Immigration rates in the USA are almost at the peak they reached a century ago before severe restrictions on immigration were imposed in 1924. About 14% of Americans today are foreign born.
In contrast, Australia’s immigration rate is more than twice that of America’s with 30% of Australia’s population born elsewhere. There is a certain mystery as to why Australia allows a much higher rate of immigration because historically Americans have been more open to immigration. Australians claim that they allow large numbers of immigrants into their country out of economic necessity, but the same economic laws also apply to the USA, where immigration is not as popular as one would expect.
The reason for Australia’s higher immigration rates might be the fact that Australia does not share a land border with any other country — especially a poor and populous country. By this theory, if Australia did hypothetically share land borders with Indonesia and Malaysia, then Australia’s immigration policy might be as restrictive as Japan’s — with almost zero immigration.
There might be a tendency for the human mind to lump together all foreign-born newcomers — whether they are immigrants, refugees, seasonal migrant workers, or migrants without permission to settle. When a society experiences an incoming surge of seasonal migrant workers and migrants without permission to settle, it develops an allergic reaction against immigrants and refugees. It is guilt by association, and although it is not fair, it is reality.
But there is also a reverse phenomenon in which idealists react against restrictions against refugees and immigrants by advocating for totally unrestricted migration of any sort. For example, the New York Times tech writer Farhad Manjoo once wrote that the best way to address Trump-era restrictions on immigration was to adopt the exact opposite policy. He argued that a borderless world would have thriving economies because countries with high unemployment rates would find work for their citizens abroad, and countries with low birth rates would have a new source of workers, taxpayers, and consumers. First, the best way to oppose extremism might not be the articulation of a polar opposite extremist view. Second, the advocacy of a borderless world is not liberal or socialist, but libertarian or anarchist, and it might have been the Democratic Party’s libertarian turn in the 1990s that triggered the backlash from conservative populists (who were, until the 1970s, the core voters of the Democratic Party).
The argument here is that in a future with less unregulated migration and fewer migrants, opposition to refugees and immigrants might diminish. But the 21st-century environmental challenges faced by Central America and the Caribbean are increasingly harsh, and will probably lead to economic and state failures that will, in turn, make mass migration to the USA a constant condition. Because humans tend to conceptually lump together immigrants, refugees, migrant workers and mass migration, hostility toward even modest numbers of refugees and immigrants might intensify. That is not good for the American economy because America needs population growth. Also, there is a moral obligation to accept refugees whose lives are endangered and who have no other options.
The classic example of how unrestricted mass migration can cause a backlash that lasts for generations is Chinese immigration during the gold-rush era, when “ceremonial greetings swiftly gave way to bigotry and violence.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/america-was-eager-for-chinese-immigrants-what-happened
A few of the features of the story are that:
- immigration to the west coast was largely unrestricted, and pleas by American officials for the Chinese to limit their immigration went unheeded;
- the growth of immigrants from Guangdong province to California grew explosively once gold was discovered in 1849;
- almost all the Chinese immigrants were young men rather than families;
- there was a sense that the Chinese were from an alien civilization and radically different, and while at first that made the Chinese objects of fascination who were welcome, gold-rush era mass migration from China triggered a disgust response that mass migration from Ireland and Germany did not.
To some extent, these are also characteristics of the mass migration to Europe that commenced in 2015. Most indications today are that the migrants have settled into their new homes. However, the political consequences of mass migration to Europe seem to involve a long-term shift toward the extreme right — and this shift might still be in its early stages. This shift is evident in the transformation of French political culture, in which right-wing sentiment that was once taboo is now mainstream. But there is also the subterranean sweep of such sentiment throughout the military and police forces in Germany, as a broad swath of the security forces in Germany conspire to overthrow the German government if it allows another “invasion”. In fact, the reaction against unrestricted mass migration might be permanent. After all, the culminating reaction to young Chinese men flooding into California in the early 1850s was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which serves as a backdrop to the Immigration Act of 1924. (The Immigration Act of 1965 opened up immigration to non-Western immigrants, but at the time it was seen largely as symbolic and not expected to increase immigration rates; it also favored educated immigrants, which has transformed elite American universities. In fact, the audience for immigration reform at the time might have been Blacks and non-Americans; President John Kennedy republished his 1958 book “A Nation of Immigrants” in 1963, after his electoral strategy shifted away from the white Southern base of the Democratic Party toward urban Blacks, but up until this time Kennedy was focused on the Cold War and lukewarm or even suspicious of the civil rights movement — until the rest of a world still embroiled in decolonization and clueless about American segregation started seeing photographs of Blacks being attacked by police.)
Another example of the tendency to lump together different groups of people into a single stereotype can be found in the way that the public perceives homeless people as homogeneous. For some people, the homeless are “bums” who should be arrested for vagrancy; indeed, in some cases, the homeless are young men sound in mind and body living a care-free, wandering life. For others, the homeless are purely victims of society. It does seem that large numbers of homeless people are schizophrenics who have been forgotten by society in the aftermath of the “deinstitutionalization” of the mentally ill from mental hospitals in the 1970s and the abortive shift to halfway houses. Still other homeless people are intellectually disabled people who in the past would be taken care of in small towns, but are now living in the big city (when they are given a home to live in, so often they will abandon it within weeks for no good reason). And still other homeless people are bright, hardworking, middle-class people who ran into a spell of bad luck. The human brain lumps all these people together into a single group with uniform characteristics — and tends to (mis-)understand them in moralistic terms. This results in an inability for politically divided communities to agree on policy; moreover, when communities are not ideologically divided (like liberal San Francisco), they end up with a one-sided and dysfunctional approach that fails to recognize the complexity of the issues.
