Immigrants and foreign policy
Posted on April 28th, 2009
by Scott McConnell |
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Here’s a piece I wrote for World Affairs on immigration and foreign policy. It’s the kind of thing that should prompt disagreements among TAC readers, since it argues that sensible immigration and foreign policies don’t necessarily follow one from the other. A jokey alternative title might be “How I learned to stop worrying and love muliticulturalism.”
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It is interesting perspective. I can see how immigration can be a counterweight to a hawkish foreign policy. I think it could be a tool for further militarization at home (keep the peace) and aboard (Cuban Americans vs Castro). Ahmed Chalabi who is a Shia muslim born in Iraq desired war against the Sunni controlled Baathist regime in Iraq. The states of the world are not divided along tribal lines.
What ethnic group wouldn’t want to use the most powerful military on the planet to take out enemies in their homeland with the backing of wealthy interest groups that seek control of dwindling resources and profits made from the Military Keynesianism?
Our society promotes and encourages this behavior. I don’t think the elite that tells people what to think is going to have a major change in foreign policy. The enemy may change but the purpose will remain the same.
I think a comparison to the politics of European countries could be useful. Here, at least in Scandinavia, the parties which are most critical of immigration and immigrants are also usually those who favor the most hawkish foreign policies. Anti-islamism can often make people both reject immigration and multiculturalism and turn them into supporters of western occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and cheerleaders of Israeli wars.
On the other hand, most antiwar voices are leftists with little or nothing critical to say about immigration.
The dynamics might be different in the USA, partly because most immigrants are coming from different parts of the world (Latin Americans in the USA and North Africans/Middle Easterners/South Asians in Europe) than were the major wars are happening. So the mass backlash against immigration can not be as easily exploited by neoconservative politicians to rally support for an interventionist foreign policy.
But mass immigration may lead to a more interventionist foreign policy. Not because most immigrants support it, but because it can make the non-immigrant part of the population more gullible to jingoism.