Counterrevolutionary Meditations

One might be forgiven for surmising that sheer innumeracy is a requirement for advancement in the American establishment when even fellows of the Council on Foreign Relations, the establishment of the establishment, as it were, exhibit the vice. Nevertheless, such innumeracy seldom appears unadorned, but requires a bit of intellectual scaffolding if it is present itself as persuasive; a popular form of such scaffolding is the discussion of demographic trends, the type erected by Shannon O'Neil in a recent LA Times piece, in which the effort is made to dismiss concerns about immigration as being somewhat irrelevant.

The reason, of course, is that "Mexico is undergoing a demographic transition." The Mexican birthrate has declined to 2.2 births per woman, with the projected consequence that by 2050, Mexico will "become as old as the United States." With respect to the question of immigration, the aging of Mexico will eventuate in the lessening of migration pressures:

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the economically-active population — which grew by more than 1 million new members each year during the 1990s — now adds just 500,000 annually. Over the next 10 years that means about 5 million fewer new workers compared to the previous decade — a number that's roughly equal to the population of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. This suggests that demography may accomplish what border enforcement has not. In the next decade, the tide of northbound Mexican labor will likely recede.

Laying aside the risible underestimate of the number of illegal immigrants resident within the borders of the United States, it bears mention that "weak job growth" is a euphemistic description of the causes of Mexican economic stagnation and the resultant waves of immigration, which range from the usual sclerosis of a bureaucratic/socialist, and frequently corrupt society, the contraction of the maquiladora sector, and the collapse of small-scale agriculture in the wake of the implementation of NAFTA, to the willingness of the American establishment to utilize the nation as a safety valve for pressures that might otherwise coalesce for reform in Mexico.

There is more, however, to the scaffolding O'Neil erects about the fundamental innumeracy of her argument. America is itself on the cusp of momentous demographic transitions:

The first baby boomers are becoming eligible for Social Security benefits, and over the next 25 years, many will retire. The next generation, Generation X, with 15 million fewer members, doesn't have the critical mass to fill their shoes, much less new job openings. The generation after that, Generation Y — now ranging in age from babies to college students — is larger, so it will partly alleviate the labor crunch. But Gen Y workers are also likely to follow form and be better educated than their elders, which will push them toward high-skill careers.

Now that the scaffolding has been completed, leaving us with a picture of demographic decline in both the United States and Mexico, bearing ominous portents for the prospects of continued economic expansion and the stability of the social welfare system, O'Neil proposes to resolve this dialectical dance of "inexorable supply and demand" by means of an immigration regime that "...balance(s) the pressures of supply and demand", providing "a flexible (emphasis mine) and legal valve on the labor flow", an "efficient guest-worker program that rises and falls with labor needs and also provides a potential path to citizenship", involving "long-term planning with Mexico (and other Latin American nations)."

The manifest implication of O'Neil's proposed system of flexible immigration - adjustable, that is, to the requirements of "economic growth" and public spending - is that such immigration, which she herself distinguishes from the increasingly-skilled labour of Generations X and Y, will be at once both relatively low-skilled and, magically, we must believe, causative of economic expansion. We must be confronted here with an instance of magical realism transposed to public policy analysis, for, as Robert Rector observes:

On average, low-skill households received $32,138 per household in immediate government benefits and services in FY 2004, including direct benefits, means-tested benefits, education, and popula­tion-based services. Total benefits rose to $43,084 if public goods and the cost of interest and other financial obliga­tions are added.

By contrast, low-skill households paid only $9,689 in taxes. Thus, low-skill households received at least three dollars in benefits and services for each dollar in taxes paid. If the costs of public goods and past financial obligations are added, the ratio rises to four to one.

Furthermore,

Receiving, on average, at least $22,449 more in benefits than they pay in taxes each year, low-skill households impose substantial long-term costs on the U.S. taxpayer. Assuming an average 50-year adult life span for heads of household, the average life­time costs to the taxpayer will be $1.1 million for each low-skill household, net of any taxes paid. If the costs of interest and other financial obligations are added, the average lifetime cost rises to $1.3 million per household.

I shall leave it to those conversant with the field of "lies, d*mned lies, and statistics" to ponder how it could transpire that even "flexible" (most probably, this flexibility will assume the form of indefinite expansion) immigration of primarily unskilled labour, a net drain on the public treasury, could relieve the pressures of the entitlement crisis and the felt imperative of economic growth in an era of native population decline. I should like only to note one further detail of O'Neil's argument, such as it is, before proceeding to elaborate its significance and, therewith, the meaning of my title. When O'Neil writes that

..Gen Y workers are also likely to follow form and be better educated than their elders, which will push them toward high-skill careers.

she, and all those who employ arguments akin in form and substance, commit a fallacy of argumentation, a hasty generalization from the fact that some members of Generations X and Y have sought higher-skill occupations to the conclusion that most or all members of the aforementioned generations both have sought and/or will seek, and, furthermore, are capable of seeking and obtaining both the educational credentials requisite to most high-skill positions, and the positions themselves. The argument implies that Americans of these generations are living in a sort of Lake Wobegon world, in which they are all above average, and require the immigration of vast numbers of unskilled labourers, without whom their superior intellects would be incapable of generating anything save stagnation, or, possible, poverty itself. I submit that, if such generalizations are actually taken seriously, there is no more egregious sort of provincialism and elitism, all wrapped up into one tidy package of implicit condescension, in all of our voluminous political discourse. The assumption would also seem to contradict both the understanding of productivity as a cause of economic growth, as well as the individualism of much economic doctrine, not to mention that of the right, generally speaking, but let us pass this over discreetly.

The true import of O'Neil's argument, whatever may be her cognizance or lack thereof, cannot lie in the literal significance of the words and phrases employed, because, strictly speaking, they refer to nothing. There is no possible world in which a population of largely unskilled labourers who are a net burden on the public weal can possibly be causative of economic growth in absolute terms, let alone in a manner sufficient to enable us to meet certain unfunded entitlement liabilities. The argument is, as it were, a referent without an object, sense without reference. In other words, it is a hieroglyph, a linguistic symbol having a position in a type of discourse that no longer refers (or, perhaps, never did refer) to the concrete realities seemingly indicated by the meanings of the terms employed. No, the symbol finds its significance in the reification of such things as "supply and demand" and "demography" into abstract agencies which work upon us inexorably, before which we can either submit, or find ourselves crushed beneath the mighty onrush of Necessity, History, and Progress. It all sounds rather like Hegel, with an accent of Smith, perhaps. Before such abstractions, in the dessicating heat of their glare, the concrete culture of America, the common good of her actual citizens, for which purpose her political institutions once were framed, and even republican deliberation as to the good, all disappear. America has no culture, no identity, if she is naught but an expanding and contracting site of economic endeavour. America's people can have no common good if their good can be reduced, by an ideological sleight of hand, to the operations of an economic system, as though such things by nature yield the good as the addition of two integers yields a sum. America can indulge no republican deliberation if only inexorable necessity, which is to say, fate, stands before her.

There is more, however, to the significance of our hieroglyphs. They are not mere intellectual errors. For even though they be innumerate, even though they fail to refer to realities according to their literal sense, they do, in fact, refer to an actual social process; for they are not symbols of intellectual activity alone, but of something which does occur. It is simply the case that this 'something' is not the thing to which the language itself would lead us. That special something is an increasingly formalized system of private profit and public expense, whereby the profits of the employment of certain forms of labour are subsidized by the transfer of their costs onto the public - the very public who are being dispossessed in their own nation by such policies. One could say many things about this attempt to elide, and then efface, a concrete America with its political and cultural heritage and institutions; let it suffice to state that it ought not be considered inflammatory should Americans determine that it is, ahem, analytically incompatible with patriotism.