I Am an Illegal Immigrant
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—10/31/11—I am listening to a re-run of the “debate” of the Republican presidential aspirants when I hear the unmistakable drone of mowing machines.
I fling open my door, charge over to a group of men in those orange and yellow flak jackets and ask insistently, “Are you illegal immigrants. Because if you are, I don’t want you mowing my lawn.”
Since I don’t look like an immigration functionary, the group simply bursts into laughter.
As should the whole country when it hears Candidate Rick Perry accusing Candidate Mitt Romney of employing illegal immigrants to mow his lawn.
But the laughter should turn to tears when it hears Candidate Herman Cain suggest that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their joblessness.
Yet there is no laughter from the audience at the Perry-Romney exchange. Only shocked silence.
And there are no tears from the audience at Mr. Cain’s suggestion. Only resounding applause.
And then I begin to mist over a tad myself as I begin to liken the country to a massive mob of people jeering at the proverbial man on the ledge and howling, “Jump!”
Nearly everywhere, I see signs of mushrooming ignorance, irrelevance, and neglect of civic responsibility.
But, especially, I see schadenfreude descending into outright cruelty.
Maybe because I am aging, perhaps too rapidly, despite the most energetic efforts to preserve a youth that I may never really have possessed. But it doesn’t seem my country anymore.
I am a stranger in this land. I am an immigrant.
And I probably should be outlawed.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)
9 Comments
Dale Richards
when your lawn care service laughs in your face regarding who they are, you have been emasculated. your opinion and rights as an american mean nothing, and they know this. to suggest that candidates should not question whether another has any balls, while mirroring your own truncated belief in the rule of law, really is unamerican. check your passport, you may be late for a different country to live in.
srose
Predisposition governs polemical style. If you like immigrants, you view the Perry-Romney exchange through a satirical lens. If you don’t like immigrants, you view it as a serious conversation. But what governs predisposition? If it is an aversion to certain accents or appearances, discourse is impossible. But if one wishes to behave like the proverbially rational man, then one should be open to the facts. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are a net benefit to our economic and social life. In fact, in some senses they are, or could have been, a lifebelt. See my next column.
S. Rose
Elizabeth
From reader, Burt Kempner, on Facebook, Sanford: “Excellent piece, Sanford. I, too, share your sense of dislocation and alienation. But so do the people who are doing the inappropriate applauding and cruel taunting. They, too, are lost and want to recapture an innocence that probably never… existed. It would be nice to have leaders who would tell us that while it’s OK to feel fear in turbulent times, we cannot give in to it. Two groups — the Tea Party and OWS — have gotten off their rumps and decided to take action. You may disagree with the message of one or both, but each understands that it’s better for the government to fear the people than for the people to fear the government. Wow — that’s the most even-handed I’ve been since the Truman Administration!”
srose
Thanks, Burt.
Even-handedness can be overdone, however. Most economists are defensively even-handed, saying, “on the one hand,” then, “on the other hand.” The late Otto Eckstein would in consequence hire only one-armed economists.
S. Rose
Alex Raccoon Tavor
Forgive this one’s obtuseness, but I do not quite follow. A few questions, please:
Why did you run outside and confront the lawn mowers with your suspicions of them being illegal immigrants? Why would you suspect them of being illegal immigrants? Is this a metaphor or an actual anecdote?
I also do not understand the connection between Cain’s hyperbole and the debate on immigration. Do you see both as expressions of schadenfreude?
“Immigrants, legal or illegal, are a net benefit to our economic and social life”:
That is usually true. There is, however, a limit on how much immigration a country can absorb in a given period of time without suffering adverse effects.
To give a radical example: should the entire population of Africa immigrate into the US in the same month, the averse effects would be enormous. And preparation would only be able to mitigate them to a degree.
There is another aspect, which ties in with the unemployment issue. Namely, the question of how countries become and remain poor. To the best of my knowledge, they do so almost exclusively through protracted bad governance.
And that, in turn, derives from the memetic composition of the governed population. Prevalence of some memes (trust for other people, respect for private property, etc) has been shown to correlate strongly with economic success/failure of countries.
And immigrants bring their memes along with them, just as they do their wealth and their skills. Since USA has successfully marketed itself as the most desirable place to immigrate to, there’s no shortage of applicants for immigration. USA can pick and choose those with the most desirable memes, wealth and skills – and ascertain reasonable integration. Unlimited immigration is at least as problematic as no immigration at all. No?
Sorry for the long rant.
srose
You raise many interesting points, answers to which cannot be briefly given. But just a few notes:
No, I didn’t actually run out and pose such a ludicrous question. The Republican preoccupation with immigration and so-called self-reliance are evidence of a growing schadenfreude in this country. Immigrants are not the cause of the unemployment problem; they could, indeed, ameliorate that problem. The proximate cause of the problem was that the pace of home-building outstripped that of household formation. One remedy is to try bridging the gap by importing people from abroad at an accelerated pace. There is an enormous pool of people classified as highly skilled who can’t get into the country. These people can contribute to our economic growth from the day they arrive. They not only buy houses and pay taxes, they innovate, so they actually speed up the rate of productivity gain. If they wanted to be sensible instead of appealing to prejudice, the candidates should concentrate on ways to remove many immigration barriers.
By the way, though I cannot now expand on the subject, bad governance is much overstressed as the cause of economic backwardness.
At least as important a reason is the policies and behavior of the IMF, the World Bank, and the rules of international trade advocated and sustained by the advanced countries of the West.
S.Rose
Alex Raccoon Tavor
Thank you for the answer, Sanford.
*** Republican preoccupation with immigration and so-called self-reliance are evidence of a growing schadenfreude in this country ***
I am sorry, I cannot quite see the connection. This raccoon thinks the aforementioned trends are a result of a zeitgeist shift in the West. Jingoism and xenophobia are on the rise; at least in the USA, anti-intellectualism is on the rise as well. Seems like a backlash against the pseudo-liberal excesses of the post-WWII generation. Perhaps there’s a psychological dimension this one is missing?
Blaming immigrants for unemployment and stressing self-reliance are par for the course in economic downturns, is it not?
Re: bad governance vs external influences. I have heard the claim that IMF, the World Bank, and the rules of international trade are a negative influence on the growth of weak economies. Usually it is presented a conspiracy theory. This one would love to read your take on the subject; alternatively, do you perhaps have links to relevant research?
Even if we presume external influences to be of importance, memetics are paramount. After all (unless there’s a global conspiracy, which I dismiss as logistically unrealistic), some countries are successful in breaking away from poverty under the same unfavorable external conditions. Asian and Baltic tigers come to mind as recent examples.
From what I’m reading, high unemployment and a good chunk of USA’s social ills are the result of transition into oligarchy. When corporations are legally defined as people, the people are no longer in control. But then again, this one is not American nor has ever been to that continent; mine are feeble observations from afar.
srose
Again, much thought.
There are conspiracy theorists and there are those who research and argue logically. Among the latter, I commend to you Ha-Joon Chang, who professes at Cambridge.
I have limned in past postings my view of the situation in the USA. Inequality (the rise in the Gini coefficient from .35 to .45) and the resultant politically required democratization of credit underlie much of the problem. This basic reason is coupled with the low and at times negative real rates of interest that prevailed in the USA during part of the last decade.
S. Rose
Alex Raccoon Tavor
Thank you again for the reply. I shall peruse your other articles to understand your position on USA’s… vicissitudes, for a lack of a better word.
Also, thank you for recommending Prof. Chang. The gist of his message seems to be that infant industry protection is important. This one thinks that the wisdom of Kohelet is appropriate here – there are times and circumstances in which [protectionism/free market] is the better course of action. Optimally the policy decision should be made on a case-by-case basis, taking the particular circumstances into account. But this one shall research further.
I have some reading to do :)