Update 2: History Of Traditional Levels Of US Immigration

Courtesy of Numbers USA, here is the exponential, unsustainable increase in immigration into the US since the 1965 and 1990 Immigration Acts. The trend is quantitavely and qualitatively different from decades past.

This is top-down central planning that swamps the local, founding peoples (Anglo, Afro, and Indian-American). I’m surprised at those who’ve shrugged it off as an inevitable natural phenomenon.

Update 1 (May 20): A few of our valued contributors seem unfamiliar with the term “central planning.” They confuse it with conspiracy thinking. I’m not a conspiracy thinker. I’ve written about the flaws of that kind of thinking in “On Conspiracy Thinking.”

Applied to immigration policy, my critique of conspiracy means that “the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy. … most of what the behemoth does nowadays [is] contrary to the good of the individual, and aimed reflexively at increasing its own power and size.”

In other words, immigration central planners began with good intentions and dollops of the usual stupidity and hubris never in short supply among the political class. Progressively, as with any sphere that has been brought under government control—and not as a matter of collusion and conspiracy—immigration policy evolved into an industry, with stakeholders, powerful vested interests, and power-conferring constituencies.

This is politics, not conspiracy. This is also why you want to keep these natural-born social engineers away from as many spheres as possible—an impossibility in contemporary America.

I can’t locate the reference I once made in a column to Samuel P. Huntington’s conclusion that the “denationalized elites” of the American state are unique in the modern political landscape in acting entirely against the interests of a “patriotic public.” (Maybe a reader can find this citation. Larry located it; thanks.)

Update 2: And this is also why I wrote in “Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling” that,

“[A]ll immigration policy by definition amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers. Bush’s batch of soon-to-be amnestied illegal aliens are voracious tax consumers, who will cost more in social services than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. By contrast, immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920, during the Great Migration, although poor, did not constitute a burden, because the Welfare State as we know it did not exist.”

“Moreover, what Bush in his dotage termed ‘the great American tradition of the melting pot’ is no more. In previous decades immigrants assimilated. In the spirit of the times, they are now encouraged to acculturate to the politics of petulance. As a result, too many seem to harbor a vestigial resentment toward the host society and to cling to an almost-militant distinctiveness.”

“Clearly, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state, as Ludwig von Mises noted, cannot coexist.”