tracing woodgrain

The fights over Haitian immigration have made me think about Mormonism and immigration again.

One thing I've always admired about Mormonism is its eagerness to proselytize to anyone who will listen. They currently have some 25,000 members in Haiti, and have built a temple there. I respect that. 

In Sydney, on my own mission, I taught very few white Australians. Access to the English-language internet puts people off Mormonism, for some reason. It doesn't get many bites from educated westerners. I taught lots of overseas Chinese students struggling to pass the English-language test that would let them stay, spent time around Tongans and Samoans in a poor part of town, visited people in decrepit public housing. I was ecstatic whenever any of them expressed interest.

People experience a certain role reversal around proselyting and immigration. Progressives blanch at the "colonialism" inherent in traveling to poor overseas countries to tell them what they ought to believe, but tend to feel strongly that western countries ought to welcome immigrants of all stripes. Religious conservatives put immense time and effort into traveling overseas to spread their doctrine and culture, but have made their peace with the American conservatism that has grown warier and warier of immigration.

I won't pretend the multicultural nature of Mormonism led to no problems. In every Australian mission I am aware of, a large, quiet part of the mission president's job is smoothing over cultural gaps between the pacific islander and Utah-white missionaries. Painting in broad strokes, the Utah missionaries tend to be more immersed in LDS doctrine and culture, more doggedly obedient to mission rules more educated. There are exceptions! There are always exceptions, but that pattern leads to a thousand tiny tension points for leaders to handle and for missionaries to experience. It's all muted relative to the outside world: for a Mormon missionary, a crisis looks like "went out alone" or, heaven forbid, "kissed a girl." But when you feel disobedience carries divine consequences, even trivial things feel catastrophic.

"Beg and plead for people to join your organization, dreaming impossibly of filling the whole world" has always been the ethos of Mormonism, though, with very little thought to online-right fixations like national IQ, and (though it remained a stain on their organization for too long) little thought to race for the past half-century. 

I fundamentally admire that. If somebody wants to work with me, I want to work with them.

Immigration, entailing physical movement, is not precisely the same as religious conversion. As much as I would like to take the same attitude towards it, I respect practical concerns. At the core, though, I have the same sense: if people want to work with me, I want to work with them. If it causes problems? Problems of growth are good problems. Healthy problems. I want to understand how they can be solved.

What principles should the US follow on immigration? My instinct suggests a few:

1. A country's primary duty is to its citizens. It can and should treat citizens and noncitizens differently.

2. If foreigners want to be subject to my country, I want them to become so. The more territory, and the more people, want to be subject to a country, the better. 

3. Immigration that takes resources without returning them is unsustainable. 

4. If current policy makes an influx of people a net negative, it is a problem with the policy, not the people.

I hear right-wingers talk about pathological altruism, and I don't think that's impossible. Immigrants should be net contributors, and if recent migrants, legal or illegal, receive more in benefits than they return to their communities, I think it represents a policy failure. If that means 'heartless' actions like restricting benefits from immigrants, so be it. If that means explicitly treating crimes by non-citizens more harshly than crimes by citizens, so be it. The same for any other policy levers that might make a difference, including off-the-wall propositions like requiring prospective immigrants to pay US taxes for years before entering or requiring a simpler entry free. 

But in my home of Utah, which is and always was founded even more firmly on immigration than the United States as a whole, I never dreamed of building a parochial community focused only on preserving one quiet corner of the world.

I dreamed of an empire, expanding to fill the world. Always voluntary, always preserving exit rights—but always expanding to anyone who wanted to be part of it. I dreamed of proselytizing, of inviting immigration, of building something worthy of leading as much of the world as would be led.

I no longer see Mormonism as the vehicle to achieve the goal. But why would the goal itself be wrong? Why, if people want to join with me, should I not welcome them? They will exist regardless. Given the choice, I would rather have them on my side.

The last states were admitted to the USA before my parents were born. Only two have been admitted in the past century. Physical expansion, at some point, fell out of fashion. But why should it? 

Immigration and expansion go hand in hand, signs of a vital civilization. People should want to join with us. We should live and build so that the value of our culture is self-evident. And then, if they want in—

Why not figure out how to expand? 

The Voluntary American Empire awaits.