New Arguments for a Decline in Immigration to the US: Part 1
An immigrant’s gumption and gutsiness are good for the immigrant, but it is not good for us and is no reason to laud or love him
by
David Gottfried
First, consider these quotes from a leading liberal racist, Sarah Jeong, who is snobbily ensconced on the New York Times Editorial Board:
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins? . .
Reported in https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/white-privilege-debate-elizabeth-warren/
AND
“White people (are) marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,”
The Washington Post reported on August 3, 2018 that Jeong made this patently racist assertion likening white people to “dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
The next few posts on Substack will consist of my arguments for reduced immigration to America. We have heard arguments for and against immigration ad nauseum. I will try to make the debate a bit more interesting by discussing ideas that for the most part have never been raised by anyone.
1st idea: We in America often praise industrious immigrants because they have the gumption and guts to want to help themselves. While the immigrant benefits from his desire to help himself, this desire does not necessarily benefit anyone else. Consequently, why should we love the immigrant for wanting to help himself, especially since there is such a thin line between helping oneself and annoying and aggressive selfishness.
Of course, some people believe that when the immigrant helps himself, he makes money and that in making money, he makes America richer and that this benefits all Americans. Anyone whose understanding of economics has progressed beyond concepts such as a toddler’s piggybank, or Al Gore’s and W’s social security lock boxes (They both claimed in the 2000 campaign that they would protect Social Security by putting all the money in a lock box, thus proving that piggy banks are not only for toddlers but also grannies with blue hair who attend moronic Democratic and Republican conventions) knows this is bullshit.
First, consider the matter abstractly. Thorstein Veblen, a sagacious and sardonic economist of the late 19th and early 20th century, said that capitalists often make a mint by sabotaging the work and productivity of their competitors, consequently reducing productivity. If Veblen seems a bit too dated for our snarky 21st century sensibilities, just look at the derivatives market where people will sell shorts, or bet that a commodity or stock will tank and then take measures to increase the chance that that commodity or stock will tank. Also, consider work done in Harvard University: A study released by Harvard in 1968 showed that the ability to make money correlated most strongly with the ability to lie and look someone in the eye at the same time -- which reminds me of something I already said on substack: The essence of capitalism is this: Buy shit for 5 dollars and convince some poor shnook that it is really worth 50 dollars.
But again, this is probably too abstract, or so my detractors will obtusely contend. Therefore, let me show you how specific rich immigrants, while making themselves filthy rich, made other people a whole lot poorer.
Lucky Luciano, Al Capone and a host of other mafioso made themselves very rich, no doubt about it. But did their wealth boost American wealth by giving us death and social deformations ala Sicily and Naples. Similarly, was the wealth of America boosted when the Jewish Owners of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory killed over 100 teenage girls, Jewish and Italian, in their fire trap of a sweatshop. (At this point, someone will contend that I am a sick, self-hating Jew. They will doubtless also find it in poor taste to note that a Jew, Bernie Madoff, robbed billions of dollars from Jewish charities or that Bernard Bergman, an orthodox Rabbi, owned a viper’s nest of nursing homes where elderly Jews rotted in their urine and feces-filled beds. Quite frankly, I don’t think the Jews are bad; I think almost all of humanity is overwhelmingly selfish and sadistic. Keep reading, and you can savor plenty of scorching salvos against Blacks, Asians and last, but certainly not least, Arabs.)
(Of course, all of capitalist enterprise overlaps with the criminal, but I think the wantonness and malfeasance is more pronounced in immigrants, and I hope to address this in a subsequent section.)
While the immigrant very often is a fired-up go-getter, on the make, on the move, his hands tenacious talons going for the gold, so many Americans appear lackadaisical about success or self-betterment. Of course, today’s anti analytic inclinations prompt the rude and crude to conclude that such an American is just plain lazy.
The problem cannot be brushed aside with aspersive language like “lazy.” Americans have a higher measure of depression and this accounts for their lack of vigor in trying to make money or get a job.
This depression is often the result of severe and growing atomization in American life. By atomization, social scientists refer to a condition in which one is separate and alone, supposedly like an atom. (Of course, they are not literally like atoms as atoms are often closely mated with other atoms, e.g., oxygen atoms often travel in pairs; the term atomization is a misnomer) A highly atomized person has little in the way of family and friends to keep him rooted and to ward off crippling depression. American people, highly atomized, are often just too depressed and messed-up to make much of themselves. I posit five reasons why America is so severely atomized:
1) Hypercapitalism, or intense, febrile and furious capitalistic activity. Examples of how this incites atomization: a) When one is moved by one’s boss to a new city, one is forcibly separated from family and friends; b) a colleague of mine at NYU law school did not go to his father’s funeral because he was working on a brief
2) Feminism taught women to dump on filial loyalty and the loss of Mothers and Wives axed the family
3) The sexual revolution became a tawdriness and a bitchiness revolution which embittered people and made them more distant (John Lennon suggested that the sexual revolution had missed something when he sang, in “Working Class hero,” “They kept you doped on religion and sex and TV/ and you think you’re so clever and classless and free/ but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”)
4) Vulgar, popular conceptions of psychology held that unhappiness was derived from familial binds and more people snubbed and severed familial ties
5) America is intoxicated with the glory of individuality and independence. These are important values. But these are not the only values we should cherish. We should also adore love, brotherhood, loyalty and community. But like political advisors who counsel that a politician should “stay on message” and not complicate his campaign with more than one or two ideas, OR SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS WHO TELL ME THAT MY POSTS ON SUBSTACK SHOULD SAY ONLY ONE SIMPLE THING AND REPEAT THAT SAME BANAL, SIMPLE GARBAGE IN EVERY SINGLE POST I WRITE, the idiot media cannot disseminate more than one idea at the same time.
(The moronic way in which people chatter and “think” is perhaps most evident when one listens to fat women talking about dieting. I had an epiphany, to the effect that Americans reasoned like a bunch of people with Down’s syndrome, when I watched a talk show, in the late 80’s, in which one loud, hysterical blonde bitch screamed, like Mussolini calling for war against Ethiopia, that the problem was fat and nothing but fat and that anyone who thought carbs could also make one fat was guilty of rank apostasy. Then another sick bitch screamed that the problem was carbs and that fat was innocent of all wrongdoing. Those broads started to go at it like crack heads in a holding pen in Rikers Islands. I had never before been so thoroughly entertained in all my life.)
Although Americans suffer from severe atomization, many immigrants have not been similarly warped by the cardinal mistakes of modernism. Immigrants arrive in this country as part of a team. And so a team of 15 Asian relatives may land on one block in New York City and very quickly subdue and impoverish the depressed, alone and isolated Americans who often go nowhere for Thanksgiving or any other holiday and drown in the waters of their tearful, fatal depressions.
Instead of weeping for immigrants, people who love themselves and came to America to grab the bucks. I would weep for the Americans who because of guilt or neurosis or rejection don’t love themselves. I think this idea first flashed in my head in about 1987 when I was reading Michael Gold’s “Jews Without Money,” his classic account of desperately poor Jewish Immigrants in the Lower East Side. Although they had nothing, they had familial solidarity and drive and they seemed to outmatch some of the American protestants whose families had been here for ages but had decomposed.
Somehow, instead of adoring Asian immigrants who industriously and craftily learn how to finagle and manipulate the strings of finance like an award-winning harpist, I would devote my love, care and attention to the American born drug addict or alcoholic who is wondering the streets in the middle of the night, unmoored, unloved and wholly unaffiliated.
(Subsequent parts in this series will delineate additional problems induced by excessive immigration.)