Legrain - Immigrants : your country needs them

Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them

Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them

Philippe Legrain

Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2006 Philippe Legrain

Preface Copyright 2007 Philippe Legrain

Published in the United States by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Little, Brown
First Princeton edition, with a new preface, 2007

The extracts from Who Are We? Americas Great Debate by Samuel P. Huntington are reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

Copyright 2004 Samuel P. Huntington

The extracts from Thinking the Unthinkable: The Immigration Myth Exposed by Nigel Harris are reprinted by permission of I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd

Copyright 2002 Nigel Harris

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number 2007926069

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13431-4

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To my mother, with love, and to Pete and Marion, for always being there for me

Contents

Preface

A quick search on Amazon.com reveals a depressing picture of Americas immigration debate. Volumes warning of impending doom clamour for attentionPat Buchanan alone has penned two: first, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization and more recently, just in case you didnt get the message the first time, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Or take your pick from In Mortal Danger: The Battle for Americas Border and Security by presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo, Immigrations Unarmed Invasion: Deadly Consequences by Frosty Wooldridge, Illegals: The Imminent Threat Posed by Our Unsecured US-Mexico Border by Jon Dougherty, Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Battle to Save the Nation by Daniel Sheehy, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn against Immigration by David Reimers, Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border Security and the War on Terror by congressman J. D. Hayworth, Unguarded Gates: A History of Americas Immigration Crisis by Otis Graham, and that old stalwart, Alien Nation: Common Sense about Americas Immigration Disaster by British-born journalist Peter Brimelow, to name but eight. Eight! They are the political equivalent of Nightmare on Elm Streetgreat if youre into spine-tingling horror stories, but wholly unreliable guides to reality. Or to put it another way, they produce a lot of heat, but dont shed much light.

What is not in doubt is that immigration is always in the news these days: Mexicans sneaking across the border; Cubans landing on rafts; Chinese stowed away in ships; Central Americans stuffed into trailers; the Border Patrol, the National Guard and the self-styled Minutemen scrambling to keep as many people as possible out; bodies discovered desiccated in the desert, drowned in the sea, frozen in the mountains and suffocated in containers; talk-radio hosts demanding a border wall, mass deportations, and even a shoot-to-kill policy; over half a million people massing in Los Angeles and other cities in support of illegal immigrants; politicians posturing in Washington, DC, or laid low for hiring a nanny without a green card; President Bush saying immigration reform is his top domestic priority, Congress pondering whether to collaborate or stall; state ballot initiatives to protect the English language, that endangered tongue which half the world is trying to learn; competing proposals for a guest-worker programme, a pathway to citizenship, or is it an amnesty? Its hard to make sense of it all. Is it really feasible to seal Americas borders? Should the US even be trying? Would a temporary-worker programme work? Questions abound. But if you want to go beyond the headlines, the slogans and the fears, where do you look?

The difficulty is not just that sober voices of reason are precious few. Worse, the sensible books are mostly dry and academic, with titles such as The Economic Consequences of Immigration, which hardly leap off the shelves. Yet immigration is too important an issue to surrender to the extremists or confine to academic debate. It affects jobs, the economy and every Americans standard of living; it impinges on delicate matters of race and religion; it touches on tricky issues about how society can cope withand make the most ofthe huge diversity of the individuals who make it up; and it is at the heart of the debate about what kind of countryand worldAmericans want to live in. Many people are in two minds: they may be proud that the United States is a nation of immigrantswith Barack Obama the latest embodiment of how the American Dream is inextricably intertwined with the countrys longstanding openness to immigrationbut worry that America has lost control over its borders; they may appreciate the benefits of all the Mexican gardeners, Filipino nannies and Vietnamese chefs, not to mention the Indian-born internet entrepreneurs, while fearing that the newcomers may also threaten their jobs and their way of life; they may hope that immigrants will change America for the better, but fret that they might change it for the worse. All the more reason why an intelligent book on immigration aimed at general readers is sorely neededwhich is precisely what Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them strives to be.

Even so, you might wonder, what could a foreigner like myself possibly have to contribute to Americas immigration debate? Well for a start, outsiders often notice things that locals who are too immersed in an issue fail to spotthink of Tocquevilles masterpiece, Democracy in Americaor they simply see things differently, and their perspective helps shed new light. In any case, the US is not entirely alien to me: although I was born in London, England, and have lived most of my life there, my mother is Estonian-American and I inherited US citizenship from her; I have visited the States frequently since I was a kid; and I have family in California. Whats more, I researched this book thoroughly. Not just ploughing through Pat Buchanans collected nightmares, but also delving into more considered work such as Who Are We? The Challenges to Americas National Identity by Harvard academic Samuel Huntington and Heavens Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy by George Borjas, another Harvard academic, as well as piles of academic papers and official reports. I devote several chapters to examining Brimelows argument that America is becoming an alien nation, scrutinising Borjass economic calculation that unskilled immigration is detrimental to the US and considering Huntingtons thesis that Latino immigration is splitting America in two, producing a domestic clash of civilisations potentially as dangerous as the international clash that he made his name warning about (in that book, incidentally, he lumped the US and Mexico together into a single civilisation, united by the threats from the Islamic and Confucian realms). Equally importantly, I travelled around America to see for myself. I spoke to people such as Michelle LeBoeuf, herself a third-generation immigrant from Louisiana, as she kept guard with the US Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas; Miriam Mejia, the sprightly old lady who runs the Alianza Dominicana, the biggest provider of services to Dominican Americans; and Seshan Rammohan, who heads the Silicon Valley chapter of The Indus Entrepreneur, a network of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that helps immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere start new technology companies.