Further Comments on Immigration

My newspaper, the Financial Times, has carried two interesting columns on immigration, a topic I addressed last week.

The first, from Christopher Caldwell, points out that

opponents of [Arizona's new] law promise to resist it through boycotts and court challenges. It may indeed be overturned. But such action is unlikely to be decisive. Challenges to its constitutionality focus only on a handful of policing elements that could easily be purged in replacement legislation. The bill is long, detailed, carefully crafted and extremely popular.

Caldwell is skeptical of the grounds on which a legal challenge might be fought:

The nub of the constitutional questions surrounding the bill is that the federal government, not the states, sets immigration policy. Does this bill usurp federal authority? At the most basic level it does not – it leaves to Washington the determination of who is and is not legally in the country.

He also points out the strange twists some protests have taken:

Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva has backed an economic boycott of his own state. His district has a Hispanic majority. Only 34 per cent of his constituents are non-Hispanic whites. (Which makes it hard to see how singling out Hispanics for racial profiling would be possible even in theory.)

The second, by Clive Crook, notes that the Arizona law does not differ so widely from the federal statues it seeks to support:

Federal law already requires non-citizens to carry their documents at all times. It is an offence not to. The law’s arcane and sometimes surreal provisions impose many other demands, some more onerous than others. These rules are so weakly enforced that few legal immigrants are even aware of them.

His description of the current system is scathing - and accurate:

A moronic compromise has been struck, one that has achieved the worst of all worlds. To satisfy public opinion, the federal government promises to exert tight control of immigration – then fails to, because it is unwilling to enforce its own laws. And it is right not to enforce them. Apprehend and deport more than 10m illegal immigrants? That would require totalitarian powers and cripple the economy into the bargain. But voters then feel they have been lied to, which they have. Their distrust of Washington increases year by year, making an intelligent solution to the problem ever more difficult.

This pathological bargain has also skewed the pattern of immigration. Illegal unskilled immigrants pour in and fuel a grey, tax-evading, sub-minimum-wage economy. Immigrants with skills, willing to pay taxes but disinclined to evade the law and the border patrol, are shut out.

Ask any US high-technology company how this crimps its productivity – and forces it to send jobs abroad. (Let those workers pay taxes to other governments. It is not as though the US needs the money.) The shortage of highly trained people pushes up the US wage premium on skills, so economic inequality worsens as well. Yes, they thought of everything. I defy anyone to propose a regime more stupid than this.

Finally, he notes what elements are needed for a successful reform package:

The three essential components of the needed reform are easy to see. First, more effective enforcement at and especially inside the border, including credible policing of companies that hire illegal immigrants. Second, wider channels for legal immigration, including a guest worker programme that allows temporary migration sufficient to meet the country’s needs. Third, conditional amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the US.
Without laws that are enforceable and enforced, most voters will oppose amnesty, because they will suspect – and in this case it really will be a reasonable suspicion – that the next amnesty will not be the last.

It is a rare day that I can read not one but two pieces in the London-based FT about my home state. Let us hope that all this media attention and the growing debate will finally lead to some comprehensive, workable and just immigration reform.

Banality Dressed up as Provocation

When the Financial Times says your English Department is idiotic, you're probably doing pretty bad. Well, that is exactly what has happened to Harvard.

Harvard's plans to change their required courses, "reveal a confusion about what a college English department is suppose to do," writes Christopher Caldwell.

Under the new regime, students will take courses in four “affinity groups” or “common-ground modules”: “Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions” and “Shakespeares”. Two of these (“Poets” and “Shakespeares”) are consistent with English as it has been taught at Harvard for a century. The other two are not. “There is no such thing as writing that is indigenous or ‘native’ to England,” runs a copy of the department’s guidelines for “Arrivals” obtained by the Harvard Crimson. “All the great writing between the 7th and the 12th century is produced by invaders and immigrants who knew that ‘they’ came from somewhere else.” This is a banality dressed up as a provocation. English literature surveys have always stressed the influence on English writers of foreign ones.... If literary influences were what Harvard wanted to stress, there would be no reason to scrap its current approach. “Arrivals” appears to be a pretext for teaching more about migration, building a bridge to the doctrines of post-colonial and cultural studies in which the many professors are heavily invested. The description of “Diffusions” reveals similar preoccupations: “What is this nation, ecosystem, town, region, community, continent? What does it mean to belong to a where, and what are the signs, and forms, and idioms, of belonging – and unbelonging.”

Caldwell is left to conclude that "The goal is to take the most superficial, unliterary and easily politicised aspects of the study of English and pretend they are the throbbing heart of the whole enterprise." Yet it was not always so. "Harvard’s English department was always relatively conservative," but by the 1980s "roughly half the faculty pined for an English department more like Yale’s or Princeton’s, which were quicker to embrace 'deconstruction', 'theory' and cultural studies. Freed of the need to master, say, Milton, junior faculty could devote their reading hours to continental semioticians."

Today, a note to would-be majors on the Harvard English website shows that theory has won there, too: “To ask how and why writers of different times and places have represented men and women (or the rich and the poor, or the coloniser and the colonised) as they have done is the question that compels cultural studies – a form of history and anthropology combined.” This is Harvard’s invitation to “the best that has been thought and said”? Even 25 years ago, we assumed that spending four years with Shakespeare, Donne and Keats was self-evidently “worth it”. Yet here is someone in the English department who feels that, to appeal, English literature must be passed off as anthropology.

An accusation that has beset English since it caught on as an academic discipline in the 1850s is that it is idleness masquerading as scholarship. This view was once held to be the badge of hard-headed businessmen and other philistines. But all those who believe that English is not a real field of study until it is garlanded with practical or political concerns embrace a version of it, even if they do so from the heights of a university English department.