Everything good depends upon discrimination to survive, but for those who don’t think, “discrimination” is a dirty word.<\/p>\n
Every living thing should be expected to seek their self-interest and to try to preserve their world from invasive species<\/a>. Why would birds want to allow cats in their habitat to kill them? Why would deer want to allow lions in? Why would dolphins welcome killer sharks? Why would non-Muslims want to allow Muslims in? Why would Europeans welcome a migration of Africans?<\/p>\n New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n The aim of a state\u2019s immigration policy has to be one that would-be immigrants ought to accept as reasonable (even if in practice they disagree with it). For example, it is legitimate for a state to admit only high-skilled immigrants if this serves its economic goals, despite the fact that this policy may be unpopular with low-skilled migrants. By contrast, it is illegitimate for a state to admit only people of a certain skin color, or to have a \u201ctemporary\u201d migrant policy (say, for guest workers) that in actuality creates a semi-permanent two-caste system. An unfortunate policy is O.K. An unfair one is not.<\/p>\n Does that distinction seem as if it might get blurry in practice? The early history of immigration policy in America, as told by the historian Douglas C. Baynton in DEFECTIVES IN THE LAND: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (University of Chicago, $35), suggests so. Traditionally, scholars have divided that history into two periods: a \u201cselective\u201d phase starting in 1882, which in large part (aside from the Chinese Exclusion Act) involved screening out individuals with any \u201cdefect\u201d that would render them \u201clikely to become a public charge\u201d; and a \u201crestrictive phase\u201d starting with the passage of a \u00adliteracy test in 1917, which marked the beginning of a series of proxy measures for keeping out whole nationalities or races. Using Miller\u2019s principles, you might condone much of the first phase but condemn the second.<\/p>\n Yet Baynton, challenging the conventional historiography, argues that the selective phase of American immigration policy, despite its heavy reliance on the \u00adsensible-sounding \u201cpublic charge\u201d standard, was no less discriminatory. During those years, he demonstrates, immigration officials could and did customarily invoke this standard to rule out such \u201cdefectives\u201d as women unaccompanied by male providers and members of races with supposed \u201cpredispositions\u201d to criminality. Even those with \u201cobjective\u201d physical impairments (as the Americans with Disabilities Act would underscore many years later) were incapable of work only if you made certain assumptions about how workplaces were to be structured. So beware \u201creasonable\u201d justifications for immigration policies, Baynton warns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everything good depends upon discrimination to survive, but for those who don’t think, “discrimination” is a dirty word. Every living thing should be expected to seek their self-interest and to try to preserve their world from invasive species. Why would … Continue reading