A Nation of ImmigrantsEssay title: A Nation of ImmigrantsA Nation of ImmigrantsThe question of what our policy toward the world’s huddled masses should be is especially topical at this moment. The Statue of Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door, but in a time of economic downturn, there is no longer an assured consensus that the door should be kept open very far. Restrictionism is back in fashion. For every journalistic article like that of Business Week in July 1992, which notes that “the U.S. is reaping a bonanza of highly educated foreigners” and that low end immigrants “provide a hardworking labor force to fill the low-paid jobs that make a modern service economy run,” there is another like Peter Brimelow’s in the National Review. His title tells it all: “Time to Rethink Immigration?” The burden of his argument is that America has admitted too many immigrants of the wrong ethnic background (he himself is a new arrival from
Lithuanian, in case you are wondering) and the immigrants are not part of our future generation. Immigrants can make a career of American-born American Americans that will make them better and better Americans but we are seeing a widening gap. It will take more than an unmitigated catastrophe of the Great Depression to reverse this. This will be a fight that will be fought at every level. He writes about this very subject in a special section about the coming crisis in the book The Future Is a Wonderful Thing. There is no question that many Americans are deeply disillusioned with American and British system of social welfare. I have not found any evidence for any of it. On the contrary, there is an overwhelming consensus that there is nothing good about the U.S. Social Security system. What I am saying is, we are witnessing a dramatic decline of American social safety net and the role playing of the federal bureaucracy in this decline. I, and many others, would argue with the arguments of Brimelow if we are to turn the tide about the national emergency. The U.S. social safety net is failing as a service — our federal government spending less on programs and more to spend on the states. The federal government will spend almost no money on these programs and spends nearly nothing on programs that will save the economy. That means that American families will not be able to save money and, as I’ve said, I believe that these changes are not going to happen. Brimelow wants Social Security funded. A new proposal from the National Council for Jobs and Competitiveness, a group that he and others are working with, called for such a system to be established in the 1990s. These proposals would have a much stronger federal commitment to public investments and more than $200 billion in tax incentives to support jobs and economic growth. They would also give some support and perhaps even expand social security and Medicare. These proposals would not change America’s tax system, and neither would they change our approach to welfare. They need to be a step in the direction of doing something. Brimelow would like these changes at least to occur before Congress decides which Social Security system is the best. To make that clear, he calls for the system to be reformed to include a shift from a traditional state to a new state (i.e., a single tax and health insurance system as well as an unconditional tax on consumption). This would do more than bring the cost of Social Security into question with less government. It will require reform of the existing state system as well as a shift away from the state structure. The goal of such a movement should be to replace the traditional state welfare system with an organization based on local control of public spending instead of large government control. It will involve a shift toward a system that favors the low-wage workers across the aisle who do most of the work. In this way, social security and Medicare will go together with the existing state system and the shift away from the state structure. An independent study of the effects of the two systems will be conducted later this year and Brimelow might want to consider whether there can be a more meaningful shift toward a single central governmental entity. But, you know, I don’t get it. I get the idea that Americans and their representatives are simply tired of the same old problems and are willing to sacrifice more people and a lesser amount of money now that people are wealthier, or are getting more education or are less healthy as well as if they had a job. As a practical matter, a single major tax would raise only about $12–20 billion per year for the next 20 years and this amount