Immigration Moratorium Now

In a podcast released last week, President Trump expressed a desire to include green cards for foreign students who graduate from an American higher education institute in their graduation packet. Indeed, he specifically included junior colleges under this umbrella. Needless to say, this has sparked some very zealous discussions and debates amongst the America First crowd.As data from the Center for Immigration Studies shows, not only does America have more foreigners in the country than at any point in its history as an independent nation, it has also broken the percentage record set during the last great wave, a wave that saw a third of those immigrants eventually return home due to their incompatibility.In fact, all the proper econometric evidence points to a very inconvenient truth: post-1965 immigrants from the Global South massively underperform local Americans socioeconomically, and so do their children. This is why immigration policy must not be flippantly regarded as one reversible policy among many but as the policy that will make or break America’s future.For example, when it comes to trade policy, we can reverse our disastrous, largely free-trade regime with the stroke of a pen. Healthcare policy can be overhauled and its positive effects felt within a few short years. But immigration policy is different simply because its consequences reverberate over many generations, and cannot be easily undone.Immigration policy must ensure economic and cultural compatibility.When a country's immigration policy focuses solely on the economic potential of immigrants, it ends up in the quagmire that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are facing: the prospect of being turned into a culturally deracinated economic zone where everyone is a hamster running on a never-ending corporatist wheel. While examples of relatively prosperous nations that haven’t imported the unwashed masses are few and far between, two nations in the Orient, Japan and Singapore, have been able to buck this trend of globalization and come out relatively unscathed.In the case of Japan, they have escaped most of the consequences of globalization and mass immigration by simply opting out of participating in it. Not only have they reduced their reliance on international trade down to the bare minimum of finished goods they need to export to fund their raw materials imports, but they have simply kept their doors shut to nearly anyone who wishes to immigrate to their country.Not only do the Japanese have the self-respect to insist that any immigration application paperwork be done exclusively in their Katakana script, but they also have immigration officials snoop around the neighborhoods and places of work of plausible immigrants to ask acquaintances about their character. While this is something the global media does their best to chastise the Japanese over, it ensures that migrants are assimilating into their host communities.As a result, Tokyo, the world’s single largest metro area of 38 million souls, is also the safest large city on the planet. Not only have they trained their own people to behave and commit one of the lowest crime rates in the world, but the few foreigners they decide to bring in commit even fewer crimes than the already well-behaved locals, Johnny Somali notwithstanding.The case of Singapore is likely more relevant to America’s situation and the wider Anglosphere because Singapore shares similar challenges with us, namely being demographically heterogeneous. Unlike the Anglosphere, which decided one day it would be fine and dandy to turn their monocultural paradises into multicultural circuses, Singapore started out with a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious mess from day one.What Singapore has had to do to keep its volatile mix of Chinese, Malays, and Indians from rioting every other week demonstrates the absolute absurdity that diversity is a strength. The government has had to house the three races proportionally in public housing estates in order to eliminate ethnic ghettos.Once this had been done, the government also had to create group electoral constituencies with a mandatory minority (non-Chinese) candidate in order to ensure the industrious and well-organized Chinese did not completely dominate every area of life in the city-state.Most importantly, for the purposes of this piece, Singapore has an immigration policy explicitly designed to maintain the ethnic balance of the resident population, namely to keep it around three-quarters Han Chinese.Without the poison of political correctness, the ruling party of Singapore, which has now governed the country for sixty-five consecutive years, understands that when you shift a country's ethnic balance, you necessarily alter its character. Even the Mexicans themselves know this, which is why maintaining their ethnic balance is enshrined within their constitution.In fact, there was a time when America did follow a similar policy, and that was when this country received its best crop of immigrants ever, and that was during the pause from 1924 to 1965. Under the Johnson-Reed Act, would-be immigrants were subject to national origins quotas, specifically that the number of immigrants coming from a particular nation could not exceed two percent of that nation’s representation of the American population as of the 1890 census.In essence, America was seeking to maintain its existing ethnic balance because it had decided that this was the nation it wished to uphold moving forward. Not only did this bring immigration levels down to sensible levels, but the few that came in, on average, were the only group where the immigrants themselves went on to out-earn native-born Americans. Not even those from the first great wave who stayed could make this boast.The solution seems quite clear: America needs another immigration breather in order to respectfully filter out those who cannot and/or will not assimilate and pay their own way. Thereafter, it needs an immigration policy designed to preserve the demographics and culture of America, not one that strictly prioritizes economics.