By LLEWELLYN KING
By LLEWELLYN KING
New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — Delegates filing into the party nominating conventions over the next two weeks might be advised to contemplate the advice of Francis Macdonald Cornford, a professor of ancient philosophy at Cambridge University before World War II.
Cornford said: “Nothing is ever done until everyone is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else.”
The conventioneers of the left and the right are pretty sure of what should be done, and have been sure of it for a long time. They simply don’t agree on how to do it.
They agree that the federal deficit has to be cut, entitlements have to be reined in, trade is good if it is fair and America’s dominant role in the world needs to be continued. They don’t agree on defense spending, taxes and social issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and role of religion in public life. Then there is immigration — the painful issue. They agree that legal immigration, under the current law, is all right. The big and bitter disagreement is over the 11 million illegals in the United States.
America is not welcoming of mass immigration. So just what are New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, the world’s most successful multimedia mogul, and William “Bill” Daley, the Chicago businessman who once sat at the right hand of power as President Obama’s chief of staff, cooking up?
This unlikely trio has been on the road calling for more immigration. They see it as the only solution to America’s problems, and their text is taken from a new study conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy.
Bloomberg, echoed by Murdoch and Daley, says that if we don’t open up to immigration, we are committing national suicide. The trio made their pitch at the Economic Club of Chicago; Bloomberg and Murdoch made it at The New England Council.
At best the ideas of Bloomberg, Murdoch and Daley have gotten polite recognition. Odd, given that two of them are the most successful publishers of their time.
Bloomberg revolutionized financial journalism and created an authentic new media empire. Sure he can’t direct that organization while he is mayor, but even so the lack of big coverage by Bloomberg’s media outlets is notable. The same is true of Murdoch. His Fox News and its commentators have been passionately anti-immigrant. Murdoch, who turned a left-wing English newspaper into a right-wing one when he bought it, has let this heresy stand.
Daley, compared to his compatriots, is more obscure. But one wonders: Did he argue for more immigrants and simpler procedures when he was White House chief of staff and met daily with Obama?
The argument, supported by complex calculations from the Partnership for a New American Economy, in its simpler form is that immigrants start 29 percent more businesses than their U.S. equivalents, and they have more babies.
The need for replacement population has always seemed evident. Social Security and Medicare — programs which are based on the life-insurance principle that the young pay for the old — can only be saved in the out-years by replacement population. That means immigration. Sadly, the immigration debate has been debased by language.
When you say “immigrant” today, you do not immediately think of Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post; Tina Brown, editor in chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast; former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; or Murdoch. We think Hispanics, who speak a foreign language that is taking root. We think not of the enhancement of our well-being by new arrivals, but rather of conquest by stealth from the South; of a creeping usurpation of what we are by what we are not.
What we really are is the sum of our parts which, when we get it right, is greater than those parts. If the Bloomberg-Murdoch-Daley troika is right, we need to leave behind what we thought we had agreed upon and to agree upon something else.
Think of immigration as national nourishment, not as another mouth to be fed, and harness the talent of the 11 million in the shadows right now.