We Americans belong to a nation, whose history is close to us and often celebrated in our public life. We are proud of our success, proud of our constitution and our law, proud of our ability to hold so many interests and customs and people together in peaceful association on our continent. These accomplishments would not have been achieved, had we not thought of ourselves as a nation, bound together by territory, language, tradition and citizenship.
We expect our corporations to be citizens too. We expect them to uphold the national interest, to identify their long-term interests with the survival and success of our nation, and to respect the rights and obey the duties of the citizen. That is why we question their behavior, when they connive at large-scale law breaking, merely because it is in their short-term interest to do so. This is not, we think, how an American corporation should behave.
But there are people, and corporations, who do not think in that way. We belong, they argue, to a new world order, in which national boundaries and national identities are of ever-decreasing significance. Globalization has connected the nations in a world-wide economic web. What happens in one country has an impact everywhere else.
Corporations have adapted to this situation, and also played their part in creating it. Those firms who support the Essential Worker Coalition are only nominally American firms. In reality they are multinationals. They produce, employ, export and invest all over the world, and are driven by the laws of economics to invest and employ in whichever manner profits them best.
Such corporations begin to lose sight of the nation to which they owe their existence. They grow away from their home, as children do. And like children they are tempted by ingratitude. They no longer see the American employee as a fellow American, to whom they are bound by the duties of citizenship. They see him as part of the ‘world work-force’, in competition with workers all around the globe.
The multinationals are not alone in this attitude. There is a movement among our political elite to reject the nation and the nation state. Even though elected by the American people, they see their scope and their duties in global terms, acting as though members of a trans-national government. They establish global institutions like the WTO and the UN. They join with the European Union in campaigning against the old nation states. They shape their policies as though addressing the entire population of the world. And all the time they forget who votes for them and why.
When things are seen in this way the American worker becomes a mere statistic. He is an overpaid member of the world work-force, whose services could be replaced by someone in China costing a tenth of the price. The fact that the American worker costs so much because he is free, because he is a fellow citizen, because he is not part of some conscripted economy of slaves, is forgotten.
Likewise a multinational company, seeking to staff its new factory in Idaho or Kansas or Virginia, no longer searches the ranks of American citizens for its employees. It goes for the cheapest members of the ‘world work-force’, and if it can bring them to the plant at the American tax-payer’s expense, so much the better.
What we see here is a growing cancer on the idea of citizenship. Everything we Americans have achieved was made possible by our belief in America, as a nation of citizens united by their mutual respect. If we lose this belief, then we lose with it our pre-eminent position in the world. The multinationals come here as their haven, to enjoy the privileges and security that have been achieved through our rule of law. And they augment their profits by breaking our law, by undermining the terms of our social contract, and by hastening the day when America will no longer be the proud nation, the haven of security and the source of legal order that they now enjoy.
This is the problem that we are now confronting. And we look to our politicians to take the citizens’ part. It is not for our elected representatives to sell out to the multinationals. It is not for them to regard America as just one part of the global economy, or the American citizen as simply one member of a global workforce. Their task is to represent us and our long-term interests, against the short-term exploiters who are undermining our trust.
The ‘new world order’ is in fact a fiction. If it really existed, then it would be as easy for a corporation to settle in Mexico as to bring its Mexican workforce here. It would be as easy to obtain medical treatment in Mogadishu as in Geneva, and as easy to invest profitably in Pakistan as in France. In reality the world remains divided by national boundaries, which define the laws, the obligations and the freedoms which make business possible. And if we do not protect those national boundaries, we lose everything that depends on them — law, freedom, and also the prosperity which brings so many businesses to our shores.
We must secure our borders and end illegal immigration. We must insist on the enforcement of existing law and make it emphatically clear to our elected representatives that we will not tolerate any kind of amnesty for those who break our laws. It is the only way to make it abundantly clear to the millions of foreign nationals now contemplating entering our country illegally that they will never be rewarded if they do indeed manage to run the gauntlet of the US Border Patrol or an immigration inspector at a port of entry. Illegal aliens already here must be encouraged to leave. Those thinking of coming should be discouraged. Neither group should be promised a pathway to United States citizenship. Whenever a foreign national enters our country illegally or overstays a visa he should know beyond any doubt that he forfeits for all time the possibility of becoming an American citizen. Without this shared knowledge America will continue to be over-run by tens of millions and within a matter of decades America, home of the brave and land of the free, will cease to exist.