Plunder and Deceit (10 page)

The enforcement of ideological groupthink extends beyond the faculty. College and university campuses are now among the least tolerant institutions for inquiry and debate. Too frequently they accept or even encourage an atmosphere of discomfort, intimidation, or militancy in promotion of the statist orthodoxy. The purpose is primarily political indoctrination of the sort that is hostile to the civil society and America's heritage. And toward this end, the campus and classroom atmosphere narrows the scope of what is considered legitimate thought or opinion, dismisses or derides more traditional viewpoints that challenge statist convention, and disregard outright the perspective of individuals who are not identifiable members of a politically preferred group—either by birth or by belief.

Even as students graduate from colleges and universities, most are treated to one last speech from a statist spouting ideological boilerplate. According to Young America's Foundation, as reported by Fox News, in 2015 “liberal speakers outnumbered conservatives by at least 6 to 1 at the nation's top 100 schools as ranked by
U.S. News & World Report
. Among the top 10 of the list, none hosted conservative speakers.”
⁴⁷

At the end of his book,
The Closing of the American Mind
, the late philosopher, educator, and author Allan Bloom questioned whether the nation's failing educational system, most notably higher education, could “constitute or reconstitute the idea of an educated human being. . . .”
⁴⁸

This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before. The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship.
⁴⁹

There are salient realities that very few in the academy will acknowledge. The most prominent is that education is not supposed to be about administrators and educational bureaucrats, labor unions, tenured educators, improvident construction projects, and statist indoctrination. It is supposed to be about the enrichment and improvement of young people and society. Students are not lab rats to be subjected to endless educational experiments; they are not Pavlov's dog to be conditioned as societal malcontents; and they and their families (and the taxpayers) are not cash cows for reckless spending and debt assumption. The failure of American education is an unforgivable dereliction of one generation to the next.

WHEN THE ISSUE OF
immigration is raised or debated, the one group rarely considered or consulted is the group most adversely affected by current immigration policies—the rising generation. Therefore, it is pivotal to examine the nation's immigration affairs in the context of the well-being of younger people and future generations.

For more than two centuries, the United States has attracted immigrants from all over the world. America's civil society, in which societal and cultural traditions and values have served as a beacon to humanity, has historically inspired millions to come to America in search of a better life. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, immigrants from Europe came to the United States seeking, among other things, religious freedom. In the nineteenth century, immigrants from countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Germany were mostly escaping famine and oppression. In the twentieth century, America welcomed those fleeing communism and despotism. However, as the late Harvard professor Dr. Samuel Huntington explained in his book
Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity
, “America has been a nation of restricted and interrupted immigration as much as it has been a nation of immigration.”
¹
It may surprise some to learn that in the past, each successive wave of immigration was followed by a period of time where the flow of aliens ebbed as more recent arrivals assimilated into the American way of life.

For example, from 1901 through 1910, approximately 8.8 million people immigrated to the United States. The United States Census Bureau reports that between 1911 and 1920, there were 5.7 million immigrants, and between 1921 and 1930, there were a little over 4 million immigrants.
²
The 1930s through 1970s experienced periods of immigration followed by integration and assimilation. About five hundred thousand individuals immigrated into the United States between 1931 and 1940; between 1941 and 1950, a little over one million; between 1951 and 1960, approximately 2.5 million came to America; and between 1961 and 1970, there were some 3.3 million immigrants.
³

However, today there is no period of assimilation between immigration flows. Rather, the flow of immigrants coming to America for more than forty years has been unprecedented and uninterrupted, with no end in sight. In the last decade and a half alone, from 2000 through 2014, 14 million new permanent legal immigrants were admitted to the United States in addition to the surge of millions of illegal immigrants.
⁴
The Migration Policy Institute reports that 2013 estimates from the Census Bureau put the U.S. immigrant population at more than 41.3 million, or 13 percent, of the total U.S. population of 316.1 million. Between 2012 and 2013, the foreign-born population increased by about 523,000, or 1.3 percent. U.S. immigrants and their U.S.-born children now number approximately 80 million persons, or one-quarter of the overall U.S. population.
⁵

In
Liberty and Tyranny
, I explained how this wave of immigration was triggered by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which introduced a system of chain migration—that is, awarding preferences to family members of citizens and resident aliens. This was a radical departure from past immigration policy. For the first time, the law empowered immigrants in the United States to elicit further immigration into the country through family reunification. The late author Theodore White wrote that “the Immigration Act of 1965 changed all previous patterns, and in so doing, probably changed the future of America. . . . [I]t was noble, revolutionary—and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society.”
⁶
As a result, in subsequent years immigrants have been poorer, less educated, and less skilled than those who preceded them—a pattern that continues today.
⁷

Moreover, President Barack Obama, as a matter of unilateral executive policy, and in contravention of existing immigration law, has severely weakened deportation efforts. A report issued by Senator Jeff Sessions (R, Ala.) reveals that “interior deportations have fallen 23 percent since [2014] alone, and have been halved since 2011—when then–Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director (ICE) [John] Morton issued the so-called Morton Memos exempting almost all illegal immigrants from enforcement and removal operations. The effective result of the Administration's non-enforcement policy is that anyone in the world who manages to get into the interior of the United States—by any means, including overstaying a visa—is free to live, work, and claim benefits in the United States at Americans' expense.”
⁸
In fact, Obama has gone further. In an unprecedented and unconstitutional act, he issued the so-called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which seeks to legalize nearly 5 million illegal aliens. As the
Washington Post
editorialized: “Mr. Obama's move flies in the face of congressional intent.”
⁹
For now, the federal courts, at the request of numerous states, have stayed the implementation of Obama's fiat. The matter is likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

As Dr. Huntington described, the massive influx of aliens has been rationalized, in part, by what European scholars have promoted and conceptualized as “societal security.” It is an attempt to justify the deleterious effect unfettered, unassimilated immigration has on a society. It refers to “the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats”; “the sustainability, within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and religious and national identity and custom.” Dr. Huntington wrote that it “is concerned above all with identity, the ability of a people to maintain their culture, institutions, and way of life.”
¹⁰
However, in the United States, he added, “America has . . . been a nation of immigration
and
assimilation, and assimilation has meant Americanization. Now, however, immigrants are different; the institutions and processes related to assimilation are different; and, most importantly, America is different. . . .”
¹¹
“Assimilation of current immigrants is . . . likely to be slower, less complete, and different from the assimilation of earlier immigrants. Assimilation no longer necessarily means Americanization.”
¹²

If assimilation no longer means Americanization, then in what kind of society will younger people and future generations live? Princeton University professor Dr. Douglas Massey points out that as a result of continuing high levels of immigration “the character of ethnicity will be determined relatively more by immigrants and relatively less by later generations, shifting the balance of ethnic identity toward the language, culture, and ways of life in the sending society.”
¹³
Therefore, immigration without assimilation and Americanization undercuts the civil society as ethnic, racial, and religious groups self-segregate. The problem is magnified further when a nation abandons its own culture to promote multiculturalism, dual citizenship, bilingualism, and so on, and institutes countless policies and laws promoting and protecting the practices of balkanized groups and their infinite array of grievances.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) explains that as of 2010, there were approximately 40 million legal and illegal immigrants residing in the United States—an increase of 28 percent from 2000.
¹⁴
One in five public school students (or 10.4 million) are from an immigrant home. It is further estimated that 28 percent of all immigrants are in the country illegally.
¹⁵
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has performed an analysis of the latest effort to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants and concluded that it would increase the immigrant population by about 10 million (approximately 3 percent) in 2023 and some 16 million people (about 4 percent) by 2033.
¹⁶

Open-ended immigration takes a considerable toll on the job prospects of younger and less-skilled workers, as well as college-educated graduates. Typically, younger workers (those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine) are competing with recent immigrants for similar jobs. Many younger people begin working as waiters, construction workers, or grocery-store clerks. These are the types of jobs many illegal immigrants also seek. “How can that be?” you might ask. After all, as the argument goes, illegal immigrants do jobs Americans will not do. For example, the United States Chamber of Commerce advocates widespread amnesty to enable its members—mostly large corporations—to “utilize immigrant labor when U.S. workers are said not to be available.”
¹⁷
The National Restaurant Association supports amnesty, in part, because “[t]here are too many jobs Americans won't do.”
¹⁸
The Independent Institute, a libertarian group, has insisted that low-skilled immigrants “do jobs that wouldn't exist if the immigrants weren't there to do them.”
¹⁹
It claims that immigrants “aren't substitutes for American labor.”
²⁰
They “free up American labor to do jobs where it is more productive.”
²¹
The facts demonstrate otherwise.

Using the federal government's own statistics, CIS explains that the Census Bureau has identified what it classifies as 472 civilian occupations. Of those occupations, six are considered majority immigrant (legal and illegal). Those six occupations amount to about 1 percent of the total workforce. However, jobs that are stereotypically thought to comprise mainly immigrants actually comprise mostly American citizens. Maids and housekeepers are 51 percent citizen; taxi drivers are 58 percent citizen; butchers are 63 percent citizen; landscapers or grounds workers are 64 percent citizen; construction workers are 66 percent citizen; porters, bellhops, and concierges are 72 percent citizen; and janitors are 73 percent citizen.
²²

Moreover, 16.5 million citizens have jobs in the sixty-seven occupations composed of a significant percentage of immigrants (25 percent or more).
²³
In other words, millions of Americans work in jobs that are incorrectly but widely considered “immigrant-type.” These “high-immigrant occupations” are mainly “lower-wage jobs” requiring “little formal education.” Notably, citizens in “high-immigrant occupations” have a much higher unemployment rate than citizens who work in jobs with a smaller percentage of immigrants.
²⁴
The logical conclusion is that although Americans hold more of the jobs in occupations that have a higher percentage of immigrants, untold numbers of Americans, particularly younger and less skilled, are having more difficulty finding jobs in these occupations as immigrants are filling a growing percentage of them.

As it happens, on April 22, 2015, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in part, that “Between 1970 and 2013, the estimated foreign-born population in the United States increased from 9,740,000 to 41,348,066, respectively, an increase of 31,608,066 persons, representing a percentage increase of 324.5% over this 43 year period; . . . [t]he reported income of the bottom 90% of tax filers in the United States decreased from an average of $33,621 in 1970 to $30,980 in 2013 for an aggregate decline of $2,641 or a percent decline of 7.9% over this 43 year period; . . . [t]he share of income held by the bottom 90% of the U.S. income distribution declined from 68.5% in 1970 to 53.0% in 2013, an absolute decline of 15.5 percentage points over this 43 year period.”
²⁵