Immigration, Evasion and Decadence
                              by John Attarian


Immigration opponents have raised many legitimate concerns, such as the
cost of illegals to our already-burdensome welfare state. However, another
compelling reason for curtailing immigration goes unnoticed: Immigration
has become a crutch used to compensate for the economic consequences of our
decadence, and to evade the need to confront that decadence and take
unpleasant remedial steps. And while immigration may in the short run
compensate our decadence, in the long run it can only worsen it.


That America is decadent is obvious; only consider our culture, our
moron-factory schools, our fiscal indiscipline, our pervasive abandonment
of standards. More to the point, it is characteristic of a decadent entity
-- whether a person, nation or people--to evade unpleasant realities, to
duck challenges, to indulge failure and slackness, to shrink from solving
its problems through its own exertions and from reforming its
self-destructive ways, and instead, to depend on more robust, skillful,
disciplined or diligent others.


In the eighties, addicted to living beyond our means, we turned to
foreigners for the savings we were unwilling to generate ourselves, to
finance our plunge into debt. Likewise, we lean on immigrants to do the
unpleasant and demanding work we are no longer willing or able to do
ourselves.


America increasingly relies on immigrants, especially illegals, for
low-skill, tedious and unpleasant work. Without them, California and Texas
could not function. Who else would be willing to pick fruits and
vegetables, wash dishes, clean homes and offices, watch yuppies' children,
and collect garbage -- and docilely, even gratefully, swallow coolie wages
and mistreatment while doing so?


Meanwhile our inner city black youths, who could and should be working,
learning good work habits and building good work records to enable them to
move up, have immigrants increasingly shutting them out of low-skill jobs,
hence denying them an economic foothold. All too often they embrace
welfare, crime and drugs. Strategist Edward Luttwak pointed out that the
1992 Los Angeles riots arose partly from "a purely economic phenomenon--the
loss of traditional underclass jobs to more educated workers and
immigrants."1


Granted, illegal immigrants work hard and enable us to get dirty, low-skill
work done cheaper than if we hired our own people. Granted, too, this
willing, cheap labor offsets the decadence of our work ethic, especially
regarding unattractive jobs. But in the long run, reliance on illegals
means that this aversion to unpleasant, unglamorous low-skill work will
only worsen and we will have no incentive to change our attitude--why even
consider menial work if immigrants are on hand to do it? It will also make
us even less willing to tackle the problem of unemployed underclass
Americans--why bother with them when immigrants will supply tractable,
industrious, cheap labor?


At the top of the skill range, the story is similar. Overall, American
students' performance in mathematics and science is appalling. Only one in
five nine-year-olds can do even simple math; only one in eight
thirteen-year-olds can understand and use intermediate science.2 An
Education Department study found that of 17-year-olds, only 7% know
beginning algebra and can solve multistep math problems.3 This massive
incompetence in these subjects owes much to maleducation. Schools have
de-emphasized such indispensable basics as rote drill in arithmetic,
mastering the multiplication table, even arriving at correct answers. In
many schools, using calculators is acceptable as early as kindergarten,
meaning students just aren't developing computational prowess.4 As of 1991,
over half of public high-school students weren't taking chemistry or
advanced algebra before graduating.5


Thus poorly prepared, American college students are shying away from these
demanding subjects. Whereas about 6% of first-year college students
intended to major in math in 1965, in 1990 only 1% did.6 Between 1983 and
1993, engineering enrollments fell 17%.7 According to the National Science
Foundation, of those who enter college interested in a science or
engineering career, 42% forsake the sciences after their freshman year; 23%
more leave before graduation.8


Consequently, business and industry suffer shortages of math and science
graduates and engineers. Even during the 1990-1991 recession, many firms
had trouble finding adequately-qualified chemical and electrical engineers,
computer scientists, and computer systems analysts.9 To meet these needs,
we are turning more and more to immigrants and foreigners. Non-Americans
are dominating these fields. Immigration enthusiast Ron Unz observes that a
third of all engineers and microchip designers in Silicon Valley are
foreign-born.10 American industry is now doing more recruiting overseas;
Modern Engineering, a Detroit automotive engineering firm, for example,
expanded its talent search to Europe and Latin America.11


As American-born students are less able, and willing, to do competent
college-level work in the hard fields, foreign-born students are taking
their places. They received 62% of doctorates awarded in engineering in
1990, similar shares of the math, computer science, and physical science
doctorates, and 40% of economics doctorates.12 The National Science
Foundation reports that in 1993, foreigners accounted for 49% of computer
science Ph.D's, versus 35.5% in 1983.13 In 1991 Professor Donald Lewis,
chairman of the University of Michigan's mathematics department, warned
that,


In recent years only about 400 Americans per year earned a Ph.D. in the
mathematical sciences, broadly construed. This is not enough to replace the
faculty that retire or die each year, to say nothing of meeting increased
demands of government and industry.The problem is so severe that Allen
Bromley, scientific advisor to the President, has said that if the
situation cannot be reversed, the United States will become ิthe first
fully industrialized Third World nation.'


In the last decade, our nation's need for Ph.D. mathematicians has been met
by retaining foreign students educated in U.S. graduate schools or, as in
the last two years, hiring Russian mathematicians. Indeed, the number of
foreign students earning Ph.D's in mathematics in the U.S. exceeds that of
U.S. citizens: ิ57% of U.S. Math Doctorates Going to Foreigners,' said a
New York Times headline last November. Just as we import foreign
automobiles, we are now forced to import foreign mathematicians.14


The loss of American competence in these fields is only part of the story.
The other part is cheaper labor: Foreign computer software engineers,
mathematicians, and other hard-science and high-tech professionals work for
substantially less than their American counterparts, and are therefore much
in demand. Analyzing the 1990 Census data, University of California (Davis)
professor of computer studies Norman Matloff found that foreign-born
computer professionals in Silicon Valley had average salaries almost $7,000
lower than those of Americans of the same age and education level.15 While
the law forbids employers to seek temporary or permanent immigration visas
for foreign workers if a qualified American is available, Business Week
writer Catherine Yang points out that "it's widely known that employers
often get Labor Department approval by tailoring job descriptions to a
particular foreign candidate to make sure that no U.S. candidate can fill
the slot."16


Granted, foreign talent comes cheaper than American, and may be of better
quality. From the standpoint of individual employers, reliance on foreign
talent may make sense. But the long-term effects for America as a whole are
disastrous.


First, it will accelerate the loss of native-born American human
capital--skill, talent, training, know-how--in hard science, math,
engineering and computers. Because foreign computer programmers are
cheaper, perfectly good American programmers laid off from the defense
industry aren't getting rehired, and are falling into the proletariat, some
reduced to janitorial work and delivering pizzas,17 their human capital
squandered. With American firms obsessed with reducing costs, especially
labor and pension costs, the same pattern will likely prevail in other
high-tech industries where cheaper foreign labor is available. This means
that a huge stock of native skill, intelligence and know-how will waste
away from prolonged disuse.


As for students, it is fatuous to argue that competition from foreign
students will just force American students to work harder, the way Japanese
imports forced our automakers to improve quality. The analogy is false. The
automakers shaped up because they had no choice. They were stuck where they
were; they had sunk huge sums into labor and equipment specific to making
cars, and could not have entered another line of manufacturing without
colossal difficulties. College students, by contrast, can change majors
easily; see a few faculty, fill out some forms, and presto! You've escaped
into a less-demanding field.


Yes, some students will meet the challenge by working still harder: The few
who are fanatically dedicated to succeeding in math, engineering and hard
science, willing to do whatever it takes, yea unto wrecking their health.
The rest will fold up and find something easier to do.


As foreign students increasingly dominate these demanding fields, fewer and
fewer Americans will enter them for fear of having to compete with the
hard-working Asians. Thus not only are Americans being displaced from these
jobs now, but the candidates for these jobs in the future will increasingly
be non-Americans. If this continues long enough, we will end up with
ever-fewer American-born scientists, engineers, computer scientists,
programmers and mathematicians, perhaps none at all.


And with fewer and fewer American students majoring in math and science,
fewer and fewer will be qualified to teach these subjects, from grade
school to grad school. We will thus be increasingly ill-equipped to rectify
our educational deficiencies out of our own resources. We will be
increasingly dependent on foreigners not only to do math, science and
engineering but even to teach them. What will become of native-born
Americans under this arrangement? Had America confronted her educational
decadence and overcome it, her people would have futures of solid bourgeois
prosperity to look forward to. But because we've chosen a pain-dodging,
cost-cutting strategy of evading decadence via immigration, their prospects
are grim, prefigured by the fate of the laid-off defense-industry computer
programmers. As immigrants and their children increasingly occupy the
science, engineering, computer programming, and other jobs which are the
cutting edge of the high-tech Brave New World, middle-class native-born
Americans and their children, unschooled, unskilled, and/or undersold in
the job market, will sink into the low-skill, low-pay proletariat
euphemistically called the "service sector": Delivering pizzas, manning
cash registers at gas stations, flipping burgers, and bagging groceries.


These are not desirable outcomes.


Because immigration boosters have an unscholarly tendency to attack
opponents' motives and characters, let me pause to anticipate the
argumentum ad hominem and dispatch it. Being descended from immigrant
survivors of Armenian massacres, I do not hate immigrants. Nor do I blame

them for America's woes. Our wounds are self-inflicted. Our decadence and
its symptoms--maleducation, crime and violence, soaring illegitimacy,
misogynist porn culture, rotten politics--owe nothing to immigrants. Nor do
I fear their competition. My occupation is scholarship and the crafting of
superior-quality prose in the service of my convictions. Cambodians,
Koreans and Iranians who can barely speak English, let alone produce
publishable English prose, do not threaten my bread and butter.


My concern, rather, is: What is in the best interest of my country? If
human capital is so crucial for America's ability to hold her own in a
global economy, is it really in her long-term best interest to become
dependent on imported human capital rather than develop her own? Should we
not, rather, be doing all we can to prepare our own children for the
ferociously-competitive global economy of the future which globalists tout
so much? Is it really desirable that we watch passively while
well-educated, skilled, experienced American high-tech employees are
proletarianized simply to save employers some money? Is it in America's
interest to allow such a fate to overtake our ill-educated children?


In all this there is a disturbing parallel with British experience. For
decades the British neglected education in science and engineering, and
investment in new plant and equipment such as machine tools. These
deficiencies crippled British rearmament, both during World War I and in
the thirties. The British were forced to rely on foreign machine tools and
equipment and even, in some cases, foreign skilled labor, to meet their
needs.18


Pro-immigration economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Milind Rao argue that "an
influx of foreign students is a sign of U.S. strength."19 This is a piece
of mendacity inspired by the triumph of ideological dogmatism over common
sense. Since when has dependence on external support ever been a sign of
strength for anybody? Nobody argues that British machine tool imports for
rearmament signified British strength. This "influx" is a sign not of U.S.
strength but of U.S. weakness--a sign that our education system no longer
produces enough high-quality human capital to meet America's needs, and
that we are so desperate for ability, with scholarships and jobs in these
fields going begging, that we have to scour the world to get it.


The argument is mendacious in another way. Foreign students are attracted
not by our "strength" but by the prospect of getting educations, marrying
American women, and making high incomes. "U.S. strength" has nothing to do
with it.


Moreover, in becoming thus dependent on foreigners, we are giving hostages
to fortune. Suppose foreign governments decide to no longer allow their
students to live in America after graduating, but require them to come home
instead and develop their own countries? Or suppose we fall out with India
or China and emigration to America for employment or education is cut off?
Unz argues that "Silicon Valley ... is absolutely dependent upon immigrant
professionals to maintain its technological edge. If they left or their
future inflow were cut off, America's computer industry would probably go
with them."20 That for this very reason we ought not to become so dependent

on immigrants does not occur to him. Our calamitous experience with
dependence on OPEC oil has taught Unz nothing. Moreover, this is the
classic pattern of argument of an alcoholic or drug addict declining
treatment: Confession that he is hopelessly hooked, followed by fear that
kicking his addiction willkill him. This is "a source of U.S. strength"?


And the greater this dependence becomes, the higher will be the cost of
terminating it, hence the longer it will be perpetuated. Hence the worse
the decadence of American performance in hard sciences, mathematics and
engineering, and the greater the displacement of American high-tech
professionals by an ever-growing pool of immigrant counterparts.


The second pernicious long-term effect will be to remove any need to
grapple with our maleducation. As long as high-quality foreign human
capital is readily available, Americans need not address the catastrophic
collapse of our math and science education in the primary and secondary
schools and the mathematical incompetence and science ignorance of our
population. Nor need we do anything about the flight from science, math and
engineering among American-born college students.


In the selfsame pattern of depending on foreigners to rescue us from our
own decadence, some "policy wonks" are counting on immigrants to pinch-hit
for America's declining fertility. Specifically, they are hoping that
immigrants will supply the additional taxpayers needed to keep Social
Security from collapsing when the Baby Boomers retire, supported by a
slower-growing cohort of younger taxpayers. Julian Simon, a prominent
immigration booster, observes that without benefit cuts, the only way to
reduce the tax burden on workers is to obtain more workers. More births
won't help "until a couple of decades hence." Therefore, "only immigration
provides immediate help." Most immigrants are young and near the start of
their working lives. "Therefore, each cohort of new immigrants contributes
substantially to reduce the Social Security burden of natives, in
proportion to its numbers."21


True -- but while the immigration option exists, we need do nothing to
reform or better still, liquidate Social Security, which has become a vast
universal entitlement grounded on an immoral and increasingly burdensome
coerced redistribution of income from young workers to elderly
retirees--total strangers who have no moral claim on the workers
whatsoever. The same goes for Medicare, which is funded the same way and in
even bigger trouble.


One of the best reasons for eliminating illegal immigration and drastically
reducing legal immigration, then, has nothing to do with demonizing
immigrants. Rather, immigration should be sharply curtailed to take away
our crutch and thereby force Americans to confront, and rectify, their
decadence.


We would be forced to face up to the widespread aversion to hard, dirty or
tedious physical work among Americans, many of whom deem themselves too
good for it. This attitude is a grim sign of how badly affluence, envy,
covetousness, gluttony and a lunatic sense of entitlement have rotted our
national character, of how spoiled Americans have become and how their
heads have been turned by a childish hankering for prestige and glamor. It
would do us good to have to pick our own apples and pull our own carrots,
collect our own trash, clean our own dirty office bathrooms. To get our
dirty work done, we would have to reaffirm the dignity of all labor,
however humble; re-learn the truth that a man's worth resides not in what
kind of work he does but in how well he does it, not in how much money he
makes but in how truly he earns it; and give these jobs enough respect to
make them attractive. We would have, in short, to reverse our decadent
valuation of leisure, money and consumption over labor and character, and
our decadent flight from smelly, dirty reality.


We would be forced to abolish Mickey-Mouse math and science in public
schools, restore discipline and hard work, and properly prepare students
for college. Cutting off access to foreign-born talent and skill would
drive the deficiencies of American education and our American-born
workforce into the open. It would force Americans to stop indulging
incompetence, sloth, indiscipline, and stupidity in the schools; to
ruthlessly fail students who cannot measure up; to cultivate ability
instead of squandering the time and interest of bright students in classes
pitched to the dullest minds in the room.


We would be forced, too, to confront the oncoming disaster in Social
Security. Matters are at a pretty pass when analysts are counting on
foreign-born laborers choosing to immigrate to rescue our largest social
program from bankruptcy, like children in a fairy tale counting on a good

fairy turning up to save them from going over a cliff. Adults ought not
engage in such wishful thinking.


An immigration moratorium would, in short, force Americans to stop evading
the unpleasant reality of their decadence, face it and deal with it. One of
the best arguments for immigration curtailment has little to do with
immigrants, but a lot to do with us.
         ---------------------------------------------------------


                                   NOTES


l Edward N. Luttwak, "The Riots: Underclass vs. Immigrants," New York
Times, May 12, 1992.


2 Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America's Kids Feel Good
About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1995), p. 20.


3 "Students Improved In Math and Science Over Last Decade," The Wall Street
Journal, August 18, 1994.


4 Sykes, pp. 114-120.


5 "High-School Science, Math Education In U.S. Gets Low Marks in New
Study," The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 1991.


6 D. J. Lewis, "Why Johnny Can't Count: An Examination of Mathematics
Education," LSA Magazine, Spring 1991, p. 18.


7 "Dwindling Supply of Engineers Brings A Sense of Desperation to Auto
Makers," The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1994.


8 "Shortage of Scientists Approaches a Crisis As More Students Drop Out of
the Field," The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1990.


9 "Despite Layoffs, Firms Find Some Jobs Hard to Fill," The Wall Street
Journal, January 22, 1991.


1O Ron K. Unz, "Immigration or the Welfare State: Which Is Our Real Enemy?"
Policy Review, Fall 1994, p. 34.


11 "Dwindling Supply of Engineers Brings A Sense of Desperation to Auto
Makers."


12 Jagdish Bhagwati and Milind Rao, "Foreign Students Spur U.S. Brain
Gain," The Wall Street Journal, August 31, 1994.


13 Catherine Yang, "Give Me Your Huddled ... High-Tech Ph.Ds," Business
Week, November 6, 1995, p. 161.


14 D. J. Lewis, "Why Johnny Can't Count: An Examination of Mathematics
Education," LSA Magazine, Spring 1991, p. 18.


15 Norman Matloff, "Debugging Immigration," National Review, October 9,
1995, p. 29.


16 Yang, "Give Me Your Huddled . . . High-Tech Ph.Ds," p. 161.


17 Matloff, "Debugging Immigration," p. 29.


18 Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (New York: William

Morrow & Co., 1972), pp. 83-90, 112-114, 476-485.


19 Bhagwati and Rao, "Foreign Students Spur U.S. Brain Gain."


2O Unz, "Immigration or the Welfare State," p. 34.


2l Julian L. Simon, The Economic Consequences of Immigration (Cambridge,
MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 126.


Return