Stemming the Flow of Immigration

Spent the weekend in Washington with the board of the Center for Immigration Studies, the most staid and cautious (and perhaps therefore the most influential) of the various groups which hope to reduce immigration rates from current record levels.

Informal chat at such gatherings typically concerns whether there is indeed light at the end of the tunnel, or whether the tiny glimmers one sees are only phantasms. If they are only that, the lives of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will play out on a crowded country of a billion or so souls with no common language or culture, whose politics are driven by ethnic and linguistic divisions. A globalist post-nation.

The reasons for pessimism are obvious. The leadership of America's conservative party is now solidly in the hands of shortsighted business types, deaf to arguments about the environment or the impact of low wage immigrants on the earnings of poor Americans. Republican establishment opinion, once stripped of trendy diversity-speak, is usually on the level of "Who is going to clean my pool?" GOP strategists now speak hopefully of one day winning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote (Bush got in the low to mid-30s). To this end, the president hosted a White House mariachi party on Cinco de Mayo, and promised a Spanish language radio address every week.

The Democrats, perhaps already holding a slim national majority, have few complaints with the prospect of continued large scale influx of folks whom?according to GOP's best scenario?will break heavily Democratic.

What then are the straws for immigration reformers to grasp at? Well, Paul Krugman, a pro-immigrationist Times columnist, sees in the burgeoning anti-sprawl movement a worrisome (for him) slow-down-the-foreign-influx sentiment. Bill O'Reilly, probably the nation's hottest political tv talk host, has supported putting the military on America's southern border, receiving huge ovations for this stand in Arizona. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado has started a bipartisan immigration caucus in the House: it has 15 members so far, and is the kind of political institution that was missing when the immigration issue surfaced during the early 1990s.

To this brief list I would add the emergence of Angela Merkel as the leader of Germany's Christian Democrats?and the distinct possibility that she will be elected chancellor of Europe's largest country as a forthright immigration reformer. She is a protege of former chancellor Helmut Kohl, a brainy and media-savvy woman who rose by the new rules of meritocracy to head one of Europe's most influential parties.

Merkel comes from a liberal Protestant background: her pastor father migrated from Hamburg to East Germany in the mid-1950s. Theirs is a cast of mind with deep roots in American culture as well: left-wing Protestants played a decisive role in abolitionism, the civil rights battles and virtually every social justice movement before and since. At their best, they embody an ethos of personal rectitude and service to the broader community; at their worst, they become trapped in their own guilty consciences, prone to reckless alliances with whatever voice for the oppressed is making the biggest noise. Just as liberal Protestants were on the front line against slavery and segregation, so too have they found much to admire in Stalinism and the Sandinistas.

Merkel seems to have imbibed the most worthy parts of the tradition and junked the rest. For a conservative leader she has a healthy irreverence for the capitalist market gods: a 1986 visit to the U.S. (when she was an East German citizen) left her ruminating on the sight of blacks with crutches lying on the church steps, whereas in East Germany, she noted, doctors lived in the same apartments as workers.

Under her leadership the Christian Democrats are becoming the first major Western party to put rejection of high immigration and multiculturalism front and center. Virtually alone among Western political leaders, Merkel recognizes the massive double standard under which the nations of the West are supposed to embrace a world without borders and submerge themselves in new peoples, while the rest of the world cultivate their patriotic traditions. Nobody really imagines that China or South Korea will accept their share of African refugees, though they certainly have living standards high enough to benefit the Africans. Says Merkel, "Try opening a Christian church in Istanbul."

No German politician is ever going to be popular in the U.S; Nazism has seen to that. But a German leader who makes responsibly the essentially Gaullist case for the value of nationhood, who argues that nation states?including Western ones?have a right to exist and contribute something essential to human progress by maintaining their own traditions and languages and way of doing things: this would have an effect on world opinion at the elite or "Davos" level. There are thousands of influential men and women in the Western countries who don't want their nations to die, and Angela Merkel's emergence will inspire and fortify them for the battles ahead.