{"id":462,"date":"2012-08-04T05:46:40","date_gmt":"2012-08-04T05:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=462"},"modified":"2014-02-09T05:11:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T05:11:38","slug":"review-of-mark-krikorian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2012\/08\/review-of-mark-krikorian\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Mark Krikorian’s “The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal” – Article by Daniel Griswold"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Daniel Griswold
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
August 3, 2012<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/div>\n
Recommend this page<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
Published by:<\/strong> Sentinel \u2022 Year:<\/strong> 2008 \u2022 Price:<\/strong> $25.95 hardcover and e-book \u2022 Pages:<\/strong> 304<\/div>\n
***<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\n

In his new book Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argues that immigration may have been good for America a century ago but not today\u2014not because the immigrants have changed but because our nation has changed.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an interesting thesis, but as the book unfolds, the arguments sound more and more familiar. Krikorian argues that immigrants at current numbers can\u2019t be assimilated and that \u201cmass immigration\u201d jeopardizes national sovereignty and security, our quality of life, our jobs, wages, and wallets.<\/p>\n

Despite his avowed goodwill toward immigrants, Krikorian\u2019s book is a polemic written to paint immigration in the worst possible light. The word immigration hardly ever appears without the modifier \u201cmass\u201d before it, even though the immigration rate today is far lower than a century ago. He dismisses efforts in Congress to legalize low-skilled immigration as \u201camnesty\u201d legislation, even though the proposals would have imposed fines, probation, and security checks. He also ignores important findings in the immigration literature for the sake of advancing his argument.<\/p>\n

Krikorian\u2019s worries about assimilation are nothing new and carry no more weight today than similar worries about the Italians, Poles, Irish, and Germans in past eras. Government promotion of multiculturalism and bilingual education don\u2019t help assimilation, but they are not the insurmountable hurdles that Krikorian paints: Studies show second- and third-generation immigrants are almost all fluent in English.<\/p>\n

The book is at its xenophobic worst in the chapters on sovereignty and security. Krikorian warns that \u201cMexico City is moving to being, in effect, a second federal government that American mayors and governors must answer to . . . becoming a permanent participant in the day-to-day business of governance, [exercising] joint dominion\u201d over American territory. As evidence for \u201cthis assault on American sovereignty\u201d he mostly just musters quotes from Mexican officials urging the U.S. government to reform its immigration system.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s only the beginning. While just about everybody recognizes that radical Islam is the most likely source of future terrorist activity against the United States, Krikorian is eager to bring every immigrant group under equal suspicion. In a section titled \u201cFuture Wars,\u201d the author manages to slander millions of normal, peaceful, hardworking immigrants from China, Korea, and Colombia. \u201cThough the nearly 700,000 Korean immigrants here came from South Korea, there can be little doubt that the Communist regime in the north has a network of agents already in place among them,\u201d he writes, casting unwarranted suspicion on the corner grocer in Brooklyn and the worshippers at the Korean Central Presbyterian Church down the road from where I live in northern Virginia. In the same vein, Krikorian writes, \u201cWar with China is by no means a certainty, but it is clearly possible, and the nearly 1.9 million Chinese immigrants throughout the United States, including a major presence in high-tech industries, represent a deep sea for Beijing\u2019s fish to swim in.\u201d Is this really a valid argument for turning away immigrants such as Taiwan-born Jerry Wang, cofounder of Yahoo!, or Beijing-born Liang Qiao, the Iowa-based coach of the American Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson?<\/p>\n

Turning to jobs and wages, Krikorian sounds like a class-warfare \u201cliberal.\u201d \u201cMass immigration affects society as a whole by swelling the ranks of the poor, thinning out the middle class, and transferring wealth to the already wealthy,\u201d he asserts. The facts say otherwise. Studies show that immigration benefits the large majority of Americans, not just the wealthy. The middle class has not been thinning out but moving up: The shares of households earning below $35,000 a year and between $35,000 and $100,000 have both declined in the past 20 years as the share earning above $100,000 has grown. Fewer Americans were living under the poverty line in 2006 than in 1994, and the poverty rate has actually been trending down in the past 15 years\u2014a time of robust immigration.<\/p>\n

It is true that low-skilled immigrants consume more in government services than they pay in taxes, as Krikorian argues at length. But he dismisses the practicality of limiting access to welfare while glossing over the fact that the average immigrant and his or her descendents generate a sizeable net fiscal surplus for the government.<\/p>\n

In the final chapter Krikorian advocates deep cuts in legal immigration and a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration. Among his preferred coercive tools would be a national database of all U.S. workers, native and immigrant alike; uniform national ID documents; enlisting local law enforcement officers in pursuit of illegal immigrants; and even barring private property owners from renting to people without the right documents.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of thoughtful questions to be considered when it comes to the role of immigration in a free, modern, and globally connected society. Unfortunately, this book brings nothing new to the discussion.<\/p>\n

Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Griswold August 3, 2012 Recommend this page. ****************************** Published by: Sentinel \u2022 Year: 2008 \u2022 Price: $25.95 hardcover and e-book \u2022 Pages: 304 *** In his new book Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argues that immigration may have been good for America a century ago but not today\u2014not because the immigrants have changed but because our nation has changed. That\u2019s an interesting thesis, but as the book unfolds, the arguments sound more and more familiar. Krikorian…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,7,5],"tags":[1141,1142,1145,1136,1147,1138,1148,876,836,1139,1137,1143,1140,1144,228,25,1012,381,1146],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-economics","category-politics","tag-assimilation","tag-china","tag-crackdown","tag-daniel-griswold","tag-globalization","tag-illegal-immigration","tag-immigrants","tag-immigration","tag-jobs","tag-legal-immigration","tag-mark-krikorian","tag-mexico","tag-migration","tag-national-database","tag-private-property","tag-united-states","tag-wages","tag-welfare","tag-xenophobia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2105,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/2105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}