Anglo-Saxon Platitudes

Traditional image of King John signing the Comprehensive Immigration and Inheritance Tax Reform Act of 1215. Via.

Shorter David Brooks, "Talent Loves English", May 26 2015:

Happy birthday to the Magna Carta, 800 years old next month and still having amazing effects around the world! One little-known fact about this classic document of the Anglo-Saxon tradition is that when the liberty-loving barons forced it on big-government liberal King John they were setting up the conditions that would make Britain, Canada, Australia, and other countries including the United States a magnet for immigrants in the 21st century, drawn by relatively strong economies, good universities, and open cultures. Because immigration isn't your grandfather's huddled masses any more, but a savvy middle-class population now. Thus now that Mexico is more prosperous it sends us fewer immigrants, while we get more from China and India looking for better living conditions, better educational opportunities, and better retirement opportunities such as those offered by our generous Social Security system. Hillary Clinton's daring support for a comprehensive immigration report with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is the way to go, and Republicans who stick with policies based on stereotypes from the 1980s are insane.

I have to say, the bottom line is OK with me here, except I'd hardly call Clinton "daring" for standing by what's been the Democratic platform for at least 16 years, with approximations also tried by Reagan (successfully, in the middle of those stereotype-haunted 1980s) and George W. Bush (not). I can't skip the idiocy in this column though.

Wake up, copy editor! Or is "the those people" the latest euphemism?

Probably why the UK was the no. 4 source of immigrants to famously centralized, sclerotic France in 2012, after Portugal, Algeria, and Morocco but ahead of Spain, Italy, Germany, and Tunisia. Or why more US citizens than German or French ones moved to UK in 2013.

Mexico's unemployment shot up—to almost 6%!—with the Great Recession, but didn't get higher, even as immigration to the US flatlined, after 15 years of steady declines, because Mexican labor demand really has gone up. Chart from Trading Economics.

We get fewer immigrants from Mexico these days because Mexico has relatively more jobs (holy cow, that couldn't be Nafta, could it?) and lower population growth, and more from Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador because people there are desperate, not because they're all going to Yale or retiring in Florida. There are a lot of different reasons for emigrating, always have been. I'm continually amazed by the families with kids speaking German and French and Dutch I see around me on the West Side, but there seem to be plenty of Senegalese as well. The top 10 countries for immigration from Africa to the US are Nigeria, Egypt, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana, Morocco, Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, in that order, and if you see a one-dimensional pattern there, from more to less middle-class or whatever, you may want to have yourself tested for paranoid schizophrenia.

immigrants do not come from the poorest countries. Nations like Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger — some of the poorest countries in the world — have some of the lowest outmigration rates. Less than 3 percent of their populations live outside their borders.

Figures for the Democratic Republic of Congo are pretty hard to come by, involving a good deal of forced migration, and a good deal of immigration into the country as well, because there are always jobs in the mining industry. As of last June more than 20% of the population of the Central African Republic was displaced, 554,800 persons inside the CAR and 359,834 in neighboring countries, and getting in a plane for New York or London was not too easy. Nigerien migrants are best known for dying of thirst in the Sahara. It wouldn't be such a bad thing to take on some of those people, instead of just patting ourselves on the back for all the guys we get from Fuzhou and Gujarat because that's just so upscale.

Funny to think of the Magna Carta as an "Anglo-Saxon" development when everybody involved was a French-speaking Anglo-Norman, and nobody even thought to translate the document into English (an official French version was issued alongside the Latin original); Parliament didn't start functioning in English until some 200 years later, decades after the end of the Hundred Years' War and the final divorce of England and France. It's a profoundly stupid theory that people want to immigrate to the US because of the glories of Anglo-Saxon culture (unless he means the Anglo-Saxon propensity for steamrolling native populations and taking over, something the Normans shared with them and indeed did even more efficiently).

In 2010 Britain was a net loser of migrants. Were they less Anglo-Saxon than they are this year? Note that centralized, sclerotic France was one of the highest net gainers, though not up there with Russia and Saudi Arabia. With what? Of course Russia is absorbing cheap labor from Central Asia and Saudis taking on slave labor, more or less. Almost as large a percentage of Americans emigrated as Indians did. Guardian.

Oh, and that's Brooks's 114th career use of the adjective "amazing" in his time as a Times columnist (by my count around 9 times a year since September 2003).