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From Safety Valve to Safety Net
The Emigrants then -- and now
by Marian Kester Coombs
The Washington Times, January 13, 2002

n the A section of any serious newspaper, the plot of virtually every story is the struggle of People vs. People -- not classes, as Marx thought, but races (or cultures, to put it politely).

One people seeks its "fair share" of the land and water controlled by another people. One people complains its borders are being breached by another people. One people seeks to avenge an injury to its self-esteem inflicted once upon a time by another people.

One people petitions the government to favor it at the expense of another people. One people demands the erasure of another people's cultural-religious symbols and their replacement with its own. Ethnologists would do a much better job reporting the news than journalists can.

Then add to this basic plot the end of the Cold War, which defrosted many things, among them the movement of peoples. The emigration/immigration patterns thawed out by the end of the East-West standoff are so striking that many have analyzed and characterized them, including Joel Kotkin, Robert D. Kaplan, Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Samuel P. Huntington, Paul Kennedy, and most recently Patrick Buchanan and Tony Blankley in The Death of the West and The West's Last Chance, respectively.

Just as motion in the atmosphere is away from high pressure areas and toward low, the demographic momentum of Asia, Central and South America, and to some extent Africa, is causing a seemingly irresistible outflow of population toward the relatively less populous nations of Europe and North America. This round of the "rise and fall of peoples" proceeds as it always has -- but with at least three major differences.

First, the successful expansion of these Third World populations is not due, as was the pattern in the past, to the flowering of their own societies, but to the globalization of the generous genius of Western civilization. Second, today's desired destinations are full up, unlike the vast tracts of emptiness that drew population to places like Australia, Canada, the U.S. and Argentina beginning in the 17th century and continuing throughout the 20th. Although large areas of today's destinations are "depopulated" by Third World urban standards, they already teem as "colorfully" as the people who live there wish them to.

Last, people now emigrate as much to be kept alive by rich societies as to find work. Salvadorans trying to get to El Norte, for instance, are far better informed about U.S. government programs for public health, education and welfare than are native-born Americans. They are drawn here by them, and it would be unnatural if they were not.

England possesses the same problematic attractiveness. In December 2001, Reuters reported on the latest attempt of desperate Third World refugees to break into Britain through the Channel tunnel from their base at Sangatte, a nearby French holding area:

"The blame lies," exasperated French officials were quoted, "with Britain's relatively liberal asylum laws [which] create the picture of an El Dorado for impoverished immigrants." Unfortunately this El Dorado really exists: Life on the dole in England is paradise compared to life in Sri Lanka.

By contrast, European immigrants to the empty continents encountered no safety net and precious few "jobs" in the modern sense of an employer offering specific paid positions. Often there was no work unless you invested, invented, created and drummed it up yourself.

There was no infrastructure, not a street corner to beg on or a park bench to sleep on, unless you built it yourself. There was no welfare, no food stamps, no universal free education, no unemployment or health insurance, no disability, no workers' comp, no Social Security. The dread "poorhouse" was the best you could hope for.

Now the global frontier is closed; the Wild West of the entire world is past. So what are those faced with futurelessness to do, where are they to go?

Population movements have historically functioned as a safety valve, easing the growing pains of nations and expelling "ungovernable" elements before they could coalesce to unbalance the status quo. Yet despite the open valve of emigration throughout the 18th and 19th centuries -- more than 43 million people quit Europe between 1770 and 1914 -- it was an age of revolutions: first the French, inspired by the brilliant rhetoric, ideals and success of the Americans in throwing off the dead hand of hereditary monarchy; then the Greeks, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Belgians, the French again (and again), the Germans, the Hungarians, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians.

Whatever it had become by the time it devoured its children, the French Revolution was undeniably fueled by a hatred of elite idiocy and unjust privilege that even emigration to New France couldn't take the edge off.

Today, however, population flight allows dysfunctional and kleptocratic regimes to remain in power decade after decade, as all who have the wit or will to oppose them get the hell out -- Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Algeria, the Philippines, Vietnam, China. After their enemies, these regimes export their hardcore poor for the West to take care of.

For this is now apparently our function: We are the adults of the world, caring for masses of hapless child-like asylum-seekers, economic and political and social refugees, immigrants legal and illegal, as well as entire hapless child-like nations that have not yet physically landed on our shores with hands outstretched.

The West -- specifically, the European, Canadian, Australian and American men whose inventions like the piano, representative democracy, pasteurization, vaccination, antiseptics, antibiotics, electrification, engines, generators, suspension bridges, The Lord of the Rings, the antislavery movement, the doctrine of Free Will, computers, opera, the theory of evolution, stainless steel, asphalt roads, telephones, photography, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, the movies, insecticide and the skyscraper have made the world infinitely better for its billions of inhabitants -- constitutes a sort of Head Start program for the entire planet. As with the version tried with "underprivileged" kids in the U.S., performance improves during the intensive initial effort, but once the program's over, the improvements fade away.

People in the West used to understand how unprecedented and unique their achievements were. To pick up on a new idea is one thing; to conceive a new idea is another thing entirely. Anyone can be taught how to drive a car, but only a few dozen Western men had what it took to design, build and perfect the automobile. This is a difference not of degree, but of kind.

One genius is "worth" a million ordinary folk when it comes to his power to do life-changing good for others. Objectively speaking, one Albert Schweitzer was worth all his patients put together -- but of course that is not at all how men like Dr. Schweitzer are wont to view their fellow human beings.

Hoping that demography is destiny, the races of the human race are now engaged in a different kind of race: reproduction. Hispanics boast of reconquering California and the Southwest through numbers alone. Mexico in particular acts as though it has unlimited human dumping rights on U.S. territory, and squeals like a stuck cabrito whenever we try to chuck somebody back. (America's border with Canada, on the other hand, is one of the longest in the world and the least needful of defense. An orderly, small-scale, inter pares population exchange is constantly ongoing, featuring easily bored, "ready for prime time" types like Jim Carrey departing Canada for the U.S., and a lesser number of Americans who prefer a kinder, gentler, duller society deserting the U.S. for Canada.)

The Palestinians speak openly of "Arabizing" Israel with their "population bomb" (The Washington Times, 12/12/01). "Greater Albania" is on the move throughout the Balkans, parlaying the "greatness" of numbers into domination of Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia. The same race is on in Kashmir and a hundred other places. Only the West is failing to weaponize population growth.

The ancient Romans imploded demographically, and Rome fell long ago. Yet the Eternal City still stands, and much of Roman civilization lives on in our minds and hearts. So it is possible to believe that we too, like Tolkien's Aragorn, "will not let the White City fall."