There is always something scary about a person who claims they are a citizen of the world rather than tied to some locality. There is a certain piousness to the notion admittedly. Such a person supposedly isn’t ‘selfishly’ concerning himself with just he and his kin. He has a wide mind. While I wouldn’t call such a system evil, I would say that it has euphemistic implications. Often, the person does indeed care about the world as much as he cares about his locality; the problem is that he doesn’t care all that much about his locality. Much like the man who claims to be following Rome while in opposition of his bishop, the worldly man works to the destructions of his community while claiming to save the world.
This reminds me much of the immigration debate. The immigration debate largely consists of people in other parts of the U.S. worrying about the emergence of a population of dark skinned people speaking Spanish in southern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. Admittedly they will couch their concerns in security. The problem is that if you propose open borders – a pejorative used to describe an immigration policy of excluding people for cause rather than an arbitrary lottery system – these same people will go into convulsions. Then these same folks will make the claim that these immigrants are straining our public infrastructure. These folks act like Buffalo is the city on the hill compared to El Paso. There are very few places in this country where the public infrastructure isn’t being strained and destroyed. St. Michael’s Hospital in Milwaukee was closed under this strain, and it didn’t serve an immigrant population. The public infrastructure in this country is quite dysfunctional, and convenience is the only reason for scapegoating immigrants for this problem.
The objections will continue though. And each one will be as much nonsense as the last one. We wouldn’t want anyone named Antonio Coronel, Jose Marcarel, Cristóbal Aguilar, or Antonio Villaraigosa to be mayor of Los Angeles. You would swear Santa Fe was as common a city name as Clinton the way folks prattle on about culture. This despite La Prensa being founded in San Antonio in 1913 by Ignacio Lozano and the same man proceeding to found La Opinión in 1926 in Los Angeles. There are certainly issues with immigration, but dark skinned people speaking Spanish just north of the Mexican border isn’t one of them. It’s been done for a long, long time.
This is not to say that immigration doesn’t have cultural impacts. The next generation has impacts on our culture. A large manufacturer closing their facility has an impact on the local culture. A mega church opening has an impact on the local culture. Doing nothing has a cultural impact. Culture isn’t experienced in a vacuum. This is why we have governance. We have governance to moderate the impacts of change. We have it to offer a corporate response to changes in the community. The rights of government, no matter how people attempt to twist the Catechism, is not to establish an abolitionist state that allows no one to leave or no one to enter. The rights of government are not so circumscribed as to be some Libertarian paradise where the government is just there to collect taxes and provide services. Government is devoted to pursuit of the common good.
The problem with immigration is that it magnifies any existing problems. It is much like business in this respect. There is nothing that exposes the dysfunction of certain business processes like a company doubling in size. Our communities are much the same way. Taking the most extreme example, a tight food supply, it is inherently obvious that a mass migration to the afflicted area will cause famine. In such a situation, the local authorities would be within their rights in refusing the migrants. Another example would be foreign investors purchasing a significant amount of capital and causing disunity. This would be modern-speak for what transpired in Texas prior to its independence. This would also describe much of the socialist fervor in South America.
Such is the problem with globalization. Globalization is a caste system writ large. Under the guise of community, globalization segregates societies. Specifically, it separates the rich from the poor. In the guise of ‘free markets’ it removes one of the essential marks of community, the economy. Economics is no more the study of wealth creation within a community. Instead economics is the study of the invisible hand. Rather than the economy serving the community’s interests from which it originates, the economy is supposed to serve all of mankind. It is supposedly nativist and racist to concern oneself with manufacturing jobs serving Americans being moved to China, but it is culturally enlightened to throw the illegal immigrant back to Mexico. Let’s never mind that the illegal immigrant shows great concern for the welfare of the Americans for whom he is employed, buys services, and seeks security whereas the Chinese worker is concerned about his community and is only peripherally concerned with the state of Americans.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In