“He dominates his area. He is protected by good clothing, good houses, and good food. But in his fight for dominance he has pushed out others of his species who were not so fit to dominate and perhaps these have become wanderers, improperly clothed, ill fed, having no security and no fixed base. These should really perish, but the reverse seems true. The dominant human, in his security, grows soft and fearful. He spends a great part of his time in protecting himself. Far from reproducing rapidly, he has fewer children and the ones he does have are ill protected inside themselves because so thoroughly protected from without. The lean and hungry grow strong, and the strongest of them are selected out. Having nothing to lose and all to gain, these selected hungry and rapacious ones develop attack rather than defense techniques, and become strong in them, so that one day the dominant man is eliminated and the strong and hungry wanderer takes his place.”
“And the routine is repeated. The new dominant entrenches himself and then softens.”
--John Steinbeck, 1941
The prescience of Steinbeck never fails to amaze. I'm sure that many who read this passage, from The Log from the Sea of Cortez, would be quick to draw parallels between this paragraph and the supposed decline and imminent doom of the American "empire." What with China on the rise and advertising slots to sell, the narrative of a great nation in decline is a sure-fire winner.
What I think is missing, though, is the impact of immigration. When Steinbeck talks about the dominant becoming soft and having fewer, less-capable offspring, he neglects to account for the possibility of fresh, hungry, new blood being introduced (fair enough, Steinbeck was talking about old, rich families - not nations - in the passage above). The "lean and hungry" who invariably overthrow the entrenched softies - for generations these have been the immigrants arriving on American shores; these have been the people keeping alive the hunger that keeps alive the economic and cultural dominance of America. These people have provided the fresh blood that has kept America the culturally vibrant and economically dominant power that it is today - for a look at the alternative universe, look no further than any number of European countries with laws that, for fear of competition, severely restrict the immigration of educated workers...limited GDP growth, declining populations, three-month summer vacations for all. Sounds like Steinbeck hit the nail on the head with those.
This is what was so troubling with Bush policy that greatly restricts the number of educated immigrants that are allowed to enter the US. This is what is so troubling with some of the protectionist sentiments in America that call for even more restrictive immigration policy - TARP recipients, for instance, could no longer employ H-1B visa holders, causing many an educated immigrant to return to their home country to ply their talents. It's the defensiveness that Steinbeck refers to coming around to bite us in the ass - fearful for our own jobs, wary of a stagnant unemployment rate, we think that the best solution is to eliminate as much competition as possible. Has there been a clearer case of cutting off one's nose to spite the face?
We are a country of immigrants. Immigrants are who made America, who made it the great country it is, and who will make it the great country it can be for generations to come. What a shame, then, that once many of these "immigrants" became "Americans," they suddenly started to play protect-the-pie, forgetting not only their history but also compromising their futures.
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