Information (in the Hands of Potential Migrants) Is a Key Factor in the Size of the Inward Flows
My CIS colleagues keep telling us that people flooding across our southern border are highly likely to know what they are doing, and are up to date on Biden Administration’s de facto decision to open the door as widely as it can.
That thought led me to a distantly-related notion: one of the reasons I am here, rather than in New Zealand, where I spent a very happy time as a Fulbright student in the mid fifties, is because of a lack of information on my part at the time.
To reminisce a bit, in 1954 I was a recent college grad and was working for an up-and-coming advertising agency in New York, Ted Bates and Company. It was a cutting-edge place, soon to have the distinction of placing the first TV advertisements for a presidential candidate in American history, one Dwight D. Eisenhower. I had not sought the job as a publicist there, it had sought me.
A bit of an idealist, I was uneasy at work in that I was not sure that I wanted to stay in the business. Further I had a lot of chums who had studied overseas at someone else’s expense, and I was jealous of them.
I decided to apply to only to English-speaking countries.
This is where I (successfully) applied a bit of knowledge or informed speculation. I did not want to go to South Africa, because of its racial policies, and this left me with UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Though I had a magna cum laude degree from Princeton I was worried about my ability to compete, and thus sought the nation were there would be the smallest number of candidates, which I figured would be New Zealand.
I hit that one on the head; unbeknownst to me (prior to my arrival in Wellington) there were twelve Fulbright slots in that country that year and all of six applicants. There was to be a seventh; Laura had wanted to study dairy cows in Denmark, but spoke no Danish, so she was diverted to New Zealand, which has many cows. So something like information caused me to get the scholarship.
Once there I fell head-over-heels in love with Merelle, a grad student in library science; I wanted to marry her and take her back to the U.S.; she was, in turn at least very fond of me, but did not want to leave her home country. I had found out that the UN, then a new outfit, had a big library and no New Zealand employees; perhaps she could work there. But she wanted to stay in New Zealand, I could not figure out how to get a job there (no OPT program is NZ then) and Ted Bates wanted me back. We did not marry.
This is where lack of information changed my life (and perhaps Merelle’s). I knew nothing about immigration at the time and did not know that as a spouse of a kiwi citizen I could get a work permit. So I returned to New York alone. While my temporary migration to New Zealand was in part facilitated by information, by departure from it was caused, at least in part, by my lack of it.
So, I am writing this from Washington, not Wellington.
All this buttresses my strong suggestion that if and when the Biden administration changes its mind and starts enforcing the immigration law, it must make maximum efforts, through all kinds of media, to tell the story of the new rules.
This cannot be just a series of press releases, it must be an all-hands-on-deck effort to reach the would-be migrants via radio, television, and word-of-mouth, including maybe some workers stationed at the other end of the Darien Gap, telling people about the terrors of that trip, and its uselessness once one arrived at the Rio Grande.
