Immigration: Curse or blessing?

Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker, not to be out-trumped, has suggested building a wall along the U.S.-Canada border as well. Never mind that our Canadian border stretches 5,525 miles. And never mind that the current net migration flow from Mexico and Canada to the U.S. is virtually zero. No expense is too great to spare us from Canadian immigrants like architect Frank Gehry, movie producer Jack Warner, James Naismith (who invented basketball), and singers like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Hank Snow, and George Beverly Shea, not to mention Michigan’s former governor, Jennifer Granholm.

To be sure, a genuine migration crisis does indeed exist right now in Europe, where masses of refugees fleeing the clutches of Bashar al-Assad have walked, sailed, driven, bussed, and trained all the way from Syria, only to be brutally bottled up in places like Budapest and Calais. Although Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, and many ordinary Germans and Austrians have welcomed these refugees, anti-immigrant political parties are rising throughout Europe. Germany has reported 340 attacks on asylum seekers this year, including an apparent arson last week at a home sheltering refugees. Hungary is building a barrier along its southern border to stem the flow of migrants. Last week, a journalist in Hungary was caught on camera deliberately tripping a migrant who was carrying a child through a field. To discourage immigrants, Denmark’s new center-right government has cut assistance benefits for refugees in half — and publicized its stinginess by taking out advertisements in a newspaper in Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have fled.

The logic behind such policies, says Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, is this: “Once people see that refugees are going to be taken in by the West, they’re going to stampede. This problem is going to metastasize.”

Blue jeans and shopping malls

Metastasize? Are we talking about cancer here? Or are we talking about valuable human capital, in the person of hundreds of thousands of determined, courageous, resourceful people who, on balance, would likely add value to any country smart enough to welcome them?

Immigrants — whether they’re fleeing from persecution or merely seeking better jobs and homes — tend to be optimists, risk-takers, and entrepreneurs, three qualities in short supply among natives. They also tend to appreciate their new homelands more than natives like, say, Donald Trump do. Most economists conclude that immigrants by their very nature strengthen a country’s economy. Some go a step further, arguing that the very experience of migrating — as an expression of individualism, ambition, self-reliance, and even religious tolerance — turns people into capitalists.

To their new homeland, immigrants bring talent, youth, and global connections. They create new jobs because they’re more likely than natives to launch new businesses. In America, they’ve created entire new industries (movies, theater, public relations, advertising, real estate, cosmetics, scrap metal) and revolutionized many others (clothing, publishing, retailing, banking, investments, liquor). In these fields and others, they’ve relentlessly broken down class lines among consumers — for example, with the blue jeans of Levi Strauss, the shopping malls of Victor Gruen, or the tabloid newspapers of Joseph Pulitzer. America’s motion picture industry was launched a century ago when immigrants like William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, and the Warner brothers perceived that a crude novelty like movies — if elaborately produced and then screened in palatial theaters — might inject a ray of sunshine into the otherwise gloomy lives of their fellow immigrants toiling in urban sweatshops.

Ormandy and Bartók

When immigrants move from poor countries to rich ones, notes the economist Paul Collins in his 2013 book, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, “their productivity rockets upwards,” because they are “escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.”

Consider one such dysfunctional model: Hungary, where this month Syrian refugees hurled themselves on the tracks at a railway station when a train they thought was carrying them to Austria was stopped by Hungarian police to take them to a detention camp. (This deliberately nasty act was intended to deter other refugees from heading for Hungary.) “The migrants’ despair,” noted the Hungarian writer Noémi Szécsi, “was because they didn’t want to be stuck here — in the country where we Hungarians are destined to live our shabby little lives.”

Hungary has actually produced a disproportionately large share of overachievers — but most of them did their achieving somewhere else. Andrew Grove escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and subsequently built Intel into the world’s largest maker of semiconductors. Eugene Ormandy, Georg Solti, and Fritz Reiner transformed ordinary American orchestras into great ones. Edward Teller developed the hydrogen bomb. Magician Harry Houdini, publisher Joseph Pulitzer, author Arthur Koestler, investor George Soros, composer Béla Bartók, film actor Leslie Howard — in each case, Hungary’s loss was America’s gain.

Albert Greenfield’s theory

By contrast, the list of notable Hungarians who flourished in Hungary largely begins and ends with composer Zoltán Kodály and sculptor Ernő Rubik, inventor of the Rubik’s cube. Haydn, Liszt, and Ignaz Semmelweis (the father of antiseptic medicine) all found outlets for their talents outside of Hungary.

“We Hungarians are a proud people!” my grandfather once told me. Then he added impishly: “But I’ve never understood what we have to be proud of.” I think I know the answer: We can take pride in all those Hungarians who were smart enough to get the hell out of Hungary.

Actually, Hungary was once envied for the richness of its culture — during the 19th century, when its tolerance of Jews attracted immigrants from all over Europe. (My Rottenberg ancestors emigrated there from Germany in about 1820.) In other words, Hungary flourished when it welcomed immigrants and declined when it rejected them.

“But the cost of supporting immigrants is overwhelming,” you say. And you’re right. But then, so is the cost of supporting children. Immigrants usually start operating businesses and paying taxes within a few years of their arrival. By contrast, most kids don’t start paying back their parents’ $1 million-plus investments until they’re 25 or so. Has anyone suggested that we stop having kids?

But what about those Mexican immigrants cited by Trump — “people that have lots of problems,” as he put it? The 20th-century Philadelphia tycoon Albert M. Greenfield — a Russian immigrant (the subject of my recent biography) who rebuilt Center City and restored Society Hill — once remarked, “Most of the world’s great achievements were accomplished by men who were born poor.” It’s something to think about next time you look at all those desperate, unwashed immigrants on the TV news and you wonder what possible good they could do for this or any other country. To paraphrase Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof: If immigrants are a curse, may God smite us with them, and may we never recover!