Warning: lengthy rant ahead…
Today, the New York Times has a column by “conservative” David Brooks titled “Talent Loves English” in which he writes about immigration. He started by mentioning the Magna Carta and “Anglo-Saxon” a couple of times. He then pointed out that almost one in six people in the US were born in other countries. Surely all of those 46 million people came to our country legally, Shirley.
Brooks then brought attention to a recent report that said 318,000 people migrated to England in 2014–meaning 641,000 immigrated to the UK while 323,000 emigrated away from the UK. That stands in comparison to 209,000 migrants just the year before. The UK’s ambition is to have 100,000 migrants per year. I think they’ve exceeded that goal by just a bit.
The UK report, by the way, derived most of its data from the UK’s International Passenger Survey (IPS), which is conducted at airports and sea routes and such. It doesn’t sound as though it accounts for immigrants who may sneak into the country undetected by officials.
As an aside, the sentence that started off that paragraph about UK immigration was odd. Brooks wrote, “Canada, Australia and New Zealand are also immigrant magnets,” which aren’t part of the UK.
And the next paragraph starts with a typo. “Some of the those [sic] people went to Britain from outside of Europe…” [Emphasis of editorial laziness mine.]
Newspaper of record, folks. But I digressificate.
With the “some of the those” part, Brooks downplayed the part of the study that said most of the immigrants came to the UK from Asia and the Middle East. Instead, he wrote how “a great many” more people came from other countries in the European Union such as Italy, Spain, and France because “Britain is a job-creating paragon.” He must have missed the part in the report that explained that the increase of people immigrating to the UK from those EU15 countries was “a slight but not statistically significant increase” from 2013 to 2014.
Brooks goes on to write that–among the usual suspects of favorable economies, education, and culture–immigrants are drawn to places like the UK and the US because those places are the lands of “the world’s lingua franca,” a fancy phrasey-phrase meaning “common language.” Really? Immigrants come here in part to speak English, and hence, that’s the inspiration for the title of the column? For my lack of ability to come up with anything witty at the moment, I’ll just say that this is an absurd notion. Looks to me like Brooks the Conservative merely wanted to flaunt his knowledge of Italian phrases then managed to wrap some hooey about immigration around it.
Getting back to the rest of the hooey, Brooks wrote that the image of modern immigrants coming from poor countries is incorrect. He used three African countries with low emigration rates as his examples. He writes this just weeks after the news that hundreds of African refugees perished in the waters of the Mediterranean as they attempted to cross into Europe. Some people have blamed Italy for these deaths because the nation ended an operation called “Mare Norstrum,” which accounted for the rescue of around 130,000 African refugees between 2013 and 2014. The operation also led to those hopeful immigrants receiving legal aid on how to gain European citizenship.
Brooks wants to feed us the “immigrants don’t come from poor countries” line, but it’s just a big heap of hooey. He would be correct that those who come to places like the US and the UK seeking eventual citizenship through legitimate, legal means were motivated by wanting things like a good job and education. But Brooks only referred to legal immigration in the column to this point. He had yet to address illegal immigration. Moving on…
Next up is another absurd statement by Brooks. He claimed that “as Mexico has prospered, immigration has dropped.” He still did not say whether he was referring to legal or illegal immigration or both.
While there may be a drop in the illegal Mexican immigrant population in the US, nearly half of Mexico’s citizens still live in poverty. How is that prosperous? Good golly, does anyone at the NYT fact-check any of this crap? Obviously not.
Brooks then goes on to write about how more people from China, India, and other nations from that part of the world are getting richer but are moving to or want to move to Anglo-Saxony parts of the world such as America. Though those people may be getting richer, there are still a whole lot of people in poverty in China–about a third of the population–and in India–between a fifth and a quarter of the population.
Reading Brooks’ column, you might have the impression that rich and middle-class Chinese and Indian citizens are the bulk of those immigrating to English-lovin’ places from their homelands. Yet Brooks fails to take into account that many of the wealthier Asian immigrants are here on visas and may likely move back to their lands of origin in order to improve the economies there once they complete their educations here.
In fact, if you look at the nationalities of those who became naturalized US citizens between 2010 and 2013, the percentage of those who were born in China as part of all the new naturalized US citizens went down–from 5.5% to 4.5%. The Indian-born percentage of new legal US citizens went from 9.9% to 6.4% in those years. In contrast, native Mexicans who decided to go through the process of becoming legal naturalized Americans made up 10.8% of the whole in 2010 but 12.7% of the whole in 2013, though 2013 was a bit of a decrease from 13.7% in 2011.
So just taking legal immigrants into account, native Mexicans still lead all other countries in becoming American. That isn’t a bad thing, of course, because they became citizens the way they’re supposed to.
Again, it doesn’t include the number of illegal immigrants in the US. Most illegal aliens still come from Central and South American countries in numbers that eclipse the number of illegals from Asian countries.
But Brooks wants readers to think that middle-to-upper-class, educated, and entrepreneurial Asians are coming to America and staying in America in greater numbers than the poor who originate from countries to the south of our nation. Brooks’ words:
We have an image of immigrants as the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. According to this stereotype, immigrants are driven from their homes by poverty and move elsewhere to compete against the lowest-skilled workers.
But immigrants do not come from the poorest countries…Instead, immigrants tend to come from middle-class countries, and they migrate to rich, open ones.
As I’ve pointed out, that is simply not true. Stereotypes are often stereotypes for obvious reasons. The idea of “poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is one stereotype that still holds true. The idea of “not-so-poor, slightly disparate masses yearning to get an education or make a few bucks here for a while and never go back home” is more the exception. So no, it is not “time to revise our stereotypes about the immigration issue,” as Brooks says. That time may come, but it’s not that time yet.
Then Brooks goes blah blah we’re the lucky inheritors of the Magna Carta model of decentralized politics and intellectualism yadda yadda globalization yadda middle-class dreamers enriching the lucky nations who will have them blah.
Brooks saves the biggest heap of hooey, in a column heaped high in hooey, for the final paragraph:
In this context, Hillary Clinton’s daring approach to immigration, supporting a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, is clearly the right one. The Republican Party is insane if its conducts a 21st-century immigration policy based on stereotypes from the 1980s.
“The end.”
So finally, after all that stuff about a charter signed hundreds of years ago, about Italians and Spanish people (legally) moving to Britain, about middle-class Indian and Chinese people (legally?) moving to the US, and all of them migrating to those places so they can talk in English like all the cool people talk, David Brooks finds his real point, which is, “Ain’t Hillary brave and daring and great for wanting to legalize illegals? But those anti-immigration Republicans are crazyloonypants who are stuck in the Reagan era!”
That would be the era of amnesty, mind you.
As blogger Mickey Kaus points out, Brooks writes as if most of the people who would get this path to citizenship are highly skilled workers. Uh, no, the highly skilled workers are trying to become Americans in the way that’s already legal…if they aren’t going back home after they got what they wanted from us, that is. The reality is that the group that stands to make out above all in the pathway to citizenship deal are poor and unskilled undocumenteds who are doing the work that Americans supposedly won’t do–remember? David Brooks would probably say that’s part of the stereotype that needs revising.
Screw it, I’ve wasted enough time writing about this faux-intellectual, faux-conservative’s heap o’ hooey. Have a nice one, everyone.
