The Girl From Human Street: An Appreciation and Appraisal

What follows are remarks prepared for an event hosted by the Dallas Jewish Historical Society in honor of the South African Jews of Dallas that took place on Monday, May 2, 2016. Roger Cohen was the guest speaker and he spoke eloquently about his book. These remarks were prepared to be delivered in the event that he was not able to make event and are meant as an appreciation.

I have appended some further remarks by way of critical commentary that might be of some interest.

The Girl From Human Street: An Appreciation

In The Girl from Human Street, Roger Cohen has written a fascinating and unusual book. He is an accomplished and talented writer. His descriptions are vivid and insightful full of original clever little epigrams to encapsulate and summarize his observations.

It is easy to recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting and informative read, but it will be of particular interest to those who like to read about history, especially modern Jewish history.  And it is above all very appropriate to discuss it here tonight because of its South African connection.

Roger Cohen is a well-known and respected New York Times columnist and one-time foreign correspondent. He now calls New York his home (for more than 25 years), but by origin he is a South African, who grew up in England, and has strong Lithuanian roots. Human Street is in Krugersdorp, outside of Johannesburg, and the girl from Human Street is his mother. It is Cohen’s memory of her that hovers over the entire book as he struggles to come to terms with her suffering and the effect that it has had on him. And that suffering appears to him to have a lot to do with her exile from South Africa. So the South African Jewish element features very prominently in this book and I will pay particular attention to it.

The book is what one may describe as a bio-documentary. It is first an historical autobiography stretching from before the beginning of Cohen’s life until some unspecified time before the present. It is a very intimate and detailed autobiography of his past, told through the lives of his family members in various generations. It is probably more detailed and intimate in its revelations than any us could or would like to reveal about ourselves and our families. But in it South African Jews will recognize themselves, as I did, in a strikingly familiar way. It is his story, but it is also the story of most of us expatriate South African Jews of his generation, particularly those of us who have come to America. 

So at the inner most level it is the fascinating story of his family for which he clearly has done an enormous amount of research. His talent for writing is evidently a family trait. He was aided in his research by various memoirs of family members, evidencing considerable literary polish. Through these surviving documents and many other historical sources he is able to trace the various strands of his remarkable family and recount their stories over the generations. Most of us Jewish South Africans of Lithuanian origin have not taken the time or expended the energy to find out much about the lives of our ancestors, either in South Africa, or before that in Lithuania, nor about Lithuania after their emigration to South Africa. What would have happened to them had they not emigrated? Cohen has done this and his account is path-breaking.

At another level this book is an historical documentary of the Jews of Lithuania and of South Africa, with significant views of the Jews of England and Israel as well – and a few glances at Italy. In these forays into the surrounding conditions of the time, Cohen delves also into the lives of others, not family members, and treats their stories just as intimately and compellingly as those of his own family.

So there is a lot of stuff mixed up in the telling. It is not a narrative that proceeds in linear fashion from beginning to end. Rather it is collection of themes, “ghosts of memory” (as the subtitle of the book suggests) seemingly randomly presented, but which, upon further reflection, come together in a poignant mosaic. One may wonder, what is the motivation for this particular mode of expression? Before moving on I want to offer a potential explanation for this.

This is a book about identity. Who are we and what makes us who we are? Clearly, we are more than the sum total of our experiences, but those experiences do play a large part in shaping who we are. This works through memory – through the remembering and imprinting of those experiences. But events remembered do not appear in our memory in historical order. They are more random and mixed. One remembered element connects with another far removed in geography and in historical time. Every chapter in the book contains a kind of network of connected memories separated by place and time. The reader thus becomes privy to the way in which the author encounters his memories, and thereby to the reasons for their significance to him.

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Lithuania: Cohen weaves his personal family history into the broader historical picture in different places at different times. These include Lithuania at the time of the emigration to South Africa in the 1880’s, Lithuania at the time of the Nazi occupation and extermination of more than 250 Jewish communities, Lithuania soon after the liberation from the Soviet Union and, finally, Lithuania in 2012, a Lithuania trying tentatively and not completely successfully to face up to the reality of what happened there with the submission of many and the active participation of many others in the genocide of the Jews. One learns also that there were indeed Lithuanians who did not stand by and who distinguished themselves by saving Jews at great risk to themselves.  But they were definitely the rare exceptions. Most Lithuanians, then as now, simply averted their eyes from the horror.

Lithuania is a very small country that has a traumatic history being squeezed between Russia, and later the Soviet Union, on the one side and the Nazis on the other. After the war, when Stalin had already annexed the country, recognition of the genocide was simply ignored and subsumed into the heroic suffering of the Soviet resistance to the Nazis. It is an old story, under Nazism Jews were vilified as communists (Bolsheviks). Under Communism they were vilified as capitalist collaborators. Lithuania achieved independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Only very recently has the Holocaust begun to feature in the Lithuanian collective consciousness and now school children are, at last, being told about it. They are learning about how centuries of Jewish civilization in Lithuania came to an end in a few months during 1941.

We South African Litvaks have all heard vaguely about the pogroms in Lithuania and that the Jews who remained behind were wiped out, but if you are like me, you do not know much more than that. Cohen uncovers painful but vital details about the history of the Jews in Lithuania, the fruits of careful painstaking research including multiple visits to the towns from which his family members came. Of the four pairs of Cohen’s great-grandparents, three were from Lithuania, from towns in close proximity to each other. (Actually in one case it was his grandparents that emigrated, as is the case with many of us). Two of the towns were Šiauliai and Žagarė. Each town has its own particular circumstances and story of how and when the Jews there met their end. Cohen documents the story of these two towns in stark detail. This is the reality of what our ancestors left, this is the fate they avoided, and in doing so they gave birth to us.

What may not be realized about the Jews in Lithuania is that their demise preceded Hitler’s final solution of the gas chambers. Instead, the Lithuanian communities were for the Nazi murderers a first step along the way to the discovery of a more efficient extermination method. The famous Nazi einsatzgrupen (death squads) specialized in mass executions the old fashioned way - with firing squads and naked Jews lined up in front of the graves that they had been made to dig for themselves. In this way they killed thousands upon thousands in a very short period of time. Cohen quotes a recently erected memorial: ”In this place on October 2, 1941, Nazi killers and their local helpers killed about 3,000 Jewish men, women and children from the Šiauliai region.”

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South Africa: Roger Cohen is descended from a remarkable set of ancestors. As mentioned, three of the four pairs that emigrated to South Africa at the turn of the 20^th century were from Lithuania, the other couple  came from England. Three of the four men, starting with nothing and struggling to overcome hardships and setbacks, eventually  made their fortunes, becoming founders of family dynasties in the new South African Jewish aristocracy of riches. One of his great-grandfathers was a founder of the very well-known South African mid-level department store the OK Bazars. His father’s side was of more modest means, but married into wealth.

So we have graphic and familiar descriptions of the life in South Africa for Jews starting in the hard-scrabble immigrant generation, through the formative period, to the ultimate established generation with their mansions in the Johannesburg suburb of Houghton – glimmering swimming pools, lush gardens tended by ubiquitous but invisible black gardeners, lavish meals cooked by invisible black cooks, and waited on by formally attired black waiters, babies and children cared for by uniformed black nannies, all very tranquil and secure.

The South Africa from which we emigrated was rich in blessings both material and cultural. It was a great place to grow up. Our grand-parents, or their parents, had done the hard work and we were reaping the rewards. The Jews were part of the privileged white minority that ruled the country with a view to hanging on to these hard earned blessings. But, of course, there were formidable, if subliminal, tensions. A slightly older friend of mine from that period, the historian Gideon Shimoni, refers in the title of his Ph.D. dissertation on the Jews of South Africa to the Community of Conscience. Whether we knew it or not, we all struggled with the moral dilemmas of living in the midst of the police-state that enforced the Nazi-style requirements of the policy of Apartheid.

Cohen confronts this ambivalence head on. He provides valuable details about the founding immigrant generation – again more than most of us are aware of. His admiration for their achievements is unstinting and well-deserved as is his appreciation of the richness of life in established Jewish South Africa. His South African readers will delight in the vivid familiar scenes – the foods, visits to the Kruger National Park, the rich South African English dialect with its sprinkling of Afrikaans and Yiddish words thrown in. “Howzit, hey?” “Shame, ach sistoch man” “He’s a brainbox” “Let me just go and put on my face” “I stopped at the robot.” [I embroidered here just a bit.]

Whatever the background circumstances there is no denying that it was a period of extraordinary Jewish achievement and creativity. And by contrast to Cohen’s experience in England, South African Jews had no desire to assimilate. South Africa was a society of separate groups living together in an uneasy accommodation. To be Jewish was to be a member of one of those groups. There was nothing to be done about it. They were proud Jews, strong Zionists and they practiced a unique form of Judaism in which the vast majority were affiliated orthodox no matter what their degree of observance – and by the time of our generation most were not observant. We were cultural orthodox Jews who reveled in our various synagogue affiliations boasting of the best cantors or choirs who reproduced the liturgical artistry of the big-city Lithuanian communities that had so recently disappeared. It is natural that in leaving all this behind we felt a considerable loss.

As Cohen points out, these achievement were possible because of the acceptance of Jews into to white mainstream and, notably, because of the absence of institutionalized anti-semitism. It is true that the white Afrikaners, with their seething antipathy toward Britain and to English-speaking South Africans, tended to side with Germany in WWII and identified with the Nazis in their anti-Jewish sentiments. There is a clear incipient anti-semitic movement in Afrikaner history. But after the war, and the gaining of political power, the Afrikaners changed their tune completely, finding it more expedient to coopt the Jews rather than persecute them. They were, after all, white and they were the brethren of those heroic survivors that had founded the state of Israel, in the promised land, out of the ashes of Auschwitz. So began decades of cooperation between the state of Israel and the Apartheid Republic of South Africa.

“Antisemitism was deflected by racism” and Jewish consciences were coopted. But there were notable exceptions, among which were left-wing dissidents, orthodox Jews like the eminent Rabbi Rabinowitz of blessed memory, and the awe-inspiring towering figure of Helen Suzman, the lone Progressive Party member of parliament for decades, a constant thorn in the side of the dictatorial, racist Nationalist Party. But for the majority of South African Jews, as Cohen points out, the name of the game was not to rock the boat. Better not to draw attention to themselves.

This was epitomized in the posture of the organization that styled itself as the official spokesman for South African Jewry, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Throughout the Apartheid period the BOD took the position that it would not comment in any way on political matters and thereby it avoided taking a stand for or against Apartheid and its brutal state apparatus. For this the BOD earned the condemnation of many vocal Jews in the midst of the quiet acceptance of the majority. Only very recently in the post-Apartheid period has the BOD acknowledged the unconscionable deception that this entailed. All this and more is recounted by Cohen with sympathetic cogency.

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England: Though professing to be an atheist, Cohen feels himself to be a Jew, and a South African Jew at that. His parents were South African Jews even though, following his father’s wishes, they tried to leave their Jewishness behind when they emigrated to England. His mother could never make up for the loss of family and culture and geography that South Africa represented and her mental illness, and the mental illness of other family members, is a recurring theme in the book.

Cohen and his sister spent a lot of time back in South Africa while growing up. Still, England left its impression on him. For him England was in many way the not-South Africa. Though nominally open, polite English society had a way of letting Jews know that they were different and would always be different. He refers to “an ingrained bigotry” and recounts the anti-semitic taunts he endured while in school. Yet, for him, as for all South African Jews, the English experience is pivotal. By an accident of history and geography, we ended up in the English speaking section of the white population of South Africa and we developed a strong, if ambivalent, bond with England and with English culture. For Cohen as for all of us, the English heritage is priceless.

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Israel: Israel features throughout the book as it influences the history of the family and of Jewish communities more generally, but it features most  prominently in two chapters towards the end of the book when Cohen recounts his visits with family members living there.  He is a strong and emotional supporter of Israel in its origin as a refuge for Jews and an admirer of the modern state it has become. It is worth quoting a brief passage.

“My family story, like that of millions of other Jews, leads inexorably to Zionism. By the early twentieth century, no alternative offered a plausible chance of Jewish survival and belonging. As Joseph Roth once wrote, “If there is one nation that is justified in seeing the ‘national question’ as essential to survival, then surely it is the Jews who are forced to become a ‘nation’ by the nationalism of others.” Zionism was a necessary break with past, pogrom and persecution.”

But he is worried that Zionism “sought a state on land that was not empty. Zionist resolution on the Jewish question could only give birth to an Arab question.” In the book and in his other writing Cohen expresses a sincere anguish at the fact that by being forced to defend itself, Israel has become an oppressor. Resort to military solutions has had a brutalizing effect on both sides and he worries about this dilemma seeing a two-state separation of irreconcilable peoples as the only solution. He is dismissive of a one-state solution. “One state, however conceived, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state, the core of the Zionist idea. Jews will not allow this to happen.”

Cohen’s sincere grappling with these issues will resonate with his readers. And like us he is troubled by the rise in anti-semitism among the left intelligentsia and on U.S. campuses and he is likewise troubled by the spurious comparison between Apartheid in South Africa and the separation of populations in Israel. As a South African Jew he knows the difference.

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America: Roger Cohen now feels he is at home in New York. He finds in America an openness that was lacking in England. America is a land of immigrants, a land constructively fashioned out of people’s differences. We as Americans are united in our differences. We can be whatever we are, while still being enthusiastic Americans. What better adopted home from which to contemplate and wrestle with the “ghosts of memory” that are the substance of this intriguing book.

Critical appraisal – three comments

One: As noted, this book is difficult to categorize. It is part autobiography and part historical documentary. At times it may seem like the expression of an unconstrained stream of consciousness. Some people have told me that they found this problematic. I suppose it depends on the reader. I think Cohen took a risk in creating the book in this form, but it did work for me. I was not troubled by the frequent jumps in and out of the personal to the general and back. But, clearly, some readers will be.

Two: There is a potential inconsistency in the personal story, the story of his mother. On the one hand Cohen wants to connect her wrenching displacement from South Africa to her tragic mental illness. On the other hand he wants to highlight the prevalence of mental illness in his family – more family member have black dots in the family tree than do not. Both impulses are understandable. Cohen wants to deal with the loss of leaving South Africa for his mother and more generally, and, also, he wants to deal with his personal discovery of this lurking genetic menace in his family. But it does raise the question: was his mother’s mental illness a result of the trauma of emigration or would she have succumbed under any circumstances simply because of her genetic makeup, like Cohen’s Israeli cousin many years later. A possible reconciliation is to imagine that his mother had the genetic disposition toward debilitating depression that was triggered and exaggerated by her traumatic experiences. This is probably how Cohen wants us to read it.

Three: Finally a word about his position on Israel. On these matters I think Cohen, like most analysts of this subject, may be  considerably off base, and, if I may, I would like to offer a few comments on that. 

To worry about the oppression of Palestinians by Israelis as a betrayal of the core Jewish values, values intrinsic to the founding of Israel, is certainly legitimate. The Israeli military and the Israeli government can be and should be called to account in a way that other governments in the region never are. There is a palpable double-standard, and maybe that is ok insofar as we as Jews set that standard for the only Jewish state. But to think that Israel is the ultimate cause of the poverty of Palestine and for the suffering of the Palestinians is just wrong. Cohen, like so many others, fails to mention that the Palestinians have been kept in refugee-dependency not by Israel but by the UN, by the various Arab states who have used them as pawns for their own nefarious purposes, and, perhaps most importantly, by the mendacious, corrupt, self-serving leaders that constitute the Palestinian Authority. It is the PA that has deprived them of the vote by refusing to hold scheduled elections, not Israel as Cohen suggests.

If Israel is responsible at all it is by handing over governance of the territories to the PA via the Oslo Accords. Palestinians fared much better under Israeli rule than they do now under the joint rule of the PA and the Israeli military. It is hard to see how a two-state solution is possible when one of the states is ruled by a grasping kleptocracy bent on the destruction of the other state. 

In fact, the only solution, if there is one, may indeed be a one-state setup in which Israeli civil law is extended to all the inhabitants of the territories together with the option to apply for Israeli citizenship. The fear that this will mean the demise of the Jewish state, though understandable, is probably unfounded. The population of the territories has been dramatically overstated by the Palestinian demographers and the growth of the Palestinian population is slowing down, even while Israeli populations growth is stable and high. Under civil law the Palestinians will be able to develop their own voices and solutions. And while some may elect to apply for Israeli citizenship, many will probably not. Other types of political arrangements, like some sort of local federalism, may emerge.

Whether and under what circumstances such a move (to extend civil law to all of Israel and the territories) is possible is another matter. How this could be done and what the reaction of various parties might be is the subject of Carolyn Glick’s provocative book, The Israeli Solution. Whatever one’s opinion on this, it seems to me that no peaceful coexistence will ever be possible until a way is found to allow the Palestinian people at large to express their own individual goals and desires and this implies a change in leadership and in political system that no one seems to be talking about. 

Immigration at a price?

Gary Becker has just published a short monograph for the IEA entitled The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution (see also here). Like most of Becker’s proposals it has a penetrating simplicity and compelling logic to it. I want to consider it briefly (for my earlier assessment of the immigration issue see here).

Here is the Executive Summary:

• Despite substantial economic growth in underdeveloped countries, there are still huge differences in wage levels between poorer and richer countries.
• Low fertility, especially in Europe, is also likely to lead to pressures that will encourage migration in future decades.
• Net migration has grown dramatically in recent years. In 1980, net migration to the UK was approximately zero and by 2005 the figure was 190,000 per annum. In the same period net migration to the USA more or less doubled to 1.1 million per annum.
• There were very substantial migration flows in the late nineteenth century but the USA imposed restrictions from the 1920s onwards. Those restrictions are onerous and involve bureaucratic controls.
• Given the extent of welfare states in countries with higher incomes, it would be difficult to go back to a policy of free migration.
• There would be many advantages to a policy of charging immigrants a fee. If a fee of (say) $50,000 were charged, it would ensure that economically active migrants who had a real commitment to the country were most attracted. This fee could be used to lower other taxes.
• Charging a fee would be a much more efficient way of controlling economic migration than the use of quotas and other bureaucratic systems of control.
• Even a fee of $50,000 would allow people on relatively low earnings to enter the USA if there were skill shortages. Given the level of wage differentials, such a fee could be paid back in a few years or in a decade or so.
• Certain categories of migrant might be allowed to benefit from a loans system to enable them to pay the fee over a period of years. This could operate rather like a student loans system in higher education.
• One advantage of using a fee rather than administrative controls would be that illegal immigrants would have a strong incentive to regularize their status – and would be allowed to do so legally. Such people would have to pay the required fee but would then be free to choose much more remunerative occupations. As such, the use of the price mechanism in migration policy could alleviate the scourge of illegal immigration.

My general reaction to this proposal was quite negative for a few reasons.

1. It appears to solidify the role of government in “centrally planning” the immigration market. Any kind of central planning smells bad – incentive and knowledge problems – abuse, corruption, unavoidable errors of judgment, etc. It also means that government officials get to decide how many immigrants is the “right” number, rather than leaving this to the market.
2. The immigration fee would be paid to the government and would become a source of revenue for it. Becker suggests that this revenue (which could be substantial) could be put toward the budget deficit and obviate the need for some taxes going forward. This argument is surprisingly naïve. It is almost certain that the government will simply expand its commitments to include the revenue. In other words it will simply fuel the expansion of government. This is a proposal for expanding government revenue, not one for simply redistributing the way that revenue is used, as is the case with vouchers.
3. The proposal is basically a mechanism for allocating immigrants between the legal and illegal categories. The higher the fee, the more likely it is to deter legal migration, leaving the potential migration two, not one, options; not to migrate or to migrate illegally.
4. Becker suggests a government funded, or supported, loan program for lower income immigrants to be able to pay the fee. (At $50,000, even low income earners would be able to pay this loan in a few years.) Who needs another government loan program? Most certainly this would turn into a dei facto subsidy.
   

Further thought, however, has inclined me more in favor of the proposal for the following reasons (referring to the list above).

1. The role of government will be diminished. So while it is clearly not ideal it does reduce the necessary bureaucracy and its scope of decision making. Responses to the level of the immigration fee set could be made public and as a way to use “market data” to adjust the number of immigrants admitted. I still don’t like this at all; but I have to concede it is a lot better than what we have.
2. Expanding government revenue by this proposal remains a big problem for me. This could be made much more palatable with a more detailed circumscribing of the use of this money; keeping it out of general revenue. Maybe it could be used for a comprehensive education voucher program. [In the high welfare states, like California, they would want use this money to pay for health-care and education of immigrants. I would resist this, since immigrants are likely to pay for them themselves in their taxes.]
3. The proposal definitely creates a mechanism by which illegal immigrants could regularize their status. It seems it would also avoid the thorny question of amnesty and the moral qualms surrounding it. At $50,000 it is likely to all but remove the illegal immigration problem.
4. One need not have government involved in any loan program. If immigration were economically profitable private companies would fund loans for the fee.

So, all in all, it seems to me this proposal would be a vast improvement over what we have. It is clearly much more politically palatable and likely than more the more radical changes that many of us would like to see along classical liberal lines. Would it foreclose such changes completely? Is it worth taking that risk? Though my heart is not in it, I would have to say yes. What do you think?

Immigration is an essential ingredient in American economic growth.

Within the space of 235 years (a blink of an eye in historical time) the United States of America has gone from an ex-colonial backwater to the greatest economic powerhouse in history. Its population has grown from about 3 million to over 300 million over this period. A sizable portion of this growth has come from immigration. The proportion of the foreign born (legal and illegal) has rarely been below 10% and has frequently been in the region of 20%. At any point in time a large proportion of working Americans were either born elsewhere, had parents who were born elsewhere, or had grandparents who were born elsewhere. This is an incredibly dynamic picture, a veritable demographic churning, with amazing cultural and economic implications.

Judging by my own experience and observations, there is a subtle inter-generational shift in cultural identity. Only by the third generation do people feel completely assimilated into the local culture. The immigrants never quite "make-it." I think of myself very much as an American. But I am frequently conscious that my accent and my experience causes me to stand out a bit - not in a bad way, but it is noticeable. Many of my fellow immigrants feel this to a greater extent. It makes for cultural tensions, but also for an exciting dynamism, an infusion of cultural DNA into to social gene pool. My children are American. But even they, as children of South African immigrants, carry an extra bit of background baggage. They feel just a little bit different, in possession of something unique (the tacit and conscious knowledge of another culture). You see this most clearly in the way they gravitate to other first generation Americans in their social circles. By the third generation the children are full Americans. Their grandparents might as well be from another planet.

This pattern is repeated over again in each generation of America's population. It has been a necessary part of the ongoing vitality of the American experience, including its entrepreneurial component. Without it American exceptionalism, and the rate of value-creation, of economic growth, will not be sustained.

Illegal immigration is not a problem. It is an opportunity.

Illegal Immigration - Ivry Man (IM) asks Dr. Know (DK) for Guidance

         At the appointed time Ivry finds Dr. Know seated on his usual park bench. Ivry extends his hand.

IM.    Greetings Dr. Know. So nice of you to take time out of your busy ego-boosting schedule to talk to me.

DK.   [Warm smile] Oh it’s my absolute pleasure. How can I help you?

IM.    Well, I see the immigration question is on the agenda again.

DK.   Really, I hadn’t noticed.

IM.    Angry eyes] So I am wondering what the debate is about. Surely its straight-forward. These people break the law to come here and then they take away American jobs. We just need to plug the holes – step up enforcement, stop the buggers from coming in. Right?

DK.    [Looking thoughtful] Maybe we should look at this a little more carefully. Why do you     suppose they break the law to come here?

IM.     To get work obviously, our work.

DK.    Yes, but why not simply stay home, in Mexico say, and work there?

IM.    The jobs in the U.S. pay more.

DK.    Indeed, probably a lot more. Else it would not be worthwhile to go to the trouble – the     time and effort – and undertake the risk of an illegal immigration, right?

IM.    I suppose so.

DK.  Well that is what the evidence (and the logic) suggests. As menial and low-paying as these jobs are, they pay a multiple of what the illegal migrants could earn at home. They are very low wages in the U.S. context but much higher than the alternative for them. It’s all relative.

This being the case, there is evidently a very strong economic pull fueling the flow of illegal immigration. It’s like two connected water tanks, in which the level of water in one is higher than the other. There is an inexorable tendency for the water in the tank with the higher water level to flow into the other tank until the water levels are equal. The only way to stop this is to sever the link between the tanks. With water tanks this may be easy (inexpensive). With labor flows it is likely to be prohibitively expensive – to plug the holes, as you say. Every dollar spent chasing illegal immigrants is a dollar that could be spent somewhere else. And even if we doubled, or tripled, the money, people and equipment devoted to it, we could probably not stop it completely. Our borders are too long and too porous.

IM.    So what are we to do? There are an estimated 13 million illegals in the country and although the flow has slowed now during the recession, it is bound to pick up when our economy does. We have to do something.

DK.   Maybe. Consider, however, the costs and benefits of immigration in general. Immigration is a kind of trade and trade is invariably mutually beneficial. The immigrant adds value to the product she produces and receives a part of that value in a wage that is attractive to her. The employer receives the other part of the added-value. Both parties gain. What is the problem?

IM.    [Looking peeved] Of for goodness sake, have you gone soft in the head.? The problem is that the immigrant is taking away a job that a good American citizen could be doing for a higher wage.

DK.  [Looking earnest] Are you sure about that? The evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, suggests otherwise. It suggests that illegals overwhelmingly do jobs that Americans will not – do not have to – do.

         But let’s assume you are correct, just for a moment. Am I to understand that the job lost by a good-citizen-American worker is self-evidently more important than the job gained by the immigrant? Change the terms in the previous sentence from “American” to “white” and “the immigrant” to “a black worker” and what do we have? Good old-fashioned racism. Hullo! I thought that immigrants were also human beings. Their alternative is often extreme deprivation or starvation. But its self-evident that we ought to send them back in pursuit of saving low-paying jobs for Americans who frequently have other alternatives?

         And let’s not forget the interests of the employers. Is it self-evident that their decreased cost of labor is not worth the alleged loss to the American workers? And consumers also gain because of reduced product prices.

IM.    [Indignant] Now wait a minute! Are you suggesting that we should be the economic savior of poor workers of the world. Why is it our problem? If they are going to starve it’s the fault of their government and it's bad economic policies.

DK.  How convenient. So whatever happens to them our conscience is clear?

         It’s not a question of being the savior of the world. It’s a question of trying to carefully weigh all the aspects of the issue, all of the costs and benefits broadly understood. Do we really want to put such a high weight on protecting domestic jobs that most Americans probably would not want anyway when the human cost to the immigrants is so great? Immigrant workers want to work. Employers want to employ them. The harm to third parties is dubious to say the least. The value-added exceeds the value-lost. This country was, and continues to be, built by immigrants – legal and illegal.

         It seems to me that increased enforcement is a solution in search of a problem.

IM.    [Incredulous] So we don’t have a problem with immigration?

DK.   Not really, no. We have an opportunity.

IM.    How so?

DK.  Immigration is selective. For the prospective immigrant immigration is a form of investment. It takes initiative, courage, persistence and motivation to succeed at it. Immigrants often have these characteristics. They are mostly young, family-oriented, hard-working people. They are prepared to do what it takes to provide their children with opportunities they did not have. They do the jobs that established Americans will not do. They save, they have babies, and they contribute to our social security and Medicare-Medicaid.

IM.    [Red in the face] Oh no, excuse me. That’s another problem you are neglecting. Isn’t it true that these illegals come here and use our social services – our public schools, our hospitals – at the taxpayer’s expense and, because they are illegal, they don’t contribute anything? They become expensive free riders. Also, they add to the crime rate.

DK.    [Sad, concerned] Another set of myths, harmful myths I am afraid.

         I really doubt that the evidence can support this conclusion. It is likely that immigrants are law abiding in general – being immigrants they are more careful to obey the law for fear of being deported.

        On the question of social services, many illegal immigrants have fake IDs. So they pay social security and income tax, etc. but will never collect a dime of social security. The potential problem of genuine free riders is worse in states, like California, who have extensive welfare systems, than in states like Texas, who do not. It seems to me the problem there is the bankrupt welfare system not the illegal immigration. It is more logical to reform welfare than to attempt to close the immigration hole.

         Californians know they have to reform their state’s finances. If you offer something for nothing you invariably attract free riders, legal and illegal. You produce dependency. That is the problem and that is what needs to be fixed.

         In any case, if we could resolve the illegal status of these workers we could fix this problem.

IM.    [Eyes light up] Aha! So how on earth do we do that? We are dealing here with criminals by definition – people who broke the law. Are you suggesting that we simply forgive them with some sort of amnesty? Is this not unfair to those millions of legal immigrants who got in line and followed the law, rather than trying to evade the line. Now the illegals will reap the reward of their criminality.

DK.   [Somewhat exasperated] So dramatic. Why do you want to call them criminals? If they are guilty, they are guilty of a victimless crime. I tried to explain this to you.

         Not all laws are good laws. There are many examples of laws in history that are bad laws (by my morality and I suggest by yours). I am not advocating breaking the law – though some laws are clearly worth breaking – like some of the laws that existed in Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa. But, we could remove this bad law and forgive its violators. Maybe we could specify that in order to receive amnesty, proof of gainful employment is required or at least one-year’s residence. We needn’t give them an automatic passage to citizenship, we could provide (what is now being provided to Haitians) immediate permanent residence – like guest workers. Though I personally see no harm in allowing them on to the citizen track. What’s the big deal? The right to vote?

         And yes, those who went the legal route may feel cheated. They are cheated by a bad law that some people disobeyed. Their outrage is worth the benefits of the reform.

IM.    [Horror and disgust] Ugh. This just gets worse. Don’t you realize that if we do what you suggest there will be a lot of new Hispanic, and other foreign, voters? It will upset the balance of power and over time threaten domination of the American culture by foreigners. Even the status of English as an official language is threatened.

DK.  [Disguised disgust] Hmm. Forgive me but do I see racism in another form here? What makes you think these new Americans will be any less committed to the American culture (and our Constitution) than the old Americans. This is and has always been the strength and the uniqueness of America. To be an American is, more than anything, to embrace the ideal of universal individual freedom. These people understand that better than many Americans by birth. They have often lived in oppressive police states. They understand the source of the opportunities they are pursuing. Their children will speak English and they will be Americans in every sense. Paranoid ethnocentrism is an unworthy and baseless norm on which to base any American policy. We should embrace the diversity of cultures that embrace us – as we always have.

IM.    You are breaking my heart Dr. Know. What about the terrorists? And the Moslem extremists? Are we not sending an open invitation?

DK.  I suppose a reformed, streamlined, more liberal immigration policy might make it easier for potential terrorists to come here. I am not sure about this though. With less resources devoted to the general apprehension of illegal immigrants more resources could be targeted to terrorists in particular.

IM.   So what exactly are you advocating.

DK.  I am advocating amnesty for illegals – immediately – and a reform of immigration law that pretty much moves us to more open borders. I think the EU has it right in this respect. I also think we should look carefully at the highly skilled end of the spectrum. Most of our software engineers, many of the academics, doctors, paramedics, nurses, etc. are immigrants. We should open this door wider. We need their human capital. If politically necessary we could ask them to pay for their Green Cards. But, this seems to me a no-brainer.

         However, let me be clear about one thing. In suggesting that we welcome diverse cultures and ethnicities to America to participate in the “American dream” I am absolutely not suggesting that we tolerate cultures that are by their nature intolerant of or inimical to American values. On the contrary that is another aspect of our legal environment that needs to be reformed. We need to be less tolerant of intolerance. Those groups that advocate an overthrow of Western civil society and the imposition of one true religion, in America and in the world, ought to be able to use the first amendment right of free speech. But they ought not to receive any government, taxpayer funds, and they ought not to receive any protection against the free speech of others to expose their noxious message. Right now we are so sensitively politically correct that we provide these people all manner of funds and protections that ought to be withdrawn immediately. We have to fight darkness with light, searing light. And when they are exposed and we see them for what they are, we can challenge them, we can shun them, we can monitor them and defend ourselves against them.

        But this has very little to do with the immigration question in general.

IM.   [Frustrated resignation] OK, OK, but listen, what about drugs? Don’t narcotic traffickers produce some of the illegal immigrants. How would you handle the drug problem.

DK.  I am glad you asked. I would decriminalize drugs of course. But that is a matter for another discussion another day. Have to go.

        He rises and ambles off in the direction of … .