The hard questions about race, immigration, and multiculturalism

The era of lax border security has ended.

If Kamala Harris’s election year rhetorical pivot towards a more Trumpian position on immigration signifies anything at all, it’s that the right-wing narrative about the Joe Biden-era border crisis has prevailed. Now, we have the opportunity to address next steps. An open or unsecured border is, as we have learned, an unfortunate matter. Over the past several decades, we have had to focus our energy almost exclusively on the question of illegal border crossings, virtually suspending any substantive conversation about immigration policymaking. Assuming the question about illegal immigration has finally closed, we now face more fundamental questions: Who will we let into the country, by what metrics will we decide, and how much legal immigration is too much?

America is ill-equipped to answer these urgent questions: liberals are unwilling to grapple with the profound necessity of assimilation or uncomfortable observations about cultural disparities, whereas conservatives, disillusioned with the failures of the progressive approach, have either reduced their proposals to unhelpful platitudes or given up on the world’s “huddled masses” altogether. 

How often have you heard the phrase, “I support immigration, but only the legal way”? I suppose that is a useful clarification. But then again, we don’t need to explain, “I support you entering my business, but you must do so legally.” “I support you driving a car, but you must do so legally.” Wherever laws are involved, the latter half — the legality clause — is inferred. In the case of immigration, the relevant question is not “Should we have laws?” — it’s “What should those laws say?” “What does it mean to enter this country legally?

To answer this, conservatives once again rely far too often on clichés. “Immigrants must love this country and contribute to their communities.” That is a great start. But it lacks specificity. Hundreds of thousands of applicants become U.S. citizens every year. How should we process them all? Is the U.S. naturalization test a sufficient litmus test for weeding out the bad actors? Vague appeals to patriotism and hard work do not an enforceable immigration policy make.

The fact that we have not, for many years, agreed about whether we should administer “the legal way” has distracted us from whether the “legal way” is even workable. That is the topic to which we now must turn posthaste.   

Prominent white supremacists, including Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke, have muddied the waters. Their racist, hateful, reproachful language should have been ostracized from serious, respectable conservatism long ago. Instead, we allowed it to fester, creeping ever closer from the margins to the mainstream. This has been devastating — and it primarily benefits the new Marxist interpretation of the world, not in terms of a class struggle but a race struggle. Meaningful conversations about assimilation have become increasingly rare due to the “Groypers” blurring the line between racial demographics and cultural dissimilitudes.

The basic alt-right argument (which we must distinguish from the overdiagnosed “great replacement theory”) maintains that America is an exceptionally great country built by white people and belonging to white people. Ironically, this claim undermines its own logic. America is, in fact, an exceptionally great country precisely because it was founded on a creed — not racial or tribal identity. That’s what makes us unique.

Abraham Lincoln understood this well. In his 1858 Electric Chord speech, he argued persuasively:

“We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty—or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years,” and “find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us.”

But that was only a part of what made America unique, Lincoln claimed. “There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”

“That,” he added, “is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

These are astonishing words — some of Lincoln’s best. His case, rooted in the Declaration of Independence, utterly wrecks the alt-right contention. The Founders, Lincoln posited, did not fight the American Revolution only for their progeny; they fought for all men. Lincoln believed men who did not share in that history, nevertheless, could lay “claim” to being “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”

No wonder white supremacists like Spencer have had to admit that their vision for America is incompatible with the Founding. “Our dream is a new society,” Spencer confessed, “an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.” It’s an odd argument that we should leave the country to these people even as they seek to implode American exceptionalism. Anyone who subscribes to an openly race-based view of America has egregiously missed the source of this country’s unparalleled success.

Now, we must address the second common pitfall. To some, perhaps, the most logical response to Lincoln’s sweeping homage to immigration is to allow as many foreigners into the country as possible. After all, “they have a right to claim [the Declaration] as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote [it].” This, however, would prove disastrous. One need only look to the modern-day British Empire to see this. 

As recently as 1951, Britain was 99.9% white. Within the next half-century, it’s projected to become a majority-minority country. Despite Britain’s governing Conservative Party and pro-Brexit leaders vowing to slash immigration, “net migration to Britain — people moving in minus those moving out — reached a record 606,000” in 2022 (the gross number surpassed 1.1 million). “That is a 24 percent jump from 2021, and roughly double the rate of net migration in the years just before and after the 2016 Brexit referendum.” Similarly, the U.S., 80% caucasian in the 1980s, will become minority white by the 2040s, according to multiple predictions. The 2010s marked the first decade in American history in which the white population decreased, and Justin Gest, author of multiple best-selling books about immigration and demographic change, including “Majority Minority,” points out that “In 2021, the U.S. population expanded at its slowest rate in history, and for the first time, the majority of its population growth came from immigration.”  

That last part is key. Race itself is irrelevant; immigration is not. It’s important to grasp, in non-racialist terms, why such seismic demographic shifts might be considered shocking and destabilizing — not because of skin color, but because of cultural differences.

Imagine a social club with 99% senior membership becoming, over several decades, a youth-majority function. Might that not engender wide-ranging instability and change? Almost certainly. Saying so has nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of the members involved but the simple reality that vastly shifting demographics are disruptive. Conceivably, the same is true of the nation. 
 
Notably, this analysis presumes that generational differences are, in some way, akin to cultural differences, which, I can imagine, is not entirely settled to many readers. To demonstrate this point, I turn to the incredible research of evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich, who, in his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” argues that Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people are unlike other people. Why does this matter? Henrich’s thesis may seem intuitive enough; nevertheless, it calls into question the underlying assumption of twenty-first-century multiculturalism, namely, that all cultures are equally meritorious.

Multiculturalism hesitates (perhaps because of the extremist rhetoric of the far-right) to call out certain cultures as inferior to others. But have we not already established, for example, that America enjoys uniquely egalitarian origins? How many other countries welcome strangers to their shores with a world-renowned memorial to liberty? How many others invite them to participate equally in the “glorious epoch” purchased by our blood fathers and grandfathers?

These are priceless propositions. If we mean to ensure that America remains a nation worth migrating to, we must protect the integrity of our exceptional land — not from blood pollution but ideological contamination. Should we allow people from historically poorer countries to migrate here? What about non-Christian, non-democratic countries? The answer, of course, is yes. But we must do so at manageable rates, making every effort to preserve the idiosyncrasy of the country into which they arrive. Imagine if Lincoln, the only president to pass a major law encouraging immigration (the immigration act of 1864), had simply flung open the nation’s gates to the world. It’s not implausible to presume that, by now, the electric chord to which he appealed would have been lost.

In this part, I hope I have demonstrated, firstly, that immigration is necessary and, secondly, that immigration is potentially dangerous. After a years-long heated border debate in this country, we have, at last, an opportunity to reverse the tide of reckless, indiscriminate migration with common-sense immigration reform. But, before we can ask the hard questions about who we let into the country, we must first agree (1) that we should let anyone in at all and (2) that we must do so selectively, cautiously, and prudently.

I realize I have not yet answered, with adequate specificity, the pressing questions with which we began: Who will we let into the country, by what metrics will we decide, and how much legal immigration is too much? Having addressed the alt-right’s anti-immigration ethnocentricity and the left’s naive love affair with overly open-minded multiculturalism, I will return to these questions in part two.