The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with the financial support of the German-American Academic Council Foundation, convened three working groups of "lawyers, political scientists, demographers, historians, political philosophers, sociologists, economists, and government officials" from Germany and the United States, to address the refugee and migration issues confronting both countries.
The result was Migration Past, Migration Future Germany and the United States. This is the first in a five volume series which will then be followed by a report entitled "German and American Migration and Refugee Policies Recommendations of the Joint German-American Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences."
Edited by Klaus J. Bade and Myron Weiner, Migration Past, Migration Future Germany and the United States is a collection of four essays - two on Germany, two on the United States - in support of Third World immigration to both countries.
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Joseph Fallon, with a graduate degree from Columbia, is a freelance researcher and writer on immigration issues. He was researcher for Peter Brimelow's best-selling book, Alien Nation Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, now in paperback. These essays share three characteristics. First, each deliberately confounds current Third World immigration with historic European immigration. Second, each refuses to address the impact Third World immigration has on carrying capacity, crime, education, energy consumption, environment, health, housing, pollution, standard of living, unemployment, urban sprawl, wages, and welfare. Third, each blames the domestic problems arising from Third World immigration to Germany and the United States on the desire of Germans and Americans to preserve their respective national identities.
A sample of the contents will show that this book is driven by ideology, not facts. The introduction dismisses the concern of U.S. citizens with high welfare rates among Third World immigrants as stemming "from a lack of understanding of the historical experiences with migrants earlier in this century." It asserts that "Prior to the First World War many immigrant families also received public assistance and were dependent on public hospitals for their medical care." But, the welfare state did not exist until the 1960s. To equate two such dissimilar social systems as that of the United States before the First World War with that of the United States in the 1990s, therefore, is intellectually dishonest. Furthermore, between 1882 and 1907, the U.S. government enacted laws that denied admission to immigrants considered likely to become public charges and deported those immigrants who later became public charges.
The first essay "From Emigration to Immigration The German Experience in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," written by one of the editors, Klaus J. Bade, insists that Germany accept Third World immigrants as its share of an "international balance of burdens." Presumably this means assisting the development of the Third World by taking in her surplus population. That the ongoing population explosion in the Third World prevents economic development is ignored by the author as is the fact that encouraging immigration to Europe and the United States discourages attempts at population control in Third World countries. Furthermore, this "international balance of burdens" does not demand reciprocity. For example, Germany must accept Turks as immigrants and citizens, but Turkey does not have to accept Germans or any other Europeans as immigrants and citizens. The stated objectives of the author are social coexistence, not social cohesion; cultural tolerance, not assimilation.
The second essay, "An Immigration Country of Assimilative Pluralism Immigrant Reception and Absorption in American History", is the worst of the lot. It was written by Reed Ueda, a member of a visible minority, an Asian American, who is deeply disturbed by the fact that Europeans founded the United States. He, therefore, responds by promoting "the big lie" that the United States was never a European country. His essay opens with the pronouncement "Unlike the nation-states of Europe, the United States has historically been a country in which heterogeneity formed the basis of the state." Compare that with the words of John Jay, who, writing in The Federalist Papers ("Federalist No. 2"), described the United States in 1787 as "one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs."
Mr. Ueda asserts that the national motto of the United States, "E Pluribus Unum" ("out of many, one"), which refers to the former thirteen British colonies joining together to form a general government, really refers to "the new government's confidence in the unity that would arise from the diversity of the American people." To advance this falsehood, Mr. Ueda misrepresents a 1792 "Report on Manufactures" by the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, to suggest that the latter favored immigration. In fact, Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson both publicly opposed immigration as a threat to the homogeneity and national security of the United States.
Censored from Mr. Ueda's review of the 1965 Immigration Act is the fact that Congressional sponsors of that bill repeatedly promised the citizens of the United States their legislation (1) would not increase the annual levels of immigration, (2) would not lower the standards for admission, (3) would not redirect immigration away from Europe, and (4) would not alter the demographic composition of the United States - along with the fact that all four of these promises were broken. Also missing are any references to opinion polls showing most U.S. citizens want immigration dramatically reduced, with some favoring a five-year moratorium.
Despite the title of his essay, the lack of assimilation among Third World immigrants and the resulting Balkanization of America which even the New York Times has reported is "producing a kind of racial and ethnic polarization" is likewise ignored by Mr. Ueda. Instead, he proclaims the United States is "a permanently unfinished country."
"Missing are any references to opinion polls showing most U.S. citizens want immigration dramatically reduced, with some favoring a five-year moratorium." The scope of Mr. Ueda's incompetency is phenomenal. When referring to Germany's immi-gration policy, Mr. Ueda writes that it was only after World War II that Germany decided to become an immigrant-receiving country after having first built its advanced industrial economy "in the framework of ethnic nationalism." In fact, as the first essay on Germany in this volume relates, large numbers of foreign laborers were employed in Germany since the 1880s. By 1913, there were 1.2 million "foreigner migrant workers." And the return to the use of foreign labor after World War II was not to gratify a whim for social engineering as he claims, but the result of Germany's desperate need to rebuild its devastated economy and infrastructure.
"Changing Patterns of Immigration to Germany, 1945-1995 Ethnic Origins, Demographic Structure, Future Prospects" is the third essay and was co-written by Rainer Munz and Ralf Ulrich. It includes three possible scenarios for German demographics in the years 2015 and 2030 based on whether current immigration levels remain constant, decrease or increase. According to their projections, by 2030 the foreign population as a percentage of the total population of Germany will be 17 percent under the first scenario, 13 percent under the second, and 21 percent under the third. No projections, however, are offered based on either a termination of all immigration or a restriction of immigration to the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans residing in the former Soviet Bloc. Furthermore, this essay offers no justification for why any non-ethnic German immigration should continue. Similarly, there is no demand for reciprocity in immigration and naturalization between Germany and immigrant-sending countries such as Turkey. The only demand made by the authors is on Germany. They insist that country "change the way it perceives Germany as an ethnically defined nation-state, conferring citizenship primarily on the children of natives and on co-ethnics from Eastern Europe." According to this argument, Israel would have to abolish "The Law of Return" and cease to be the Jewish State.
The final essay, "The Changing Demography of U.S. Immigration Flows Patterns, Projections, and Contexts" was co-written by Frank D. Bean, Robert G. Cushing, and Charles W. Haynes. The authors dismiss as alarmist the idea that Third World immigration will lead to "increased interracial and interethnic competition for jobs, housing, and social services, if not more overt conflict". Instead, they assert that, what they claim is an increasing rate of intermarriage among racial/ethnic groups (supposedly facilitated by Third World immigration), will likely prevent interracial strife or conflict.
Their unique form of "integration" is contradicted by, among others, William H. Frey, a demographer and research scientist at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center, who reports that as a result of Third World immigration "[w]e are now seeing white flight from whole states and regions". He has labeled this phenomenon "the flight from diversity." Perhaps this is why Professor Frey does not appear in the list of reference sources at the end of the essay.
Furthermore, the authors offer no examples of "Perhaps the most brazen example
of disinformation by the authors
is the citation of ten-year-old sources
to ‘prove' their case."interracial marriages leading to strife-free societies. This is understandable since those that do exist - such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico - are not models, economically, politically, or socially, which any country would wish to emulate.
In addition, the statistics presented on interracial marriage are unclear. Admitting that most Hispanics are classified as "white" by the U.S. government, the authors stress the fact they separated Hispanics from non-Hispanic whites in their population projections for 1990 through 2020. However, the evidence which they offer for an increase in interracial marriages between 1968 and 1988 refers only to marriages between blacks and whites, in which Hispanics were apparently counted as "white." It is not clear in their citations on marriages between blacks and other groups, and between whites and other groups whether Hispanics were counted as "white" or as "other groups."
Perhaps the most brazen example of disinformation by the authors is the citation of ten-year-old sources to "prove" their case. Through such misrepresentation, they declare "[b]ut the general conclusion that clearly emerged was that immigration did not appear to be generating much in the way of large effects, whether positive or negative. Almost all of this research, however, has been based on data collected during the 1970s and early to mid-1980s. The question that remains unanswered is whether similar results would obtain during periods of even greater immigration and continuing slow job and wage growth."
But legal immigration has increased drama-tically since the mid-1980s as a result of the Immigration and Reform Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 and the 1990 Immigration Act. The economic evidence that its impact has been negative was readily available to these authors. To cite just two of these sources Dr. George Borjas of Harvard Univer-sity and Dr. Donald L. Huddle of Rice University. Dr. Borjas has found current Third World immigration results in an annual displacement of two million U.S. workers and the depression of U.S. wages by $133 billion a year, while Third World immigrants have a welfare dependency rate approximately 50 percent higher than native-born Americans in general, and nearly 100 percent higher than "white, non-Hispanic" Americans in particular. This essay ignores these findings. In fact, only two early works by Dr. Borjas, 1987 and 1990, are even cited in the text and the reference list.
Dr. Huddle has found the cost to the U.S. taxpayer in net public assistance to immigrants, both legal and illegal, was more than $65 billion in 1996, and is expected to rise to $108 billion annually within the decade. Not surprisingly, his findings were similarly ignored and his name completely omitted from this essay and its accompanying list of reference sources.
Migration Past, Migration Future Germany and the United States fails as an objective and scholarly work. However, the fact that it has to resort to disinfor-mation and dissimulation to justify Third World immigration to Germany and the United States is further evidence that the immigration reform movement has won all the arguments. TSC