Is Immigration Good for African Americans?

with Rob Montz

There is a lot of terrain between hardline restrictionists and open borders advocates in the immigration debates. Without consulting the polling numbers, I feel pretty confident in saying that most people believe we must put some limits on who we let into the country, but that a certain amount of immigration is good both for aspiring immigrants themselves and for the US. Yet even a moderate immigration policy opens up legitimate questions about the relation between new immigrant populations and our national self-conception.

Open borders advocates sometimes attempt to harness sympathy for the interests of black American voters in support of their more permissive immigration policies. Such policies are said to be anti-racist. Yet, in terms of the workings of low-skilled labor markets, it’s quite possible that a steady stream of immigrant laborers will put some downward pressure on wages and employment opportunities for African Americans. Why, then, should black Americans uncritically and in the name of "antiracism" support policies that may end up making their lives more difficult? Is it because tight borders are inherently racist, and it’s the duty of African Americans to fight racism, no matter the consequences? “Counterintuitive” would be a polite word for such a proposition. “Bullshit” would be a more accurate one.

Perhaps, in this post-George-Floyd world we now inhabit, we ought not be surprised that the rise of a new racial politics finds itself refracted in the immigration debates. But this is tricky territory. Even those with previously settled views now find themselves trying to rethink the connections between two of the oldest debates we have in the US—debates about immigration and about race. The filmmaker Rob Montz is one of them. In this excerpt from our recent conversation, he talks about abandoning his prior “utopian” libertarian position in favor of open borders and struggling to understand the limits and possibilities of a more selective immigration policy. He finds inspiration for this rethinking in the struggles that prominent black Americans like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois have had grappling with this issue. Should we simply put on the green eyeshade, consult our group's interests and crunch the numbers? Or are there less easily quantifiable questions that need to be addressed in our immigration policy?

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GLENN LOURY: I wanna know what you're up to. I was especially intrigued by this most recent piece of yours that I saw, interviewing at length Roy Beck, who is an immigration—how do you put it—restrictionist? Is that a fair way of saying it? I mean, he's concerned about the unauthorized entry into the country of large numbers of people. What's the name of his organization, Roy?

ROB MONTZ: It's called NumbersUSA, Roy Beck. I think you found it so compelling because he mostly said that all the great civil rights luminaries of the last 200 years agree with Professor Glenn Loury when it comes to legal immigration. I mean, at least the idea that to be an upstanding black citizen doesn't mean you need to march in lockstep with the Democratic Party orthodoxy as it relates to how you're supposed to feel about immigration and illegal immigration.

Well, that's a better way of expressing my view, I think. That I'm not against so much immigration as I am concerned about the assimilation of African American interests to the project of making it easier for people to get into the country and stay in the country who do not have authorization. It's not obvious to me that that's kind of crusade that black people should be getting behind. And at least I'd like to see some debate amongst African Americans about it.

Mine was more about opening up debates. It was just an interview. And I feel as if we've got an opportunity on our channel to talk to some of my intellectual heroes, including you, including Andrew Sullivan, including Charles Murray. And to a person, if I ask them on or off camera, “What is the one particular policy issue you've found yourself most radically departing from over the last ten years?” And most of these guys, like Sullivan or Murray, are kind of proper libertarians, old school libertarians. To a person, they've said immigration. It kept coming up.

And I related to that because, again, I was steeped in pure, big-L libertarianism right after I graduated from school. My very first job was the Cato Institute. And back at the Cato Institute, it was like you have to be a mouth-breathing, tribal heathen to want anything other than completely unfettered immigration, preferably the instant dissolving of national boundaries, given that national borders are a retrograde primal imposition. They are pure artifice. There is no such thing as national borders. We're all one people. Free flow of capital, free flow of labor, free flow of dollars and customers. So anything less than that utopianism was considered retrograde.

And I myself, over the last like ten years, have been mostly following my intellectual heroes and becoming much more restrictionist. I mean, a lot of that stuff is prompted by the electors of Trump, who have very strong opinions about unfettered illegal immigration because they're the ones who bear the wage suppression effects. In that conversation with him, and you've seen it, it's not me saying, “Roy Beck, you're right about everything. We need to be taking immigration levels back to where they were in in 1989.” But it's me admitting to him that I'm also evolving and trying to work my way through this stuff, given that I find that libertarian utopianism to be kind of hopelessly naive and potentially economically counterproductive.

I think there's an irony here from the point of view of African American interest, which is the irony about “concerns of unauthorized entry across the southern border are racist.” And that's a kind of civil libertarian, civil rights, anti-discrimination claim that blacks should be friendly to. You know, people are concerned that the country is going to be undermined because of the entry of people who don't originate in European ports of call.

The irony I'm thinking of is that, on the one hand, that's an appealing posture for many black interest advocates. This idea of a big coalition of non-whites, a broad attack on American white supremacist thinking, a coalition of peoples of color advocating for the interest of peoples of color. That has a certain appeal. On the other hand, the African American claim on the nation's attention to redress the consequences of the history of African American exclusions going all the way back to slavery, that claim is nested within the larger American national narrative. It's an American claim, and it presupposes the existence of a national framework and context within which that claim can be prosecuted.

So the oblation of borders and the denial of there being any interest in the project, the American project, the specifically national our ambitions and undertakings of we Americans cuts sort of cuts against the story that we black Americans, I think, want to be telling to ourselves and to the country about what's the right thing to do, the right thing to do for our country.

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Absent our country, I don't know where that argument goes. Does it go to the United Nations? Does it go to the world court? No, I mean, it's an American argument. It's an argument about what is the character of our country. And the equation of black claims with the claims of residents of Venezuela who would like to be residents of the United States of America obliterates the specifically nationalistic character of the black struggle. It's an American struggle, which is why your and Roy Beck’s quoting of Frederick Douglass really appealed to me. I mean, I get it. I get that W.E.B. Du Bois, sitting in 1910 looking at what was going on in the country might have said, well, we got some questions here about, are African Americans at the back of the queue now, where the queue is gonna be lifted by every aspirant sitting in Southern or Eastern Europe who would like to be at Ellis Island? Are we now at the back of the queue? That kind of concern.

Right. But I mean, I think you saw the interview. I specifically said to Roy Beck, again, one of the most infamous, famous immigration restrictionists in America, I said that the Statue of Liberty and people coming here for a better life, the great golden dream of America, it's wonderful. I have this incredible book about the creation of the Statue of Liberty that was co-written by David Eggers, who's a very famous novelist, that I'll read to my kids at least once or twice a month. And it's about this idea, what it represents, and this symbol of opportunity and freedom and the idea that America is a creed and a set of ideas and that radicalism that it's open to people of any race or ethnicity or religious persuasion.

You can come here, and you get exceptional, unprecedented, miraculous levels of freedom and opportunity. But in turn you have to adhere to a certain creed of personal responsibility and things like that. It's so wonderful. It is wonderful. But at the same time, I guess I wonder. I started questioning my libertarian orthodoxy about the moral imperative of the dissolution of international borders right around the time that Trump got elected, specifically as it relates to the idea that unfettered or exceptionally high volumes of immigrants, I was worried about the cost that they have when it comes to culture first.

First culture. Just the idea of America has an exceptional operating software and you can “assimilate” people—bad word, triggering word—if immigration levels are at a certain level. But if they're too big—and Reihan Salam, your colleague at the Manhattan Institute, is extremely eloquent about this—once it gets above a certain threshold, that assimilation stops and people create these self-contained clusters in which there isn't that seeping in of this unique, miraculous American cultural creed, right?

Well, right. I can hear the counterargument, which is if we go back to the heyday of Ellis Island, 1890 to 1920, and we look at the flows of people coming from Russia and Italy, having been coming from Ireland for quite some time, coming from Eastern Europe and so on into the United States, they were, relative to the size of the population at that time, a larger influx of “foreigners” than we are now experiencing. And we did somehow manage fitfully and over decades to “assimilate” these newcomers. These newcomers were not selected because they had high education or because they could put a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. They were the teeming masses of Europe, and they came in very large numbers. Nativists of that era would've made arguments not dissimilar, perhaps not as eloquent as Reihan, but not dissimilar to the ones that you cite Reihan as having made, and the history has shown them they have been wrong.

What Roy says is ... Well, let me put it this way. So my children also watch [An] American Tale, which is this cartoon movie from the 1980s produced by Steven Spielberg. And it's about this mice family that is in one of the Soviet satellite states that immigrate to America. And the mice sing these songs about this golden dream of opportunity of America, best embodied in this song called “There Are No Cats in America.” So they sing this song about there not being any cats in America as they're on their way to Ellis Island.

But once they get to America, they find out that there are actually cats in America, right? The fantasy doesn't necessarily match reality, which is not to say there isn't something beautiful about the American operating software, the American idea, the American experiment. But Roy Beck, in our interview, does point out to me that in terms of the raw economic numbers of economic mobility or economic wellbeing, a lot of the people that came through Ellis Island either flatlined or actually there was slight regression in terms of their actual material wellbeing when they came to America.

Now it's probably a different story with their great-grandkids, obviously. But, you know, you don't wanna get blinded by the fantasy to what actually happened to the people that came to America. I don't know what to make of this, Glenn. I still don't have strong opinions about what we ought to be doing. But I'm trying to live in the flux and hear opinions from people, people that might be able to sharpen my thinking.

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