Who is this America?

At least one positive thing about the recent immigration reform bill in Congress is that it has really generated some serious soul-searching and debate on the question of the place of immigrants in current American society. Supporters of immigrant rights have been forced to articulate their point of view. However, this soul-searching does not go deep enough, and important assumptions about national identity, if there even is such a thing (which I doubt), remain unquestioned.

Of course, many supporters of immigrant rights are quick to invoke the "nation of immigrants," how welcoming the huddled masses within are borders is part of the very foundation of America. And they bring up important points. Thus Paul Krugman, in the New York Times yesterday (May 25th, "Immigrants and Politics"):

Moreover, as supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien, and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews.

This fact, while well documented (see, for example, Michael Frye Jacobson's excellent 1998. book "Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race"), really does bear repeating because it vividly illustrates that what we think of as "America" is neither timeless nor unchanging. There is, then, no simple essence of "America" for immigrants to destroy, even if they could.

But the point I want to make here is even more basic. Consider another passage from a New York Times article yesterday, about a poll on American attitudes towards immigration (May 25th, "Immigration Bill Provisions Gain Wide Support in Poll"):

The poll showed that Americans are uncertain about the benefits of the most recent wave of immigration, and divided over how many immigrants should come in the future.

The question that pops into my head after reading this sentence is: "should?". Or, spelled out more clearly, why is it that we believe we have a right to dictate the fate of these people, that we think we can (and should) allow or deny them entrance here? Is that really a choice that we can make and impose on others? Underlying the whole thing is the assumption that there is an unproblematic and unitary nation, and that we control it. I take issue with that assumption.

Think for a moment about this thing we call globalization. Clearly it means a lot of things, but one undeniable component is the intertwining of national economies, a meshing that is now inextricable and means that changes in agricultural policy in the US can lead to food riots in Mexico. But Mexicans have no say in who makes policy in the US. Why would they? They're not US citizens.

The point here is that while we talk about discrete political entities, in fact no nation is an island (metaphorically speaking, of course). The global economic order and the global political order are not in sync: one ignores borders, while for the other they are of paramount importance. And this leads to many problems (and, frankly, leads me to wonder if the nation-state, in its current incarnation, is not becoming obsolete (and in fact, phenomena such as the growth of the EU seem to validate this opinion). But let's leave that can of worms aside for now). Those who migrate to the US usually do so for economic reasons, like the Mexicans who (let's be honest) are really at the ones who are being talked about in this debate. As an editorial in The Nation put it ("Raw Deal on Immigration", posted May 24th):

By wrenching open the domestic Mexican market to subsidized US exports, trade deals like NAFTA have put poor Mexican farmers out of business while driving up the domestic price of staples like corn. Unable to make ends meet in Mexico, people make the rational calculation to go to the United States, where jobs pay more and are more plentiful, so they can send money home to support their families.

Simple, right? And yet, when US-engineered trade deals are pushing immigrants across the border, why do we think we can tell them whether they're welcome or not? Who is this America guarding the nation, and why does it think it has a right to do so?

Leftists in academia (or, why your professor hates America)

Let me begin this blog by talking about one particular manifestation of a much larger issue that I believe to be of crucial importance, one that I will be coming back to and approaching from different angles often. My own (admittedly dorky) label for this issue is "the problem with structural problems". I'll begin somewhere near and dear to my (dorky) heart: academia.

In his book "Thinking Points", George Lakoff points out (p.62) that "[i]n surveying conservative and progressive arguments, we have noticed another important regularity. Conservatives seem to argue on the basis of direct, individual causation, while progressives tend to argue on the basis of systemic, complex causation." This statement leads me to wonder about claims, made by Horowitz and other rightists of his ilk, that there is a leftist bias in academia. Because, in a sense, this fact seems to point a different explanation; namely, that a progressive stance is almost inherent in intellectual pursuits and that to be both a serious scholar and a dedicated rightist involves constant, unresolvable tension.

In studying history, politics, social sciences, or anything that probes the social in any way, one is struck with the massive complexity of the whole thing. Nothing is ever simple. To take a particularly obvious example, consider underdevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa. How did that happen? Why is it getting worse instead of better? To even begin to answer these questions at all, we would need to delve into the subjects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, natural resource management, globalization, neo-liberal economics, and so much more. Zooming in on any particular theme or area or event, one is confronted with a massive number of contingencies, of individuals doing things at specific places and specific times. Nothing is ever the result of an individual rationally making a decision in a social/historical/political vacuum. All this means that taking an honest look involves confronting an almost overwhelming complexity.

More importantly, it involves grappling with what is called a structure or a system because, again, causation is rarely direct. I fill up my tank at the Shell station. This helps – just a tiny bit – make Shell a profitable business, ans thereby gives it a mandate to keep doing the work they're doing. Work that involves the economic and environmental destruction of such places as the Niger delta. But that's not me, I'm just going about my life, doing what I need to make it to work. This is indirect causation (and a relatively simple example at that). Indirect causation operates by reinforcing and perpetuating a structure through day-to-day acts that, taken individually, seem like nothing at all. This entails a whole host of problems for our way of thinking about morality, something I will be coming back to (again and again and again) in this blog. But back to academia.

With this in mind, we might begin to see why there's a leftist "bias" in the world of letters and minds. In those hallowed halls and ivory towers, people dedicate lives to studying such problems. Academics are, therefore, acutely aware of the complexity of the world, of the indirect causation that underlies most issues. With this awareness, conservative discourse stops making sense. Take the bootstraps principle, a conservative favorite (as described by Lakoff in "Thinking Points" p.61): "With enough self-discipline, everyone can pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps. The government has no responsibility to help people who have fallen behind, because it's their own fault, caused by lack of discipline and morality." This principle comes, of course, with a whole host of assumptions, all of which are problematic to the careful observer of society. It assumes the playing field is even, it assumes that there are no built-in, self-perpetuating obstacles to certain groups' achieving prosperity. How, I want to ask, could any honest intellectual accept these assumptions? This goes a long way to explaining the prevailing political leaning of academics. It's not a bias. Professors are hired because they are good scholars and teachers. This, I am suggesting, makes them extremely likely to have progressive sensibilities. But they're not hired because of their political beliefs. Those are simply a natural outcome of careful study. Accepting the assumptions of the bootstraps principle would make you a bad scholar with a myopic view of society. And who wants that in a professor?

Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights says so itself: "All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs."