The Mass Immigration Debate within the Socialist Party of America from 1910–1912, Part 2

In part 1 here, the debate within the Socialist Party of America on mass immigration at their national convention in Chicago from 15–21 May 1910 was examined.

In 1912, the Socialist Party of America held another national convention from 12–18 May in Indianapolis.

Once again, the issue of mass immigration was discussed, and once again the committee on the immigration question produced a majority report.

Remarkably, the majority report of 1912 was even more opposed to mass immigration than that of 1910. Furthermore, the authors were not afraid to examine the issue of how racial feelings and animosities were exacerbated by mass immigration and also exploited by capitalists.

The full text of the majority report is as follows:

MAJORITY REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION
At the national congress of the Socialist Party in 1910, the Committee on Immigration presented a majority report signed by Ernest Untermann, Joshua Wanhope and Victor L. Berger, and a minority report signed, by John Spargo.

The majority report declared that the interests of the labor unions and of the Socialist Party of America demanded the enforcement of the existing exclusion laws which keep out the mass immigration or importation of Asiatic laborers.

The minority report declared that the danger from Asiatic labor immigration or importation was more imaginary than real and that, therefore, the Socialist Party should content itself with an emphasis upon the international solidarity of all working people regardless of nationality or race. The minority report did not state whether the Socialist Party should demand the repeal of the existing exclusion laws. When asked during the debate whether he favored the repeal of these laws, Comrade Spargo declined to commit himself to a definite answer.

In the course of the discussion, Comrade Morris Hillquit introduced a substitute for both reports. This substitute evaded the question for or against the existing exclusion laws, merely demanding that the mass of importation of contract laborers from all countries should be combated by the Socialist Party.

An amendment to this substitute, demanding a special emphasis upon the fact that the bulk of the Asiatic immigration was stimulated by the capitalists and for this reason should be excluded, was offered by Comrade Algernon Lee.

After a debate lasting nearly two days, the congress adopted Hillquit’s substitute by a vote of 55 against 50.

This close vote induced the congress to recommit the question for further study to a new committee on immigration with instructions to report to the national convention of 1912.

In this new committee the same alignment immediately took place. After a fruitless effort of the chairman to get unanimous action, the majority decided to act by itself and let the minority do the same.

Continued study and the developments on the Pacific Coast during the last two years convinced the majority of this committee more than ever that the existing exclusion laws against Asiatic laborers should be enforced and be amended in such way that they can be more effectively enforced. The details of the necessary amendments should be worked out by our representatives, or by our future representatives, in Congress and submitted for ratification to the Committee on Immigration, which should be made permanent for this purpose.

It does not matter whether Asiatic immigration is voluntary or stimulated by capitalists. There is no room for doubt that the capitalists welcome this immigration, and that its effect upon the economic and political class organizations of the American workers is destructive.

It is true that all foreign labor immigration lowers the standard of living, increases the unemployed problem and supplies the capitalists with uninformed and willing tools of reaction. But of all foreign labor immigration, the Asiatic element, owing to its social and racial peculiarities, is the most difficult to assimilate and mold into a homogeneous and effective revolutionary body. It is all the more dangerous to the most advanced labor organizations of this nation, because it adds to and intensifies the race issue which is already a grave problem in large sections of this country.

In the European countries the labor unions and the Socialist Party are not confronted by the task of educating, organizing and uniting vast masses of alien nationalities and races with the main body of the native class-conscious workers. Where alien immigration enters into the European labor problem, it plays but an insignificant role compared to the overwhelming mass of native workers. America is the only country in which the labor unions and the Socialist Party are compelled to face the problem of educating, organizing and uniting not only the native workers but a continually increasing army of foreign nationalities and races who enter this country without any knowledge of the English language, of American traditions, of economic and political conditions. The disappearance of the Western frontier has intensified the difficulties of labor organizations and Socialist propaganda to such a degree that it has become an unavoidable task to decide whether restrictive measures shall or shall not be demanded in the interests of the labor unions and of the Socialist Party. Since the race issue enters most prominently into this problem and has for years been the central point of restrictive legislation, the Socialist Party has been compelled to take notice of it.

Race feeling is not so much a result of social as of biological evolution. It does not change essentially with changes of economic systems. It is deeper than any class feeling and will outlast the capitalist system. It persists even after race prejudice has been outgrown. It exists, not because the capitalists nurse it for economic reasons, but the capitalists rather have an opportunity to nurse it for economic reasons because it exists as a product of biology. It is bound to play a role in the economics of the future society. If it should not assert itself in open warfare under a Socialist form of society, it will nevertheless lead to a rivalry of races for expansion over the globe as a result of the play of natural and sexual selection. We may temper this race feeling by education, but we can never hope to extinguish it altogether. Class-consciousness must be learned, but race-consciousness is inborn and cannot be wholly unlearned. A few individuals may indulge in the luxury of ignoring race and posing as utterly raceless humanitarians, but whole races never.

Where races struggle for the means of life, racial animosities cannot be avoided. Where working people struggle for jobs, self-preservation enforces its decrees. Economic and political considerations lead to racial fights and to legislation restricting the invasion of the white man’s domain by other races.

The Socialist Party cannot avoid this issue. The exclusion of definite races, not on account of race, but for economic and political reasons, has been forced upon the old party statesmen in spite of the bitter opposition of the great capitalists.

Every addition of incompatible race elements to the present societies of nations or races strengthens the hands of the great capitalists against the rising hosts of class-conscious workers. But the race feeling is so strong that even the majority of old party statesmen have not dared to ignore it.

From the point of view of the class-conscious workers it is irrational in the extreme to permit the capitalists to protect their profits by high tariffs against the competition of foreign capital, and at the same time connive at their attempts to extend free trade in the one commodity which the laborer should protect more than any other, his labor power.

It is still more irrational to excuse this self-destructive policy by the slogan of international working class solidarity, for this sentimental solidarity works wholly into the hands of the capitalist class and injures the revolutionary movement of the most advanced workers of this nation, out of ill-considered worship of an Asiatic working class which is as yet steeped in the ideas of a primitive state of undeveloped capitalism.

A proper consideration of working class interests, to which the Socialist Party is pledged by all traditions and by all historical precedent, demands that our representatives in the legislative bodies of this nation should reduce the tariff protection of the capitalists and introduce a tariff, or tax, upon unwholesome competitors of the working class, regardless of whether these competitors are voluntary or subsidized immigrants. Real protection of American labor requires a tariff on labor power and the reduction and gradual abolition of the tariff on capital. Such labor legislation already exists in British Columbia and has proved effective there.

The argument that the menace of Asiatic labor immigration is more imaginary than real overlooks the obvious fact that this menace has been minimized and kept within bounds by the existing exclusion laws, and that it can be eliminated altogether by a strict enforcement and more up-to-date amendment of these laws.

The majority of this committee realize of course, that the development of capitalism in China, India and Japan will necessarily tend to bring the American laborer into competition with the Asiatic laborer, even if the Asiatic does not come to the shore of this country. But the exclusion of the Asiatic from the shores of this country will at least give to the American laborer the advantage of fighting the Asiatic competition at long range and wholly through international commerce, instead of having struggle with the Asiatic laborer for jobs upon American soil. This will tend to abolish the labor of children and women in American factories, to maintain a rational standard of living and to reduce the unemployed problem for adult male workers.

International solidarity between the working people of Asia, Europe and America will be the outcome of international evolution, not of sentimental formulas. So long as the mind of the workers of nations and races are separated by long distances of industrial evolution, the desired solidarity cannot be completely realized, and while it is in process of realization, the demands of immediate self-preservation are more imperative than dreams of ideal solidarity.

The international solidarity of the working class can be most effectively demonstrated, not by mass immigration into each others’ countries, but by the international co-operation of strong labor unions and of the national sections of the International Socialist Party.

Socialism proves itself a science to the extent that it enables us to foretell the actual tendencies of future development.

This is the general principle that guided us in the struggle against the capitalist classes of the world. We work for the transformation of capitalist into Socialist society, not so much because sentiment, longing, dogma or argument drive us, but because we are convinced that the dominant tendencies of capitalism work in the direction of Socialism.

This point of view has been almost wholly overlooked in the discussion and practice of these ‘immediate’ policies which serve as our conscious steps in the direction of Socialism.

In our general propaganda and party organization, we work for the prophesied outcome of capitalist development and shape our actions in harmony with the foreseen probable course which the majority of the citizens will be compelled to adopt during the revolution of the human mind towards a Socialist consciousness.

Not so in discussing and acting upon, questions of immediate policy, such as the exclusion of Asiatic laborers from the United States. Instead of clearly foretelling the inevitable policy which the majority of the voters of this nation will be compelled to adopt in this particular instance, we are supposed to shape our actions in response to sentimental, Utopian or dogmatic arguments dictated by the personal likes or dislikes of a few individuals.

Instead of scientifically foretelling the inevitable logic of events, we are supposed to listen to a logic inspired by the sophistry of the advocates of unrestricted immigration.

Those who affirm the sentimental solidarity of the working classes the world over and at the same time demand a restriction of the stimulated mass importation of contract laborers admit unwillingly that this ideal solidarity is really impossible. And while they thus contradict their own sentimental assertion, they evade the real issue by an exaggerated reverence for a Utopian race solidarity.

The common sense Socialist policy under these circumstances is to build up strong national labor unions and strong national Socialist parties in the different countries and work toward more perfect solidarity by an international co-operation of these labor unions and parties. To this end the Socialist Party of America should consider above all the interests of those native and foreign working class citizens whose economic and political class organizations are destined to be the dominant elements in the social revolution of this country.

In the United States this means necessarily the enforcement of the existing exclusion laws against Asiatic laborers, and the amendment of these laws in such a way that the working class of America shall fortify its strategic position in the struggle against the capitalist class.

The majority of this committee are not opposed to the social mingling of races through travel, education and friendly association upon terms of equality. But we are convinced that the mass of the voters with the growth of social consciousness, will rather eliminate more and more those warring elements of social development which interfere with an orderly and systematic organization of industrial and political democracy. They will not be anxious to intensify the unemployed problem and the race issue, but will strive to transform the international working class solidarity from a Utopian shibboleth into a constructive policy. They will use their collective intelligence to reduce the evils growing out of unemployment and race feeling, until we shall be able to eliminate those evils altogether and strip race feeling at least of its brutalities.

This tendency is so plainly evident to the majority of this committee that we can afford to dispense with appeals to passion. This question will not be solved by a repetition of phrases, but by a conscious and instructive policy which will enforce itself as an inevitable step in the direction of working class solidarity and Socialism all world over.

ERNEST UNTERMANN, Chairman.
JOSHUA WANHOPE,
J. STITT WILSON,
ROBERT HUNTER.” (Spargo 1912: 209–211).

As we can see, the majority report of 1912 fully endorsed government legislation implementing large-scale mass immigration restriction into America.

Notably, they thought that preventing large-scale mass immigration of people with differing cultural and racial backgrounds into the United States would actually reduce racial tensions and racial prejudice. This view is rather similar to the progressive Liberal idea of that era of national self-determination as a way to reduce ethnic and national tensions.

The majority report view is stated again here:

“International solidarity between the working people of Asia, Europe and America will be the outcome of international evolution, not of sentimental formulas. So long as the mind of the workers of nations and races are separated by long distances of industrial evolution, the desired solidarity cannot be completely realized, and while it is in process of realization, the demands of immediate self-preservation are more imperative than dreams of ideal solidarity.

The international solidarity of the working class can be most effectively demonstrated, not by mass immigration into each others’ countries, but by the international co-operation of strong labor unions and of the national sections of the International Socialist Party. ….

The common sense Socialist policy under these circumstances is to build up strong national labor unions and strong national Socialist parties in the different countries and work toward more perfect solidarity by an international co-operation of these labor unions and parties. To this end the Socialist Party of America should consider above all the interests of those native and foreign working class citizens whose economic and political class organizations are destined to be the dominant elements in the social revolution of this country.” (Spargo 1912: 210–211).

How times have changed in modern Marxism, socialism and Social Democracy, where the fanatical support for open borders and mass immigration is now a religion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spargo, John (ed.). 1912. Proceedings. National Convention of the Socialist Party, held at Indianapolis, Ind., May 12 to 18, 1912. The Socialist Party, Chicago, Ill.
https://archive.org/details/nationalconvention00soci

A Question No Leftist/Liberal Can Answer

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Robert Putnam on the Negative Effects of Diversity

Robert D. Putnam’s paper “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐First Century” (2007) should be required reading for multiculturalist leftists.

From the abstract:

“Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/abstract

Putnam (2007: 137) begins by asking how increasing ethnic diversity and multiculturalism in the Western world affect social cohesion, or what Putnam calls “social capital,” in terms of social “reciprocity and trustworthiness.”

High levels of social cohesion (or social capital) lead to societies with much better outcomes with respect to everything from economic, social, and health outcomes to happiness (Putnam 2007: 138).

Putnam is of course a multiculturalist liberal: he thinks mass immigration and ethnic diversity are desirable and a social asset in the long run (Putnam 2007: 138).

However, Putnam argues that in the short run mass immigration and diversity break up social cohesion and inhibit social capital (Putnam 2007: 138).

Let us examine Putnam’s analysis of ethnic diversity and its negative consequences below:

(1) Putnam (2007: 141–142) first notes that the “contact hypothesis” (beloved by liberals) argues that diversity enhances inter-ethnic tolerance and social solidarity.

Unfortunately, says Putnam, most empirical studies refute the “contact hypothesis” and actually provide evidence for the “conflict theory”: the latter being that

“ … diversity fosters out-group distrust and in-group solidarity. On this theory, the more we are brought into physical proximity with people of another race or ethnic background, the more we stick to ‘our own’ and the less we trust the ‘other’ …” (Putnam 2007: 142).

Putnam cites an impressive range of studies in support of this as follows: Blumer 1958; Blalock 1967; Giles and Evans 1986; Quillian 1995 and 1996; Brewer and Brown 1998; Taylor 1998; Bobo 1999; Bobo and Tuan 2006.

Now Putnam does conclude that even the “conflict theory” is not exactly correct. But his own conclusions and thesis are even worse than the “conflict theory,” as we will see below.

(2) in terms of workgroups, as the internal diversity of groups increases (whether in terms of age, ethnicity, etc.), the more one finds lower group cohesion and lower satisfaction. Putnam cites evidence from both the US and Europe: Jackson et al. 1991; Cohen and Bailey 1997; Keller 2001; Webber and Donahue 2001.

(3) evidence from many nations shows that, as ethnic diversity increases, the more social trust falls (see Newton and Delhey 2005; Anderson and Paskeviciute 2006). Even worse, empirical studies relating to local regions of the US, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain show that rising ethnic diversity is accompanied by falling social trust and sometimes even falling investment in public goods (see Poterba 1997; Alesina et al. 1999; Alesina and La Ferrara 2000, 2002; Costa and Kahn 2003;Vigdor 2004; Glaeser and Alesina 2004; Leigh 2006; Jordahl and Gustavsson 2006; Soroka et al. 2007; Pennant 2005).

(4) even in the Third World, diversity brings deleterious effects. Studies show that in Pakistan, with rising clan or religious differences, this diversity is corrected with the failure of the maintenance of collective infrastructure (see Karlan 2002; Miguel and Gugerty 2005; Khwaja 2006).

(5) in behavioural experiments involving things like the prisoners-dilemma or ultimatum games, with a greater diversity of players, the more players are likely to cheat and defect (see Putnam 2007: 143).

(6) from his own reading of the evidence, Putnam himself suggests that increasing diversity may actually decrease both in-group social cohesion and out-group solidarity, a thesis which he labels “constrict theory” (Putnam 2007: 144). The evidence for this is given below in (7).

(7) Putnam cites the “Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey,” which was conducted in the Unites States in 2000 with a sample size of about 30,000 people (Putnam 2007: 144).

The results of this study are devastating to liberal multiculturalism: it shows that as diversity rises in a community and ethnic homogeneity is reduced, so inter-racial trust falls (Putnam 2007: 147). So it turns out:

“Inter-racial trust is relatively high in homogeneous South Dakota and relatively low in heterogeneous San Francisco or Los Angeles. The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them. This pattern may be distressing normatively, but it seems to be consistent with conflict theory.” (Putnam 2007: 147).

Even more devastating is the evidence that, as diversity rises, the more people tend to distrust their neighbours and even people like themselves, even of the same ethnic group or race (Putnam 2007: 148–149).

(8) Increasing ethnic diversity also leads to all sorts of other deleterious consequences, as follows:

(1) decreasing confidence in government and the news media;

(2) lower frequency of voting registration;

(3) decreasing expectation that others will provide cooperation necessary for collective action;

(4) fewer people participating in community projects;

(5) less giving to charity;

(6) fewer close friends;

(7) less happiness and the perception of a lower quality of life;

(8) more disengagement from the world and more time spent watching television (Putnam 2007: 149–150).

(9) In short,

“Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.” (Putnam 2007: 149).

Putnam concludes that these findings support his own “constrict theory” of the negative consequences of diversity (Putnam 2007: 149).

While diversity does not necessarily increase inter-ethnic hatred,

“… inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behavior, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.” (Putnam 2007: 150–151).

The findings are also true regardless of poverty, economic inequality, or the affluence of a community (Putnam 2007: 153, 157). Even though some differences exist, they are generally true even with respect to men and women, liberal and conservative people, whites and non-white people, and even young people and older generations (Putnam 2007: 153–154).

Increasing diversity per se always seems to have the same negative effect (Putnam 2007: 153).

Most notably, the negative effects of diversity are very clear and significant amongst liberals as well (Putnam 2007: 154), despite the widespread myth that liberals love diversity.

And even amongst young people the somewhat more receptive attitude to diversity may be nothing but a passing phase of life (Putnam 2007: 155).

Though Putnam does not discuss the issue, it seems rather obvious that greater diversity is more likely to destroy the chances for a democratic socialist society, a vision so beloved by the left.

If anything, democratic socialism requires a high trust and hence highly homogeneous society. Diversity is more likely to reduce people to atomised, isolated people, disconnected and distrustful of the people around them.

Another issue not in Putnam’s paper is this: do the negative consequences of diversity also include a lowering of the birth rate? Maybe it does in some minor way or maybe not, but it is an interesting question, nevertheless.

Putnam’s liberal spin on all this emerges from p. 159 of the paper.

In the long run, Putnam contends, America will be able to overcome the terrible, divisive effects of increasing ethnic diversity. At first, he appears to endorse the melting pot assimilation model of liberal nationalism as the solution (Putnam 2007: 160–161).

However, Putnam stumbles badly when he discusses the history of American immigration as a model for how to solve the diversity conundrum (Putnam 2007: 162). As I have shown here, the degree of ethnic diversity in American history is grossly exaggerated and a subject of liberal myth-making. Before the 1960s, most immigrants were Europeans and mostly Christians (albeit of different denominations). These immigrants were from broadly compatible European cultures, and the increasing negative effects of diversity back then (Putnam 2007: 162) were more easily solved in the long run by the melting pot model of assimilation. But that model may not work with profoundly different Third World cultures that mass immigration brings into the West today. Even more importantly, as Putnam himself notes, the era of mass immigration into America was largely halted from 1924 to 1964 (Putnam 2007: 162), to give time for assimilation to proceed. Today mass immigration is unending, even accelerating, and there is no halt in sight.

So, in short, what is the hard evidence Putnam can provide that in the long run everything will be alright with accelerating mass immigration and diversity?

Well, it turns out that it’s all based on a “hunch” that Putnam has:

“Nevertheless, my hunch is that at the end we shall see that the challenge is best met not by making ‘them’ like ‘us’, but rather by creating a new, more capacious sense of ‘we’, a reconstruction of diversity that does not bleach out ethnic specificities, but creates overarching identities that ensure that those specificities do not trigger the allergic, ‘hunker down’ reaction.” (Putnam 2007: 163–164).

Well, I am sorry, that is not good enough. What if your hunch is wrong?

The hand-waving assertion that, in the long run, everything will be just fine with multiculturalism and mass immigration is nothing but faith-based social science. In Europe, we are already seeing the failure and the beginning of the collapse of this extreme multiculturalist faith.

So what if the pessimistic critics of mass immigration policy are correct?:



My own conclusion is this: the evidence seems clear that the regressive left obsession with diversity and mass immigration is doing horrendous harm to the possibility for an effective Social Democratic vision for the Western world with left heterodox economic policies, and, above all, to the possibility of a democratic socialism, which entails a high trust and, whether leftists like it or not, a highly homogeneous society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alesina, A., Baqir, R. and W. Easterly. 1999. “Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114: 1243–1284.

Alesina, A. and E. La Ferrara. 2000. “Participation in Heterogeneous Communities,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115: 847–904.

Alesina, A. and E. La Ferrara. 2002. “Who Trusts Others?,” Journal of Public Economics 85: 207–234.

Anderson, C. J. and A. Paskeviciute. 2006. “How Ethnic and Linguistic Heterogeneity Influence the Prospects for Civil Society: A Comparative Study of Citizenship Behavior,” Journal of Politics 68: 783–802.

Blalock, H. M. 1967. Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. John Wiley and Sons, New York.

Blumer, H. 1958. “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1: 3–7.

Bobo, L. D. 1999. “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations,” Journal of Social Issues 55: 445–472.

Bobo, L. D. and M. Tuan. 2006. Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Brewer, M. B. and R. J. Brown. 1998. “Intergroup Relations,” in D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske and G. Lindzey (eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (4th edn.). Oxford University
Press, New York.

Cohen, S. G. and D. E. Bailey. 1997. “What Makes Teams Work: Group Effectiveness Research from the Shop Floor to the Executive Suite,” Journal of Management 23: 239–290.

Costa, D. L. and M. E. Kahn. 2003. “Civic Engagement and Community Heterogeneity: An Economist’s Perspective,” Perspectives on Politics 1: 103–111.

Giles, M. W. and A. Evans. 1986. “The Power Approach to Intergroup Hostility,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 30: 469–485.

Glaeser, E. and A. Alesina. 2004. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Jackson, S. et al. 1991. “Some Differences Make a Difference: Individual Dissimilarity and Group Heterogeneity as Correlates of Recruitment, Promotions and Turnover,” Journal of
Applied Psychology 76: 675–689.

Jordahl, H. and M. Gustavsson. 2006. “Inequality and Trust in Sweden: Some Inequalities are More Harmful than Others,” Ratio Working Paper 106. Stockholm: Ratio.

Karlan, D. 2002. “Social Capital and Group Banking,” Unpublished manuscript, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keller, R. T. 2001. ‘Cross-Functional Project Groups in Research and New Product Development: Diversity, Communications, Job Stress and Outcomes,” Academy of Management Journal 44: 547–555.

Khwaja, A. I. 2006. “Can Good Projects Succeed in Bad Communities?,” Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government Working Papers. http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~akhwaja/papers/BaltNov06.pdf.

Leigh, A. 2006. “Trust, Inequality and Ethnic Heterogeneity,” Economic Record 82: 268–280.

Miguel, E. and M. K. Gugerty. 2005. “Ethnic Diversity, Social Sanctions and Public Goods in Kenya,” Journal of Public Economics 89: 2325–2368.

Newton, K. and J. Delhey. 2005. “Predicting Cross-national Levels of Social Trust: Global Pattern or Nordic Exceptionalism?,” European Sociological Review 21: 311–327.

Pennant, R. 2005. Diversity, Trust and Community Participation in England. Home Office Findings 253, Research, Development and Statistics Directorate.
http://www.blink.org.uk/docs/ho_findings_diversity_trust.pdf

Poterba, J. M. 1997. “Demographic Structure and the Political Economy of Public Education,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 16: 48–66.

Putnam, Robert D. 2007. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐First Century. The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30.2: 137–174.

Quillian, L. 1995. “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60: 586–611.

Quillian, L. 1996. “Group Threat and Regional Change in Attitudes towards African Americans,” American Journal of Sociology 102: 816–860.

Soroka, S. N., Helliwell, J. F. and R. Johnston. 2007. “Measuring and Modeling Interpersonal Trust,” in F. M. Kay and R. Johnston (eds.), Social Capital, Diversity and the Welfare State. UBC Press, Vancouver.

Webber, S. S. and L. M. Donahue. 2001. ‘Impact of Highly and Less Job-related Diversity on Work Group Cohesion and Performance: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of Management 27: 141–162.

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Mass Immigration for Thee, but not for Me

That is, if you are a highly paid, middle class professional in the West, as Dean Baker notes:

“The trade agreements that the United States has negotiated over the last three decades have been about getting low cost auto workers, steel workers, and textile workers. In addition, immigration policy has been designed to ensure that custodians, farmworkers, and dishwashers all work for low wages. These policies have been successful in pushing down wages for large segments of the work force, not only those who were directly displaced by trade or immigrant workers, but also those who face heightened competition from workers who were displaced by trade or immigration.

But trade does not have to depress the wages of less-skilled workers. Trade agreements can also be structured to get us low cost doctors, lawyers, accountants, economists, reporters, and editorial writers. There are tens of millions of smart and energetic people in the developing world who could do these jobs better than most of the people who currently hold these positions in the United States. And they would be willing to do these jobs for a fraction of the wage. Real free traders would be jumping at this opportunity to increase economic growth and aid consumers in the United States, while at the same time increasing prosperity in developing countries.

But the economists, editorialists, and political pundits are not likely to raise the call for eliminating the barriers that prevent competition from professionals in the developing world. The truth is that the ‘free traders’ don’t want free trade – they want cheap nannies – but ‘free trade’ sounds much more noble.” (Baker 2006: 26–27).

Of course, even some of these people are starting to feel the effects of mass immigration on their employment prospects too, but Dean Baker’s general point still stands.

Logically, free movement of people and open borders are the natural corollary of free trade, as Ha-Joon Chang has noted here. But your average idiot neoclassical economist has nothing to say about this. The small fringe of hard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists love open borders, not least of all because they see (correctly) that it would destroy the welfare state.

Unlike Baker, however, who does seem at one point to endorse mass immigration of some Third World professionals to the West (Baker 2006: 103) to lower costs and increase supply, I don’t think this can be a sensible solution. The long-term solution is: educating more people in the West to overcome any supply issues with, say, doctors or health care professionals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Dean. 2006. The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cnswebbook.pdf

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Hoppe on Mass Immigration

For once he gets something right when he examines the views of open borders left libertarians and pro-open borders right-wing libertarians:

“Let us begin with a proposal made by the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and various left-libertarian writers of an ‘open’ or ‘no’ border policy—not because this proposal has any merit, but because it helps to elucidate what the problem is and what needs to be done to solve it.

It is not difficult to predict the consequences of an open border policy in the present world. If Switzerland, Austria, Germany or Italy, for instance, freely admitted everyone who made it to their borders and demanded entry, these countries would quickly be overrun by millions of third-world immigrants from Albania, Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria, for example. As the more perceptive open-border advocates realize, the domestic state-welfare programs and provisions would collapse as a consequence. This would not be a reason for concern, for surely, in order to regain effective protection of person and property the welfare state must be abolished. But then there is the great leap—or the gaping hole—in the open border argument: out of the ruins of the democratic welfare states, we are led to believe, a new natural order will somehow emerge.

The first error in this line of reasoning can be readily identified. Once the welfare states have collapsed under their own weight, the masses of immigrants who have brought this about are still there. They have not been miraculously transformed into Swiss, Austrians, Bavarians or Lombards, but remain what they are: Zulus, Hindus, Ibos, Albanians, or Bangladeshis. Assimilation can work when the number of immigrants is small. It is entirely impossible, however, if immigration occurs on a mass scale. In that case, immigrants will simply transport their own ethno-culture onto the new territory. Accordingly, when the welfare state has imploded there will be a multitude of ‘little’ (or not so little) Calcuttas, Daccas, Lagoses, and Tiranas strewn all over Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. It betrays a breathtaking sociological naiveté to believe that a natural order will emerge out of this admixture. Based on all historical experience with such forms of multiculturalism, it can safely be predicted that in fact the result will be civil war. There will be widespread plundering and squatterism leading to massive capital consumption, and civilization as we know it will disappear from Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Furthermore, the host population will quickly be outbred and, ultimately, physically displaced by their ‘guests.’ There will still be Alps in Switzerland and Austria, but no Swiss or Austrians.” (Hoppe 2002: 88–89).

And Hoppe, despite all his ranting about the state, knows well that multinational corporations and big business love mass immigration for economic reasons:

“Theoretically bankrupt, the left-libertarian open border stance can be understood only psychologically. One source can be found in the Randian upbringing of many left-libertarians. Big businessmen-entrepreneurs are portrayed as ‘heroes’ and, according to Ayn Rand in one of her more ridiculous statements, are viewed as the welfare state’s ‘most severely persecuted minority.’ In this view (and untainted by any historical knowledge or experience), what can possibly be wrong with a businessman hiring an immigrant worker? In fact, as every historian knows, big businessmen are among the worst sinners against private property rights and the law of the market. Among other things, in an unholy alliance with the central State they have acquired the privilege of importing immigrant workers at other people’s expense (just as they have acquired the privilege of exporting capital to other countries and being bailed out by taxpayers and the military when such investments turn sour).” (Hoppe 2002: 92–93, n. 23).

But here Hoppe gets it wrong: the “privilege of importing immigrant workers at other people’s expense” is not a “sin” against “private property rights and the law of the market,” but is wholly consistent with the laissez faire property-rights libertarianism of Austrian libertarianism. Rather, it is a violation of the collective economic and social interests of many people within society as a whole and a violation of sensible consequentialist ethical principles with respect to the well being of a society.

Furthermore, the trouble is, of course, that Hoppe’s mad world of libertarian “contractual communities” wouldn’t be much protection against this.

National governments, for all their faults, are the only effective barrier to, and serious check on, the power of private multinational corporations and big business. Hoppe’s desire to abolish the state would effectively leave the private corporate tyrannies – with their massive concentrations of capital, wealth and power – as the de facto government of advanced industrial societies.

History would suggest that hating, as they do, high wages, labour rights and the cost of first world labour, they would happily bring in millions of cheap, foreign and easily exploitable labour from the Third World even in Hoppe’s libertarian world, which would also bring about the catastrophe Hoppe predicts in the passage above.

To see this, we can look at 19th century Western colonies outside Europe (like, for example, America), at a time when the power of business was very strong. The late 19th century and early 20th century Labour parties, socialists, and trade unions in Western offshoots tended – despite streams of internationalist Marxism – to be vehemently opposed to mass immigration and this was often one of their central political struggles precisely because large sectors of big business were constantly in favour of mass immigration of Third World labour.

America is a case in point. By the late 19th century, American capitalists had resorted to a brutal system of near slave labour by importing Chinese immigrants (or “Coolies”) to exploit them for low wages under viciously exploitative conditions (see here and here; see also Saxton 1971).

Such indentured workers and their near slave-labour drove down wages for domestic American workers and caused competition for scarce jobs. This provoked an angry working class political movement, including, for example, the activism of the US labour leader Denis Kearney who organised the Workingmen’s Party of California in 1877, whose program included opposition to mass immigration.

Of course, it is well known that these movements also involved an ugly and strong racial bigotry, but the fact is there was no need for that element at all, and the primary objections of the socialists and union movements to mass immigration and virtual slave labour should have been limited to complaining about the devastating effects of mass immigration on the employment prospects and real wages of American workers and cultural issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. 2002. “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 16.1: 75–97.

Saxton, Alexander. 1971. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Mass Immigration is the Last Fraud of Neoliberalism

And Dean Baker, a man who is clearly not a conservative but left-wing, explains why in his very interesting book The Conservative Nanny State (2006) and in the US context:

“Trade is not the only mechanism that nanny state conservatives have used to depress the wages of the bulk of the population. Immigration has also been an important tool to depress the wages of a substantial segment of the workforce. The principle with immigration is exactly the same as with trade. It takes advantage of the billions of workers in developing countries who are willing to work at substantially lower wages than workers in the United States to drive down the wages in a wide range of occupations.

The conservative nanny state folklore on immigration is that immigrants take jobs that workers in the United States do not want, and they point to jobs like custodians, dishwashers, and fruit picking, all very low paying jobs. The problem with the folklore is that the reason that native born workers are unlikely to want these jobs is that they are low-paying, not because they are intrinsically such awful jobs. Native-born workers have been willing to take many unpleasant jobs when they were compensated with high wages. Meatpacking is an obvious example of an industry that did offer relatively high-paying jobs that were widely sought after by native-born workers, even though no one would be very happy to work in a slaughterhouse. This is less true today than in the past, because the meatpacking industry has taken advantage of the availability of immigrant workers to depress wages and working conditions in the industry. As a result, immigrant workers are now a very large share of the workforce in the meatpacking industry.

The same sort of situation holds in all of the jobs that native born workers supposedly do not want. Native-born workers will wash dishes, clean toilets, and pick tomatoes for $20 an hour. When the nanny state conservatives say that they can’t find native-born workers for these jobs, they mean that they can’t find native-born workers at the wages that they want to pay, just as most of us can't find native-born doctors or lawyers who are willing to work for $15 an hour. The difference is that the nanny state conservatives get to bring in immigrants at low wages to meet their needs, whereas the doctors and lawyers can count on the nanny state to protect them from competition with immigrant workers.” (Baker 2006: 23–24).

The reason that professionals and middle class people – say, doctors or university lecturers – can generally stave off such competition is that they tend to have effective trade unions or lobbies that defend them (Baker 2006: 24), but our unskilled and low-skilled workers often cannot.

Even worse, increasingly not even higher-skilled US workers can totally avoid such competition because of notorious special pro-big business visa programs like, say, the H1-B program (Baker 2006: 25).

And also let me be clear: this has got nothing to do with people’s skin colour. This is about good economic theory and good economic policy. Also note well: we are talking here about unending *mass* immigration, not immigration per se. We are not talking about, say, limited immigration of skilled people in an economy at full employment and suffering genuine labour shortages, where the economic argument for controlled immigration of the necessary labour would have good arguments in its favour.

Quite simply: mass immigration is the last fraud of Neoliberalism. And it is the “last fraud” because many people on the left simply can’t see it for what it is: a devastating part of the neoliberal program that has been ongoing for the past 36 years or so.

The left is largely blind to how its economic, social, political, and cultural consequences are devastating, because so much of the left is in thrall to a misguided and extreme multiculturalism that has come right out of Postmodernism. It is so surprising that many more people on the left – particularly in the heterodox economics blogosphere – don’t see the truth here. Or perhaps they do but are too frightened to say it for fear of being slandered with nasty words.

And it is not as though there isn’t good heterodox literature on this and the benefits of labour market protectionism for us in the developed world: there is good analysis by Ha-Joon Chang in his book 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism (Bloomsbury Press, London, 2011), p. 23ff.

This negative view of mass immigration on the left isn’t even new either: in the past the radical Marxist and socialist left in America was vehemently opposed to mass immigration because of its harmful effects on domestic workers. You can probably find precedents for this in the writings of Marx himself, and certainly in Chapter 20 of volume 1 of Capital Marx notes that foreigners can be exploited for very low wages that undermine wages for native workers (Marx 1990: 690). Moreover, we do not need Marxism to justify this view anyway, and Post Keynesianism and left non-Marxist heterodox economics generally can provide good arguments against open borders and mass immigration on economic grounds.

At any rate, the left should not stay silent about the obvious link between neoliberalism and mass immigration, because (1) the issue is obviously of concern to ordinary people and (2) if the left doesn’t get a grip on the issue the only people who will talk about it are the right.

In the context of, say, British politics, the idiosyncratic conservative Peter Hitchens often raises this issue, as in the video below, although he concentrates on cultural and social issues related to it.



That is why Hitchens – a former Marxist and clever speaker – uses the rhetoric of Marxism to attack the bourgeois, pro-business, pro-open borders elites of the neoliberal Tory and New Labour parties. From the surging support for UKIP in Britain and the results of other opinion polls against open borders, it appears opinions like this resonate with more and more people.

The left has a choice: are you going to leave the issue to Hitchens or Trump? And perhaps even people much worse than them?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Dean. 2006. The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/cnswebbook.pdf

Chang, Ha-Joon. 2011. 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism. Bloomsbury Press, London.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One (trans. Ben Fowkes). Penguin Books, London.

The Hypocrisy of Marxists and Left Libertarians on Mass Immigration

One of the most laughable aspects of modern Marxism and left anarchism is their endless bloviating talk about how they allegedly speak for the working class.

First of all, there is the reality that Marxist or communist parties are virtually dead in the Western world (here, here, and here). There are no doubt more working class people voting for conservatives in the West than for far left Marxists (e.g., for the UK’s recent general election see here), and that won’t change any time soon.

Secondly, there is the blatant reality that Marxists and far left anarchists are badly out of touch with the working class on two important issues: open borders and mass immigration.

Far left anarchists these days seem to be militantly in favour of total open borders, an utterly insane policy, and even Marxists seem to be militantly in favour of unending mass immigration too.

Unfortunately, these things aren’t very popular amongst the working class (see here, here, here, and here).

The only apparent response from Marxists to this is to live in a fantasy world and pretend that these working class opinions don’t exist or working class people have been “duped.” That is not the case, however, and open borders impose severe economic, social and cultural problems.

Even worse, most mainstream left-wing labour parties and Social democratic parties – taken over by middle class cosmopolitans obsessed with neoliberalism and cultural leftism – are in favour of unending mass immigration too, and so working class voters with concerns about the economic, social and cultural impact of mass immigration have to go to the conservative side of politics to get any traction for their views.

This is a major reason for the rise of Donald Trump, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), the Freedom Party in Austria, the French National Front, and UKIP.

One of the most stark realities of the populist right parties is this: they have substantial working class support (see Evans and Mellon 2015: 3, 5). In Britain, the working class support for the neoliberal New Labour party imploded in the 1990s and 2000s, and many working class voters went to the conservatives, and then to UKIP (Evans and Mellon 2015: 4), not to the far left.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evans, Geoffrey and Jon Mellon. 2015. “Working Class Votes and Conservative Losses: Solving the UKIP Puzzle,” Parliamentary Affairs
http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/16/pa.gsv005.full

Murray Rothbard loved Open Borders and Mass Immigration

But why should people on the left?

From Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy:

“Laborers may also ask for geographical grants of oligopoly in the form of immigration restrictions. In the free market the inexorable trend is to equalize wage rates for the same value-productive work all over the earth. This trend is dependent on two modes of adjustment: businesses flocking from high-wage to low-wage areas, and workers flowing from low-wage to high-wage areas. Immigration restrictions are an attempt to gain restrictionist wage rates for the inhabitants of an area. They constitute a restriction rather than monopoly because (a) in the labor force, each worker owns himself, and therefore the restrictionists have no control over the whole of the supply of labor; and (b) the supply of labor is large in relation to the possible variability in the hours of an individual worker, i.e., a worker cannot, like a monopolist, take advantage of the restriction by increasing his output to take up the slack, and hence obtaining a higher price is not determined by the elasticity of the demand curve. A higher price is obtained in any case by the restriction of the supply of labor. There is a connexity throughout the entire labor market; labor markets are linked with each other in different occupations, and the general wage rate (in contrast to the rate in specific industries) is determined by the total supply of all labor, as compared with the various demand curves for different types of labor in different industries. A reduced total supply of labor in an area will thus tend to shift all the various supply curves for individual labor factors to the left, thus increasing wage rates all around.

Immigration restrictions, therefore, may earn restrictionist wage rates for all people in the restricted area, although clearly the greatest relative gainers will be those who would have directly competed in the labor market with the potential immigrants. They gain at the expense of the excluded people, who are forced to accept lower-paying jobs at home.

Obviously, not every geographic area will gain by immigration restrictions—only a high-wage area. Those in relatively low-wage areas rarely have to worry about immigration: there the pressure is to emigrate. The high-wage areas won their position through a greater investment of capital per head than the other areas; and now the workers in that area try to resist the lowering of wage rates that would stem from an influx of workers from abroad.” (Rothbard 2006 [1970]: 61–63).

In a Rothbardian world, the government is abolished, and so are national borders. To his credit, Rothbard understands that national borders and controlled immigration impose labour market protectionism and so tend to raise and sustain real wages. Rothbard hates that with a passion, owing to his free market theology. Left-wing people have no such excuse – and indeed they should appreciate the advantages of labour market regulation, protectionism and controlled immigration.

In a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist world, there is literally a race to the bottom as open borders allow endless mass immigration from the Third World to the First, a process which impoverishes workers in the First World and reduces their wages to those of the Third World, and in the process massively reduces living standards and working conditions (e.g., Third World labour may very well accept brutal working conditions). People thrown out of work will be left with private debts they cannot pay, a process which, where private debt is at a very high level, will only lead to further macroeconomic instability. Since there is no effective, reliable tendency to full employment equilibrium in market economies, when private sector aggregate demand is weak or fails, mass immigration would also tend to cause much greater and rising unemployment.

The insanity in Rothbard’s argument is also clear: it assumes that the flood of people wouldn’t cause overpopulation, soaring costs for housing or rent (given scare supply), an increase in crime and social disorder, and the collapse of national social and cultural cohesion.

Even worse, it has the mad assumption that workers are, essentially, perfectly or near perfectly substitutable. Rothbard tacitly assumes that you can take somebody from rural Bangladesh and bring them to Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt or Munich, and that you can substitute the Third World person for an educated skilled or semi-skilled German worker (and even a high level of substitution with unskilled labour is doubtful).

Unfortunately, if the Third World person cannot speak German, is illiterate, is unskilled, does understand German law, culture or the German work ethic, then they are not substitutable with domestic labour. The cost of teaching people German and (even if you totally dispense with wanting them to learn the national language) training them to be skilled or semi-skilled workers – certainly in large numbers – takes a considerable amount of resources and may not even succeed for a significant number of people (e.g., it is difficult to teach a mature adult to master a whole new language and many simply may not be capable of being trained up into highly skilled workers). In a Rothbardian world, this training would be left to private businesses which would raise their costs and divert resources from other industries and services. And what about the people who come who are unemployable? You are likely to get an underclass of criminals and social misfits. There is no reason to think such an open borders policy would be anything but catastrophic.

Finally, we have not even got into serious social and cultural issues. If you allow a tidal wave of people from the Third World into, say, Denmark, Spain, or Sweden, eventually these countries will cease to be Danish, Spanish or Swedish. If you allow mass immigration of people with highly illiberal, regressive, misogynist and homophobic values, then the liberal and progressive mainstream values of these countries will be destroyed.

Since we now live in a world where mainstream liberals, social democrats, Marxists and left anarchists are militantly in favour of open orders and mass immigration to varying degrees, much of the left stands with a lunatic like Rothbard in wanting a policy that – in economic, social and cultural terms – is plainly a catastrophic for the First World.

And I am afraid that the social and cultural objections to this militant left-wing open borders obsession are just as powerful as the economic objections. Unfortunately, many people on the left have been deluded by ideas from Postmodernism like extreme multiculturalism and extreme cultural relativism. To think that open borders could never cause any significant problem of any type requires that you think – just like Rothbard – that all human beings are, in social and cultural terms, perfectly or near perfectly substitutable. This is manifestly untrue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rothbard, M. N. 2006 [1970]. Power and Market: Government and the Economy (4th edn.), Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Ala.

American Socialism and Mass Immigration

It’s surprising how many people have forgotten what the radical American left used to believe about this issue.

At a famous Socialist Congress that occurred in Chicago in 1910, American socialists adopted the following resolution:

“The Socialist party of the United States favors all legislative measures tending to prevent the immigration of strike breakers and contract laborers, and the mass importation of workers from foreign countries, brought about by the employing classes for the purpose of weakening the organization of American labor and of lowering the standard of life of the American workers.” (Carlton 1911: 352).

Amongst these American socialists were many Marxists or reformist Marxists, but these days Marxists seem to be militantly in favour of open borders.

A fundamental point: one of the major reasons why wages are so high in the West is that historically we have enjoyed a high degree of labour market protectionism, certainly after the late 19th century. That is to say, national borders stop immigration of huge quantities of cheap labour, so that Western labour scarcity helps to bid up the price of labour and hence real wages. This is just another example of how pure free trade and completely free movement of people from the Third World to the West are dangerous ideas largely contrary to the real world history of Western capitalism. (On a related point, a recent Bank of England working paper argues that years of mass immigration into Britain has tended to hold down real wages for semi- and unskilled British service workers forced to compete for jobs; see Nickell and Saleheen 2015).

This issue is extremely topical. In Germany (although admittedly the full details are not yet clear) there are plans afoot to create about 100,000 subsidised jobs in which private businesses may be able to pay wages as little as €1 an hour to employ migrants and have the rest of the minimum wage subsidised by the German government (see here). In other words: if you are a domestic unskilled or low-skilled German worker, your chances of getting a job will fall off a cliff as businesses can employ migrants for 1 euro an hour – even while German taxpayers dole out corporate welfare to private employers. Is that not a type of class war on the German working class? Is this not a recipe for driving ordinary German voters to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party?

So where are all the open borders Marxists on this issue?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carlton, Frank Tracy. 1911. The History and Problems of Organized Labor. D.C. Heath, Boston.

Nickell, Stephen and Jumana Saleheen. 2015. “The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Wages: Evidence from Britain,” Bank of England Staff Working Paper No. 574, 18 December 2015
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/workingpapers/2015/swp574.aspx

Calais Chaos

It is in the news here and here.

And people wonder why the French National Front did so well in the first round of French regional elections.

We now learn that disgraceful far left anarchists are inciting the migrants to violence.

Is this the future of Europe? Nations with no control over borders, and Europe filled up with large numbers of migrant camps, with people living as an underclass and with serious breakdown of law and order, and governments unwilling or powerless do to anything?

At some point, reality has to sink in: the migrants in Calais are demanding to be let into the UK. This is an unreasonable demand when they can claim asylum in France, or another European nation that will take them.

There is also reason to think that a significant number aren’t even genuine refugees at all, but mere economic migrants (see here and here).

Jeremy Corbyn yesterday visited the Grande-Synthe camp near Dunkirk, and complained that conditions there are a disgrace, as we can see in the video below.



No doubt that is true: conditions in these camps are disgraceful and inhuman.

So why encourage the migrants in their unreasonable demand to be let into Britain when that won’t happen any time soon? Why not tell them to face reality and claim asylum in France so that they can leave these wretched camps and actually get help from the French government?

What is more compassionate here in view of hard realities?

Finally, I can foresee so easily what will happen to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn: his chances of getting into number 10 will be crippled by (1) his love of the EU and (2) his support for open borders and mass immigration, when these issues are becoming politically toxic in the UK for good reasons (here and here).

A Neoliberal Vision for Europe

The Swiss global financial services company UBS has put out a report called “The Future of Europe” on 13 January, 2016:

“The Future of Europe,” UBS, Chief Investment Office, January 2016.

If you want to see one example of a neoliberal vision for the future of Europe, read it.

At one level, there is some very interesting analysis in it and at least the recognition that the EU needs some central fiscal policy.

But, in its other economic proposals, it makes horrifying reading. Because of the alleged population crisis, Europe, they argue, has two choices, as follows:

(1) huge mass immigration or

(2) massive neoliberal deregulation and labour market deregulation (“The Future of Europe,” p. 6).

Unfortunately, under present economic orthodoxy, option (1) is just as likely to lead to (2), so really (1) boils down to (2).

Option (2) means smashing labour market regulation, job security, minimum wages, and cutting business regulations. In other words, let the corporations and big business do whatever they want.

Option (1), as proposed in the report, would involve mass immigration of 1.8 million new migrants of working age each year for 10 years (“The Future of Europe,” p. 7). So Europe must have 18 million new migrants in the next 10 years, a number which is 38% of the current population of Spain, about 27% of the population of France, or 22% of the current population of Germany. That number is bigger than the current individual populations of Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria or Denmark. Just think about the catastrophe caused by just 1.1 million people coming into Germany last year: Europe must increase this number to 1.8 million a year for 10 years, under this proposal.

Bizarrely missing from the analysis is the crippling mass unemployment Europe is already experiencing, as we can see from some data here:

Nation | Unemployment Rate
Greece | 24.5% (October, 2015)
Spain | 21.6% (October, 2015)
Portugal | 12.4% (October, 2015)
Italy | 11.3% (November, 2015)
France | 10.8% (October, 2015)
Ireland | 8.9% (October, 2015)
Finland 8.2% | (November, 2015)
Sweden | 7.2% (October, 2015)
Netherlands | 6.9% 2015 (October
United Kingdom | 5.1% (January, 2016)
Denmark 6.0% | (October, 2015)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate

Across the EU, the unemployment rate is about 9.1% (as of November, 2015), and youth unemployment even higher. If we were to add in (1) long-term discouraged workers who have given up looking for work and (2) the underemployed, the data would be even more horrifying.

So presumably this vast army of people will be thrown into an underclass of long-term unemployed, as vast numbers of new workers are brought in? Naturally in the process, they want to smash up what’s left of labour and business regulations.

This ingenious “solution” to Europe’s economic ills will not work, however, because neoclassical economics is clueless in its inability to manage a capitalist economy.

Only massive fiscal policy and a jobs guarantee can fix the problem of mass unemployment, but it is unlikely this will happen any time soon.

A final issue is this: the irrational obsession running through most economic and demographic analysis of the West today is the fact of ageing populations.

But when you look hard at the economic problems allegedly being caused by this demographic trend, you’ll quickly discover most of the concerns are grossly exaggerated and the result of an inability to see the long-run consequences of trends that even now are visible all around us.

Does Europe need endless mass immigration because of an ageing population? Probably not, and for two reasons.

First, there is every reason to think that historically unprecedented and soaring productivity will occur this century as sector after sector is hit by mass unemployment, because artificial intelligence, robotics, automation and machine intelligence will make huge swathes of human labour obsolete. If anything, by 2050 we will be hit by a terrifying mass unemployment crisis and resulting failure of aggregate demand.

The “ageing crisis” that neoclassical economists are concerned about now will probably be easily dealt with by massive productivity growth and a shift in employment by part of the new mass of the unemployed to old age care.

Secondly, if Europe needs more children, then governments can switch to social policies that encourage families to have more children, e.g., full employment, job security, generous welfare policies for new children, paid maternity leave, and child care. In contrast, mass immigration is more likely to increase the trend of mass unemployment and cripple the welfare state.

Is Schengen Dead?

It looks more and more like it.

Why? Because Merkel’s irresponsible decision to throw Germany’s borders open to 1.1 million migrants has killed it.

There is some interesting analysis here and here, which, despite the brave face put on Wolfgang Schäuble’s remarks in Brussels, reveals a deep, new crisis hitting the EU.

Last year the major threat to the EU was the surge of democracy in Greece against austerity, but in the end the EU – and above all Germany – smashed any hope of that and the Greek government meekly accepted the horrible truth that it is little but an economic colony of the EU.

How paradoxical it is that Germany may have indirectly killed the EU, since, as Jean-Claude Juncker says in line with his neoliberal thinking, what’s the point of having the Euro without Schengen?

And now this year another – and quite possibly far more serious – crisis will hit the EU as the consequences of Merkel’s policies will follow.

Schengen may collapse even further. There will be more backlash against a policy that people simply didn’t vote for and many oppose, as well as the social and economic problems caused by 1.1 million new people suddenly in Europe but from a different culture. The mass sexual assaults in Germany during the New Year hardly augur well for the future. And how are all these people going to get employment? And then there is the nightmare of security concerns.

Even worse, there are signs that another massive wave of illegal immigration into Europe will happen this year, despite the tightening of borders (see here and here).

The million dollar question: what will be the political consequences of this? Will it lead to a vehement anti-EU backlash and the collapse of the EU itself?

Unfortunately, the left is almost totally incapable of seeing that open borders and mass immigration are a catastrophe. It is more likely that the political future of Europe belongs to the populist right or (possibly after a change of heart) a mainstream right devoted to an anti-EU, nationalist and anti-open borders agenda.

Ralph Nader on Open Borders and Mass Immigration

You really can’t get someone more left-wing on the American political spectrum than Ralph Nader – that is, without going to communism or Marxism.

And yet here he is below giving us a badly-needed left-wing perspective on why open borders and mass immigration are a bad idea. And he is perfectly right too. I put forward a similar case here.

Yet another thing to add is this: with open borders, Keynesian fiscal policy and policies to create full employment are badly thwarted and disrupted, because as your economy booms your open borders just allow more people to flood in and create more unemployed and more competition for jobs.

Open Borders within and into Europe is a Disaster for Social Democracy

And I hope more and more left-wing people can see this now. Look at some of the news from Europe in recent days. This in Sweden is just a recognition of reality.

Unfortunately, people in Sweden and throughout the EU have failed to realise that the evidence is strong that most of the migrants coming into Europe this year are not genuine refugees, but merely economic migrants. Europe cannot take in 1 million or 1.5 million people a year for the foreseeable future when most of these people are economic migrants. You cannot stick your head in the sand and ignore realities.

In the European context, the policy of open borders, both within and into Europe, is one of the last bankrupt tenets of the neoliberal catastrophe that is the Eurozone and European Union.

First of all, which political ideology has historically been in favour of open borders immigration?

Surely you know the answer: libertarians, and especially the unhinged anarcho-capitalist libertarians. These crazy bastards love open borders partly because they hate the state and understand that open borders undermine the welfare state and the social democratic model for society.

Of course, some left-wing libertarians seem to support it too, but they are equally deluded. For the left anarchists, they seem to support open borders as part of their long-run model of human society as a federated, decentralised system of free associations. But this is incredibly naïve and utopian nonsense. For the moment, human beings are far too attached (whether rightly or wrongly) to their own languages, cultures, nation-states, traditions and interests for such a vision of society to be an effective system. In our present world, it is just an unhinged idea, for reasons we will see below.

Here is the primary reason why, if you are left-wing and in favour of a social democratic system, you should vehemently oppose open borders:

A social democratic government cannot effectively and efficiently engage in short-run or long-run planning and funding of public services and infrastructure if it has no control over its borders and has no idea how many people will enter its country in any given year or in the long run.

It’s that simple. A government has finite resources and needs to engage in planning to provide effective public services and infrastructure, such as universal health care, education, public housing, transport and welfare, etc. You can’t do this without the knowledge necessary to plan public services and infrastructure, and that knowledge requires good and reliable estimates of future population.

What is a humane, sensible and general left-wing policy on borders and mass immigration? It is as follows:

(1) it would not oppose immigration per se, nor a country taking in its fair and reasonable share of refugees in desperate need.

(2) it would not oppose controlled immigration of a reasonable number of economic migrants, if this can be justified on economic or social grounds, e.g., a skilled labour shortage. But here you have to very careful about the West “brain-draining” the developing world. What good does it do to suck in vast amounts of talented and skilled labour from the developing world? This policy just contributes to preventing development in the third world.

(3) however, the left ought to be well aware that huge mass immigration in many circumstances will tend to lower or hold down real wages.

(4) the left should oppose endless mass immigration that simply provides big business a club with which to smash trade unions and organised labour. This will polarise working class communities and tend to contribute to the already serious issue of wages not rising in line with productivity growth.

(5) the left should recognise, as we have said above, that a government cannot effectively and efficiently engage in short-run or long-run planning and funding of public services and infrastructure if it has no control over its borders and has no idea how many people will enter its country in any given year or in the long run.

(6) the left should recognise the fact that unending mass immigration is partly based on an extreme and foolish cultural relativism that comes right out of Postmodernism. More cultural diversity is not necessarily a good thing for your society, if this means more extreme religious fundamentalism, parallel legal systems and the introduction of values that radically conflict with the core values of a secular Western society (e.g., gender segregation, homophobia, female genital mutilation, misogyny, etc.).

(7) in the special European context, there are more and more urgent security issues within Europe that are so obviously related to the open door borders policy.

(8) finally the left should recognise the fact that unending mass immigration will tend to cause severe issues related to urban overpopulation, supply of housing and cost of rent.

A new left-wing, anti-open borders camp should proudly stand up and defend its position. Its view is different from that of certain sectors of the anti-immigration far right, where genuine and irrational xenophobia or bigotry can be found.

The reasons above I have listed for opposing open borders and mass immigration are compassionate, humane, sensible and intelligent. An opposition to open borders is a fundamental way in which a decent and compassionate left-wing government would look after its citizens – no matter what their race or ethnic origin.

Finally, what is the solution to the problem of global inequality? The solution is radical reform of global international institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and World Trade Organisation. A reformed global reserve currency along the lines suggested in Post Keynesian economics is needed. For those countries with large enough economies, what is needed is a space for import-substitution industrialisation and industrial policy.

If necessary, the industrialised world should directly pay for basic infrastructure projects in the developing world (e.g., sewage, clean water, education and health care) and even subsidise the transferal to the developing world of the technology and capital goods they need to build modern industrialised societies. Radically reform the outrageous and hideous corporate intellectual property rights regimes that have been a hallmark of neoliberalism for the past 30 years (e.g., concerning drugs and pharmaceuticals).

Only these solutions can allow the developing world to escape its poverty and lack of development.

Marx on Mass Immigration and Capitalism

Just for all you Marxists out there.

Here are Marx’s comments on mass immigration into Britain in the 19th century in a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt in 1870:

“But the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in the present economy of Ireland. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.

And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.

But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between Englishmen and Irishmen is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.

England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.”
Letter of Karl Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm

There are two fundamental points here. First, I have some brief thoughts on it, and, secondly (and more importantly), I want to see Marxists apply this analysis to modern capitalism.

Personally, I think the argument here is exaggerated, even if there is some truth to some aspects of what Marx says. Marx and Engels were clearly very angry that the most industrialised nation in the world – England – was at the same time highly impervious to communism.

So the passage above is Marx’s rationalisation of this.

What is true here? I suspect that it is probably true that Irish immigration had some tendency to hold down real wages in Britain. It is no doubt true that this Irish immigration exacerbated some ugly and disgusting ethnic tensions in the 19th century UK, sometimes fueled by a reactionary press. But as the major explanation of why the revolution never happened in England? I think it is grossly exaggerated.

I think Marx and Engels just couldn’t face the fact that after 1848 violent revolutionary movements died off in Britain and even with the labour violence of the 1880s and 1890s the Marxists and other extreme left-wing agitators could never build up enough support. The English labour movement was reconciled to some degree to capitalism by the increased living standards and even by the granting of the vote to some of them in the Representation of the People Act 1867.

Moreover, Marx enters into conspiracy theory territory in these ideas:

But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between Englishmen and Irishmen is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.

Even worse for Marxism, it was eventually the British Labour Party, which emerged just as much from Fabian socialism, that was to capture the British working class vote.

But, anyway, let us move on to my second point.

A question for Marxists: can any of you modern Marxists apply Marx’s analysis above to mass immigration in modern capitalism, especially in the European Union? I’d be very interested to see it.

Appendix
There are of course other passages in Marx’s writings that mention the issue of immigration.

Here is another from with an interview with Marx in the New York World, July 18, 1871 on strikes and immigration:

“To give an example, one of the commonest forms of the movement for emancipation is that of strikes. Formerly, when a strike took place in one country it was defeated by the importation of workmen from another. The International has nearly stopped all that. It receives information of the intended strike, it spreads that information among its members, who at once see that for them the seat of the struggle must be forbidden ground. The masters are thus left alone to reckon with their men. In most cases the men require no other aid than that. Their own subscriptions or those of the societies to which they are more immediately affiliated supply them with funds, but should the pressure upon them become too heavy and the strike be one of which the Association approves, their necessities are supplied out of the common purse. By these means a strike of the cigar makers of Barcelona was brought to a victorious issue the other day.”
Marx, “Our Aims Should Be Comprehensive,” interview with New York World, July 18, 1871
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/07/18.htm