I have always viewed with disgust the pervasive anti-immigrant sentiment that has plagued this country for decades, and is now reaching a fever pitch. It is most on display in the Republican Party — as I, a long-time supporter of the party, am ashamed to say. You can see the nativist hatred in its full intensity by watching the followers of our latest populist demagogue Donald Trump — people I call “Trumpeters” — exhibit orgiastic glee when he tells them he will deport 11 million illegal aliens, together with any American-born children they may have.
Trump — a man in the populist mold of Huey Long and Father Coughlin — already promises he will set up a “deportation force” to enter the immigrants’ homes and arrest them en masse. Since the immigrants are all entitled to court hearings, a President Trump will have to set up internment camps to house the millions of arrested immigrants until they can be tried.
Trump’s immigrant-bashing is all the more outrageous when we remember that when Romney was running for president, Trump bashed him for suggesting that illegals “self-deport.” Trump has no compunction about the illegal immigrants’ children born here being included, advancing the unusual legal theory that the Constitution does not (as the 14th Amendment seems clearly to do) make the children of illegals born here legal citizens.
You can see nativist hatred in its full intensity by watching the followers of Donald Trump exhibit orgiastic glee when he tells them he will deport 11 million illegal aliens.
Trump has repeatedly promised us a “fabulous wall,” to be paid for — by the Mexicans themselves! All we will need in addition are fabulous concentration camps. This is fascism of a new kind — fabulous fascism. And we need a new word for it. Perhaps the Orwellian neologism “fabulism” best captures Trump’s political program.
Of course, as readers of this estimable journal know, I don’t think that this resurgent nativist tide is — as the mainstream media portrays it — solely a Republican phenomenon. We must remember that Obama himself, when he was a US Senator, play the key role in scuttling the Bush comprehensive reform plan; moreover, after winning the presidency and having near-dictatorial control of Congress, he refused to introduce any immigration plan, or even discuss the topic for two years. He started to feign interest in the issue only after the Republicans took back the House, and intensified his charade when they took back the Senate.
The reason is, as I have suggested, that two key components of the Democratic Party base are deeply anti-immigration: organized labor, and the African-American community. The former dislikes immigration because it fears that immigrants will lower native-born workers’ wages and compete for their jobs, and the latter fears not only competition for jobs but losing its status as the main victim group entitled to governmental support.
But the joke is on the nativists, because the most recent wave of immigration is in fact rescuing this country.
Demographers love the cliché, “demography is destiny,” no doubt in great part because it accentuates the importance of their profession. But there is a fair amount of truth to it. For this reason, the most recent Pew report on recent trends in American demographics is well worthy of comment.
This resurgent nativist tide is not solely a Republican phenomenon. We must remember that Obama himself scuttled the Bush comprehensive reform plan.
As most of the European and Asian countries face contracting populations, our population is slated to grow robustly. The Pew report projects (on the basis of the most recent US Census data) that the American population will grow by an estimated 36% over the next half-century, reaching 441 million in 2065. The main driver of this projected increase in population is immigration. The report notes that nearly nine out of ten of the additional 103 million people will be immigrants or the children of immigrants (both legal and illegal). In fact, the percentage of immigrants in America’s population will rise from the current 14% to an estimated 18%.
Being spared the baleful effects of demographic decline puts us in much better economic shape than virtually all of our trading partners — indeed, most of the world. Social scientist Joel Kotkin has recently explored the idea that most countries will be facing demographic implosion. He points out that half the world’s population is now living in countries that are at negative population growth and suggests that by 2050, 139 countries (representing three-fourths of the world’s population) will be at negative population growth. China is just the most recent country to face this problem — which is why it has now frantically reversed its “one-child” policy. (What a surprise: government planning that results in failure! Who could have imagined it?) China is facing the same problem as Japan, Korea, Singapore, and most of Europe: increasingly fewer workers to support the elderly population.
Japan in particular is the paradigm case of a country struggling with deep demographic distress. The current population of 127 million is predicted to shrink to 108 million by 2050 — at which time there would be three Japanese over 65 for every one under 15. By 2100, the U.N. projects that Japan’s population will shrivel to 84.5 million, while Japan’s National Institute of Population projects it will plummet to 60 million — less than half its present size.
Exceptional in the Asian context is India. India continues to experience population growth, and is predicted to overtake China to become the world’s most populous country in just seven years. India faces no labor shortage in the foreseeable future — its population is not expected to peak until about 2060.
Being spared the baleful effects of demographic decline puts us in much better economic shape than virtually all of our trading partners — indeed, most of the world.
Even more interesting information from the aforementioned Pew Report is that there has been an historic demographic shift in the pattern of American immigration. Up to the 1970s, most immigrants to the US came from Europe. Starting in the 1980s, and peaking in the 1990s, most immigrants hailed from Mexico (and elsewhere in Latin America). But since 2011, most immigrants have come from Asia.
Nearly two-thirds of Asian Americans today are foreign-born, compared to only 37% of Hispanic Americans. Asians are predicted to surpass Latinos as the biggest foreign-born group in four decades — at which point, if the predictions are accurate, a higher percentage of Americans will be Asian than Black.
As Asians increase their numbers in America’s population, they will increase the wealth and productivity of this nation. Why? Because more than any other ethnic group — whites included — they embrace traditional marriage and education. Consider first the rates of American children born out of wedlock. As of 2013, the statistics are stunning: 72% of Black children are born outside of marriage, 66% of American Indian children, 53% of Hispanic children, and 29% of white children. The figure for Asian children is only 17%.
Now consider educational attainment. Looking at American ethnic groups, the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2014 was: American Indian 5.6%, Hispanic 15.1%, black 22.4%, and whites 40.8%. Asians were at a whopping 60.8%.
Obviously, we should hope that the immigration of Asians only accelerates — the proliferation of scholars and entrepreneurs that would result would be of enormous economic and social benefit to all of us non-Asians.
Part of the reason for this historic shift is that the number of Asians seeking citizenship keeps rising steadily, in large part because Chinese and Indian students in American universities apply for citizenship upon graduation. Given the fact that most Asian countries — including China, but excluding India — are in demographic decline, we can expect that India will more and more be the supplier of our immigrants.
But another reason for the historic shift to Asian American immigration is the recent reversal of Mexican immigration. As a recent WSJ article reports, over the last five years, more Mexicans headed back to Mexico than moved here — 1,000,000 Mexicans decamped, compared to 870,000 coming in.
Trump’s fabulist fascism targets immigrants as a way to appeal to neurotic and psychotic voters who made bad personal life choices.
There are two major reasons why the flow of Mexican immigrants has reversed. First, over the past two decades, the Mexican birth rate has plummeted, and is now at about replacement level. But second, while the economic boom times from the 1980s until 2008 created lots of jobs for Mexican workers, the slow growth of jobs during the Obama “recovery,” along with the higher rate of growth in the Mexican economy, has drawn many Mexicans back home.
So Earth to Trump:
The Mexicans are already self-deporting, and the new wave of immigration is from Asia, not the Middle East.
And me to Trump:
I am a classical liberal, i.e., one who favors modern free market capitalism. This system, which involves the free movement of financial capital, products, and labor (human capital) across the world to find their most productive uses, isn’t just the right thing to do from the perspective of economic theory. During the modern era, and during the past half-century in particular, it has proven empirically to be the only force able to lift massive numbers of the absolute poor out of their misery — something that no other force (including religion) has ever been able to do. And this system is also morally superior because it allows the maximum amount of personal liberty: unless it threatens the security of the nation, every person should be free to invest his money where he believes it will give him the best return; unless it threatens the nation, every person should be free to buy products he finds it in his interest to buy, from anyone else on the planet; and unless it threatens the nation, every person should be free to employ anyone it is in his interest to employ.
Hence I hate interventionism (i.e., welfare statism), despise socialism, and loathe communism. But I both loathe and fear fascism. Forinterventionism, socialism, and communism are based on relatively weak psychological forces, to wit, envy of the rich and pity for the industrial working class. I say that these psychological forces are weak, first because the world is moving with increasing acceleration toward a global post-industrial (or more specifically, an epistemic) economy, with low-level factory work disappearing not just in America, but in every other industrialized economy (including China’s). So the appeal to pity for the proletariat is losing power, as the proletariat itself disappears. (Witness the precipitous decline in union membership in the private sector over the past half-century). And second, envy can always be countered by self-love: show an envious man that he, too, can become wealthy and the envy dissipates as “greed” (self-interest) grows.
But fascism — while it certainly does exploit envy of the rich and pity for the proles — appeals mainly to the love of one’s own tribe and the hatred of other tribes. Its power to pervert patriotism and intensify it by demonizing other groups is potent. Trump’s fabulism targets immigrants as a way to appeal to neurotic and psychotic voters who made bad personal life choices — failed to graduate from high school, had kids without first having jobs and husbands, got into drugs or booze too deeply, refused to work hard, whatever — and are profoundly unhappy. Trump, like all demagogues, is a master manipulator of pathological politics — the politics of projection of one’s own failures upon innocent people.
That is why Trump is to be feared, as well as despised.
