Edward J. Dodson / Answering Questions of Personal Political Philosophy -- 1987

SCI LIBRARY

Answering Questions
of Personal Political Philosophy

Edward J. Dodson

[An introspective guide examining public policy options regarding immigration and our attitudes toward immigrants. Submitted in partial completion of the course requirements: National Public Policy, Prof. Douglas Bennett, Temple University, April 1987]

PART I

IMMIGRATION IN CONTEXT -- DIVERGENCE ON PRINCIPLE

Can the United States afford to do the things which it needs to do? Can it afford to run successfully in the race of armaments? And can it also afford a foreign policy which sustains our alliances and helps to finance the underdeveloped countries? And can it also pay for the schools, hospitals, roads, airports, the reclamation and the conservation and other public services and facilities which our rapidly expanding urbanized population requires? And can it also make it possible for the people as private individuals to raise their personal standard of life?[l] These questions (raised in 1958 by Walter Lippman) have not been resolved. That we continue to argue the same ground over and over also provides insight into why many Americans think the way we do about immigration.

Our thinking is framed both by the character of our own personal political philosophies and by the direct awareness of immigrants in our daily lives. Those of us who work with individuals we know to be "foreigners" may develop positive or negative attitudes toward immigrants in general because of our personal experiences. Although I recognize this latter basis for what we think as an important, if not primary, determinant of how we react to immigrants as individuals, the history of immigration policy initiatives in the public arena requires a more abstract interpretation of private political philosophy held by our political leaders. The object of this effort is a search for principle. Once identified, one can then examine whether a given position is consistent with specific principles (as well as whether such principles are consistent with our standards for justice or how human rights are involved).

In this paper I will discuss immigration within the context of Liberalism, as characterized by opposing positions taken on six specific philosophic areas of the Liberal agenda. Although the tendency is to identify these positions as either "liberal" or "conservative," I suggest that in doing so one's logic suffers from serious inconsistencies. In the extreme, certain positions move one out of Liberalism and into the purview of state socialism or toward the totalitarian society; what I have categorized "cooperative individualism" occupies the opposing reaches of Liberalism, where greater reliance on private arrangements is the thrust of public policy initiatives. Liberalism, then, occupies a somewhat narrow and centrist position, tenuously balancing the status quo against forces pulling our society in one direction or another.

Policy initiatives that move one from the centrist position toward state socialism and totalitarianism are characterized by:

A greater concern for security than for liberty.

Redistribution of wealth from producers to non-producers by various compensatory payments and other forms of transfers.

Policy driven actions by government that tend to ignore market consequences.

A reliance on legislative and regulatory constraints on private arrangements.

Centralization of governmental authority.

A declining degree of direct participation in societal decisions by the citizenry.

An opposite agenda of philosophical objectives will pull Liberalism in the direction of a society based on cooperative individualism (though, if this agenda is only partially adopted, the result could be more radical societal structures, such as communitarian socialism or "anarchy" which are characterized by the absence of real authority vested in the state). Within the bounds of cooperative individualism the objectives are:

A greater concern for the preservation of liberty (constrained by conditions of equality of opportunity) than for security guarantees associated with equality of results objectives.

A distributive basis for establishing control over wealth. Here, the key determinant of private property sanctions is production, which means that control over nature is recognized to be redistributive and is sanctioned only by license.

Policy initiatives designed to preserve the outcomes of market driven, private arrangements entered into without coercion.

A heavier reliance on moral and ethical constraints than on legislative or regulatory constraints.

The decentralization of governmental authority to the maximum extent possible, stressing cooperation between individual governing units without the centralized administration thereof.

Direct participation in societal decisions by citizens.

Liberalism dominates our public policy agenda, yet involves often contradictory positions being taken on the part of those who assert themselves to be liberal or conservative on principle. These two identifiers are, then, not very identifying; what they are is rather convenient labels that defy specificity. Both the liberal and conservative accept coercive government intervention, their differences being a matter of degree rather than of kind. Which leaves us with attempting to distinguish between them by resorting to secondary labels, such as: "far left liberal" or "moderate Democrat" or "moderate Republican" or "right wing conservative" or "ultra-conservative" -- not on the basis of principle but on the basis of particular policy stances. We are aided by history, however, in that a long pattern of parallel struggles for survival and for power exists. Most have struggled for survival; the few have used the others in their struggles for power.

Is our current situation much changed? Have the structural issues been resolved so that "the just society" is merely awaiting the appropriate attitudinal and behavioral changes on our part? This seems to be the recent conclusion of John Kenneth Galbraith:

Although the reputation and use of condign power have greatly declined in modern societies, and notably so in relation to compensatory power, its ancient aura survives. For those who once possessed the right to use it, it remains a factor in winning submission. The husband, parent, schoolmaster, policeman, sheriff, National Guardsman, and bar-room bouncer all have authority now in consequence of a past association with condign power.

We see here, also, the basis of the conservative yearning for capital punishment, corporal punishment in schools, the dominance of men over women, more sanguinary powers for the police, enlarged rights of search and seizure, the right to promiscuous possession and, as necessary, use of lethal weapons. It is held that these relics of a generally more violent time are required for the defense of law and order or for otherwise winning acceptable social behavior. The more important reason is that all are manifestations of condign power. Such power was considerably more important in the past than it is now, and the natural business of conservatives is to conserve or retrieve from the past.[3]

Galbraith, as a "far left liberal," would use compensatory power to coercively require individuals to relinquish legitimately-acquired private property based on policy goals established by a centralized government. This is done in the interest of "equality of results"; yet, in the very act of attempting to achieve equality by such methods the policy initiatives move society away from equality of opportunity and toward sanctioned inequality.

Immigration policy is also subject to this unprincipled tug of war. The confusions of liberal and conservative positions result in actions that serve as push/pull levers in favor of state socialism. Part II of this paper focuses on the six opposing philosophical positions set down above and how immigration policy fits into the wider context of these opposing agendas.

FREEDOM OF THINKING IS REQUIRED

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with dut study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people. Where any people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox speculation was for a time suspended. Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

PART II

AGENDAS IN CONFLICT

1 . Security versus Liberty

The most famous essay on liberty is certainly that of John Stuart Mill, though this work has been oft-criticized as largely unclear in its conclusions. Mill cautions against excessive power being given to government, but sets down no absolute principles by which to determine whether particular actions are derived in excessive power. He does not specifically present his views on immigration policy; nevertheless, his concern that our societies suffer from the paucity of "just institutions" and an absence of "deliberate guidance of judicious foresight"[4] suggested to him that population increase was undesirable. On this basis, he would have concluded that securing liberty for those in the present required strict government controls over immigration. His world view was one of scarce resources, so that technological progress would not indefinitely secure an improving standard of life under conditions of expanding population.

Unfortunately, Mill offers little help in resolving the problem of defining liberty or in helping us determine in what ways public policy toward immigration affects our liberty. This question is also largely ignored by the contributors to Nathan Glazer's Clamor At The Gates; the repeated theme is a focus on socio-economic consequences that fall within the security agenda -- the protection of what are viewed as scarce resources, a threatened quality of life, and a loss of cultural (if not ethnic) homogeneity in the makeup of our population.

What Americans have had difficulty accepting is that the United States again, after a quarter century of dominance, shares economic and political power in the global arena with many other nations. Unilateral actions by our political leaders are quickly countered by other nations, and we are. finding it increasingly difficult to absorb the price demanded by a security-directed Liberal agenda. The management tools acquired from Keynesian economic theory no longer are capable of maintaining the economic engine at full speed. Unemployment remains a serious and growing structural problem for our society. Real or imagined, immigrants are looked at by American workers as being one more threat to their security. The policy responses called for by critics of demand management intervention ostensibly would move us in the direction of greater liberty (e.g., lower business and personal income tax rates, deregulation and the breakup of monopolistic enterprises, cutbacks in social welfare programs); yet, applied in isolation to immigration, minimal control over immigration (screened for criminal behavior or contagious illnesses) threatens to exacerbate the ill effects of uncorrected structural flaws. The unforeseen consequences may further threaten both liberty and security.

2. Redistributive versus Distributive

The libertarian view of taxation is that it equates to theft. First of all, taxation is a coercive means utilized by the state to confiscate privately-held property. Secondly, there is often no relationship established between the required payment and the value of services received; the question of equity is not very well addressed by our tax system.

With the liberal we find a strong desire to use the tax system to provide revenue for programs that target certain groups as beneficiaries, either based on a perceived "good" or because political debts have come due. Ability to pay (subjectively determined) has been the expressed standard by which liberals measure equity in taxation, while the reality is that many of those with the greatest ability to pay have paid very little.

Conservatives have tended to rally around the principle of equal taxation; that is, everyone should pay about the same amount of taxes, or at least be charged at the same rate of taxation. As a policy matter, this translates into a much less progressive system of income taxation (with fixed rates being the standard in many states). Besides the equity argument there is a theoretical postulate of "supply-side" economics that looks at high marginal tax rates as growth inhibiting. in the end, conservatives are no less apt to use tax revenue to repay political debts or to target certain groups as beneficiaries, although they are perceived as being more security-conscious in their spending decisions than are liberals.

None of these three groups extends its principles of taxation much beyond a superficial acknowledgement that capital formation should not be too heavily taxed. Forming capital is perceived as a societal "good" because capital is associated with growth and with the policy objective of full employment. And yet, the greatest amount of revenue is raised by taxing labor -- whose services are essential to the creation of capital. The libertarians are correct to the extent that taxation is redistributive (and, if not consented to, unjust) when applied to production. They inappropriately fail to distinguish between capital and nature, a serious oversight because the economic value of nature has nothing to do with labor or capital expended by the individual or entity that controls particular portions of nature. Nature increases in value in response to aggregate demand and thus its value is societally-created; government's failure to collect this value results, in fact, in a redistribution of produced wealth from those who produce (laborers and capital owners) to those who simply possess titles to nature (such titles being nothing more than government-sanctioned licenses, in a very real sense a form of monopoly privilege).

Any additional population growth, whether caused by immigration or otherwise, increases aggregate demand for access to nature and therefore raises its economic value. To the extent government collects that increase, a fund exists to pay for the added infrastructure required by increased numbers of citizens. What the individual produces potentially has a market-derived value for which the individual may engage in a market exchange, receiving money wages in return for labor services. Thus, the appropriate public policy is to ensure that market forces operate so that those who produce retain the value of their production; it is when government fails in this responsibility that immigrants threaten the leverage native workers possess with employers, insofar as it is normally the employer's desire to not compensate labor for the full value of what is produced.[5] Under current conditions, immigration is a very real threat to those native workers employed by firms whose activities are subject to strong regional, national or international competition and where labor is in more than sufficient supply.

3. Policy Driven versus Market Driven

I have touched on one of the major challenges to the development and implementation of reasoned public policy initiatives in today's political environment. Re-globalization of political and economic power has reduced the ability of any nation to isolate itself from externalities. The challenge is to take advantage of this changed environment. But how? First, we need to identify the major forces at work in the global economy; then we might be in a better position to develop positive public policy initiatives as they relate to immigration. Almost all immigrants share a common reason for migrating -- the desire for a better life, which usually involves a perceived increase in the opportunity to produce and accumulate wealth.[6] Underlying this expectation is the knowledge that in the United States the political structure incorporates relatively greater safeguards for the sanctity of private wealth accumulation than in many other countries.

A thorough analysis of the global political economy is well beyond the scope of this paper; however, the reasons for the most recent migrations of people from less developed countries (LDC's) can be treated briefly with some satisfaction. Things began to become unglued for countries such as Mexico and its Latin American neighbors when anticipated export revenue declined dramatically soon after theirs governments had accumulated massive debt to the international banking community. Domestic political pressures not to curtail public expenditures collided with International Monetary Fund (IMF) guidelines for restructuring existing loan and for obtaining additional credits. The IMF demanded cuts in domestic programs, the introduction of import restrictions, wage controls and higher taxation of business and individual income. In short, consume nothing and export everything. At the same time, the industrialized nations had embarked on an energy conservation and productivity enhancement drive designed to break the monopoly power of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC). By 1980 OPEC-generated price increases had produced double-digit inflation and rising unemployment in the United States, Europe and Japan. Almost all other nations were hit even harder. Deep and sustained recession brought prices down quickly, but in the United States deficit spending kept the economy from plunging further. Meanwhile, the LDC's flooded the global markets with raw materials and agricultural commodities which created even greater deflationary pressures on prices. Despite rising unemployment in those sectors of our own economy attempting to compete with the LDC's on such terms, the American consumer regained nearly all of the previous decade's lost purchasing power[7]. LDC agricultural producers shifted to cash crops, a strategy designed to secure dollar reserves but which caused runaway inflation in domestic food prices; import restrictions added further fuel to the fire across the board for all goods. Heavy taxation generated a flight of private financial reserves to safer harbors, such as the United States (which helped to bring interest rates down despite record Federal borrowing).

Many of the wealthy in the LDC's followed their money to the United States or Europe; the poor they left behind have had few options -- political insurrection, acceptance of long-term unemployment and poverty, or migration. Those who have come here have done so at a time when our own economic future is far from rosy. A worst-case view was put forth in 1980, at the recession's trough, by economist Lester Thurow:

In agriculture the problem is not productivity but opening foreign markets to our producers. Agriculture is the industry that everyone, including ourselves, protects the most. For all practical purposes, the United States is a residual supplier to the rest of the world. Each country buys only what it cannot produce itself. Operating behind high price supports, Common Market farmers produce whatever they can. If crops are bad, the Common Market is a massive agricultural importer. If crops are normal, the Common Market is a large importer. If crops are very good, the Common Market subsidizes exports. Other countries do the same. This leaves us subject to large demand shocks and sudden price changes, but it also deprives us of one of our major export markets. As a consequence, we become more dependent upon our relatively weak sector -- manufacturing.

We need free trade in agricultural commodities if our economy is to compete, but we cannot demand it because we do not practice it.[8]

The people of the United States are now paying for our government's protectionist sins in the agricultural sector. Many American farmers, induced b; payment programs and other subsidies, borrowed extensively to expand their land holdings. The size of the debt load they carry is greater than that owed by Mexico and Brazil combined.[9] Moreover, the farmland price increases sprouted during the late 1960's and 1970's by this speculative fever have come crashing down. And with the collapse of traditional export markets American farmers have become an LDC in their own right For those who resisted the temptations to borrow heavily, this is bargain time; not only land prices but those for machinery and farm laborers are still falling (though recently a bottoming out has occurred in some parts of the country). As family farms disappear so does the demand for migrant workers; many will b forced to join native Americans in another rural-to-urban migration, competing for low wage jobs and adding to the crowded conditions of urban ghettos, adding more complexity t immigration policy considerations.

4. Legislative and Regulatory Constraints versus Moral and Ethical constraints

The immigration bill passed late in 1986 focused on the problem of what to do about those who are in the United States illegally for many their future as Americans was resolved by provisions for amnesty. A key element in the control of future illegals is to be employer sanctions. There is no serious provision for prosecuting illegal entrants. In the same way that one must provide proof of age to obtain employment (and other services) employers will undoubtedly require evidence of citizenship or resident alien status as well. Is this a further inroad upon our liberty? Or, is this a necessary safeguard of our citizenship rights against outside infringement? Civil libertarians opposed the bill because they believed employer sanctions would lead to a mandate for a national identify card.[10] Case precedent in the Federal courts will, I suspect, eventually establish a definition of "due diligence" on the employer's part. The above discussion of the state of global affairs should suggest that a reasoned position regarding immigrants can be neither just nor painless Anything we do is fraught with danger.

Perhaps we ought to throw a cover over the Statue of Liberty until we figure out a way to bring immigration policy into harmony with our professed desire that America be a truly "Open Society" -- as we approached during the decade before the First World War. The moral and ethical issues are complex, involving international relations and sovereignty of the nation-state. We have yet to resolve even the most basic question of whether certain rights are shared equally by all humans by virtue of our humanness. Liberalism itself is contradictory where human rights are concerned, making no attempt to define what is meant by "economic rights" and giving little more than lip service to the objective of equality of opportunity. This becomes painfully clear when one looks to liberalism for positive law that is consistent with the premise that the earth is the birthright of all mankind. Both the body of property law and system of taxation as they apply to nature erode the concept of equal access to the bounty of the earth as a human right. The very existence of borders separating sovereign states also denies this human right. In no event, however, would many Americans (or other nationals) seriously consider voluntarily relinquishing geopolitical autonomy; at best we might hope that the United Nations evolves into a meaningful confederation. The desire for territorial control runs very deep in the human character.

Given the constraints of sovereignty, we face the moral and ethical dilemma of having to decide who will be permitted to enter and who will not. What to do about immigration is also affected by other concerns; many Americans -- conservatives, liberals, libertarians, individualists, people whose philosophies differ in many respects -- have called for more mechanistic restrictions on the ability of government to spend without end. The proposals include Constitutional amendments imposing a spending ceiling (as a percentage of Gross National Product) accompanied by a balanced budget requirement. Special interests would then be forced to compete with even greater intensity to retain their piece of a finite pie. For what it is worth, I am convinced that the risk of "unforeseen consequences" is worth taking if we can impose some discipline on those given the authority to spend on our behalf. immigration policy might also be best served by a more mechanistic system that removes prejudicial selection.

I suggest that a lottery system best approaches fairness and equity within the limits of our existing political economy. Each year's maximum immigration could be tied to total population; the names of all applicants would go into the lottery and be selected at random. Those whose names are pulled gain entrance (subject to a background check for serious criminal activity or contagious illnesses). This is a system of least prejudice and is consistent to a realistic point with our societal objective of equality of opportunity.

5. Centralization versus Decentralized Authority

We are not 51 sovereign states (although some may desire to be). Ours is a Federal system under which individuals -- not states -- have rights. Because immigration is an international issue the administration of public policy must be consistent nationwide. And yet, there are large areas of the country virtually unaffected by immigration but which must share in the cost. New York, Florida, California and Texas are the destinations of over 40% of all immigrants[11] and are being asked to bear more and more of the financial burden to accommodate these new arrivals; associated with new immigration is the added stress on already overburdened public services, on education systems, on housing and on wage labor opportunities.

The political consensus about what responsibility the Federal government has toward new arrivals once they have gained entrance has been fluid. We should expect that externalities will play a major role in the nature of and funding for future public policy initiatives at the Federal level. How will standards for implementation be established? Hopefully not by the central authorities. A first step would be to actually ask immigrants what their needs are, which can only be accomplished where services are to be rendered; community institutions and leaders are also key factors in achieving immigrant assimilation.

To summarize, immigration policy requires uniform application at the Federal level regarding entrance. New arrivals must then receive assistance by local groups in order to adapt to their new environment.

6. Representative Democracy versus Participatory Democracy

How much voice should existing citizens have in whether their communities will become home to new arrivals? Certainly, even a unanimous vote against allowing immigrants (or any outsiders) into a community would be challengeable on Constitutional and moral grounds (if we accept, as does Judeo-Christian teachings, that the earth is the birthright of all mankind). Actions taken on the basis of a democratic decision-making process have no intrinsic goodness; a test of justice must be met in all such cases to prevent democracy from producing tyrannies of the majority. History, on the other hand, reveals that tyrannies are more inherently characteristic of societies in which governing power is concentrated. Modern decentralists , such as Kirkpatrick Sale, suggest that anything approaching true democracy is no longer possible because of the scale of our population centers:

Our major cities cannot lay any serious claims to being governed democratically. Citizen participation is limited almost entirely to quadrennial elections for mayor and city council, the candidates offered having been selected usually by one or another form of clubhouse politics. And even those elected officials are the first to admit that they are mostly in the grip of unelected forces ... thus making the citizens' connection to the actual governing of their city very tenuous indeed. It is this that accounts for the common findings among residents of large American cities of political apathy, cynicism, alienation, lethargy, and non-participation, all of which apparently increase as city size increases.[12]

Thus, while it is true that local autonomy has a statistical possibility of creating a democratic tyranny, the probabilities are much less than with power concentrated even in elected representatives. In a sense, the perpetuation of political power within families from generation to generation (e.g., the Kennedys, Byrds, Rockefellers) has mitigated the spirit of republican democracy called for by Jefferson when he spoke of an "aristocracy of talent." As the most recent participants, immigrant minority groups as largely absent from the political hierarchy even at municipal levels. Representative democracy does a poor job of securing them a voice in public policies that affect their lives.

It is interesting to note that our political system also failed native inhabitants during the nation's period of greatest immigration. By the early 1900's foreign-born and first-generation Americans outnumbered older Americans in most major Eastern and Midwestern cities. The fear that foreigners where taking over the country led to a nativist backlash and passage of the National Origins Act of 1924. The writings of Henry Pratt Fairchild of New York University reflected the nativist sentiments of the period. America was to be no dumping ground for the world's excess population, which in such large numbers could not be assimilated into American society and would threaten "the very heart of nationality." The immigrant population also included socialists, communists and anarchists --dangerous to the peace and tranquility of American life. "The citizen [on the other hand]," wrote Fairchild, "is presumed to be familiar with the genius and spirit of his own government, and to be sincerely devoted to it."[13] "They" had to be remade (through education) into real Americans or all would eventually be lost. Yet, native Americans were not anxious to integrate large numbers of immigrants into their communities or allow them access to their institutions. Cuban and Hispanic immigrants (as well as native-born Blacks and American Indians) today face the same resistance to acceptance in the larger society. I would argue that the scale of government and the minimal opportunities for direct participation as citizens is also one of the primary factors in retarding assimilation of recent immigrants.

What has evolved in response to the loss of participation, among natives as well as immigrants, are the extra-governmental community groups; they are the new liaison between citizen and bureaucracy but are themselves subject to being absorbed by the political hierarchy as they secure grant monies and participate in government-sponsored programs. Those immigrants unable to communicate .in English are most vulnerable to loss of their participatory rights and must depend on agents to assist them in dealing with an increasingly complex and centralized bureaucracy.

By casting aside the concept of participatory democracy, we have made sure that a smaller and smaller percentage of our citizens understand the foundations on which our nation was built and -- equally as important -- cannot therefore recognize the signs of its destruction.

FOOTNOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Walter Lippmann. "Crucial Internal Question," The New York Herald Tribune, December 11, 1958. Reprinted in The Essential Lippman [New York: Random House, 1963], p.364. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, editors.

2. See Appendix A. This chart identifies the poles of theoretical political economy and the qualifications on which each philosophical position is built. Exactly where Liberalism begins and ends is, I suggest, a somewhat subjective analytical question. Societies are always undergoing change, albeit at different rates and in differing directions. My personal conclusion is that the direction of policy initiatives in the United States is pushing us in the direction of state socialism.

3. John Kenneth Galbraith. The Anatomy of Power [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983], p.22.

4. In his Principles of Political Economy (1865) Mill voices his desire for stability: "I cannot ... regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested towards it by political economists of the old school. I am incclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on ... are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress." [New York: The Colonial Press, 1899] Vol. II, pp. 261-262.

5. The globalization of production knowledge has, in one sense, seriously threatened the employment stability of many America] workers. Owners of capital are able to generate greater short-run profits by relocating production facilities in countries that have labor surpluses (and, hence, lower wage demands), minimal revenue requirements for public services (and, hence, little taxation of production), and an absence of the moral and ethical restraints imposed by a republican tradition of democracy. For the most part, this is a short-sighted private decision; the engine that drives the global economy is the power to consume, and if those who produce do not receive the reciprocal value in return the condition of overproduction results. Moreover, the very same capital owners remain dependent upon the very same high-wage workers who they leave behind to consume the goods produced. The problem is further exacerbated by the drive for increased productivity per unit of labor and capital input unless the growth in consumption power matches the growth in productivity.

6. I suggest that this conclusion is supported generally by the readings we have had in this course. However, unless one has considerable personal experience with immigrant groups, the following observation by Ivan Light in "Immigrant Entrepreneurs in America: Koreans in Los Angeles" is more than a little surprising: "With the exception of Mexican and some Latin American immigrants, the general level of socioeconomic status among new immigrants surpasses that of the American common man. As a result, new immigrants possess class resources in excess of the underdog Americans, blacks and Mexicans... [Also a factor is that] U.S. immigration laws have awarded priority to professional and technical workers in 'short supply1 occupations and to persons prepared to invest in a business enterprise they own and manage." [Clamor At The Gates, p.175]

7. Housing, for very structural reasons, has been the one major exception. increased demand for housing in areas where employment opportunities were diverse and either high technology or service-oriented set off feverish investment activity in urban and suburban development sites. Land costs have continued to rise in major population centers, making housing affordability a national problem. The recently published report, U.S. Housing Markets, by the mortgage banking firm Lomas & Nettleton reports: "Land and lots -- their availability and their cost -- are at the top of builder concerns in almost every local market. Not in many years has the land problem been so pervasive...In market after market, builders bid against each other for finished lots or desired land. At the same time, they fear loading up on land or lots in case the good market runs out." [March 1987, p.13]

8. Lester Thurow. The Zero-Sum Society [New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980], pp.90-91.

9. Lynn Adkins. "Farm Crisis: The Worst Is Yet To Come," Dun's Business Month [New York: Robert A. Potts], September 1986, pp.41-42. The total farm debt exceeds $200 billion, of which 25% is deemed by agricultural bankers and economists as uncollectible.

10. Harris N. Miller. "'The Right Thing to Do': A History of Simpson-Mazzoli," in Clamor At The Gates [San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies; Nathan Glazer, editor, 1985], pp.67-68.

11. Thomas Muller. "Economic Effects of Immigration," in Clamor At The Gates, p.115.

12. Kirkpatrick Sale. Human Scale [New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980], pp.202-203.

13. "American and Un-American: For Restriction of Aliens," Sources of the American Republic [Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1961], Vol. 2, p.279. From Henry Pratt Fairchild, The Melting Pot Mistake, 1926.