Immigration, Globalism, and the New American Empire

Prologue In our day, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand ... is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted. --Karl Marx, speech at the anniversary of People's Paper, 1856 world in which we live is both remarkably comfortable and thoroughly miserable. There is unprecedented prosperity in the world, which is incomparably richer than ever before ... But ours is also a world of extraordinary deprivation and of staggering inequality ... dual presence of opulence and agony ... makes it hard to avoid fundamental questions about the ethical acceptability of the prevailing arrangements and about our own values and their relevance and reach. --Amartya K. Sen, Globalization and Values, 2001 Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but empire describes the awesome thing America is becoming? ... Being an imperial power, however, is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there may be in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants ... while exempting itself from other rules ... that go against its interests. --Michael Ignatieff, from The Burden, New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003 INTRODUCTION excerpts quoted in the Prologue span more than 150 years of recent human history, right up to the present moment, and capture at least two old realities and one new one. To some, the first of the old realities seems almost biblical--the poor you will always have with you--and from that emanates the biblical desire to make them more secure in their poverty, rather than to eliminate it, as was Lyndon Baines Johnson's bold intent when he signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (Levitan, 1969). A second old reality follows on the heels of the first: while these thinkers can point us either toward pessimism or optimism, they beckon all of us to the need for an appraisal of our values and actions toward the great mass of socio-economically disenfranchised peoples throughout the world. What makes this call an old one, of course, is that it has been raised almost continually through the last two millennia by as diverse a cast as Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Dwight David Eisenhower, and, even sometimes, the editors and writers at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But it is the new reality reported by Ignatieff that makes this a historically unique context in which to make these observations, and summons us to reflection and action. This is, of course, the self-conscious emergence of the United States as the Western Hemisphere's newest and imperial power. I will not go into the distinctions Ignatieff draws between the kind of imperial power the United States now wields and that commanded by its 20th Century predecessors, e.g., the English, the French, the Germans, the Ottomans, or the Soviets, leaving that to writers already embarked on that project (e.g., most provocatively, Hardt and Negri, 2001). …