I didn't mean this to be a long post. I started writing and just kept writing. I'll work this into a collection of essays etc that I am slowly coalescing into a political book.
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So today, I went to the thrift store. There were some good older school books. I felt tempted to buy one - a history book similar but not quite identical to (or as good as) the one which I used in high school. I re-read the part on Roman history - interesting to examine it again coming from a position of greater knowledge.
The section about the Romans was interesting in that it contained a lot of observations that would definitely not make it into a modern schoolbook, amongst them the claims that:
"The basic unit of Roman society was the family...this ensured order and stability..."
"Romans made good soldiers and were a successful civilization because they honored courage, discipline, and devotion to duty."
"...the Roman educational system declined into 'ridiculous amusements' and libraries lay empty..."
"...the Roman middle class was reduced to poverty..."
"Women had far greater freedoms in Roman civilization than Greek; they owned businesses and managed the household's affairs...the Roman ideal for a wife was dignified, loyal and strong."
"...the crushing taxes necessary to maintain a huge military establishment wiped out the Roman economy..."The author, however, also made some generalizations I thought were pretty over-generous to the Romans, amongst them the claim that it was because the Romans "usually treated conquered people with justice" that the conquered would "remain loyal to Rome even in troubled times". In reality, it had a lot more to do with the absolutely terrifying ruthlessness the Romans were capable of, and their carefully cultivated reputation for reliability thereof.
I also re-read the parts about the expansion of Roman citizenship and the effects this had on Roman civilization, making it more expansive but less cohesive. This policy was most dramatically advanced by Julius Caesar, granting not only citizenship but Senate seats to Gauls and Germans to establish a broad political base for his dictatorship. This was controversial at the time, but looking back 2000 years later we can see how it played out in the end, and with that perspective Caesar lacked, we can take a more constructive approach. I thought about how this could work for an American commander-in-chief.
I took a nap, and a few hours later I woke up with a sudden flash of insight into how to fix Mexican immigration.
Simply extend United States citizenship to everyone in the Americas.Sounds crazy, no? But it would solve the problem. And here is why.
To understand how to solve the problem of Mexican immigration, we must first understand why it is a problem. Mexican immigration is a problem because:
1. Mexican workers take jobs that, in theory, could or should be done by American citizens (though in practice they refuse to do so)
2. Mexican immigrants often do not integrate into mainstream American society as fast as would be preferred, often insist on continuing to prefer Spanish as their main language, and in doing so, create an unfair competitive advantage for dual-language speakers (which in practice means only other Latinos)
3. Opportunistic Latino "community leaders" use bullying, cronyism, sheer numbers, and distance in time and space between border regions and other parts of the country to drive political agendas of discrimination against non-Latinos and building political empires with public money, by disingenuously misrepresenting the actual issues in the border regions for political gain
Now, let's examine each of these problems, and how to change the immigration system to fix them.
1. Mexican workers take jobs that, in theory, could or should be done by American citizens (though in practice they refuse to do so) Ok. So why is it so? It's both easy and valid to say that it's because native-born Americans are lazy, but that's not really all there is to it. Besides their industrious and virile nature, Latinos have two very important advantages:
a) Because many Latinos are in this country illegally, employers prefer to hire them as they can pay them in cash, evade taxes for doing so, and bully and otherwise mistreat them without fear of legal action
b) Due in part to the latter and also the industrious nature of many Latinos, strong social networks have developed, connecting Latinos with potential employers and with each other, that enable them to more easily find employment. These social networks are exclusive to Latinos and often Spanish-language, effectively excluding English-speaking white and black Americans from working on farms or in civil maintenance even if they were inclined to. Cause and effect quickly become a single whole.
Point (a) is particularly interesting in that the perverse pragmatism of turning oppression and abuse into a social advantage (also see: the Jews) is not lost on Latino community leaders looking to build their private empires. As (a) has reduced in relevance over the years, with illegal immigration gradually declining and a greater proportion of Latinos are born in this country and are therefore citizens, Latino community leaders have sought to refuse to forfeit this advantage and compete with other Americans on even terms, and in its place, have advocated racist laws and policies aimed at establishing preferential hiring status for Latinos. (Ethnicity (check one): Latino [] Non Latino [])
In reality, of course, this approach is terrible for Latinos, and benefits only these small-minded community leaders, just like the feminists, affirmative action advocates, Indian chiefs, military pigs, fat cats, and every other self-interested group that claims their agenda will in some way help their constituency and/or the country at large. The approach is terrible for Latinos because these programs, which ultimately benefit only some Latinos, arouse enmity and resentment towards them all, and they destroy their future in this country not because of that enmity, but because it shackles their social progression to an unsustainable system of entitlement, rather than creating wealth and power for themselves.
So what if the United States instantly granted citizenship to everyone in the Americas?
Simple - the Latinos would lose their competitive advantage.
Employers would no longer have an incentive to exploit them, as they would automatically receive the same protections of American law as everyone else. This would destroy one of their key competitive advantages against native-borns. Latino social networks would suddenly become obsolete, deluged through sheer numbers and lost by overwhelming competition between individuals.
Immigration would dramatically increase for a few years, but thereafter, it would drop to zero as free immigration would make itself obsolete. Human osmosis would establish economic homeostasis and there would no longer be an incentive to move to America, as Latino migrant workers would be competing not only against natives, but against everyone else on the entire continent. In such an environment, they would have no competitive advantage against anyone.
The two best criticisms of this approach:
a) Granting citizenship to all citizens of the Americas would result in a tidal wave of poverty, overwhelming American public servicesIt sounds like liberal blather, but the truth is, poverty is a social condition, not an economic one. Immigrants in America are proof of that. The immigrants who have jobs and are regarded jealously by native-borns typically live a much more hardscrabble life, with fewer amenities, less leisure, and less economic security than, say, natives on welfare or part-timers.
You want proof? Where do you think the Chinese boat people who cook your fried rice sleep? Do you have any idea what the profit margin is on running a Chinese restaurant? What about Latino gardeners, garbagemen and other menial labor types, where do you think they sleep, how big do you think their food and luxury budget is?
What these very poor and desperate people have, that whites and blacks don't, is social networks and social enfranchisement. They have families, clearly defined social goals and aspirations. Such is the basis of social identity and the way out of poverty.
Furthermore: A truth, too easily and too often concealed by bigots looking for an excuse to hate anyone who isn't like them, is that social services
really aren't all that expensive. All the bitching about Mexican welfare mommas and police/fire protection for their barrio towns and educating their warrens of children conceals the reality that ballooning public deficits are driven by factors that have nothing to do with the burdens imposed by immigration, amongst them:
1) the unwillingness of the wealthy to pay their share, and that the wealthy have been paying less and less in taxes since 1945, while seizing more and more of the country's wealth
2) decadence and political partisanship have driven a sharp decline in the effectiveness of the American educational system, with destructive effects rippling through the entire economy
3) the bloated American military establishment, which now provides full-time, grossly overpaid employment for over five million Americans, has become a parasite that is killing the host
I'd like to make a digression here to examine the third point in greater detail, because I firmly believe that the role of the military in America's economic demise is both decisive and wholly overlooked. The simile of a "parasite killing the host" is a hackneyed one, applied to everything from the feminists to illegal immigrants to education to the fat cats, but I believe that the Old Lie protects the American military from the blame and condemnation it deserves for having done more to enrich itself while undoing this country's economy than anyone and anything else.
In a country of 300 million men, women and children, the American military employs 1.5 million active duty personnel, another 1.5 million reservists, and
about another five million in support industries. This includes not only manufacturers of military hardware, but also products and services of zero utility except as a means to support these very expensive welfare recipients. This includes industries such as base construction, food and transport services, medical and social support for so-called "veteran" families, fabrication of non-weaponized hardware such as proprietary computers and sundries with zero market viability, and expensive civil programs such as ROTC, the CIA/NSA, and the hordes of lobbyists, consultants, lawyers, civilian advisors and other hangers-on to the military system whose very expensive lifestyles are maintained entirely through the existence of military bloat and are counted as neither support industry nor uniformed personnel.
Claims to the effect that their existence is the fault of the civilian government is null and void as the military establishment would be unable to secure wealth and power for its uniformed personnel or its contractors without these snake oil salesmen in Washington, and it is by the will of the uniformed personnel that they are there, for those same people in the flesh have resisted efforts to trim the size of their fief by means unto treason.
8m moochers out of 300m, however, does not do the full picture justice.
The population of the US is 300 million, but the number of employed in this country is
only about 59 million. Working backwards, this means that, in effect, every working person in this country spends 14% of their income, the equivalent of an additional dependent, on supporting someone on military welfare.
Including unemployed and other persons, the ~$600B cost works out to $1,800/yr per man, woman, and child. The GDP of Mexico is $1.2Tn, and its per capita income is $11k. In simple terms, this means that for twice the annual upkeep of the American military establishment,
the United States could buy the entire produce and upkeep of everyone and everything in Mexico. The few stragglers heading over the border, or already here, are an economic pinprick by comparison. More importantly, those stragglers are actually capable of producing wealth and things people want and need. Mowing a lawn or harvesting grapes may not be as glorious as putting on a costume and doing silly walks around West Point, but it brings far greater benefits to the lives of average Americans. And those activities have far greater corollary economic benefits, such as lawnmower manufacture and sales of oak barrels. From simple and productive things, in time comes a sprawling economy.
We have considered such unimaginably vast piles of cash, but the real cost, the economic cost (as opposed to financial cost), is even greater. I described the military as a cancer killing the host. The military sucks up land, men, resources and technical expertise that are in demand by the civilian sector, while producing no useful product in return. It lays down infrastructure of scant civil utility. In sum, the military's destruction of the American economy through oppressive taxation is secondary to its destruction through over-optimization of our economy for military support.
This is in evidence when one considers the acute shortage of engineers, technicians, mathematicians and other experts in this country: the military has an unfair advantage against private industry, having no bottom line and access to the funds of those very industries it competes with, ironically similar to how divorce lawyers help themselves to the assets of persecuted men. This destroys the competitiveness of American private industry by denying it easy access to the skilled and energetic manpower it needs.
Going back to the Mexican immigrants. The dollar-and-cent costs of having more immigrants in this country, as we see, would be extremely marginal by comparison. And with strong and established communities, driving employment in housing, food, education and public services, their economic contribution would continue to increase, drawing them further into the mainstream. This we have seen already with the Latinos who have come as recently as a few decades ago, to say nothing of the ancestors of whites and blacks who came to this country a century ago.
Approaching poverty as a social and not economic condition would be an epiphany for white people in this country, who are arguably most disadvantaged in that respect than any other group in America. Lacking a common history, common institutions, common ideas or allegiances, white people, despite being called "the dominant culture", in reality have no culture at all. This lack of a real cohesive culture drives the allure of militarism and bigotry amongst white people. Militarism and bigotry, in every time and place, always grow out of a sense of cultural insecurity.
The solution would be to establish such institutions, built on renewal of the best American values of freedom, justice, and pursuit of money, actualized in pure Americana such as Uncle Sam, parables about apple trees, and that pursuit which is most quintessentially, inescapably American...baseball.
Vivid imagery based on enlightened ultra-nationalism would go hand-in-hand with practical services such as access to technical education and socialist employment organizations.
Anyway, continuing:
2. Mexican immigrants often do not integrate into mainstream American society as fast as would be preferred, often insist on continuing to prefer Spanish as their main language, and in doing so, create an unfair competitive advantage for dual-language speakers (which in practice means only other Latinos)This competitive advantage would vacillate should the job market be flooded with Spanish-speakers, making English the greater advantage, especially since - corroborating the above - Latino success in this country is predicated on access to social networks. Drowning out the exclusivist networks through sheer numbers would descend power back onto the natives.
I believe the language issue is an overstated one, blown out of proportion by bigotry. Skin color drives an outsized perception of the novelty of the Spanish language, when in reality, our own ancestors expected to communicate in their own native language during their first two generations in the country, often putting up posters and reading official posters likewise in their own language. Officials at Ellis Island were multilingual, but as both they and the immigrants were white, this seemed less strange. Indications are that the Latinos, like every other group in this country, lose their preference for their mother tongue by the third or fourth generation.
Plausible speculation about the distant future offers scant comfort to the whites and blacks in this country who feel - justifiably - that dual-language recognition is in effect institutionalized discrimination against them. The solution, I believe, is simple: mandate English-only documentation. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrant social networks provided not only employment but also translation and social navigation services, and in this way immigrants would learn English on the immersion method.
I believe the immersion method has fallen out of disfavor only partly due to the indifference of many Latinos, but more because of the decadence and banality that has come to pervade the educational system, something I believe is driven by small-minded middle-class white people who are no more interested in real cultural studies than they are in hard science and technical education. In short, the white people are not interested in learning anything on the immersion method either; they prefer to stay in their debt-reinforced suburban bubbles. The result is a sort of trench mentality on both sides, with Latinos sticking to their own communities longer and more tenaciously than would be otherwise.
Universal citizenship paired with English-only documentation would re-establish the social center of gravity firmly on the side of the natives.
3. Opportunistic Latino "community leaders" use bullying, cronyism, sheer numbers, and distance in time and space between border regions and other parts of the country to drive political agendas of discrimination against non-Latinos and building political empires with public money, by disingenuously misrepresenting the actual issues in the border regions for political gainThis issue is the ugliest but it is also the one which would be most simply and efficiently addressed by universal citizenship.
Without the "hard place" of questionable immigration status and oppression by capitalist bigots, the "rock" of the "community leaders" would vacillate. No longer would they be able to establish their relevance and engage in hatemongering by establishing themselves as the exclusive means of social legitimacy and patronage for Latinos; those things would be taken for granted by everyone, Latino or otherwise.
But all these claim about how universal citizenship would fix the Mexican immigration problem pale in comparison to one titanic force that it would bring to bear on the problem. Mexican immigration is, in the final analysis, driven not by the wealth of America, but the profound inability of the Mexican government to keep its own house. Immigration to the US is currently something of a relief valve for Mexico's problems - and so the Mexican state is fine with it - but universal citizenship would be a game-changer.
Universal citizenship would turn the relief valve into a hole in the boat. All of a sudden, anyone with a reason to think they would be happier in America would get up and go there. This would appeal not only to Mexico's teeming poor, but to all the good honest Mexican people tired of the drug wars and official corruption.
Most dangerously - this exodus would absolutely destroy Mexico's technocracy. Anyone with any skill would move to the more lucrative American market, just like when Germany reunited and every East German with a degree in medicine or engineering bought a house in the West.
Universal citizenship and the threat of mass exodus would threaten Mexico's national sovereignty far more critically than the flow of poor, unskilled laborers does that of the US. What this would do, is what the US has so far been totally unable to get the Mexican government to do, which is clean up its own house.
To staunch the bleeding, Mexico's leaders would have to take on the corruption, win the drug war, and basically make their country liveable. Either that - or do what the East Germans did, which was build a bigass wall to keep their recalcitrant citizens from running away. Which is just as well, since it's what many Americans have been wanting to do, and if they pay for it, so much the better!
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So that's what I think. Opinions?
