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Immigration or the Welfare State - PDF - / Send As Email
Which Is Our Real Enemy?
by Ron K. Unz
In Policy Review, September 1994, pp. 33-39 - Previous Article / Next Article

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Uncorrected Raw Text
IMMIGRATION OR THE WELFARE STATE
Which Is Our Real Enemy?
RoNlL
immigration has recently become a lightning rod for
America's deepest fears of social chaos and national decline.
Millions worry that immigration is rapidly transforming
America into a third-world country, with
crowded, violent cities, under-educated and low-skilled
labor, and an ethnic spoils system replacing America's
tradition of constitutionalism and individual rights. Concerns
are rising that immigrants are abusing the generosity
of our welfare state, and will become an enormous
burden on taxpayers. And because a large number of
immigrants are Spanish-speaking, many Americans fear
that continued immigration, especially from south of the
border, will result in the balkanization of our country into
different language and ethnic groups, ultimately leading
to the sort of social tensions afflicting countries from
Canada to Ukraine to, in the worst case, Bosnia.
These are legitimate concerns, but the problems that
Americans rightly fear are not due to immigration itself,
but to the wrong-minded social policies of our government.
State-sponsored affirmative action, bilingual education,
and multiculturalism are promoting dangerous
levels of ethnic group tensions and conflict. And our
welfare system is breeding pathological levels of crime
and dependency—not primarily among immigrants but
among native-born whites and blacks.
A country in which 22 percent of white children and
70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock need
not look to immigrants as the source of social breakdown.
The underlying problems are government policies whose
emphasis on group rights promote ethnic tensions and a
welfare state that encourages individuals to destroy their
own families.
IMMIGRANT BLESSING
With proper government policies, immigrants are a
blessing. We saw this with earlier waves of immigration, as
America absorbed and assimilated tens of millions of
foreign immigrants of every language, religion, and ethnicity.
By 1900, some 20 percent of America's total population
was foreign-born, and an additional 10 percent
arrived in the following decade. Today's immigration rate
is only a fraction of this level. Millions of impoverished,
poorly educated Jews, Slavs, and Italians became proud
and productive Americans through a public school system
that emphasized English language skills and American
culture, and a society that provided economic opportunity
rather than government entitlement. The Ellis
Island tradition was harsh but fair: Immigrants with illnesses,
or who were otherwise likely to become a burden
on society were excluded, while those with willing hands
were allowed through the Golden Door. This is the tradition
to which America should return.
Even today, despite government policies that foster
dependency, the immigration of the last three decades
has still been a strong net positive for the American
economy. Anyone walking the streets of New York City or
most other major urban centers sees that the majority of
the shops are owned and operated by immigrant entrepreneurs,
often in ethnically defined categories—Korean
grocers, Indian newsstands, Chinese restaurants. It is
obvious that most of these shops would simply not exist
without immigrant families willing to put in long hours
of poorly paid labor to maintain and expand them, in the
process improving our cities. In Los Angeles, the vast
majority of hotel and restaurant employees are hardworking
Hispanic immigrants, most here illegally, and
anyone who believes that these unpleasant jobs would
otherwise be filled by either native-born blacks or whites
is living in a fantasy world.
The same applies to nearly all of the traditional lowerrung
working-class jobs in Southern California, including
the nannies and gardeners whose widespread employment
occasionally embarrasses the upper-middle-class
Zoe Bairds of this world, even as it enables their professional
careers by freeing them from domestic chores. The
only means of making a job as a restaurant busboy even
remotely attractive to a native-born American would be
to raise the wage to $10 or $12 per hour, at which level
the job would cease to exist—this is Economics 101.
Though immigrants are frequently blamed for the
severity of California's current economic problems, there
is no connection whatsoever between the two. Massive
numbers of jobs have been lost because of the wind-down
of the defense aerospace industry, the bursting of the
RON K.UNZ is chief executive officer of Wall Street Analytics,
Inc., in Polo Alto, California. This year he challenged Governor
Pete Wilson in the GOP'primary, and won 34 percent of the vote.
Fall 1994 33


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