Doing the podcast rounds to promote “One Billion Americans,” I was pleasantly surprised by how frequently I was able to get to yes with conservative hosts about immigration.
I would tell them that I broadly agreed with the view that illegal immigration should be taken seriously and that there are reasonable questions about the fiscal impact of low-earning immigrants.
But my counter was that there are hundreds of millions of people — 900 million in the latest Gallup survey — who say they’d like to leave the country they are currently living in. So it should be easy for a country like the United States to substantially increase the number of permanent residency slots we hand out while making all of the increase selective in the sense of bringing over people with above-average earnings.
I’m not going to tell you that every conservative I talked to loved this idea, but it was generally received warmly as a welcome alternative to progressive anti-patriotism or hostility to merit. I always did wonder, though, if they understood that in practice, this would mean a lot of people immigrating from South Asia.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since Bo French, the G.O.P. nominee for railroad commissioner1 in Texas, tweeted that “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” where “the problem” seemed to be students of South Asian ancestry attending a football game at the University of Texas. This remark generated quite a bit of backlash, and by happenstance, Democrats have a strong nominee opposing French in the form of Jon Rosenthal, a moderate veteran of the oil and gas industry who is not a gutter racist and who I hope Texans will elect in a few weeks.
Right-wingers who agree with French have, since that tweet, seemed to feel the need to come up with reasons why South Asian immigrants are bad. Hence the slightly bizarre spectacle of conservative pundits Jonathan Keeperman and Christopher Rufo doing a podcast on what they term “The Indian Question,” which Keeperman promoted by complaining that progressives have been able to “pathologize the desire for homogeneity and subdue any explicit political effort to maintain a white majority in the country.”
A lot of liberals are wondering what’s going on here. The Indian-American population, after all, is tiny. And this right-wing obsession with a small and successful group of people is exactly why my meeting of the minds with these conservative hosts felt so unstable — I think they were implicitly believing that an orderly and selective immigration system would only let white people in.
Conservatives raise a lot of specific objections to various subsets of immigrants — these people came illegally, those refugees are negatively selected, this family unification visa is a fiscal burden — but Indian-Americans overwhelmingly arrive through selective immigration pathways and are an elite group in the United States. According to Pew, Indian-Americans’ median household income is more than $150,000 and 77 percent of those 25 and older have a college degree. This is a great American success story, a clear benefit to the economy and the budget, and something you can’t raise a reasonable objection to other than — as Keeperman says — just objecting to ethnic change as such.
That’s an ugly sentiment that if indulged is going to lead to bad consequences for the country.
A Christian nation no more?
I think Keeperman slightly sold his own side of the argument short by referring to a desire for a “white majority.” What I think is even more true is that America’s identity as a Christian country is deeply important to a lot of conservatives.
Like most American Jews, I appreciate that conservatives tend to be polite about this and use the phrase “Judeo-Christian.” But we can’t help but notice that the mail doesn’t get delivered on Sunday and that schools are all closed on Christmas. The fact that it’s a Christian mass culture and not actually a “Judeo-Christian” one does not particularly bother me, but it’s a notable and real aspect of American life.
I also, as a person who is not Christian, don’t particularly believe in the importance of keeping it that way.