America's Immigration Dilemma

The Long Crisis, Part 6

The last essay laid out why Europe is sliding into a long relative decline, not a sudden collapse but a steady slide all the same. The natural American reaction is relief. Our demographics are better, our energy is cheaper, our technology is ahead, our military is without equal. All of that is true, and none of it is the point.

Because America has a structural problem of its own, and it is the one most likely to decide whether the next 20 years bring a real renewal or just a glossier version of managed decline. The problem is immigration. Not the volume of it, which is all anyone argues about, but the kind.

The Two Ways a Melting Pot Fails

The kindest way to see what “kind” means is to remember what the melting pot was for. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. The point was never that many peoples lived here, which is common enough around the world. The point was that the many were meant to become one, fused into a new thing that was neither the old country nor a museum exhibit of the founders. That is the proposition, and it can fail in two opposite directions.

It fails when people come and never join, present in body and absent in everything else. And it fails when people come and join only their own, committed wholly to a separate identity that they govern by separate rules. The first is a hole in the civic fabric. The second is a second fabric woven beside the first. They look like opposites, the empty lot and the walled garden, but they are the same disease, because in neither one does the unum actually form. A serious argument about immigration has to hold both failures at once, and American politics holds neither. So take them one at a time.

One thing to fix in place before either, because it is where this gets twisted. Neither failure is about where anyone comes from. A settler from Guatemala who means to become American is no part of either problem. A sojourner or a separatist from anywhere on earth is. The line runs through intent and through the design of the system, never through nationality, and anyone who reads what follows as a claim about a particular people has it exactly backwards.

Failure One: The Sojourner

Set the two kinds of newcomer side by side.

The first means to become American. He burns the boats. The old country is behind him, and he learns the language, badly and slowly but he learns it, because the future is here. He puts the kids in the local school and starts caring about the local school. He buys a house and starts caring about the street, the crime rate, the condition of the roads. He learns the neighbors’ names, turns up at the school board, joins something. His world shifts year by year from the place he left to the place he joined, and the second generation bridges the two, and the third is American with a hyphen and a family recipe. It works because he made the one commitment the rest depends on: this is home now.

The second comes for the wages, not the country. The calculation is simple and rational. An hour of work here earns several times what the same hour earns back home. So he lives cheaply, often packed in with others from the same place, his social world the home community here, the news he watches from home, the language at the table the home language, and a large share of every check, in some cases half or more, wired back as remittances. The house being built is back home. The family being kept is back home. The plan is to return, or to keep the option open. America is where the money is made. It is a worksite, not a home.

None of that makes him a bad man. It makes him a rational one. If you could earn in a week what takes a month back home, with your family waiting on it, you would do the same. The point is not moral. It is civic.

Follow the money, not because the money is the problem but because of what it tells you. Remittances from the United States to Latin America run well over 100 billion dollars a year. Mexico takes in more from remittances than from oil. In Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala they run from a sixth to a quarter of national output. A reader of a blog like this one should be careful here, because there is a bad version of this argument and it has to be set aside first. The bad version says the money “leaves the community” and so makes it poorer. That is mercantilist nonsense. The man’s labor was real and was paid for at a price someone freely offered. He built the house, picked the crop, cooked the meal, and the community got that work. What he does with the wages afterward is his business and takes nothing from anyone. Money crossing a border is trade, and trade is not theft.

So the remittance number is not the harm. It is the tell, the clearest available measure of where a life is actually pointed. A man who wires home half of every check, lives four to a room to do it, and is building a house in a village he means to retire to is telling you in dollars that his center of gravity never crossed the border with him. He is here in body and home in everything else, and a town can fill with such men, and grow in population, without gaining any of the only currency that builds a community, which is people who have thrown in their lot with the place.

That is the civic hole. The framework underneath American life, the operating system from Part 4, runs on participation, on people who feel the pull of obligation to their neighbors because they have chosen to belong. The sojourner cannot supply it, not from hostility but from the ordinary indifference of a man whose real life is in another country. Let enough of a place tip his way and the civic layer thins, not sharply, not visibly at first, but steadily. Fewer hands at the town meeting, fewer coaches for the kids, fewer people who could name the family three doors down. From a distance, from a spreadsheet, the place looks fine. Up close it is people who share a zip code and very little else.

Failure Two: The Parallel Society

The first failure is a man who never joins. The second is a community that joins only itself.

Picture the sojourner’s opposite. These immigrants are neither transient nor indifferent. They commit all the way. They buy the houses, raise the children here, mean to stay for good, and pour themselves into civic life with an energy that shames the average native. They show up to the school board. They run for the council. They win. By every item on the assimilation checklist except the one that counts, they are model citizens. And what they are building, with real success, is a society that is less American than adjacent to America, governed where it is concentrated by its own norms rather than the common ones.

This is the failure that multiculturalism does not merely tolerate but prescribes. The salad-bowl creed tells every group to keep its identity whole and treats the old demand to dissolve into a common people as a kind of violence. So the most cohesive groups do exactly that. They keep the language, the schools, the marriage customs, the authority structures, and above all the habit of acting together, and they hand all of it intact to a second generation that the old melting pot would have pulled outward and that this one is built to hold in.

Here the mechanism the salad bowl never reckons with takes over, because political power has never been proportional to population. A group that votes as one, on the issues it cares about, and that concentrates in a place instead of scattering across the map, governs that place at a fraction of the national whole. You do not need a national majority. You need a local one, and cohesion plus concentration manufactures local majorities out of single-digit national shares.

You can watch it on the map. Hamtramck, Michigan elected an all-Muslim city council and mayor, and in 2023 that council voted to ban Pride flags from public property, reversing the town’s prior consensus outright. Dearborn beside it is a Muslim-plurality city with an Arab-American mayor, where public life now runs on a calendar and a set of sensibilities its mid-century residents would not recognize. None of this is illegal and none of it is a plot. It is ordinary democracy. A concentrated, cohesive population votes its values exactly the way every population always has, and the values are simply not the ones that governed the place before.

Lest anyone mistake this for an argument about Islam, look at a case with nothing to do with it. Kiryas Joel, New York is a village built by and for Satmar Hasidic Jews, who vote in blocs so disciplined that a word from the right authority delivers ninety-odd percent of the ballots, who keep their own language and institutions, who draw heavily on public funds while staying almost hermetically separate, and who once had a public school district drawn around them struck down by the Supreme Court as a religious gerrymander. The Hasidim are not Muslim, not Latin American, not anything that fits a cable-news segment about immigration. They are simply the purest available proof of the structural point. A cohesive group that assimilates into itself rather than the nation, and concentrates, will govern its ground by its own law, and the more perfectly it does so the less of the common American thing survives inside its borders.

There is a real objection here and it deserves a real answer. Isn’t this just pluralism? Isn’t a community living by its own lights the whole American idea, the Amish in Pennsylvania, the Mormons who built Utah, federalism doing what federalism is for? It is, right up to a line, and the line falls between private separateness and captured public power. The Amish ask nothing of the state and seek to govern no one but themselves. They are famously, almost perfectly apolitical. A community crosses into failure mode two not when it keeps to itself but when it turns its cohesion into leverage over the shared public power, the school and the police and the council and the purse, and then runs that power by a particular creed rather than the common one. One enclave doing this is pluralism. A society that has made permanent separateness the celebrated goal for everyone, so that a patchwork of parallel sovereignties becomes the design rather than a quirk at the edges, is the thing Part 4 warned about, the empire of many peoples that needs a strong hand to stay whole. Many peoples, one territory, no shared thing they are all becoming.

And notice which failure is the more durable. The sojourner half-corrects on his own. He may go home, and even if he never does, his American-born children are dropped into American schools and often pulled into the country in spite of him. The parallel society is engineered against exactly that drift, the separate school and the in-group marriage and the disciplined bloc all designed to keep the next generation from melting. Failure mode one leaks members back toward the nation by accident. Failure mode two is built never to leak at all. If you had to bet on which does more, over fifty years, to keep the unum from forming, you would not bet on the sojourner.

But Isn’t Restriction Un-Libertarian?

On a blog like this one the objection writes itself. If you believe in free markets and limited government, who are you to stand between a willing worker and a willing employer, or to tell a lawful community how to vote? Isn’t all of this just central planning of human beings?

It is the right question, and it has a two-part answer.

The first part is Milton Friedman’s, and Friedman was no one’s idea of a statist. Free immigration and a welfare state cannot coexist, he said, because open access to tax-funded benefits turns an open border into an unlimited claim on other people’s money. That is precisely the collision Part 5 watched happen in Europe. You can have open borders, or a generous welfare state, but not both without the arithmetic eating you alive, and America has only been running a smaller version of the same law.

The second part runs through this whole series. A free society is not a machine that runs on anybody at all. It is downstream of a particular kind of person, the kind the operating system in Part 4 produces, who governs himself, keeps his word, settles most disputes without a magistrate, and carries the habits of liberty without being forced into them. Limited government is only possible where the culture does the work the state would otherwise have to. Bring people in faster than that culture can form them, into a model deliberately built to keep them separate, and you are not enlarging freedom. You are spending down the capital that freedom runs on. A libertarianism that burns its own foundations to feel generous is unilateral disarmament. Choosing immigrants who will become self-governing Americans is not a betrayal of liberty. It is how a free people stays free enough to remain a people.

Why Nobody Fixes It

The obvious answer to both failures is a system that selects for the thing that matters, the intent to become one of us, and that is exactly the thing no one will build, because the present mess pays off too many people.

The business wing of the right wants cheap labor, and the farms and the meatpackers and the hospitality chains lean on the sojourner stream. Tilt the system toward settlers and you raise labor costs, and the donor class will not have it. The progressive wing of the left has made immigration an identity question, where any line drawn between kinds of immigrants is called discrimination and any enforcement is called cruelty, and where, worse for our purposes, the parallel society is not seen as a failure at all but celebrated as diversity, the salad bowl working as designed. The populist wing of both parties talks about the border and the volume, the easy question, while the hard question, what legal immigration is even for, goes untouched. So nothing structural moves. Every cycle brings the same hot rhetoric, every administration fiddles at the edges, and the design stands, because the design pays.

The Gilded Age Parallel

None of this is new. It recurs, and the Strauss-Howe frame explains why it sharpens in a First Turning. After the Civil War the country needed labor on a scale the native population could not supply, and the answer was something close to open immigration. Millions came, took the jobs, laid the track, and powered the Gilded Age. Some assimilated and many did not, at least not at first. Enclaves formed in every city, whole neighborhoods living in other languages, trust between groups low and exploitation high.

And here the optimist has his strongest card, which deserves to be met rather than dodged. Last time it worked. The Italians and Poles and Greeks whose enclaves frightened the nativists of 1910 produced grandchildren who are simply Americans, and the man worried about today’s wave looks, from where the optimist sits, exactly like the fool who worried about his own great-grandmother.

The answer is that the machine which closed the gap last time has been taken apart, and that the enclave of 1910 and the enclave of today are not the same animal. Three things made the old melting pot melt, and all three are gone. The 1920s restriction bought a pause, decades of low inflow during which assimilation caught up, and nothing in today’s politics will allow such a pause. The ruling ideology was assimilationist on purpose, the public schools drilling English and civics with the open goal of manufacturing Americans, and that ideology has been swapped for its opposite, a multiculturalism that treats the very demand to assimilate as bigotry. And the old technology forced a clean break, an ocean and no telephone and no air travel and no wire transfer and no second passport, so that to come was to leave. The Little Italy of 1910 was a way station because everything around it, the law and the schools and the sheer distance from home, pushed its children out into the country. The enclave built today is built to be permanent, and the ideology around it tells it to stay that way. The melting pot did not work by magic. It worked because staying separate was made hard and becoming American was made attractive and expected. We have reversed both settings and left the heat on under an empty pot.

So the modern First Turning lines up the old pattern with the cure removed. The post-crisis economy will want labor, the political class will keep immigration high to supply it, and neither failure will be addressed, because addressing them takes a courage not currently on offer. GDP climbs while trust sinks. The spreadsheet looks wonderful. The neighborhood does not.

America’s Wasting Asset

Across these essays I have argued that America’s edge over Europe in the coming First Turning is its operating system, the framework of individual responsibility, voluntary community, and bottom-up civic life from Part 4. Europe swapped that for procedure. America still runs it, and that is a genuine advantage.

But an operating system needs users, people plugged into it and handing it down, and both failures drain them in their own way. The sojourner never connects to it. The parallel society connects only to its own copy of it. One leaves an absence and the other a rival, and the common system loses ground to both at once. That is America’s wasting asset. The framework still works, and it is still powerful wherever it is live, but its footprint is narrowing, the thick-civic places concentrating into particular regions while the empty lots and the walled gardens spread.

Let that hold through the First Turning without correction and America reaches the 2050s Awakening with the very condition Europe carries now, a fading framework coasting on momentum instead of living participation, only with better GDP and a larger army. The numbers will still read as power. The thing underneath will read as something else. A country whose power and whose civic health are pulling apart is building on sand, however grand it looks from the road.

The Window

The First Turning is the window in which this gets fixed or gets locked in. The end of the crisis will scramble the coalitions, and the old alliances that hold the status quo in place may not survive the Fourth Turning whole. A new settlement could, in principle, open room for a system that finally draws the line, that selects for the intent to become American and treats assimilation as the goal of the whole enterprise rather than an accident we hope occurs.

Whether it does depends on whether the leaders who come out of the crisis grasp what is actually at stake. Not labor markets, not border security, not the cultural worry that gets waved off as nativism. What is at stake is the civic foundation that makes the country work at all, the operating system, the voluntary community, the web of mutual obligation that turns a population into a people. The melting pot was never automatic. It was a thing the country chose to do, and meant to do, and can choose to do again or let die.

Reinforce that foundation in the First Turning and America comes into the 2050s with the resilience to take whatever the next Awakening brings. Fail, and America comes into the 2050s looking a great deal like Europe looks today, comfortable, strong on paper, and quietly hollow. The Gilded Age ended when a new generation demanded more than gilding. The only question that finally matters is whether there is something solid going up underneath, or whether we are brushing another coat of gold paint onto a frame that is rotting behind it.

Next: The Next Twenty Years