102 - Politically Potent Anger at Immigrants: But We Need Them

            Populist and nativist François Legault’s reelection this week as premier of the province of Quebec at the head his Coalition Avenir Québec illustrates once again the political pulling power of anti-immigrant rhetoric.  Legault, a sometime entrepreneur who espouses prejudice against outsiders and favors keeping Quebec forever insular in culture rather than seeking secession from Canada (a failed maneuver of his predecessors over many decades), joins those many other political leaders who use antagonism toward incomers to gain political hegemony.  Yet we need immigrants to grow and prosper.

            Likely Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been vituperative in her castigation of immigrants.  Her Brothers of Italy Party and its coalition partners have all railed against the overrunning of Italy by non-Italians. Part of the reasons for autocratic President Viktor Orban’s electoral successes has been his closing of Hungary’s borders to immigrants.  The basis of the Swedish Democrats’ recent electoral upsurge has been its criticism of the willingness of Liberal Democrats, long the political rulers of Sweden, generously to open national doors to asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Somalia.  A major reason for Brexit’s appeal to the British public and for the Conservative Party’s success in former Labour Party strongholds was its promise to prevent immigrants from crowding their isles and creeping across the channel from Europe.

            President Biden and Democratic Party hopefuls seeking Congressional seats next month all campaign with the veritable immigration albatross around their necks.  It is a major problem that will never resolve itself despite the uncomfortable fact that immigration numbers are down, not up; asylum seekers are numerous, however, and draw the headlines. Republican governors and ambitious legislative candidates in places like Texas and Arizona claim falsely that the Spanish- and French-speakers trying to cross the border into the United States are all criminals.  But that is patent nonsense, spouted by Trump and then parroted by his would-be acolytes. It plays well in conspiracy circles.

            Nor, in another continental setting, can South Africa easily reject that it, too, is a magnet that attracts migrants fleeing poorer and less stable countries farther north such as Zimbabwe.  Nigerians rush, if they can, to South Africa. So do Congolese fleeing the mayhem in their own land.  Indigenous urban shack-dwelling South Africans respond to these seekers of better lives as do official Hungarians and angry Americans – by attempting to stanch the flow of newcomers, by attacking them physically, and by demanding that they “go back where they came from.” Xenophobia is alive and well almost everywhere across the globe.

            Legault won attention and provincial majorities by banning the wearing of religious symbols (e.g. Muslim veils) and further restricting the use of English in public places.  But he also stressed the dangers of immigration; it dilutes the Frenchness of Quebec, he declared, and gained renewed electoral support.   (That the federal government of Canada actively seeks more immigrants only improves Legault’s appeal to a Francophone electorate in his province -- at least everywhere but cosmopolitan Montreal.)

            As Legault campaigned recently he falsely (but popularly, like Orban and Trump) alleged that immigrants brought violence and extremism into the province (and into Canada).  His provincial minister in charge of migrancy alleged that immigrants flock to Montreal and “don’t work and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.”  They both were forced publicly to apologize for their biased statements.  But they preached, as all anti-immigrant verbal assaults do, to the beliefs of at least a substantial proportion of their voters.  Alas!

            During the Quebec campaign, citizens spoke comparatively openly to reporters: “They [immigrants] don’t resemble us; they are strange.” “Why do people [referring to veiled Muslim women] come here and try to change our culture? Why do they want to take away our crucifixes?”

         Inhabitants of Quebec made it clear, as so many Europeans have done and as their votes show, that they fear incomers.  They are apprehensive that their own lives will be altered for the worse by having to share community with persons who look and dress differently and possibly worship in a new manner.  Bostonian Brahmins reacted that way to Irish and Italian arrivals. Everywhere, people descended from immigrants like most Americans want to close their national doors against new waves of persons wanting in.

            South Africa’s rampant and dangerous xenophobia has the same origins that anti-immigrant rallies have in South Texas or Quebec.  The incomers will take our jobs, they imagine, overuse our facilities and tax our administrative abilities, thus depriving those of us who are here already of advantage and privilege.  The U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was only a stark example of the common human attempt to protect one’s own existing gains and deny them or refuse to share them with the next wave.   How un-American (if one reads the Statue of Liberty welcomes and our own historical myths)!

            The irony, of course, is that we need renewed waves of immigration to prosper. Post-Brexit, Britain no longer has sufficient agriculture workers to harvest its summer crops.  Australia likewise is unable to produce foodstuffs without the seasonal workers who once arrived from abroad.  Immigrants rarely replace native employees;  instead, at first they do the tasks that residents shun and think beneath them. As birthrates and populations decline almost everywhere – even in China – drawing in immigrants helps to maintain productivity.

            In the United States, the enduring Covid-19 era reality is that labor is short.  Too many jobs are unfilled.  Every kind of business is advertising forlornly for new employees.  Even the enforced recession is unlikely to fill the employment ranks.

The coronavirus pandemic restricted immigration and travel and effectively halted the flow of foreigners into these United States. At the end of 2021, there were about 2 million fewer working-age immigrants in the U.S. than there would have been if pre-2020 immigration patterns had continued.  We cannot advance economically without sufficient workers, many of whom (according to evidence) would be well educated. Of the 2 million shortfall, 1 million would have graduated from college.

            These last are rational arguments.  Canada’s Liberal government understands their force and wants to grow on the backs of immigrants.  But nativism has much more political salience everywhere. The only way that the Biden administration might conceivably blunt the impact of anti-immigration sentiment would be by articulating boldly and often how immigration lifts all boats economically and that immigrants (like our own forefathers) assimilated relatively rapidly. We now have an Irish-descended president and a Jamaican/Indian first generation vice-president.

            But the rational arguments will not topple bias, especially when prejudicial ideas are peddled for political aims by would be autocrats.  President Obama could explain the virtues of accepting immigrants, but most of the globe’s putative leaders know that they can gain political advantage by appealing to the basest fears of their constituents.  Alas, the world must seek the kinds of new leaders who – rather than building walls – can turn immigrant needs into a positive economic good.