To make America white again

January 31, 2018

Trump’s misguided drive to ‘make America white again’

Riad Tabbarah| The Daily Star

The hegemony of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (the WASPs), later the “non-Hispanic whites,” on the social, economic and political life of the United States lasted some 350 years, beginning with the establishment of the first British colony on the American continent in the early 17th century. 

The “self-evident [truth] that all men are created equal,” found in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, did not include blacks and Indians, or indentured white workers. Practically all the founding fathers owned slaves and fought the Indians to near oblivion.

Throughout this period, Americans fought to keep America white. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by Congress only three years after the adoption of the Constitution, restricted citizenship to “free white persons” of “good moral character,” who have resided in the United States for two years (it was revised in 1795 and 1798 mainly to increase the residency requirement, eventually to 14 years).

The gold rush of 1848 in California, followed by the railroad boom beginning in 1862, resulted in a massive migration to the west of the United States, which included Chinese laborers. So in 1892, as a result of the popular perception of a “Yellow Peril,” Congress passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act” of 1882 which banned the immigration of ethnic Chinese to the United States.

For the Japanese, a “gentleman’s agreement” was informally agreed between the U.S. president and the Japanese government in 1907, which annulled a previous treaty between the two countries that assured the free migration of Japanese to the United States. According to the new agreement, the Japanese government would not issue passports to its citizens who intended to migrate to the United States.

The Immigration Act of 1924 was the first to limit the overall number of migrants coming into the United States. It traced the countries of national origins of the existing population as per the 1890 Census and assigned quotas of 2 percent to each country. This made the overwhelming majority of those eligible for immigration British and Western European. But just to make sure, it effectively banned the immigration of people of Asian lineage.

This Act remained in effect until 1965. Thus, from 1790 until 1965, the main purpose of immigration policy after independence was to ensure that the population of the United States remained overwhelmingly white, that is, of Western European stock. This policy was quite successful.

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 helped change all this. It gave up the quota system and replaced it with one that favored the reunification of families and attracting skilled workers needed by the United States. The reunification, referred to sometimes as “chain migration,” favored the non-Europeans and was cumulative.

Thus, a relative who was brought in under the new rule could, after receiving the citizenship papers, bring in members of his or her family and so on. Add to this the fact that the differential natural increase also favored non-Europeans, as was the naturalization of most of the illegal migrants, the percent of the white population fell sharply after 1965.

While until the 1950s, the proportion of “non-Hispanic White” population never went much below 90 percent of total U.S. population, it has fallen to 60 percent at present.

Trump’s immigration policy has its roots, therefore, in American history. It is in essence a continuation of policies since independence interrupted by the immigration law of 1965 and related events. Trump has promised to deport all undocumented Latinos, including the children under the DACA program, and to build a wall and additional security at the southern border to make sure they won’t come back.

He signed several Exclusion Act type executive orders banning persons from some Muslim majority countries from coming to the United States that were thrown out in Federal Courts, but one has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court for decision. He has strongly favored the abolition of “chain migration” and any other type of migration that favors poor non-European countries (such as the diversity visa lottery). The recent statement he made at a migration meeting with Senators demeaning migrants from Haiti and El Salvador and from “s ?hole” African countries, while advocating migration from Norway, summarizes his desire to go back to pre-1965.

But times have changed and here lies the difference. While the Exclusion Act was passed to keep the status quo of an overwhelmingly white America, the proposed new measures are aimed at reversing the trend in an America that has already become largely multiethnic. In other words, while the Exclusion Act of 1882 was enacted to “keep America white,” the new measures are designed to “make America white again.”

But can America be made white again? Extremely unlikely. The reason is that, aside from immigration, the natural increase of the white population is negative while that of all other groups is positive, generally above 1 percent. Ethnic projections of the U.S. population by the Pew Research Center indicate that, even if immigration of all other than non-Hispanic whites was cut in half today, the date at which the white population will fall below 50 percent will be postponed by one or two decades at most. The U.S. Bureau of the Census predicts that the percentage of the “non-Hispanic white” population will continue to decline, falling below 50 percent in about 25 years.

This is indeed the rational underpinning of the heated debate on immigration going on in the U.S. Congress, which lead to the recent government shutdown, a contentious debate which is likely to continue for some time. It is the struggle between nativism and globalism; between a desperate resistance to cultural change and the irreversible march of multiculturalism, which has divided Americans and is destabilizing the American political system.

Riad Tabbarah is a former ambassador of Lebanon to the United States.

https://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2018/Jan-31/436177-trumps-misguided-drive-to-make-america-white-again.ashx

Lebanese Family

Jan. 12, 2018

Lebanese family becoming a burden, not a safety net

Riad Tabbarah

The other day, I saw on television a middle-aged Syrian woman who had just lost her family to a terrorist attack. She was crying hysterically. “And now ...” she managed to exclaim, “Who’s going to take care of me in my old age!”

For this woman, like many Middle Eastern women, the family was her only social safety net, and that net suddenly vanished. It makes one think how different is Western or Northern Europe in this respect and how, the safety net of the traditional family, was replaced, minus love and affection, by an elaborate and reliable system of old-age pension. Lebanon, as usual, is a peculiar case: The traditional family, as a social safety net, is rapidly fading away and is being replaced, if only partially, by remittances, while the government is debating, ad infinitum, the establishment of a comprehensive system of old-age pension.

Yet, the Lebanese population has been aging for some time, at least since the 1970s, as couples began to produce fewer children, and people continued to live progressively longer. United Nations data show that the average age of a resident Lebanese has risen from less than 19 years in 1970 to 29 years at present. The population aged 65 years and over (the “old” by definition), represents the fastest growing age group in the population and will be so for a long time to come. While in 1970, there were eight times more children under 15 years of age than old people, it is expected that, by 2040, the number of older people will surpass that of children, and the gap between the two groups will continue to widen thereafter. Most important, at least for planning an old age pension scheme, the growth in the numbers of old resident Lebanese is expected to accelerate considerably after the end of this decade. Thus, while the number of the elderly grew annually by 3.5 percent between 2010 and 2020, it is expected to grow by 8.5 percent annually during the 20 years succeeding 2020.

A number of factors are changing the traditional family. One of these is emigration. Traditionally, emigration affected mostly males of marriageable ages, leaving a gap between the sexes at these ages. A demographic measure of this gap takes into account the typical difference in age between men and women at first marriage in computing what demographers call the “availability of mate ratio,” which presumable measures the availability of marriageable males to females. In Lebanon this translates into a ratio of around eight males to 10 females which, added to other economic and social considerations, has resulted in a high-celibacy rates among Lebanese women. At present, it is estimated that more than 20 percent of women aged 45-49 years are never married, as against 10 percent of men. What has eased this situation lately, is the fact that single Lebanese women have, in the past couple of decades, begun themselves to emigrate, in search of work abroad, in the Gulf and other destinations.

Another factor affecting the traditional Lebanese family is the increasing rate of divorce. Since 1970, the percent of divorced persons among the population 15 years and over has risen considerably for both sexes. Yet, there are at present approximately twice as many divorced women than divorced men. The reason is that divorced men generally remarry much more often than divorced women.

Widowhood remained fairly stable at about 6 percent of the population for 15 years and over since 1970. So did the gap between male and female rates. There are approximately five times more widows than widowers in Lebanon. This ratio is even higher in most other Arab countries. One reason is that women live two to three years longer than men, but the main reason, here again, is that widowed men remarry much more often than widowed women.

Finally, the intensive emigration of the young has also had a major effect on the traditional family. A large number of older couples live alone because their children have migrated. Some of those who are in financial need do receive material support from their children or other relatives abroad in the form of remittances. Lebanon received last year some $8 billion from Lebanese working abroad. This of course helps since it goes in large part to those left behind who are generally with modest means. But that does not change the fact that it is an additional factor in changing the role of the family from safety net to economic burden.

These factors have not only shrunk the average size of household, (from 5.4 in 1970 to less than four at present), they have, more importantly, resulted in an ever-increasing proportion of one and two persons households, which constitutes at present as much as a quarter of the total. These households are typically composed of older couples whose children are living abroad, or of never-marrieds, divorced or widowed persons, mostly women. A 2009 survey by the Central Administration of Statistics showed, for example, that the heads of single person households were 59 percent women.

The decline in fertility, intensive emigration of the young and the aging of the Lebanese population, which has begun in earnest, are changing the structure of demand for services in the country. One of the more important of these changes is that arising from the oncoming rapid increase in the older age group, accompanied by a diminishing capacity of the family to contain it. This is creating, among other things, a rapidly increasing need for old-people’s homes, which already are overcrowded, and where the waiting period for admission sometimes exceeds the expectation of life of the elderly requesting entry; and this in spite of the mushrooming of unsupervised and inadequate institutions trying to fill the gap.

This situation urgently requires a comprehensive policy for the aged, based on a serious demographic and actuarial study that takes into account the rapidly increasing future growth of demand. Spontaneous financial measures by the government, irrespective of the goodwill behind them, are bound to face bankruptcy before long because of the coming rapid acceleration in the growth of the elderly group in Lebanese society.

Riad Tabbarah is the author of the book “Lebanon: Development and Human Problems by the Numbers,” (in Arabic) from which much of the information for this article is taken and documented.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 12, 2018, on page 7.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2018/Jan-12/433355-lebanese-family-becoming-a-burden-not-a-safety-net.ashx