How can/should cultures preserve themselves?
By Thoreau
I’ve noticed a lot of people saying, in regard to immigration, “Cultures have a right to preserve themselves.” This is said by a lot of people, including those who support allowing more people in but still retaining some limit. Now, there are lots of things to be said for or against allowing more or fewer people into the country, but I want to focus on this particular argument, and ask whether it leads to any useful prescriptions.
Let’s say that the Tancredo gets his wish, and the number of immigrants to the US drops substantially. And let’s say that with most of the Hispanic labor gone from a town in the Midwest (yes, Hispanic immigrants have been going to the Midwest more and more lately), wages go up and lure a new group of migrants to the town: They could be poor Cajuns from Louisiana, poor blacks from the Bible Belt, even some Spanish-speaking New Mexicans whose families have been here for centuries (yes, such communities still exist). This wouldn’t be the first such northward migration in US history, and from the perspective of paler locals the cultural, economic, and even linguistic contrasts would still be significant. It’s also worth noting that previous such migrations were accompanied by racial tensions, some of which continue to this day in black-white relations.
Is this town any better off than before, from a cultural perspective? Yes, yes, I’m aware that legally it’s completely different: The new arrivals in this scenario are American citizens. That means that the locals can’t call the INS to have the new arrivals removed, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no potential for cultural, social, economic, or religious tension.
Of course, citizens are allowed to migrate within the US because we recognize that despite the potential for clashes when groups come into contact, it’s still better for the country to have a free flow of labor. The principle of cultural self-preservation is sacrified on the local level for a number of very good reasons. We recognize that the people who tried to preserve their “local culture” in the face of black migration were in the wrong. On a less dramatic scale, most would say that it would be unwise to use laws and regulations to restrict the influx of new businesses into a gentrifying neighborhood, even if it means that the locally owned vegan co-op will lose out to Whole Food$.
Now, I realize an argument can be made that it’s different when we start talking about a large influx of foreigners and examine things on a national scale. Still, whatever the merits of that argument, I think it’s distinct from cultural self-preservation. Ours is a very heterogeneous nation, with a variety of regional cultures. Our national culture is a less meaningful concept than local cultures. If the more identifiable cultures are not allowed to use the force of local government for self-preservation against threats from other Americans (and the cultural differences between a poor rural southerner and a Manhattanite are arguably almost as large as the differences between a Wisconsinite and a Mexican) then how valuable is that concept of cultural self-preservation? Perhaps we sacrifice that concept because we recognize how low its value is.
Now, you could argue that it’s very valuable, but that’s the price we pay for the greater economic benefits of a free flow of labor, and the trade and security benefits of a large Union. If so, then the economic benefits of substantially freer (not the same as “unlimited”) immigration should also be valid arguments against the concept of preservation. But if that’s the case, that cultural changes associated with the free movement of people are a necessary evil for the sake of economic growth, then it would follow that anybody who tried to keep poor southern blacks from moving to northern neighborhoods was in fact acting on a valid principle that we only sacrifice (as a matter of law) as a trade-off for economic growth.
However, I think most would agree that there was nothing valid about trying to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods in the north, and that such efforts would have been wrong even if the economic benefits of migration were small. It thus follows that the rather nebulous concept of cultural self-preservation is not a useful basis for law.
It’s also worth noting that arguments for cultural self-preservation could also be used to justify censorship of new art forms, protectionist policies against importation of books and movies and music and whatnot, and a variety of other insane policies.
Anyway, I am neither claiming to nor attempting to refute every anti-immigration argument. The economic and security arguments need to be addressed on their own terms (and I do think those arguments justify some sort of border control, even if they don’t justify significant limits on the number of immigrants). Here I want to focus on the argument that cultures have an alleged right to preserve themselves via the mechanisms of the state.
Comment by IOZ —
December 31, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
How can a “culture” have rights? The proper rejoinder is the old truism: Individuals have rights; nations have interests.
Anyway, culture is not at issue. Racial demography is. The only thing that Latin Americans might change about the United States is its average hue.
Comment by Vance Maverick —
December 31, 2007 @ 4:26 pm
I’ve noticed a lot of people saying, in regard to immigration, “Cultures have a right to preserve themselves.”
You don’t cite any such people. Are there any arguments there worth taking seriously? This notion seems so clearly false and pernicious that it’s hardly worth the rebuttal — unless the idea has important proponents.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
December 31, 2007 @ 4:47 pm
I’ve noticed a lot of people saying, in regard to immigration, “Cultures have a right to preserve themselves.”
And yet those people are never willing to promise to stay below 36°30′.
Comment by Cala —
December 31, 2007 @ 5:21 pm
2: In my internet travels, “American culture should be preserved against the invading gatecrashing hordes” is racism in its dress-up clothes. Really cheap dress-up clothes from Walmart, both for the reasons Thoreau points out, and it’s a stretch to call an immigrant group that is largely hardworking Catholics something foreign to American culture, or one that has nothing in common with immigrant groups that have succeeded in the U.S..
Comment by Vance Maverick —
December 31, 2007 @ 7:22 pm
Cala, we’re in emphatic agreement. A post like this, though, would become more interesting if there were non-moronic examples of the “preservation of culture” trope for us to react to.
The only other country I’ve lived in recently is Italy. One hears the same argument made there (sometimes with some vigor, as by Oriana Fallaci), and in a sense one might think there could be some substance to it — Italian culture is obviously a good deal more marked than American. But scratch the surface of Italian politics, language, art, food, etc., and you find that its history is a history of change, confusion, and conflict.* Even there, the descriptive stability is an illusion — how much more so the normative stability.
* Weirdly, Italian orthography has been stable and consistent for a long time, unlike ours in English. But of course that means even Scary Brown People can learn it easily….
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
December 31, 2007 @ 7:45 pm
English orthography has been very stable for the past 500 years. However, the spoken language has not been.
Comment by Vance Maverick —
December 31, 2007 @ 7:58 pm
I’ll give you the past 200-some years, but I wouldn’t push it back into the 1600s.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
December 31, 2007 @ 8:16 pm
Good grief. You can’t “preserve” culture. What are you going to do - pickle it? Boil it up real good and seal it in a jar? Absent immigration, culture’s still going to change. Of course, ridiculous arguments against “them” - whether they’re Irish, German, Italian, Slavs, Chinese, Japanese, Latinos - don’t seem to change…
Comment by UrysohnNormal —
January 1, 2008 @ 8:43 am
Well, as there are any other dissenting voices I might as well say something; I hope that I’m not a racist moron.
Obviously you can’t preserve ‘culture’. Nothing lasts forever. But sometimes you might want to keep it around for as long as you can anyway. Venice might be slowly sinking into the sea but the Italians are rather keen on putting off that inevitable day as long as they can.
In the same way, the Japanese try to keep Japan ‘Japanese’ (fairly successfully) by not allowing mass immigration. Japan in 500 years isn’t going to look much like the Japan of today, but it will look far less like contemporary Japan than otherwise if they ever open up their borders.
If the flow of immigrant Hispanic labor to that Midwestern town is stopped, will Cajuns/bible belt Blacks/New Mexicans simply replace it and produce a similar cultural dislocation? No.
The supply of Louisiana Cajuns et al. is many magnitudes smaller than the supply of hundreds and hundreds of millions of Mexicans, Central Americans and the rest of the worlders who have or want to come to America. Also, the demand for wetback labor isn’t concentrated in one particular area but spread out across the US. In addition, part of the reason that the northward black migration was so large was that blacks wished to escape Jim Crow. There would be far, far fewer arrivals to the Midwestern town.
America may have heterogeneous subpockets (New Mexicanos, fundamentalist Mormons, Amish, snakehandlers and so on) but these are mostly fairly small by population. What actually strikes me is actually how culturally homogenous the broad mass of Americans are, from California and Florida to Washington to Maine.
We allow citizens to migrate within the US for the same reason that family members are allowed to walk from one room of the family home to another. At the same time nations regulate their borders for the same reason that we regulate the flow of guests walking through our front door- and we don’t regard the two as morally the same.
Comment by Cala —
January 1, 2008 @ 9:26 am
Note, 9, that the popularity of ‘culture war’ rhetoric cuts against the idea that Americans are that homogenous, as would any amount of travel between, say, New York and Palestine, Texas. Not to mention that many areas of the Southwest have more in common culturally with areas of Mexico. Or that assimilation historically hasn’t meant that the new immigrants blend in completely (ah, the Puritan St. Patrick’s celebrations…..), just that they do so successfully, and that the dominant culture changes without noticing so much (that foreign food, spaghetti…)
Also “hundreds and hundreds of millions?” No one here is suggesting open immigration, and as much as Tancredo wets his pants, he started wetting them over maybe around 150,000 people in Colorado. (around 3% of the population.)
Vance, if I wanted to make a good argument for preservation of culture, I think I’d start not by arguing that cultural change is bad (or at least that it’s inevitable so we might as well stop pretending it isn’t — even Japan isn’t monolithic), but that rapid cultural change can lead to instability. And that might give us some hand-wavy reasons for immigration caps, or the state’s interest in public education, or some such. Still, I think it’s kind of weak, mostly because I’m pretty sure historically the U.S. has had higher levels of immigration adjusted for overall population, and the republic hasn’t come crashing down.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony probably would have had a heart attack over electing that Papist Kennedy, but eh, so much the worse for them.
Comment by UrysohnNormal —
January 1, 2008 @ 10:26 am
Cala,
Americans aren’t homogenous when it’s a question of abortion or gay marriage but most are strikingly culturally homogenous when it comes to everyday life. Historically immigrants have pretty completely assimilated and deracinated - pasta and St Patrick’s day aside.
‘Hundreds and hundreds of millions’: The US population is expected to rise to 419.9 million by 2050 from 300 million now with the increase being almost totally due to immigration. Hispanics are expected to increase from 36 million to 103 million from 9.6 million in 1970. From 5% to 25% in 80 years. That’s huge, whether you think it’s a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
Comment by Vance Maverick —
January 1, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
9: preserving Venice is an example of valuing the fruits of past culture. Venice the living city, though, is moribund, and I haven’t heard anyone suggest we should make positive efforts to maintain its population, way of life, etc.
As for Japan, it’s true that it’s insular. Is that good or bad? You don’t make an argument either way. (I certainly don’t care how much Japan changes in the next 500 years.)
10: here’s an argument that has some merit, I think. A rapidly changing world is disorienting for older people. It’s lonely to grow old surrounded by people who speak a different language.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
January 1, 2008 @ 3:48 pm
Americans aren’t homogenous when it’s a question of abortion or gay marriage but most are strikingly culturally homogenous when it comes to everyday life.
Few are the people in my neck of the woods who tart up their five year-olds for beauty pageants or respond to pubescent manifestation of sexual characteristics by having fathers and daughters attend Chastity Balls at which the girls make promises about their maidenhoods to their daddies. There’s more variation than you think.
Comment by Cala —
January 1, 2008 @ 4:31 pm
11: You said hundreds of millions of “Mexicans.” (about 25% of the projected immigration totals, assuming current rates and lots of other handwaving) Are they going to be budding asexually?
Historically immigrants have pretty completely assimilated and deracinated - pasta and St Patrick’s day aside.
Except that that’s just the point. They didn’t just assimilate: they also changed the culture. It didn’t end badly, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a change in the dominant culture. Assimilation goes both ways, and we’re generally pretty good at it. Read a newspaper from 100 years ago. Read Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. They would have described it as a Big Change. Heck, Joe Dimaggio gets described as a real American who prefers Chinese food to that foreign spaghetti.
8% to 25% Hispanic isn’t necessarily all that huge in terms of the effects on the culture. (There are more people of Irish descent in the U.S. than there are in Ireland, after all. ) There are good reasons to support measures that would end illegal immigration, but being overrun isn’t really up there.
The real question is why you seem to think that Hispanics won’t integrate in a similar way to all the millions that have come before, so that 25% is a Big Deal rather than some kids saying ‘I’m a quarter Dominican an’ a quarter Polish an’ a quarter German an’ a quarter Mexican an’ one of my ancestors was a Cherokee princess.’ Don’t their kids get to count as American?
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 1, 2008 @ 10:56 pm
The real question is why you seem to think that Hispanics won’t integrate in a similar way to all the millions that have come before…
Sure, they will. Just give them the same immigration pause every other group had.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 1, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
As for Japan, it’s true that it’s insular. Is that good or bad?
The most important judge of that is the Japanese themselves, and they seem to think it a good on balance.
We in the U.S. have passed immigration laws democratically. The problem is they’ve been subverted by elites in both parties through malignant non-enforcement.
If you don’t believe the American people have a right to regulate their borders for any reason, including cultural preservation (which does NOT mean freezing things in amber), then you should just be honest and own up to being an anarchist across the board. If the government can’t regulate entry into the society, then there isn’t really anything it can regulate in the long run.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 1, 2008 @ 11:11 pm
The Massachusetts Bay Colony probably would have had a heart attack over electing that Papist Kennedy, but eh, so much the worse for them.
That’s because Catholicism was a different beast in the 1600s then it is now. A Papist in 1625 would not have looked kindly on Puritanical practices, to put it mildly, and the Puritans would have reciprocated.
That’s why we should stick to comparing contemporaneous cultures. Is it healthy for the U.S. to import a large number of people who have far lower educational levels and cannot speak the language? Whose views on the place of government is very different than ours? Whose views on religious freedoms are at odds with ours? These things come with serious costs, both in financial terms and human terms, and these costs are often borne by the native population.
Many of you don’t want to deal with these questions, so you bring up hazy, feel-good scenarios of mythical pain-free assimilation.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 1, 2008 @ 11:48 pm
That means that the locals can’t call the INS to have the new arrivals removed…
The locals really can’t call the INS as it is. First, the INS has been replaced by the ICE, and second, they hardly respond with alacrity. They’ve only moved against a few high profile cases lately because of the outrage the issue has caused.
At any rate, the idea that people that you’ll have a second great migration is a little overstated. What happens now is the meatpacking companies find a low-tax area to set up a plant in some midwestern town, and then they import illegal labor forces, dumping the social costs that come with them on the town: education, law enforcement and health care. It’s a classic case of privatizing benefits and socializing costs.
If this practice was stopped through serious workplace enforcement, these plants would be either forced to invest in labor-saving devices or to be relocated in other areas, like Louisiana.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 2, 2008 @ 12:52 am
Derek-
I agree, a second great migration is unlikely. I tried to focus my post on the ethical issues in any response to such an event, not the probability of the event.
So here’s my question for you: What would you say to Manhattanites if a bunch of black people from Louisiana started moving in and the Manhattanites were upset? You can answer in regard to a hypothetical in the present or concrete events of the past, as you prefer.
Also, I actually support border control. I would concur that there are some people who most definitely should not come into the US. I just consider that list of people to be fairly short.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 2, 2008 @ 6:09 am
An entertaining hypothetical: are multi-generational residents of Southern California entitled to take steps to corral and reduce the influence of immigrants from the Midwest?
Comment by Thoreau —
January 2, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
“You dumb gringo! My family was here before your parents were even born!”