The right stuff

About immigration during a heated political environment

Here’s a thought experiment.

You’re in charge of the immigration policy of the United States of America. You will create a scale of compatibility reflecting your perception of who has the appropriate profile to be a part of this great country. Whether they will be a great cultural fit, and a highly productive, and patriotic member of its citizenry.

You have to choose between two candidates.

The first candidate, let us call her Jane, is white, an UK citizen who was born in France, and raised in Oxford, England. Daughter of a multi-millionaire, she grew up in a 53-room mansion, and attended the highly prestigious Balliol College in Oxford and was a prominent member of the elite social class of that country. She has even founded a non-profit for the protection of oceans. Her father’s funeral was even attended by Prime Ministers. She wants to get US citizenship during the 1990s. This is ChatGPT’s (Dall-E) rendition of an image of this person.

The second, let us call him Russom, is a black school teacher in Eriteria. This is 1981, and the Ethiopian civil war has devastated the country. Russom is in danger, and flees the country by walking 150 miles to Sudan, and then to Milan, Italy. After working as a custodian (janitor) for five years, he has managed to evacuate his family of nine to Italy. Now they want to emigrate the United States. They do not speak English. This is ChatGPT’s (Dall-E) rendition of an image of this person.

Whom would you select amongst the two applicants?

Most rational people will chose Jane over Russom. It is obvious that based on the parameters I had defined, the probability of being a fit for the United States might be an order of magnitude higher for Jane.

You knew this was a trick experiment, didn’t you?

Jane is the name I gave to Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of press baron Sir. Robert Maxwell, infamous for her role in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. As Wikipedia notes,

In December 2021, she was convicted on five out of six counts, including one of sex trafficking of a minor.^[1][2][3] She faces a second criminal trial for two charges of lying under oath about Epstein's abuse of underage girls.

Russom was the real name of Russom Keflezighi. As a New York Times article from 2004, notes;

The father cleaned floors in various banks and drove a taxi so his children could concentrate on their education instead of work. Fitsum, the eldest son, became an electrical engineer. Aklilu, the second son, got his M.B.A. Meb, the third son, received a degree in business communications from U.C.L.A. and won four national collegiate running titles. Bahghi, a younger sister, is in medical school. Merhawi, a younger brother, is in law school. Bemnet, yet another brother, is studying economics.

The family is practicing Christian (Orthodox), over-achieving, integrated and highly patriotic. Together, they might have paid millions of dollars in taxes, and contribute loads to charity. In fact, the reason I know about this family is that I hero-worship the third son, Meb Keflezighi, who won the bronze medal in the marathon for the United States in the Athens Olympics, and came first in the NY and Boston marathons. His emotional victory in Boston 2014, a year after the previous marathon was disrupted by terrorism, moved many to tears. I’ve read his books and take inspiration from them. Everyone who has met him, including Olympians, have nothing but good words to say about him and his family.

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When a former president of the United States talks about migrants from Latin American/African countries in terms that do not belong even in private discourse, far less in the public sphere, we should be concerned.

But this is a tradition that has been alive for a long time. Samuel Morse - yes, the gent whose name is synonymous with the telegraph - wrote a long treatise about the dangers of allowing Catholics to migrate to the US. It was called, Foreign conspiracy against the liberties of the United States: the numbers of Brutus. It was originally published in the New York Observer and you can read it here at the Library of Congress website or here at the Internet Archive.

What  is  the  duty  of  the  Protestant  community  in  the  perilous  condition  to  which  religious as  well  as  civil  liberty  is  reduced,  by  the  attempts of  Popery  and  foreign  enemies  upon 
our  free  institutions. Have  Christian  patriots reflected  at  all  on  the  possible,  nay,  I  will  say probable  loss  of  religious  liberty ;  or  in  idea attempted  to  follow  out  to  their  result,  and  in their  immeasurable  extent,  the  fearful  consequences of  its  loss?  Why  is  it,  then,  that  no more  energetic  efforts  are  made  to  save  ourselves ? 

Today, six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic, many powerful members of the Congress and Senate are of that denomination. Would Samuel Morse double down on his assessment or would be concede that these powerful men and women aren’t papists (including in an Aubrey-ism here.)?

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A couple of decades ago, people would argue in an email group that I was in, that India’s lack of Olympic medals was due to genetics. I would contend that the nation didn’t have a sporting culture and that given the right role models and training, a generation would rise that would debunk nonsensical racial theories.

The Olympics are about individual outliers and in nations such as India and China, whose population exceed a billion, eventually, the system will find these outliers. Of course, these individuals have to train hard and compete, and that will certainly not be easy. However, anyone who has read any book on sports science, or on the Kenyan and Ethiopian runners knows that the edge is caused by a highly competitive & structured running culture which surfaces individual outliers.

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The whole point of this post is that public discourse that considers superficial markers that makes generalizations of populations misses the mark. Individuals migrate and there is no way one can predict the attributes - the right stuff - that can make a migrant integrate successfully into the US. What we do know is that all ethnicities that migrate to other countries adopt the culture of the countries and integrate within two generations.

There is but one exception, viz; religion. There are clear statistics on the lack of integration of citizens, especially women, of one religion in most countries. But that post for when I’ve retired from the corporate world.