Is Current Immigration Policy Helping to Foster a Civil Society?

Dear All:

The past two weeks have supplied an embarrassment of riches in the form of stories that a few years ago would have been fodder for the tabloids versus an accounting of actual events.  Case in point is the exuberance of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas after Title 42 expired and the news that alien encounters at the southern border reportedly dropped from 10,000+ a day to under 5,000. “Messaging” is what he attributed it to.

According to reporter Uriel Garcia, of The Texas Tribune, “In fiscal year 2022, which ended in September, agents apprehended immigrants a record-breaking 2.3 million times at the southern border — and in the first six months of the current fiscal year, apprehensions hit 1.2 million.”

Many believe if the Biden administration doesn’t get serious about fixing the problems at our southern border, as many as six million people may cross illegally into the U.S. by the end of the Biden administration. That influx of individuals from such diverse backgrounds and cultures, will have seemingly broad and damaging short-term and long-term implications on our quality of life. 

To start, these migrants won’t be bringing needed infrastructure like roads, sewer or water systems, or schools or hospitals to support their existence.  Nor do they possess working capital or own homes. So, from day one they’ll compete with our most vulnerable populations for public assistance and tax our already burdened and aging infrastructure.  If there’s any bright light in all this, it’s that we’re beginning to see Democratic Party strongholds like Chicago and New York City push back.

Back in 2016 we outlined the long term consequences of immigration-fueled population growth in our environmental impact study. At the time, it seemed inconceivable, but we projected bringing in 2.5 million people a year would expand the U.S. population to almost 670 million by 2100. If you believe we can have infinite growth with finite resources, then fine, but I don’t and see a very bleak future for our country as we grapple with a host of societal and cultural issues that are the direct result of too much immigration.

A month ago, I and a hundred or so denizens of Lancaster, Pennsylvania attended a lecture by Chuck Marohn, Founder of Strong Towns, an organization dedicated to helping municipalities become financially strong and resilient. During his talk he introduced the concept of “social cohesion”.

“I personally think that the future success of the city is going to be more based off of leadership and community. I’m going to use the word “cohesion” for lack of anything else, “community cohesion”, than it is any other thing. There will always be, you know, Philadelphia, New York City, these are completely different ecosystems, but a city of this size, [Lancaster] if you told me that Lancaster 50 years from now was just a ghost town with a few people, or it was a booming place full of life, to me, those are both equally likely outcomes. I think the determinate factor on that is going to be your social cohesion.”

In a similar vein, in 2007, Robert D. Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University published E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century in which he utilized rigorous survey techniques involving almost 30,000 respondents to better understand “how diversity (by implication, immigration) affects social capital.”

Putnam defined social capital as “social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness.” I prefer to label Putnam’s social capital, as social cohesion, and one of the most salient aspects he demonstrated was there’s a negative correlation between diversity and social cohesion:

“In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

He also concluded:

“In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.”

I disagree with Putnam, there, as he seems to deduce that earlier waves of U.S. immigration were successful. I’d argue it was the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, known as the Immigration Act of 1924 (IRA 1924) that although biased in several respects to race and ethnicity, made the difference.

IRA 1924 banned entrants from Asia, capped total immigration at 165,000 immigrants per year, authorized the creation of the Border Patrol, and set quotas for people from Eastern and Southern Europe. It governed immigration policy until 1965, and during that time it can be argued there was net zero immigration to the U.S. That roughly 40-year hiatus or cooling off period afforded the country the opportunity to absorb prior waves of immigrants and the smaller numbers of new arrivals and ultimately allowed the U.S. to forge a new national identity.

While Putnam’s study was provocative for dispelling the notion that diversity is a strength he wasn’t alone in that regard. In The Downside of Diversity, Michael Jonas stated, “economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital.” 

I live in the city and county of Lancaster, Pennsylvania which is home to the oldest and largest community of Amish in the country. The first Amish came to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century and their direct descendants still live there. You’re considered a newcomer If your family hasn’t lived in the county for at least five generations, and it’s not unusual for people to trace their roots back nine generations. With that kind of longevity comes social cohesion.

In Amish Society, writer John A. Hostetler describes the Amish as a “high-context” culture, one in which people are deeply involved with one another and there is greater subtlety and a collective understanding.  In contrast, “low-context” cultures “emphasize literacy and rationality” and tend to be more bureaucratic in which levels of awareness are often restricted to verbal and written communication.  

As I was drafting this message, I came across something which further connected the seemingly disparate thoughts of social cohesion, diversity, and a culture’s context. It came in the form of John Michael Greer’s newsletter Ecosophia and its reference to German historian and sociologist Max Weber’s notion of “disenchantment of the world”:

“In a disenchanted world, public life is on the wane because transcendent values are no longer to be found in the community or polity, rather people seek emotional fulfillment in private relations.”

In many respects a “disenchanted world” is a low-context world with low social cohesion, it’s one in which people tend to be atomized and see themselves as something apart from community. Greer gets it right when he flips the script and wisely opines “The enchanted world is not a collection of things; it is a community of persons and experienced as a community of persons.”

In closing, if our goal in in this country is a low-context world with low social cohesion, it’s easy; pluck a person from anywhere on earth and plant them in any town in America. Things will work out just fine and if they don’t, just blame the system or call on one of the public institutions to solve the problem.

On the other hand, if the goal is a high-context world with high social cohesion in which a neighbor, to quote the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, “is a great blessing,” then we must take great care.  In this respect, Switzerland’s immigration policies and practices could prove to be instructive.

Waves of immigration and diversity will not get us there as it’s not just how many people we allow into the country that matters, but also who we allow.  Only by embracing that approach will we avoid our living in a “disenchanted world”. 

In Solidarity.

 

Congress passed H.R. 2 – the Secure Border Act

Congress passed H.R. 2, the Secure Border Act and now it is off to the Senate. It’s a very good bill that includes long overdue reforms. Please call your senators today and urge them to pass a companion bill.

See House Bill

 

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