Since the advent of the thirteen colonies, Americans have debated who belongs here, who should remain, who should enter and who should be left out. Americans practice a politics of exclusion while expiating comfortable myths about our warm-hearted inclusiveness.
Like all myths, the ones that define our political culture foresee a future based on an unlikely past: an America where opportunities matched expectations, where everyone believed they belonged, where clean cities complemented bucolic pastures where, like the musical "Oklahoma," everything's going my way."
No way. The United States was never like that, and probably never will be. Our society is built on tension and dissent, on iconoclasm and indeterminacy, on uncertain experiments, frequent success, occasional tragedy and an almost congenital optimism.
Immigrants have been crucial to this mix, and our immigration policies have played critical roles in creating our economy and society. When other nations and economies fail we often gain -- and often their people come here. At the same time, we often try to limit access to "the land of opportunity" -- to close the doors after we have arrived. When things get tough -- when the economy feels weak, jobs seem scarce, social conflict increases -- we redraft our immigration laws. This spring, the new Republican congress will hold hearings on the bill to control illegal immigration, and more revisions to current legislation are pending.
Because immigration is always a policy problem, the 1994 U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, sought a "more credible immigration policy that deters unlawful immigration while supporting our national interest in legal immigration." Despite its admirable concern for civil rights, its recommendations still highlight ways to keep people out -- border patrols, employer verification systems, computerized data. A study by the Washington-based Urban Institute of the costs to government of undocumented aliens shares some of these conclusions. But in an age defined by global trade and investment, migrant labor and interdependent economies, what we really need is a new discussion of our national interest" in immigration.
Peter Brimelow's acerbic commentary on America's contradictory myths about immigration -- "Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster" (Random House. 352 pages. Random House) -- does exactly the opposite. Instead, Brimelow defies all wisdom -- conventional and otherwise -- to argue that the U.S. is being "engulfed" by a wave of immigration that can only produce disaster. According to Brimelow, the United States treats immigration as an "imitation civil right" that contravenes our national interest. We let people in when we should keep them out.
His point of view deserves lucid argument -- all the more because the distinctions between liberals and conservatives are misleading in contemporary debates. Free marketeers often advocate open borders, but some conservatives (including Brimelow) adamantly oppose open entry; liberals may support the pluralism that open immigration creates, but equally often accept immigration quotas.
For Brimelow, immigration is a smokescreen that hides America's real problem. The decline of social harmony -- read: homogeneity -- is the true enemy, and immigration policy seems xTC the quickest corrective. He does not build from hypothesis or observation to conclusion. (Readers can find this task commendably undertaken by several conservative commentators in Nicolaus Mills' 1994 collection, "Arguing Immigration: The Debate over the Changing Face of America." Touchstone Books. 224 pages. $12). Rather, Brimelow's conclusions bridge his many prejudices. Hyperbolically, he calls our current immigration policy Adolf Hitler's posthumous revenge America."
But despite centuries of talk about crafting a singular national identity, the result has always been a pluralism of chance. Our debates about immigration are therefore contests about everything but immigration. From Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt to nativists and know-nothings, Americans periodically fix on foreigners and immigrants -- to define what we are not and thus what we are. Worried about fragmenting social values, we target unfamiliar immigrant cultures; dismayed at declining economic opportunities, we temporarily exclude new workers; unsure of our many identities, we extol the primacy of the English language; fearful of increasing crime, we treat drug dealers first as foreigners and only second as criminals, and then redesign our immigration policies once again. We erect boundaries that restrict access to America, but as Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez notes, we assume that the whole world will remain accessible to us. To build a better society, we arm our borders and conduct routine searches on the highways -- and barbed wire and searchlights give our citizens a taste of life in a police state.
These are the mixed messages of our public policy. And since we are a government of laws, we erase our inconsistencies by separating legal migrants from illegal ones and then treat illegal aliens like hardened criminals -- as if the cover of law determines who succeeds and fails, who burdens society and who makes it rich. This conundrum informs Senator Alan Simpson's proposed new law to control illegal immigration. It is an effort with which Brimelow would agree.
Brimelow also believes the changing quality of American democracy is both a cause and a consequence of too much immigration. He points to the gap between public opinion, which often disapproves of immigration, and public policy that encourages it -- a phenomenon analyzed far more gracefully by Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer. But Brimelow's diatribes against immigration hide important messages about our democracy: that opinion polls show short-term trends and are not the key to long-term governance, and that anti-immigration sentiment has not prevented immigration policy itself from being crafted with surprising respect for the democratic process.
Brimelow is thus his own worst enemy. He is not defeated by his ideology, but by his attitude. His breezy, irreverent style should be a refreshing change from dreary statistics and pedantic policy prose; his barbs against politicians are sometimes devastatingly accurate. But his book is a long parenthetical comment, a scattershot attack in sledgehammer prose. He marshals too much unconnected data, too many unrelated quotations, too many political agendas -- but does not pursue any of them persuasively. What was provocative in his 1992 cover story in the National Review falls short in a book.
Yet Brimelow's bark is worse than his bite. Forced from his ideological perch by his publisher's demands, he falls prey to the palliatives of familiar policy and ends up endorsing some of the Jordan Commission's and Urban Institute's proposals -- tightening existing regulations, better law enforcement, stronger border protection. In the end, he, too, ignores what can make American democracy stronger, and opts for weak proposals that simply reinforce our borders. For all his apparent idealism, Brimelow ends up parroting the politics and policies he purports to disdain.
In his elegant narrative on America's changing peoples and the cultural consequences of many immigrations ("Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World," 1991), David Reiff reproduces a famous interplay from Dashiell Hammett's "The Thin Man": "Those were the good old days," says Nora Charles, to which Nick replies, "No, these are the good old days." It is a perfect gloss on contradictions that Brimelow never confronts. "Alien Nation" concludes where it begins, paying obeisance to a sensitive and even fragile" American culture that cannot be "intruded upon" without consequences. But Brimelow's idea of America is a dusty museum, an artifact of a time that never was. Fortunately for us, immigration helps to create the living organism that is our raucous democracy.
Paula R. Newberg is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her books include "Democracy Assistance and Democratic Transition in Central Europe," and "Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan." She teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, Columbia University and Rutgers.