June 12, 2007

David Brooks: only uneducated nativists oppose massive immigration

David Brooks shows that he's a complete tool:

...What's shaping the immigration debate is something altogether deeper and more interesting. And if you want to understand what it is, start with education. Between 1960 and 1980, the share of Americans enrolled in higher education exploded. The U.S. became the first nation in history with a mass educated class. The members of this class differed from each other in a thousand ways, but they tended to share a cosmopolitan approach to the world. They celebrated cultural diversity and saw ethnocentrism as a sign of backwardness.

...Liberal members of the educated class celebrated the cultural individualism of the 1960s. Conservative members celebrated the economic individualism of the 1980s. But they all celebrated individualism. They all valued diversity and embraced a sense of national identity that rested on openness and global integration.

...And if you want to predict which side a person is likely to be on, look at his or her educational level. That'll be your best clue.

As the sociologist Manuel Castells generalized, "Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local." People with university values favor intermingling. People with neighborhood values favor assimilation.

...It's not the '60s versus the '80s. It's - to mimic Mark Lilla - between the people who have absorbed both the '60s and the '80s, and everyone else.

It's between open, individualistic cosmopolitans and rooted nationalists. It's between those who ride the tides of the cultural mainstream and those so driven by marginalization that they're destroying the best compromise they will get.

UPDATE: His column is one of those self-evidently wrong things, but, in addition to the many comments, I nonetheless feel the need to point out:
1. The reason I bolded the first "cosmopolitan" is because it's a bit of a loaded word. Did he know that?
2. At the first link, I compared him to Tokyo Rose, and I hereby renounce that comparison as unfair (to her that is, since she was eventually pardoned).
3. Brooks is lumping all forms of immigration into one whole, yet almost every American would not object to moderate levels of legal immigration from a wide range of countries as long as those immigrating were not a danger - in any way - to the rest of us.
4. Safely sheltered in Manhattan, Brooks' idea of "immigration" is probably something along the lines of having as wide variety of take-out as possible.
5. Brooks is coming out against assimilation and favoring a form of multiculturalism that even most Canadians would oppose. Even Europe is starting to realize the dangers of such multiculturalism.
6. Like most other sheltered pundits, Brooks fails to note things like the Mexican government and racial demagogues obtaining political power and the delitirious impacts of that power.
7. And, the bottom line: Brooks is writing junk like this for the educated fools who subscribe to Times Select; the bigger question is what they intend to do about it. What tactics will those in his target audience who support massive legal or illegal immigration use to educate we the great unwashed?

Posted to Immigration2007a at June 12, 2007 03:43 PM