How Immigration can Arrest our Decline

Our upcoming presidential election has many oddities. One of the oddest is the stress on immigration as a campaign issue.

The importance of immigration is not the point. It’s indeed vital to our national future, but not in the way that Donald Trump claims. Immigration is one of the few things that can reverse the root causes of our national decline.

At the moment, our decline is self-evident. Our birth rate is falling. Our population is aging. The old, if not the elderly, have a hammerlock on our national wealth and power.

Politically and socially, we are as divided as never before, except perhaps in the runup to our Civil War. Our global adversaries are exploiting and magnifying our division with algorithmic precision, using our own social media and the Internet that we invented and gave the world. Exhibit A is our current presidential election, bitterly divided among supporters of two old men.

Our elderly show every indication of refusing to release their hammerlock until their survivors—in the immortal over-the-top words of the late actor Charlton Heston—pry the wealth and power “from their cold, dead hands.” They have squeezed the next generations out of all responsibility for their and our nation’s future: those generations are marrying less, producing fewer children, starting careers later, buying houses later (if at all), reaching positions of power and influence later, and generally tuning out. Many younger voters are so alienated that they will refuse to vote in an election that will determine whether our democracy survives. Or they will waste their votes on third-party candidates who have no chance to win.

Demographics is only part of the problem, although arguably a causative part. Another key part is that we have lost our mojo as a nation.

We have lost our scientific and industrial creativity. We have replaced it, partly unknowingly, with creativity in making and manipulating money. The brightest youth who, in my generation, became physicists, chemists, microbiologists and engineers, are today becoming investment bankers, private-equity capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and lawyers. Business-school grads are now telling doctors how to practice medicine and (because they own or control the shares in their medical groups) getting away with it.

Yes, our GDP and our employment are up. Our stock markets indices continue to surge. But all that is superficial. In industry, as in political power, the wealth and influence reflected in those indices are becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer, generally older hands.

To those of us who made careers in or adjacent to science and technology, the decline seems particularly precipitous. I’ll just give three recent examples.

Our own Wright Brothers invented controlled flight. We Americans developed the first long-distance and transcontinental aircraft. We invented the aircraft industry, the airline industry, airline safety regulation, and the computers and computer systems that make mass air travel possible.

Yet this week Congress dragged our premier aircraft firm, Boeing, on the carpet for abandoning a long history of excellence in engineering and safety for a haphazard and deadly rush toward greater sales, greater profit and higher share prices. This was not just a temporary peccadillo, or even a whole bunch of them. Rather, it’s the result of durable, gradual and longstanding corruption. A culture of greed has replaced the excellence in engineering and an obsessive focus on safety that had characterized the American aircraft industry and its regulation since the first few aircraft disasters, back in the 1920s and 30s, brought the practical risks of flying to the fore. Boeing’s insidious corruption did not happen overnight, and it won’t take small changes to repair.

My second example relates to “chips” or integrated circuits for computers and other modern digital devices. We invented them. Not only did we invent them: we invented the transistors that replaced vacuum tubes. Then, by miniaturizing transistors using principles of solid-state physics, we made it possible to build chips containing millions of them—whole computers on a bit of “silicon real estate” comprising a few square centimeters.

But who today makes these chips that our own scientists and engineers conceived, invented, improved and perfected, all here in the USA? Today the primary manufacturers are in Taiwan and the Netherlands. So are the makers of the highly complicated fabrication equipment (the so-called “fab labs”) that make these chips. In the last several decades, the vast bulk of this vitally important and scientifically fundamental industry has migrated overseas. That’s why President Biden’s misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” allocated billions of government money to bringing just a bit of high-end chip making back home to where it all had been conceived and invented.

My final example of national decline involves inventors themselves. Every kid raised in America knows the stories of Andrew Carnégie, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and others. Each created whole sectors of modern industry using imagination, principles of fundamental science and engineering, and sheer persistence. (Edison famously said that “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”) But few have noted how much their addition to American power and wealth derived from immigration. Andrew Carnegie was an immigrant, who came from Scotland to Pennsylvania as a child. Steve Jobs was the son of an immigrant from Syria. Elon Musk is himself an immigrant from South Africa.

In our modern world, software and the Internet loom large. So it’s easy to mistake business innovation using them for progress in science and technology. But the two are analytically and practically distinct. The differences have vast importance for economics, democracy, geopolitical power, and military strength.

Careful readers will note that I omitted Jeff Bezos’ name from the list of key American inventors, although I have praised him on my blog for initiating customer reviews of products and making retail purchases vastly easier, quicker and more efficient. But to my knowledge, despite his contributions to (and changes in!) our economy, Bezos is responsible for no significant advance in science or technology. None. Zip. All his many contributions to our economy and society involved business ideas or software, which in many cases (including his) is just business ideas coded in computer language.

As far as I know, the sole and single fundamental industrial advance in science or technology made in America since Ronald Reagan made greed fashionable was the mRNA anti-Covid vaccines and the microbiology technology behind them. As Anthony Fauci noted in a recent interview on PBS [set the timer at 4:55], that technology made possible having a safe and effective vaccine against a new pathogen in less than a year—a wildly unprecedented advance. The fact that political ideology and misdirection caused nearly a million Americans to die after refusing vaccination shows just how far our national culture has deviated from that of our inventive past. After all, we are the nation that had invented practical electric light, the airplane, the telephone, recorded sound (the phonograph), motion pictures, television, nuclear energy and weapons, and high-altitude flight.

The best diagnosis of our nation’s ills that I have read came from, of all people, Richard Nixon’s data man, Kevin Phillips. In 2006, he published a book entitled American Theocracy. His book contains an important and accurately predictive analysis of our nation’s politics and culture.

One part described and predicted—quite accurately!—the rise of Christian Evangelicals in American politics, which now drives Trump’s campaign eighteen years later. A second part analyzed the influence and rise of oil money and oil families (including the Bushes), which still fuels opposition to sensible climate policy. But the third and least-noticed part of his book described a sociopolitical phenomenon that lies at the heart of our current national decline: the “financialization” of our economy.

Much the same sort of decline affected the Spanish, Dutch, and British Empires. It involved the shift of focus—among the governing class and the “elite,” if not the general public—from real commerce and industry to making a living from manipulating money and finance and their various abstract manifestations.

“Financialization” involves a general shift from inventing, designing, engineering, manufacturing and selling tangible things to conceiving, buying, selling and speculating on financial abstractions: things like stocks, bonds, notes, options, their derivatives and the like. Whereas once a clever boy or girl might have grown up to discover a new principle of science, or invent a chip or an mRNA vaccine, he or she now looks forward to “inventing” a new form of leveraged buyout or tax-advantaged corporation or (as a recent WaPo article revealed) a whole new occupation for lawyers and accountants: inventing new ways to employ shell corporations and partnerships to reduce capital gains taxes by manipulating the tax bases (legal tax values) of assets.

As more and more smart people turn to toward these financial abstractions as ways of making a good living—sometimes a very good living—their society declines in at least four ways. First, talented youth spend more and more time and education learning about financial abstractions than about the real world. They make their careers in an artificial, abstract world which can provide them a very good living but has increasingly less to do with real life and goods, as distinguished from services. Second, a preoccupation with artificial abstractions leads to a very real division between the elite and the people who do the actual work of making, storing, selling, repairing and caring for real, tangible things, including food and medicines. It thus divides people into classes socially, financially, politically and intellectually. It leads to the sort of class division in which designers of Uber’s software can be handsomely rewarded for calling drivers “independent contractors” and so legally depriving them of vacation and sick pay and other benefits, while relentlessly squeezing them with software designed to get them to drive faster and less safely to up their income.

This kind of activity creates little or no new wealth; it just provides a convenient excuse, hidden in financial abstractions, for the elite to split the pie more in their favor. The result is a working class that, however vaguely, senses that it has been had, and so supports demagogues like Donald Trump in a hail-Mary pass toward the goal of some sort of retribution.

Third, the more smart workers spend their time learning and applying artificial financial abstractions, the less they know about the real world, including such things as physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. The more the future belongs to other nations whose smartest people study these things. Finally, artificial financial abstractions are useless in warfare, whether in defense or offense. The more a nation’s elite focuses on them, the weaker it becomes in war or military faceoffs. A clever depreciation plan or leveraged-buyout scheme cannot defend against an incoming artillery shell, let alone a jet aircraft, smart drone, or nuclear weapon.

So the more a society focuses on artificial financial abstractions as a means for its leaders and elite to become wealthy, the weaker and more divided it becomes in the real, non-abstract world. Unfortunately, reality, life and rivals eventually will force it to live in the real world. But by then it may be too late to make a smooth or quick transition.

Over eight years ago, in a blog post about immigration and aspects of the Vietnam War, I came to the following conclusion:

“There’s just one problem with the good life, which Man has known since Athens and Sparta. It doesn’t last long. If it does go on too long, it makes you weak, lazy, selfish and stupid. Then life inevitably gets harder.”

That's where we are headed as a nation are right now. We are halfway down the slippery slope of Kevin Phillips’ financialization. We are headed toward consequent economic decline, industrial weakness, and geopolitical irrelevance.

Spain, Holland and Britain are still nations today. None of them is a terrible place to live. But none of them has a fraction of the influence on science, technology, commerce or the global economy—let alone the balance of geopolitical power—that it had in its heyday. We are following in their footsteps.

There’s no guarantee that we can recover. To my knowledge, no nation in history has recovered from the kind of financialization slide that Phillips describes.

But if we are to recover, one thing is clear. We won’t manage a recovery by relying solely on native-born talent. We must rely on immigrants with a fire in their belly born of harsh conditions abroad that most native-born Americans can hardly imagine. Far from poisoning our blood, as Trump, Nazi-like, has charged, immigrants can renew it. They can bring us renewed knowledge of how much worse things still can get, and many come fired with a desire to do and be better.

Time has created a useful anomaly. Even as we await November’s crucial decision whether to turn our Executive Branch over, yet again, to a grossly unfit criminal psychopath burning with malignant narcissism, would-be immigrants pour through the snake-infested Darian Gap, and from every part of the world, striving just to live among us. Our longstanding reputation as “the City on the Hill” still burns in their imaginations, even as the City itself begins to crumble.

So if we were smart and foresightful, we would not close our borders. We would open them wide, but we would be selective. Yes, we would still allow refugees to seek asylum for reasons of persecution; from the Pilgrims onward, that is basic to our national ethos. But we would also seek out the smartest, the most ambitious, and the most talented among would-be immigrants, of course with no criminal record. We would seek out those who would apply the force of their minds, with wills forged in places of famine, criminal violence, lawlessness and an even more hostile climate, to make our nation better.

Of course we cannot do this now, not when our Demagogue promises Nirvana to the Evangelicals, White Supremacists and Christian Supremacists if only we close our gates. Joe Biden and his team must do and say whatever they need to do and say to keep our nation a democracy.

But if they win in November, we must, as soon as possible, open the gates wide again to the best immigrants, the better to refresh our blood, our youth and our national spirit. If not, Kevin Phillips’ meticulous study of empires that preceded us suggests that there’s nowhere we’re so likely to go as down.

Endnote on the Manhattan Project: At various times, Donald Trump has proposed limiting immigration by Muslims and people from Mexico and “Shithole countries” (apparently mostly in Africa), and favoring immigrants from Scandinavia as compared to Southern Europe. But the history of the federal Manhattan Project, which designed and built the first nuclear weapons that ended World War II, illustrates just how dangerous and counterproductive such a prejudice-based immigration policy would be.

Apart from E.O. Lawrence at Berkeley and a few others, the vast majority of the illustrious scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. Many were Jews; some were from Italy or France. All were admitted to live and work in the US because FDR’s government was smart enough to recognize and take advantage of their unique knowledge and expertise.

At a lower level, casual prejudice, especially against Jews, was rampant in the Roosevelt administration, even during World War II. It led to our own government’s refusal to admit many ordinary Jewish refugees during and immediately after the War; some of these rejected applicants perished in the Holocaust. Imagine how our modern world would look if that prejudice had prevailed entirely, and Stalin’s Soviet Union had gotten key nuclear scientists and therefore had developed nuclear weapons first.

The moral of this story is that prejudice of any kind—whether racial, national or religious—has no place in a rational immigration policy. The sole criteria should be lack of a criminal record and adverse intelligence activity, family sponsorship, legitimate refugee status or service to the US, and objective merit shown by personal history, trusted recommendations and/or entrance tests.



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