change in the culture. A nation of self reliant individualists is beginning to look like coddled collectivists.
Throw in a few million immigrants, largely unaware of their role as pawns of the Left, and the political math begins to look very bleak indeed. Until fairly recently the young tended to be, and remain, more statist in their outlook than the old. A steady diet of statist education since kindergarten has made the young accustomed to looking to big government as a benevolent teacher. While the internet, and the harshness of the modern economy, has made some of these victims of modern public education question what they've been taught, the odds still favour the collectivists.
So we've lost the young, some of whom will come around once they start paying taxes. We've also lost the immigrants, since they look upon the Left as their benefactors, though some seem to be peeling away now that they are paying taxes, and Jason Kenney keeps showing up at their meetings. It doesn't seem enough. The hijab and burqa clad women have gone from a rarity to a common sight in parts of Canada. The American equivalent being migrant Mexicans on the roadside. A few small victories aside - long-gun registry, the wheat board, Congressional victories in 2010 - the frontiers of the state keeping rolling outward.
This has breed a kind of Maginot Mentality among the American Right, and to a lesser extend here as well. Seal the borders, deport the illegals, and the danger will pass. The country will no longer be filled with Democrat / Liberal / NDP voting machines with foreign accents. The problem with that approach is the same as existed with the old Maginot Line: Big gaps.
It won't matter very much that you've thrown out every burqa wearer or Mexican in Canada and America, if your children espouse ideologies such environmentalism or multiculturalism. If the former takes hold, it's lights out for modern civilization. If the the latter takes hold any immigration restrictions will simply be lifted a generation down the road. That's assuming the United States is not fiscally insolvent at that point, in which case it won't really matter because we'll all be wearing potato sacks.
Immigrants failing to assimilate is only one piece of a larger puzzle. If you lose the commanding heights of the culture wars, anything else you do will just be a rear guard action.
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