Orderly immigration, or Trump. Choose one.

     "If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do."

                       David Frum, Senior editor at the Atlantic and MSNBC contributor

Click for tour of Ellis Island

A tide has turned. It is a new era.

The era of global thinking and the free movement of goods and services and people reached its apogee and is reversing. 

Humans are tribal, and their politics are expressing this reality.

There is something happening world wide, and the US is part of it. Brexit was the unmistakable signal, a heads up for the later Trump victory. 

British voters shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union, in the face of economic disruption, at a price of re-opening a border wound with Ireland, and against the warning of nearly all British expert authority.  Why? Because membership in the European Union meant uncontrolled immigration, which in Britain meant most visibly from Poland--white Christian Poles.  Immigration felt out of control.

The smart people in America saw this and dismissed it. A mistake. It couldn't be serious and it couldn't happen here in the US.  Then it did.

The phenomenon is not just in Britain. Far right nationalist parties are gaining power in the liberal democracies of Europe: La Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, the Freedom Party in Hungary. 

Riot police protected school buses.

Israel just voted a new Basic Law clarifying that it is not a multinational democracy: Israel is for Jews. China is openly and proudly intimidating its Muslim Uighur minority. 

I witnessed tribalism in the US most personally in Boston in the 1970s, where the prosperous settled into enclaves of money--nice neighborhoods--and the less prosperous settled into enclaves of ethnicity. There were Irish neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods. The clustering was so dramatic that the courts had to mandate busing children from one neighborhood to others to integrate the schools.  People panicked. The battle cry was "neighborhood schools."

World wide, we are seeing voters express their concern about the current levels of immigration and global economic union. Too much, too fast. No limits. So we are seeing backlash and a reversal of the policies of globalism.

The USA has a problem and a solution. It is the melting pot. It works, but not quickly.

In the mid 19th Century the Irish were considered "foreign" and unwanted, but then, after a generation or two, they became Americans--on the "inside" of America, not the outside. In the early 20th Century they were sufficiently American--"white"--that they opposed immigration from southern Europe--Greeks and Italians. Those southern Europeans--and Jews--were the scary outsiders then. But after a generation or two, those foreigners became Americanized, and the notion of "American" came to include them. 

Pizza isn't foreign anymore. It got melted into the pot.

Immigration is at same percentage as 1900-1930

We are at a period of heightened immigration numbers, with most coming from Latin America and Asia. This makes some people uneasy--as has always been the case in America. (Meanwhile, darker skinned Muslims are moving from south to north into Europe, causing the worry there.) 

Will those darker skinned foreigners add to America or destroy it by changing it?  

History gives us an answer: In the long run, the melting pot will work in America, because our democracy still works and those immigrants and their children will have voting power and equal rights and will be Americans. The culture will evolve to Americanize and include them. "Chinese food," and "Thai food" didn't destroy American taste in food. It added to it. 

There is a risk for Democrats: Over-learning opposition to group identity. Joe Biden's opening video reflects a potential conflation within Democratic messaging: that group identity among whites equals racism. Sometimes it does, but not always. I know from experience and observation: first and second generation Greeks like Greek food and music and speak Greek among themselves. It isn't prejudice. It is culture. Their grandchildren speak no Greek, but eat baklava. They are Americans.

There needs to be some middle ground where Democrats recognize that the melting pot works--and should be allowed to work--but that social change is slow, and it is inevitable that humans want to protect the familiar in their culture and they have pride in it. 

The political solution is available for Democrats: allow immigration, even lots of immigration, but make clear there are rules to it, and limits attached to it, and be visible in enforcing those rules. Assure the nervous that this is an area where Democrats recognize that immigration creates some problems, but they are on top of this. 

There is an idea floating around within Democratic constituencies that pride in ones culture is unacknowledged "racism," and that it needs to be called out. There two problems with that. One is that liking ones familiar culture and not wanting it disrespected is universal.  

The second is that this is a democracy. "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." A majority of Americans will accept controlled immigration--do in fact accept controlled immigration. But they won't tolerate being called deplorable or racist, and they won't accept uncontrolled immigration, which they interpret as a foreign invasion. If they perceive invasion they will exercise their democratic power, as they are doing all over the world, and vote for people who will protect them.

The Democrat who can beat Trump will be the one who says he or she will control immigration, sensibly but firmly.  Otherwise Democrats will lose another election to Trump.







[Note: I am pro-immigrant. I think we need more immigrants in America. It is powerful medicine for America, but needs to be handled as such.]