Immigration and Making America Great
Amy Wax challenges the cult of technological advancement
As is to be expected, when Amy Wax recently indicated her doubts that immigration was some sort of obvious good, a radicalized mob of students went on the attack to have her sacked. The function of colleges is largely to act as a mechanism for preparing armies of reinforcements in pursuit of constant society-wide agenda-making.
Donald Trump is known to be of the opinion that when immigrants pour in from other countries, the immigrants are not of the highest quality stock from their respective nations. It is not the top brass of each country pouring into our own, it is rather those more susceptible to crime, to welfare needs, to lower income work that could otherwise be filled with American workers. These countries, Trump has stated, are not sending their best.
And as well, the vast majority of everyday Republicans, less than enthusiastic about swarms of immigrants flooding the country, focus their own rhetoric against the illegality of entering foreigners. It is bad because it is a violation of our immigration laws, and it makes a mockery of those more honorable immigrants who enter through the proper channels and processes.
But Amy Wax focuses on something more fundamental than Trump and the Republican populist mass. It was pointed out to her that many of the immigrants are actually quite smart, quite demonstrably capable of being placed in key positions of business, government, and non-profits. They are thus both here legally and in contradiction to Trump’s framing of their class behavior.
Wax’s concerns are cultural. It is a significant case of begging the question to defend foreign immigration on the basis that many of these people are leading the massive corporate firms, producing our advanced technology, and producing new innovations and consumer goods. Resting an argument on the claim that many immigrants are the leading lights in these areas is only persuasive to the extent to which it is accepted that these are benefits to the American social order. And it is here where our crisis runs far deeper than most can see.
Wax wonders whether we ought to judge these immigrants not on whether they are contributing to the output of consumption, personal amusements, and heightened efficiency, but whether they comport with our cultural values. That is to say, it cannot be taken for granted that materialism is the chief of our values. Her way of expressing this is to wonder whether freedom burns in their hearts, as this question is more important than whether they are capable of bringing more technological innovation to the masses. The implication is that it seems we suffer from a hysteria of innovation that comes with the price of an overhauled culture that has diminished the value of freedom.
Wax’s example offered—the lack of value placed on freedom by these foreign immigrants—is certainly on the right track, though it produces a problem. It is on the right track because contemporary society indeed ought to question whether there are things more vital to the health of a community or social order than the gods of material advancement, efficiency, and prosperous lifestyles. This is the same observation that one ought to keep in mind when reflecting on the Trumpian impulse to Make America Great Again. The problem here is that what once did make America a great place to live are those features that have been the greatest hurdles to the twentieth-century’s obsession with material splendor. And further, the things that are, in our present moment, considered to have made America great are actually those things which spoiled her rotten and caused her to be drunk and degenerate.
Indeed, at the height of Modernism’s visions of a temporal utopia in the Anglo-American world, Matthew Arnold in the mid-nineteenth century expressed his own objections to dogmatically associating greatness with material advancement.
Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs short, there is an end of the greatness of England. But what is greatness?−−culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. If England were swallowed up by the sea tomorrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind: the England of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations depending on coal, were very little developed?
Well, then, what an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the greatness of England, and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this kind and fixing standards of perfection that are real!
His point, taken from his Culture and Anarchy, is to challenge the modernist presumption that greatness must be measured in material abundance, rather than in the spiritual vitality of the cultural aspects of a society. The time has long since come when we must consider whether America must be said to have been greater before the contemporary and popular material standards of what constitutes a social greatness.
Finally, I did indicate that Wax’s consideration reveals another significant problem with making freedom a standard of judgement for immigration. This problem is two-fold: on one hand, these immigrants are adherents of the present Americanist worldview that defines freedom as the ability to do whatever one wants; or perhaps more philosophically, the ability to imagine one’s self in whatever reality can be conceived. Under these meanings of freedom, which are concomitant with our present socio-political totalitarianism, these immigrants are adherents of the Americanist-supranationalist worldview. This worldview is the great destroyer of the remnants of an older American ethical communitarianism.
And secondly, and more significantly, it cannot be said even of native born Americans in our time that the older meanings of freedom are valued. Freedom in the old American context has long disappeared. Prosperity, the capacity to consume, the ability to be instantly amused and forever entertained, the emancipation from the limits of the natural order, the rejection of the ties of place, customs, community, and social station. These are the values of the present day American. They don’t value the freedoms afforded by the American heritage either. Wax’s criticism of the foreign minds presently at the top of our international corporatism apply equally to the typical (urban and suburban especially) American. The people would rather live comfortable lives than in a simple-living freedom. Modern prosperity is a creation of the State-corporate apparatus.
Amy Wax is right to challenge the orthodox understanding of social value judgements. But perhaps the damage is too far done.