Wednesday, January 14, 2004

We’re foolish to think we can stop inexorable migrations of peoples

Recently, President Bush proposed granting legal status to many of the illegal immigrants in the United States. Some see this as a cynical ploy by the Bush Administration to capture the Hispanic vote and the support of business to ensure his reelection. Perhaps this may be true to a certain extent, but it is also possible that Bush understands the long-term benefits of open borders.

Immigration is a natural inexorable movement of people across permeable borders throughout the world. Immigrants have continuously sought distant shores. There are myriad reasons people immigrate and various types of immigrants. Try as they may, efforts to insure inviolable borders are destined to fail.

The Great Wall of China impeded but did not prevent the advancement of the nomadic Mongols; the walls of Jericho fell; President Reagan’s admonishment to Gorbachev figuratively, if not literally, precipitated the collapse of the Berlin wall; Israel’s wall of separation is merely a rickety fence precariously constructed in shifting sand.

Whether one is a pro-immigration neo-conservative, an anti-Bush liberal, or a classical conservative xenophobic, the continuous migration of humanity is a certainty in what is becoming a borderless global economy.

All over the world people have been and are on the march for various reasons. North America has experienced numerous diasporas starting with the quasi-indigenous North Americans who probably came from Asia via the Bering Straits, only to be decimated by the arrival of Northern Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Institutionalized European chattel bondage brought the forced immigration of the African people. More recently, immigrants have come to these shores from Southern Europe, Asia and increasingly from Latin and South America.

Historically, most immigrants came to North America to avail themselves of perceived economic opportunities, and to a lesser extent, for religious and political freedom. The permeable Mexican border allows a relentless, interminable northward flow of economic refugees.

Regardless of the reason of immigration, the economic, civilizational, cultural, ideological and religious gradients connecting disparate people ensure the fluidity of global human diffusion and integration.

Immigration is a global phenomenon inextricably intertwined with economic globalization. In the Marxist-Leninist nomenclature, the bourgeoisie would seek to maximize profits by the exploitation of the proletariat, whereas the proletariat would endeavor to sell labor to the highest bidder.

Modernity has supplanted the bourgeoisie with multinational companies and proletariats are still the working men and woman of the world.

The dawn of the 20th century witnessed the consequential effect of high labor cost with the closing of Northern mills and the opening of replacement mills in the southern United States.

The twilight of the 20th century saw these Southern mills shut down and move to third world nations where even lower labor costs prevailed.

We see this economic dislocation occurring all over the world at an increasing rate. Initially only the smokestack, heavy industry were involved, but increasingly the service industries as well as the information and knowledge industries are feeling the impact of globalization.

Economic globalization of production and labor is becoming a natural adjunct of capitalism. Like water relentlessly flowing to the lowest level, capitalism seeks to ensure the most efficient, cost-effective utilization and exploitation of resources.

In the past, natural and artificial barriers prevented the free flow of capital and labor. In modern times these natural and artificial barriers have given way to ideological and cultural impediments to the free flow of capital and labor.

The theocratic regimes of the Muslim world, the totalitarian states of Asia and the authoritarian dictatorships scatter across the earth vehemently oppose the free flow of ideas, capital and human labor as espoused by most of the democratic societies of western civilization.

The efforts by these non-democratic societies to subjugate their citizenry, to resist modernity, and to hinder pluralism will only lead to global disaster or a new world order. Perhaps, like the erosive effects of time on the Great Wall of China, technological advancements as the Internet and other electronic communications in conjunction with the insatiable desire of people to be free will relentlessly chip away on the worn ideological stones that futilely impede the path of the immigrant.

Immigration and globalization accompanied with the free flow of ideas have a homogenizing effect on civilizations. If the people of the world can avoid a cataclysmic clash of civilizations, a new order of global cooperation will coalesce under the hegemonic influence of a dominant global entity. Hopefully this dominant entity will be based upon democracy.

Democracy, the primacy of the individual over the state, pluralism, the right of unimpeded movement and association, and all the noble ideas expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the natural rights section of the Declaration of Independence offer a clear roadmap for the world to follow on its ultimate, though unknowable, trek to a future state.

The ideas that influenced the formation of Western civilization as so eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence must not be restricted but should be available for all mankind. Inevitably and naturally, such ideas and the force of such ideas will chase whatever gradient is present, enabling the dissemination and eventual assimilation of these ideas by all earthly inhabitants.

A dam is illustrative of the transformation taking place, in that one can impede or redirect the flow of water, but one cannot stop it. Ultimately it flows. Ultimately the immigrant will cross the boarder. His one small step hearkens back to the formation of Western civilization, and its founding principles, reminding us that they are but a model, a microcosm of what should be the ultimate destiny of mankind.

R.J. Desprez

Tyrone, Ga.