Letters to a Young Conservative (18 page)

The abortion issue reveals the bloody essence of modern liberalism. In fact, it is the one issue on which liberals rarely compromise. Being pro-choice is a litmus test for nomination to high office in the Democratic Party. Liberals as a group oppose
any
restriction of abortion. They don’t want laws that regulate late-term abortion. Many liberals object to parental notification laws because they require that parents be alerted if a minor seeks to have an abortion. Some liberals would even allow partial-birth abortion, a gruesome procedure in which the abortionist dismembers a child who could survive outside the womb. One may say that in the church of modern liberalism, abortion has become a sacrament.

What, then, is the challenge facing the pro-life movement? It is the same challenge that Lincoln faced: to build popular consent for the restriction and ultimately
the ending of abortions. Right now the pro-life movement does not enjoy the support it needs from the American people to do this. Neither, by the way, did Lincoln have a national mandate to end slavery. It is highly significant that Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He was resolutely antislavery in principle, but his political campaign focused on the issue of curtailing the spread of slavery to the territories.

In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times this will require political and legal fights; at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw
all
abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping
some
abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing
no
abortions. These folks should learn some lessons from Abraham Lincoln.

Dear Chris,

I see from your letter that the anti-globalist cause is gaining momentum at your university. You comment on the number of “beautiful airheads” who are showing up at campus rallies and mouthing anti-globalist slogans. Well, we know the cause has become fashionable when the pretty girls show up.

Fashionable, however, is not the same thing as reasonable. To hear the anti-globalists tell it, disruptions of trade meetings and international conferences are justified because the protesters are speaking out for poor workers in the Third World. In their view, poor people in Thailand, India, Nigeria, and other Third World countries are being exploited by free trade and global capitalism. How cruel, they say, that a multinational company that would have to pay an American worker $16 an hour can get away with paying a Third World
worker a meager $5 a day. Moral indignation suffuses the breast of the anti-globalist.

But this moral indignation is a bit of a pose. Indeed, it is a rhetorical camouflage for the basest hypocrisy on the part of the protesters. To see why this is so, let us begin with the charge that companies are exploiting foreign workers by paying them appallingly low wages. Five dollars a day seems like an outrage by American standards, but is it unjust for Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss, or General Electric to pay that much to workers in a country where the going rate is $3 a day, and where things cost much less than they do in America?

Anyone who has lived in a Third World country, as I have, knows that when multinational corporations advertise for jobs, there are long lines of applicants. The reason is simple: As Edward Graham of the Institute for International Economics documents, multinational companies offer the best-paying jobs around. Some anti-globalists are skeptical about this, but why would Third World workers work for multinationals unless they were being offered a better deal than they could get elsewhere?

Not only do free trade policies help foreign workers at Coca Cola and General Electric, they also help other families in Third World countries because the increased demand for labor pushes up wages even for workers who are not employed by multinational corporations. Thus countries that have embraced globalization, such as China and India, have seen growth rates of 5 percent or
more per year, compared with 2 percent in Western countries, and 1 percent or less in countries outside the free-trade loop. Free trade and globalization have helped millions of Third World people enjoy the amenities of a middle-class lifestyle.

But perhaps the anti-globalists think that the multinationals could do better. Why not mandate higher wages for Third World workers? Come to think of it, why not require that they be paid the same rate as American workers? The obvious reason is that under such laws Coca-Cola, Nike, and General Electric would prefer not to use Third World labor at all. Multinationals hire Third World workers because they are much cheaper to employ than their First World counterparts.

Admittedly, a Thai worker making shoes for $5 a day is likely to pose a competitive threat to an American worker doing the same job for $12 an hour. Alarmed by this prospect, American unions are fighting desperately to protect their members from foreign competition. One textile union even opposes measures to open American markets to Asian and African textiles. In supporting restrictive tariffs and trade barriers, the unions realize that they are in direct opposition to the aspirations of Third World peoples seeking to raise their living standard through trade with the West.

In this fight, American unions have found an unlikely ally: columnist and sometime presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. To permit foreign workers to compete with Americans, Buchanan writes in
The Death of
the West,
“is to betray our own workers and their families. We should put America first.” Buchanan’s argument is basically tribal: We should uphold the interests of our steel, shoe, and textile workers at the expense of the rest of the world, whose economic welfare is not our concern.

Much as I disagree with Buchanan, let’s at least credit the man for being honest. He doesn’t give a damn about the Third World, and he is willing to say so. Such candor is woefully absent from the vast majority of anti-globalists, who pretend to be fighting on behalf of the Third World while in fact they are undermining the interests of Third World people. This is the hypocrisy that many of us with Third World backgrounds find really sickening. No wonder that ordinary people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America are conspicuously absent from demonstrations against globalization. Poor people from the Third World increasingly ask: With the anti-globalists for friends, who needs enemies?

Dear Chris,

Good news: Your suggestion that I turn these letters into a book is bearing fruit. I have been meeting with Liz Maguire, my former editor at the Free Press, who is now at Basic Books, and she is interested. So, Chris, you may be seeing your name in print quite soon, and our candid exchanges may be presented to a much wider audience. I hope you realize that this completely ends any hopes you might have for running for public office.

In your last letter you asked me to say something about the issue of immigrants. It’s obviously an issue that I’ve thought about a lot. I think about it every time I hear a multicultural half-wit repeat the mantra that “all cultures are equal.” Every immigrant knows that this is a lie. For what is the immigrant doing but voting with his feet—in the most dramatic way possible—against his culture and in favor of a new culture? The immigrant
would never leave his family, his friends, and his country unless he was firmly convinced that, on balance, the new culture was fundamentally
better
than the old culture. The immigrant is a walking refutation of cultural relativism.

Why do immigrants come to America? One reason is to have more opportunity, to have a better life. Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose parents are from Iran and who grew up in France, have started eBay and become a business legend. Only in America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, have become the shaper of the global technology industry and a billionaire to boot. Every country looks after its rich guys. America, more than any other country, gives the ordinary guy a good life and a chance at success.

But material success is only half the reason why immigrants come to America. For many immigrants, the biggest change that America produces in their lives is not material. Sure, they live better here, but it is not a fundamental difference. The larger difference is that in their home countries their destiny would, to a large degree, have been given to them. In America, they craft it for themselves. What to become, whom to love, whom to marry, which church to go to, which beliefs to espouse—these are things that, in America, we decide for ourselves. Here we are the architects of our own destiny.

So America is good for immigrants. But are the immigrants good for America? Should America allow in nearly 1 million legal immigrants every year? First let
me say that every country has a right to determine whether it wants to take immigrants, how many it wants to take, and what kind of immigrants it seeks. There is no automatic “right” to admission as an immigrant. The immigrant may want to come, but the country in question must want to take him.

Many Americans are ambivalent. Indeed, a majority of Americans seems convinced that current immigration levels should be reduced. The opposition to immigration comes from within both political parties; it comes both from the left and from the right. From the left, the opposition is mainly on economic grounds. From the right, it is mainly on cultural grounds.

The critics of immigration are wrong. Immigrants provide economic benefits to America by taking jobs that most Americans refuse to take. Immigrants clean people’s homes, serve as nannies, do agricultural labor, flip hamburgers, and drive taxis in New York and Washington, D.C. These services are affordable to many Americans only because immigrant labor is relatively cheap. In addition to doing these low-level jobs, immigrants also provide specialized labor that America needs. Immigrant doctors, engineers, and high-tech entrepreneurs and programmers have contributed immeasurably to America’s economic and social well-being.

True, immigrant workers who are willing to work for $6 an hour tend to out-compete native-born American workers who want to be paid $10 an hour for doing the same work. Why, then, is the immigrant willing to work
for less? Because he is typically comparing America to his home country. If wages in Sri Lanka are only $6 a day, the Sri Lankan immigrant is delighted to work for $6 an hour. As a result, the products and services provided with the help of immigrant labor are considerably cheaper than they would be had they been produced by native-born labor. In economic terms, immigration hurts some American workers, but it also benefits a larger group of American consumers.

I believe the stronger argument against immigration is cultural. I recently debated Pat Buchanan on this question on David Gergen’s PBS television show. Buchanan bewailed the moral and cultural decline of the West, as suggested by such indices as divorce, illegitimacy, crime rates, pornography, homosexuality, and so on. Then he proceeded to blame immigrants for America’s problems. But as I tried to point out to Buchanan, his statement was a non sequitur. Who caused America’s cultural decline? Not the immigrants! America’s cultural decline was caused by its natives.

Buchanan had to admit this was true. He had a harder time admitting that immigrants are frequently the
solution
to this cultural and moral decline. Immigrants often have very strong family values, as shown by low divorce and illegitimacy rates. Immigrants have a strong work ethic and practice the virtues of frugality and deferred gratification. Immigrants are naturally patriotic because they know how much better their lives are in America than they would be in their home countries.

I am not suggesting that all immigrants are like this. By and large, if I may say so, the farther that people travel to get to America, the better the quality of the immigrant. Immigrants from Thailand are, in general, greater assets to America than immigrants from Tijuana. This is not because the Thai are better people than the Mexicans. Rather, the reason is that it takes greater courage, entrepreneurship, and ingenuity to get to America from Thailand than from Tijuana.

I mention this because I would like to see America’s immigration policy become more selective. Canada and Australia are not too bashful to say, “We want doctors. We want nannies. We want investors. So those are the kind of people we are going to take.” America’s immigration policy has a different emphasis: family unification. But this provision, though well intentioned, is open to endless abuse. Over his lifetime, an immigrant can bring tens or even hundreds of relatives to America under the guise of “family unification.” This is how it works: I bring my parents. Then I sponsor my brother and sister. My siblings then bring their spouses. The spouses then bring their parents. And so on. The chain of family unification extends indefinitely.

Greater selectivity is also needed for American immigration policy today because there is a new magnet for immigrants that didn’t exist in the past: the welfare state. A century ago, immigrants came to America for opportunity; now, some come for a free ride. And this is fundamentally unjust to native-born Americans. Whatever the
merits of the welfare state, it is intended to settle accounts between Americans. Certainly Americans don’t owe welfare-state entitlements to people who come here from other countries.

Some liberal Democratic politicians, however, dangle the welfare state as a bribe in an attempt to buy immigrant votes. Several years ago, I attended a reception sponsored by some Indian American group at which Charles Schumer—then a congressman, now the senior senator from New York—spoke. Schumer told the Indian Americans that they had been in the country for many years, but they were still acting like guests. By this he meant that the Indians worked hard and behaved themselves, but they did not make demands of the American political system. They did not raise hell, and they did not seek government benefits and favors. Schumer’s point was that we should do these things! And he was there to provide those services! In this way do power-seeking politicians seek to corrupt immigrants.