Like It or Not, People From “Shithole Countries” Created the United States
The people on the Mayflower were lower middle class, and largely British. Which means they were lower middle-class arrivals from a country that was very poor. As Niall Ferguson wrote in his 2004 book Empire, the England of the 17th century was far, far from the one of the 19th century.
While economic measures are powerfully flawed on their best day, it’s notable that the England of the 17th century had an economy that was a quarter of India’s. Which is quite something as most who’ve been to India modernly will attest. Though it’s liberalized quite a lot in the last thirty years, to visit India is to have an all-new perception of overwhelming poverty.
It’s a reminder that religious separatism wasn’t the only driver of the efforts by those of English origin to get to what became the United States. Migration is invariably economic, which means a major informer of the new world’s appeal was attaining something better.
It was about leaving “shithole countries” with an aim to achieve much more in a place that offered nothing more than freedom. It can’t be said enough that in coming to the country that became the United States 250 years ago, and 406 years ago as was the case with the people on the Mayflower, people were coming not in search of security, but opportunity.
Which remains the case 406 and 250 years later. The people showing up for work are leaving behind backwards, enterprise-suffocating, shithole countries with an eye on fixing their poverty.
It’s all worth thinking about as Americans claim “this time is different” with immigration today. They say the countries would-be Americans are exiting essentially shower the U.S. “with the wrong element” (look it up), since the countries exited are so desperately poor.
Except that departure from the nations that are so anti-life and prosperity is what makes these people American. See the Mayflower arrivals yet again. These people were neither middle or upper class, nor was the nation they left behind a vision of prosperity. That’s why they left it, and that’s why individuals continue to depart from what degrades humanity. They look at themselves, and they see an American as opposed to an inhabitant of what crushes the qualities that makes human beings American.
As with the Mayflower arrivals, the immigrants of today are frequently risking their lives not for welfare (see where ICE agents are tragically rounding up the undocumented), but for incredibly challenging work. Remember this as dissembling conservatives wrap their anti-immigration stances in situational embrace of the law, along with a view that schools and clubs choose their members, so why not let government choose Americans with an eye on smooth cultural assimilation?
The obvious answer is that just as we don’t let government choose what computers we import, we can’t let it centrally plan the arrival of the most important capital of all: human. The second most obvious response is that private businesses not only should get to choose their employees, but that they’re much better at it than politicians are.
Of course, the most obvious answer is that in making their way to the United States, they’ve passed the test of American-ness with flying colors. To be American is to recognize what’s inimical to progress, and leave it behind.
In other words, the assimilation into the U.S. can be found in the arrival here for work. After which, not only is the exiting of a “shithole country” implied in the migration, it’s the tell that the United States is receiving American values in the migration.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.