Rock-ribbed, no-nonsense WASP conservative surrenders to destruction of America

In an appalling column at Human Events, William Rusher, the once supposedly hard-line publisher of National Review, indicates that the vast illegal population is a threat to America, but argues that nothing can be done about it, because the economy needs them. The rigidity of thinking of these supposed devotees of free enterprise is incredible. Don’t they see that societies respond to circumstances? That if an economy has available a vast pool of low-skill people, it will accommodate itself to that, by creating lots of low-skill jobs? And that if it doesn’t have lots of low-skill people, it will accommodate itself to that, by orienting itself toward high-skill jobs? Or by raising prices for vegetables? Or by going back to having college kids work at summer jobs? There is a widespread assumption today that if things have happened by one particular route, they could not happen by any other route.

I discussed this false premise in my article “Exposing the Open-Borders Arguments”:

“If we didn’t have immigrants doing all kinds of jobs in America today, there would be nobody to do them.”

As Roy Beck demonstrated in his powerful account of American workers displaced by immigration, this widely believed idea is empirically false. It is also based on a false assumption. The assumption is that the American economy could only have developed in one way, with lots of immigrants coming here and taking lots of jobs. Therefore, the thinking goes, without the immigrants there would have been no one else to do those jobs and the economy would have been crippled. In fact, most of those jobs only exist because of immigrants. We can illustrate this by means of a thought experiment. Imagine that back in the late nineteenth century there had been no Chinese Exclusion Act, and that large numbers of Chinese had continued to settle in California after 1882. Over the following decades, the Chinese would have filled all kinds of existing jobs in the California economy, and would also have created new types of businesses and employment niches that hadn’t existed before. Let us imagine further that in 1920 Californians began to call for immigration restrictions against the Chinese. The pro-immigration lobby in our fictional 1920 (using the same arguments that the pro-immigration lobby uses today) would have replied: “Without Chinese immigrants here, who would have done all these jobs?” The truth, of course, is that the Chinese in our imaginary 1920 are doing all those jobs only because they had come to America in the first place. Had there been no Chinese immigrants between 1882 and 1920, which was the actual case in the actual 1882-1920 period, California would have done just fine, as it in fact did.

From this we derive a maxim: Large-scale immigration creates the illusion of its own indispensability.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 06, 2006 10:54 AM | Send