Sowell Applied Economics Thinking Beyond Stage One (revised and enlarged ed)

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Still later, in the twentieth century, the invention of the airplane and the spread of commercial aviation internationally once again changed the origins and destinations of migrants, making possible migrations and sojourns that had not been available to most people before. In the last third of the twentieth century, more immigrants came to the United States from Asia than from Europe.

During the era of mass emigration from Europe between 1850 and 1914, about 55 million Europeans migrated to the Western Hemisphere and Australia. Earlier migrations to the Western Hemisphere were dominated by the involuntary emigration of slaves from Africa and later, after the middle of the twentieth century, emigrants from Asia. In short, the origins, destinations and cultures of immigrants changed greatly over time.

Cultures

Migrations, and especially international migrations, are not simply a movement of people. The cultures of those people move as well. Some of these cultures erode as the migrants and their descendants absorb the culture of the society around them but other cultures can persist for generations, or even centuries, despite being surrounded by millions of people with a very different culture. Indeed, the same culture may persist in one society and erode in another. There are reasons for both patterns.

Among Lebanese immigrants, for example, assimilation tends to be greater in the United States or Australia than in Latin America, and least in West African nations such as Sierra Leone or the Ivory Coast. America and Australia have been characterized historically as societies in which “there is a single culture, that of the dominant social group, to which all others try to assimilate.” An implicit corollary to this is that those who do assimilate tend to be accepted into that culture, which is what makes assimilation worthwhile to them. Latin America has been characterized as a place “where society is not only mixed in origin but mixed in culture as well; different cultures are accepted as being on the same level and capable of contributing something to the common stock.” This is essentially the “multiculturalism” philosophy which has in more recent times become a

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major, if not dominant, philosophy in most of the English-speaking countries as well. Finally, in West Africa, “the culture of the indigenous majority is not communicated to immigrant groups”— or perhaps the Lebanese and other immigrants do not choose to become like the indigenous peoples.

These suggestive characterizations reflect a pattern of assimilation not confined to Lebanese emigrants or to these particular regions. Once the Chinese were socially accepted in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, they assimilated into American society both culturally and biologically far more rapidly than they did in Malaysia, where they had been living longer and in larger numbers. Most Chinese Americans speak English, while few Chinese in Malaysia speak Malay. Rates of intermarriage of Chinese Americans with white Americans have been far higher than rates of intermarriage with Malays. Assimilation requires not only that acceptance be mutual but also that there be tangible benefits to those immigrants who decide to assimilate. Where the local culture is regarded as inferior, the immigrant culture can persist indefinitely, as the culture of German enclaves in Russia and Argentina persisted for centuries, even as Germans in Australia and the United States eventually came out of their enclaves and became English speakers and were absorbed into the larger society around them.

Sojourners tend not to assimilate as quickly or as thoroughly as immigrants who plan to settle permanently. Nor do immigrant cultures give way as readily to the culture in their country of destination when the immigrant culture is constantly reinforced by new arrivals from the country of origin, or among people who move readily back and forth between their country of origin and the country to which they have immigrated. The drastic reduction of immigration to the United States, as a result of restrictive laws passed in the 1920s, has often been credited with the assimilation of various immigrant groups once regarded as inassimilable by many Americans a generation earlier. In short, there is no single pattern of cultural or biological assimilation, even for a given group settling in different

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countries or at different times in the same country, much less among immigrants from lands around the world.

Cultures are among the many reasons for not being able to discuss immigration in the abstract. Germans who settled in Brazil were not like the original Portuguese settlers. At one time, the rulers of Brazil were quite clear and quite candid about that, and deliberately sought to encourage immigration from parts of Europe different from those from which the first settlers came. There were vast undeveloped areas of Brazil, and the existing population showed no real interest in taking on the arduous task of becoming pioneers in opening up those regions, while Germans had done such things in Russia, the United States and elsewhere. Likewise, Italian immigrants, both in Argentina and in neighboring Brazil, were far more willing to do hard and “menial” work than were the descendants of the Spaniards and Portuguese who had settled these countries. Italians were also as well known for being thrifty as the Argentineans of Spanish origin were for being free spenders, so that even though most Italians arrived in the country very poor, they soon had more bank accounts in Buenos Aires than the native Argentines did.

Ultimately the Italian immigrants became more successful than the native-born population, whether in agriculture, commerce or industry. None of this was peculiar to Italians or to Argentina. In centuries past, it was not uncommon for the Jewish minority in a number of countries to be literate, even when surrounded by a much larger population that was almost totally illiterate. Nor was this simply a matter of having money to be able to afford education. In colonial Malaya, government schools were provided for the indigenous Malays but not for the Chinese minority; yet the initially poor and often illiterate Chinese created their own schools as they rose economically and became better educated than the Malays. In late eighteenth century Scotland, people who could not afford to buy books were nevertheless able to use lending libraries that were widespread across the country because of the widespread demand for books. Yet when Frederick Law Olmsted made his celebrated excursions through the antebellum South

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in the nineteenth century, he seldom saw books even in the homes of slaveowners who could easily have afforded them.

In short, culture is a major factor in the behavior of different groups of people, often overriding even economic factors. This applies both to migrants and non-migrants, as well as distinguishing one group of migrants from another. It is one of many reasons why it can be misleading to refer to immigrants in general, when they vary so much from one another according to cultural specifics.

Cultures also change over the generations, whether for better or for worse, and at different speeds for different groups. Emigrants from the Scottish lowlands were more readily assimilated into English-speaking societies in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand than were Scots from the highlands. German emigrants, on the other hand, maintained their language and culture for centuries, living in their own ethnic enclaves in Eastern Europe, Brazil, and Argentina. Yet, despite this enduring loyalty to their own culture, most had no similar political loyalty to Germany and became patriotic citizens of the countries in which they settled. Key American military leaders in both World Wars were of German ancestry, including Generals John J. Pershing (whose ancestors’ name was Pfoerschin), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Carl Spaatz, whose bombers pulverized Germany, and Admiral Chester Nimitz.

Others, including Japanese emigrants to Brazil, maintained both cultural loyalty and political loyalty to their country of origin. The Japanese in Brazil even refused to believe that Japan had been defeated in World War II— with extremists among them assassinating fellow Japanese in Brazil who publicly said that they believed the news of Japan’s defeat. By contrast, those Japanese emigrants who went to the United States did so during a previous era in Japan, when American society was greatly admired by the Japanese, so that they arrived in the United States predisposed to become loyal Americans, and largely remained so despite encountering more discrimination than other Japanese encountered in Brazil. Among other things, this also indicates that a group’s behavior is not simply a function of

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their treatment by the society around them but also reflects internal cultural patterns.

Few, if any, American or Brazilian authorities were aware of this cultural distinction among Japanese who emigrated from Japan during radically different cultural eras, so that Japanese Americans were interned, as other enemy aliens were interned in wartime in other countries, including German Jews interned in Britain at the beginning of World War II, despite the extreme unlikelihood that German Jews would aid the Nazi cause. Many decisions made during the exigencies of war reflect a need for speed rather than deliberation, and for erring on the side of the country’s interests, rather than those of individuals or groups.

Some major cultural changes within an immigrant group can take place in a single generation. It has not been uncommon in the United States, for example, for the first generation of immigrants to continue speaking their own language, either predominantly or exclusively, while the second generation speaks primarily English, with some knowledge of the language of their parents, and the third generation to speak English only. Yet, in other ways, the second generation may adjust less readily to American society than did the immigrant generation. Those who had fled either poverty or oppression in their native lands tended to be keenly aware of the advantages of living in American society. But their children, who never experienced the life that their parents lived in other countries, may tend to compare their lot with that of other Americans around them, and often develop resentments and bitterness at their own lower economic or social status.

It was from the second generation of Eastern European Jews that leading criminals emerged to dominate organized crime in the United States before they were replaced by second-generation Italian criminals. In a later era, it was the offspring of refugees from China during the era of Mao Zedong who often became Maoists in the United States— admirers of the very system their parents had fled— and criminals as well. Similarly in France, where the first generation of emigrants from North Africa were described as “better Frenchmen than either their children or grandchildren: they would never have whistled and booed at the Marseillaise, as their

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descendants did before the soccer match between France and Algeria in 2001, alerting the rest of France to the terrible canker in its midst.” Subsequent Muslim riots that rocked France in 2005 only validated this assessment. Two years later, there were fewer riots but they were more deadly. The New York Times reported:

The onetime rock throwers and car burners have taken up hunting shotguns and turned them on the police.

More than 100 officers have been wounded, several of them seriously, according to the police. Thirty were hit with buckshot and pellets from shotguns, and one of the wounded was hit with a type of bullet used to kill large game, Patrice Ribeiro, a police spokesman, said in a telephone interview. One of the officers lost an eye; another’s shoulder was shattered by gunfire.

Crime rates among Mexican immigrants in the United States showed a familiar pattern: “Between the foreign-born generation and their American children, the incarceration rate of Mexican Americans jumps more than eightfold.” The Washington Post reported another similarity with France:

Many new immigrants are not assimilating. When the U.S. soccer team played Mexico in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum a few years ago, our national anthem was booed and our team was showered with garbage.

Among Muslims in the United States, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that one out of four respondents under the age of 30 accepted suicide bombing.

Return Migration

Twenty thousand people of Indian descent were reported to have returned to India in 2005-2006, and China had 40,000 returnees in 2006 alone. Looking at longer spans of time, more than 8.5 million emigrants returned to Italy during the period from 1905 to 1976. During the era of British rule in India, vast numbers of Indians left their native land— often as indentured laborers, to work in other parts of the worldwide British

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Empire— and then returned home after their years of indenture were over. During the century between the mid 1830s and the late 1930s, an estimated 30 million people left India and nearly 24 million returned.

Here, as elsewhere, it is not possible to speak of immigrants in general, for the extent of return migration varied greatly from one immigrant group to another. Refugees fleeing either natural disasters, such as the 1840s famine in Ireland, or the persecutions and violence of the people around them, such as the Jews of Eastern Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, returned to the land from which they had emigrated far less often than people who migrated for economic reasons and later returned after achieving a level of prosperity abroad that they could not have achieved at home. Whatever their reasons, the rate of return migration has varied greatly among emigrants from different countries, ranging during the era of mass emigration from Europe from about 5 percent among emigrants from Russia, Ireland, and Scandinavia to nearly half among Italians.

Just as immigrants bring a particular culture with them when they enter a new country, so returnees have often brought back with them part of the culture of the country in which they had sojourned, especially when they have had a lengthy stay abroad. Many Italians who had stayed some time in the United States returned to Italy not only with more money earned in the United States, but also with American ideas of equality that made them no longer willing to be deferential or subservient to local elites, and with an American emphasis on education that now led them to want their children educated. In various places, these returnees had become so different from those they had left behind in Italy, that they tended to settle together in enclaves of returnees.

Diseases

Just as cultures migrate with people, so do diseases. Indeed, diseases had much to do with the relative ease with which European invaders conquered vastly larger populations of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Diseases which had spread across the Eurasian landmass in previous centuries proved to be far more devastating to the native populations of the

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Western Hemisphere than the diseases peculiar to the Western Hemisphere were to the European invaders. Death rates of 50 percent of the native populations, as a result of contracting European diseases, were not uncommon, and death rates as high as 90 percent in some places were not unheard of. The fact that more soldiers have died from diseases than from enemy action in many wars was especially so for the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. European invaders not only had the advantage of gunpowder weapons and horses, they had millions of microscopic allies whom neither they nor the indigenous peoples were aware of at the time.

Diseases were also a factor in the otherwise puzzling fact that Europeans began conquering the Western Hemisphere centuries before they conquered sub-Saharan Africa, even though they knew of Africa’s existence more than a thousand years before they discovered the Western Hemisphere. In Africa, the indigenous diseases were far more devastating to Europeans than the European diseases were to the Africans. At one time, the average life expectancy of a white man in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year. Only after European medical knowledge had advanced to the point of being able to cope with the many tropical diseases of Africa were widespread European conquests on that continent possible.

It is not only with migrations based on conquests that diseases have been a factor. Refugees have fled from epidemics as they have fled from famines and other natural disasters. In the case of diseases, however, those who migrated to escape have often transmitted those diseases to the people living in the places to which they fled. Even migrations for economic or other reasons have often brought people with unfamiliar diseases into the society in which they have settled. As noted in Chapter 4, cholera was unknown in American cities before the Irish settled there in the nineteenth century. Here it was not only the disease itself that was brought by Irish immigrants but a whole way of life that allowed the disease to persist and spread amid strewn garbage that supported large rat populations, which in turn spread the cholera.

A similar problem continues today in many countries. In Britain, for example, over a four-year period, “95 per cent of all new cases of Hepatitis B have arrived from abroad” and “Africans in 2001 accounted for 34.7 per

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cent of all HIV infections— although they make up less than 1 per cent of the population.” The treatment of Hepatitis B in Britain has been estimated to cost the taxpayers about £10,000 per infected immigrant per year. Medical treatment for one family of Sudanese immigrants with HIV cost £80,000 a year. But the financial costs are not the only cost. Britain’s free, government-run medical care system attracts people with diseases from other countries, and these include communicable diseases that spread to the British population, which may have little biological resistance to diseases from very different parts of the world.

In the United States as well, immigrants have brought in diseases seldom found among twenty-first century Americans. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, 86 percent of the tuberculosis cases in 2005 originated in foreign countries and in Fairfax County immigrants accounted for 93 percent of the tuberculosis cases in 2004. In Texas, the proportion of the Hispanic population with hepatitis A is several times the proportion of either black or white Americans with that disease. A sample of African immigrants in Minneapolis showed them to have rates of infection of hepatitis A, B and C similar to those in East Africa, despite being “neither malnourished nor chronically ill in appearance.”

This problem is not unique to either Britain or the United States but has become common in Western nations receiving large numbers of immigrants from poorer countries. A study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reported:

In Western countries, an increase in typically tropical diseases, such as malaria or filariasis, and a return of other formerly common ones, such as tuberculosis or viral hepatitis, are being observed as a consequence of growing migration from less developed countries.

ECONOMICS

Economics affects both the decision to emigrate and the decision of the receiving country to accept immigrants, just as it affected the origins and destinations of European immigrants before and after the change from

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sailing ships to steamships. More fundamentally, immigrants bring both benefits and costs to the countries they enter, creating the classic economic problem of trade-offs. In addition, these benefits and costs vary greatly from one group of immigrants to another. For example, in the early twenty-first century, 45 percent of the immigrants from Asia had a college degree compared to just 4 percent among immigrants from Mexico.

Differences among Immigrants

Sometimes different groups of immigrants from the same country have very different characteristics, which affect their role in the economy and the net balance of costs and benefits to the country receiving them. People who emigrated from the Scottish highlands in the nineteenth century took with them a different culture from that of people who emigrated from Scotland’s lowlands, and that difference affected both them and the countries that received them, whether the United States or Australia. One of the most immediately observable differences was that the Scottish lowlanders spoke English while the highlanders still spoke the indigenous Gaelic of Scotland. But the differences went deeper than that. Like many upland areas around the world— Appalachia in the United States, the Rif mountains in North Africa, and the mountainous regions of the Balkans, for example— the Scottish highlands exemplified historian Fernand Braudel’s principle that the mountains always lag behind the plains, culturally and economically.

The industry and commerce that spread from England to the Scottish lowlands were much slower to spread up into the highlands, where transportation costs alone could be prohibitive and where the population was largely illiterate and unskilled, in addition to not speaking English. When emigrants from these two regions of Scotland settled in the United States, they settled in communities that were separate from one another, and the highlanders remained distinct longer, since they could not communicate with either Scottish immigrants from the lowlands or with the larger American society around them. In Australia the lowlanders, who came from urban, industrial and commercial areas of Scotland, went to similar areas in Australia, where they were usually successful and welcomed. Those