Auster on Fukuyama, 1993

In my analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s article in Prospect, I quoted part of my letter in the August 1993 Commentary responding to Fukuyama’s article, “Immigration and Family Values.” Here is the entire letter:

To THE EDITOR OF COMMENTARY:

After two years of increasingly frank and public debate on immigration, including Peter Brimefow’s massive challenge to the neoconservative pro-immigration position in National Review last year, one might have supposed that COMMENTARY would respond with an article on the subject that would go beyond the familiar open-borders cliches. Instead, COMMENTARY has offered up Francis Fukuyama’s complacent and vapid treatment of the issue. Mr. Fukuyama’s denial of reality is almost total: at this late date, with immigration-related problems tearing up communities all over the country, he blandly refuses to concede that immigration—even illegal immigration—represents any problem at all for America.

Even the one instance where Mr. Fukuyama admits a flaw in the pro-immigration ideology turns out to be a finesse. He acknowledges that America is not simply based on belief in universalist ideas about democracy, but that America is also a culture, even a “Christian, Anglo-Saxon” culture. This appears to be a major concession to those conservatives who insist on American cultural particularity, especially as regards immigration policy. But then Mr. Fukuyama does a very strange thing. He identifies the essence of this newly discovered American culture as “family values,” i.e., as a set of behaviors which promote economic productivity, and which can be expressed with lots of statistics. In other words, Mr. Fukuyama, having conceded that America is not just a political abstraction but a culture, reinterprets that culture itself as an abstraction.

He then devotes the rest of his article to demonstrating the good “family values” of current immigrants. He cites studies showing that Mexican-Americans have more family cohesion than do whites, with higher birth-weight babies even among low-income mothers due to taboos on smoking, drinking, and drug use during pregnancy; and so on.

Mr. Fukuyama’s argument is deceptive on two counts. First, the immigration critics are not concerned about protecting American “family values” from immigrants, as he alleges, but about maintaining a common national culture. Mexicans might have the most stable, loving families in the world and still not be Americans. When the Hispanic population of San Jose, California, demonstrated against a statue that portrayed the raising of the American flag in California during the Mexican war, calling the statue a “symbol of conquest” and threatening violence if it were erected, the issue was not the birth weight of their babies, but their national identity. When the Cubans who dominate Dade County, Florida, voted recently to overturn the laws declaring English to be the sole language of government, the issue was not the cohesiveness of Hispanic families, but the dispossession of the English language in this country by an ever more numerous and powerful Spanish-speaking community.

Second, “family values” can be very different things in different cultures. As Lawrence Harrison has shown, Latin American families have an intense family loyalty and a lack of trust toward those outside the family circle-the results of which can be seen in the unhappy political history of Latin America. Many Asians also come from cultures with fierce family loyalties and deeply ingrained habits of corruption. By contrast, as Tocqueville argued, the American family was the seedbed of social cooperativeness and good citizenship.

Mr. Fukuyama shows his complete ignorance of the real dimensions of the immigration problem in his sappy comments about illegal aliens. For Mr. Fukuyama, illegal immigrants hanging out on street corners looking for day labor are a manifestation of the “family values” that made America, and should be celebrated. Tell that to the residents of Orange, California, where Mexican illegals are living 30 people to a house and are destroying the fabric of the community. Or tell it to the beleaguered residents of Los Angeles, who rush indoors before sundown on July 4th because the Mexican illegals in Los Angeles—doubtless in an outburst of family values—celebrate American Independence Day by firing guns in the air. Yet Mr. Fukuyama, in a fit of PC-speak, smears conservative Republicans as “nativist” for advocating effective border enforcement in the 1992 Republican platform.

Mr. Fukuyama approvingly cites the free-market economist Julian Simon’s ridiculous canard that current levels of immigration are not “inordinately high by historical standards.” Anyone with the slightest knowledge of immigration history knows that these so-called “historical standards” of Simon’s are derived from one or two decades of record-high immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, the high influx of that period created intense social and political upheavals that were only laid to rest by the severe immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924. The illogic (not to mention the dishonesty) of presenting that singular period in American immigration history as typical—even as a guide for all future immigration policy—should be too obvious to require further comment.

LAWRENCE AUSTER
New York City

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James S. writes, quoting Fukuyama’s reply to me in the August 1993 Commentary:

“But critics of immigration like Mr. Auster evidence no appreciation for the positive contributions that each wave of immigrants has made to American life or realize that the old elites get tired and need periodic renewal from abroad.”

Periodic renewal of old tired elites? What immigration is he talking about?

LA replies:

Does he think that the tens of millions of 90 IQ Hispanics are renewing our elites? There is no connection between the immigration advocates’ slogans and reality. It is impossible to break through this wall of frivolousness. Why? Because I think the real motive of the pro-immigrationists is just to change America, to make it non-white. The arguments they use are not the arguments that drive them. They will say anything that “works” to advance the open borders cause and drive back the opposition. But what they care about is to take America irretrievably beyond its historic self so that all opposition becomes moot.

In connection with my reply to E.G. in another thread, this doesn’t mean FF as a Japanese-American “hates” whites in a racial sense, any more than McCain and Bush hate whites in a racial sense. It means that FF, McCain, Bush et al. are liberals, and liberals by definition are uncomfortable with and hostile to a historic white majority society because to their minds the very existence of such a society bespeaks racial discrimination and white supremacy. They want a liberal world without white majorities anywhere.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 27, 2007 12:50 PM | Send