The April 5, 2004 edi­tion of the New York­er had a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about height. (Inci­den­tal­ly, I high­ly rec­om­mend The Com­plete New York­er.) It cen­ters on a researcher named John Kom­los, an anthro­po­met­ric econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich, and work he’s done to trace heights of dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tions over time. In con­sid­er­ing the effects of immi­grants on a soci­ety and vice ver­sa, it’s worth con­sid­er­ing what we real­ly ought to con­sid­er intrin­sic. As the author of the arti­cle notes, “height, like skin col­or, seems to vary with geog­ra­phy: we think of squat Peru­vians, slen­der Masai, stocky Inu­it, and lanky Brazil­ians.” We intu­itive­ly assign those sorts of region­al dif­fer­ences to genet­ics, hard-wired lim­i­ta­tions of a par­tic­u­lar people. 

As the author explains:

In the ear­ly nine­teen-sev­en­ties, when the anthro­pol­o­gist Bar­ry Bogin first vis­it­ed Guatemala, the coun­try’s two main eth­nic groups seemed to live on dif­fer­ent social planes. The Ladi­nos, who claimed pri­mar­i­ly Span­ish ances­try, were of aver­age height. The Maya Indi­ans were so short that some schol­ars called them the pyg­mies of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca: the men aver­aged only five feet two, the women four feet eight. The Ladi­nos and the Maya shared the same small coun­try, so their dif­fer­ences were assumed to be genet­ic. But when Bogin … began tak­ing mea­sure­ments he soon found anoth­er cause. “There was an unde­clared war going on,” he says. The Ladi­nos, who con­trolled the gov­ern­ment, had sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly forced the Maya into pover­ty. Whether they lived in the city or in the coun­try­side, the Maya had less food and med­i­cine, and they had much high­er rates of disease.

A decade and a half lat­er, after civ­il war had erupt­ed and up to a mil­lion Guatemalans had fled to the Unit­ed States, Bogin took anoth­er series of mea­sure­ments. This time, his sub­jects were Mayan refugees, between six and twelve years old, in Flori­da and Los Ange­les. “Lo and behold, they were much taller than the Maya in Guatemala,” Bogin says. By 2000, the Amer­i­can Maya were four inch­es taller than Guatemalan Maya of the same age, and about as tall as Guatemalan Ladi­nos. “As far as I know, it’s the biggest increase of its kind ever mea­sured,” Bogin says. “It shows that they weren’t genet­i­cal­ly small. They weren’t pyg­mies. They were suffering.”

Much the same trans­for­ma­tion has occurred in the Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion. Since the nine­teen-twen­ties, the medi­an height of Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can teenagers has near­ly reached the Unit­ed States norm.

Height, of course, is not a fac­tor peo­ple talk about in terms of set­ting immi­gra­tion lev­els. Intel­li­gence, work eth­ic, crim­i­nal­i­ty and lech­ery are much more com­mon fea­tures of the debate. On the sim­plest lev­el, my point is that if immi­gra­tion can change some­thing as unques­tion­ably genet­i­cal­ly con­trolled as height, why should we think it would­n’t change some­thing as def­i­n­i­tion­al­ly cul­tur­al as “her­itage” or social behav­ior. (For more on her­itage, see my posts “Amer­i­can Her­itage” and “More on Her­itage.”)

There is a more impor­tant les­son to be learned from the exam­ple of height among Mex­i­cans and Guatemalans. 

The first thing to point out is the role of eco­nom­ics in some­thing as sim­ple as height. The insti­tu­tion­al­ized caste sys­tem in Guatemala, which is basi­cal­ly the same as what exists through­out Latin Amer­i­ca, has pro­found effects on health, wealth and wel­fare of the dif­fer­ent castes. Look­ing at Mex­i­can immi­grants and observ­ing that they are poor, less edu­cat­ed, etc., etc., as if those were all inde­pen­dent fac­tors is a mis­take. They are com­ing here because they are poor, and pover­ty has a num­ber of obvi­ous cor­re­lates. As a nutri­tion­ist told the New York­er, “Iodine defi­cien­cy alone can knock off ten cen­time­ters and fif­teen I.Q. points.” Improp­er nutri­tion is both a cause and a con­se­quence of pover­ty. Intel­li­gence is both a cause and a con­se­quence of pover­ty. Poor edu­ca­tion is a cause and con­se­quence of pover­ty, and a cause and con­se­quence of poor nutri­tion, and a cause and con­se­quence of low I.Q. If there are forces pre­vent­ing peo­ple from cross­ing class bound­aries, those inter­lock­ing feed­back loops can trap a com­mu­ni­ty in pover­ty indefinitely.

That phe­nom­e­non is obvi­ous in the Guatemalan exam­ple, and the New York­er offers oth­ers. In Hol­land, the growth of colo­nial wealth did not pro­duce a change in soci­etal height, but as the pros­per­i­ty spread to the whole of soci­ety, heights did increase. The Dutch, like most Euro­peans, are sub­stan­tial­ly taller than cit­i­zens of the US. Why? Kom­los and oth­er researchers quot­ed by the New York­er strong­ly sug­gest that the ris­ing income inequal­i­ty and income immo­bil­i­ty in our nation can explain the difference.

Regard­less of those details of the dynam­ic with­in our soci­ety, it’s clear that immi­grants from Latin Amer­i­ca ben­e­fit by escap­ing the much more reg­i­ment­ed class sys­tem that exists in their home coun­tries. They do inte­grate into Amer­i­can soci­ety, and it would be well worth exam­in­ing what bar­ri­ers we impose that pre­vent them from inte­grat­ing more suc­cess­ful­ly, and how we are allow­ing the lega­cy of racist poli­cies in those home coun­tries to dri­ve our own actions here.

Con­sid­er edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy. For­mer Kansas Board of Edu­ca­tion mem­ber Con­nie Mor­ris won her seat by talk­ing about deny­ing chil­dren of ille­gal immi­grants access to pub­lic edu­ca­tion. Set­ting aside that the legal bat­tle on that front was over more than a decade ear­li­er. Edu­ca­tion is the sil­ver bul­let. It plays a vital role in inte­grat­ing soci­ety, and is the pri­ma­ry venue for admin­is­ter­ing child­hood anti-pover­ty pro­grams like school lunch­es, screen­ings for treat­able child­hood dis­eases, and anti-gang after school pro­grams. Deny­ing chil­dren of ille­gal immi­grants access to schools (which hap­pens de fac­to, what­ev­er the Supreme Court may have ruled) sim­ply traps those chil­dren, many of whom are native-born cit­i­zens of this coun­try, in the cycle of poverty.

Sim­i­lar argu­ments apply to attempts to deny ille­gal immi­grants access to var­i­ous social pro­grams. The more fear­ful we make them of offi­cial paper­work, the less like­ly they are to have car insur­ance (but they still have to dri­ve to get to work and to feed the fam­i­ly) or even to get mar­ried offi­cial­ly. They are less like­ly to seek police pro­tec­tion, and are there­fore sus­cep­ti­ble to con­trol by gangs or exploita­tive boss­es. They are less able to stand up for the right to form a union, or sim­ply to demand the legal­ly required min­i­mum wage. All of which traps them in pover­ty, which traps their chil­dren in poverty.

Edward Abbey said many, many smart things, and many, many offen­sive things. An essay that per­fect­ly bal­anced those ten­den­cies is his essay “Immi­gra­tion and Lib­er­al Taboos,” anthol­o­gized in One Life at a Time, Please. He describes it as his favorite in the book, in part because of its his­to­ry of rejec­tion begin­ning with the New York Times op-ed pages, end­ing with pub­li­ca­tion in the Phoenix New Times. He essen­tial­ly argues for iso­la­tion­ism: seal the bor­ders to all new immi­grants, and to all exports of Amer­i­can force and influ­ence on our neigh­bors, at least until we sort out our own inter­nal prob­lems. To that pro­pos­al, I’d only assent if I actu­al­ly thought we could solve those prob­lems in a rea­son­able time frame. We can’t, but I think Abbey’s argu­ment for that cause is more com­pelling than the argu­ment you’d get from Lou Dobbs. I’ll let the sec­ond part of Abbey’s case speak for itself:

Ah, yes. But what about those hun­gry hun­dreds of mil­lions, those anx­ious bil­lions, yearn­ing toward the Unit­ed States from every dark and des­per­ate cor­ner of the world? Shall we sim­ply ignore them? Reject them? Is such a course possible?

“Pover­ty,” said Samuel John­son, “is the great ene­my of human hap­pi­ness. It cer­tain­ly destroys lib­er­ty, makes some virtues imprac­ti­ca­ble, and all virtues extreme­ly difficult.”

You can say that again, Sam.

Pover­ty, injus­tice, over­breed­ing, over­pop­u­la­tion, suf­fer­ing, oppres­sion, mil­i­tary rule, squalor, tor­ture, ter­ror, mas­sacre: these ancient evils feed and breed on one anoth­er in syn­er­gis­tic sym­bio­sis. To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equi­ty – and birth con­trol. Our His­pan­ic neigh­bors are grop­ing toward this dis­cov­ery. If we tru­ly wish to help them, we must stop med­dling in their domes­tic trou­bles and per­mit them to car­ry out the social, polit­i­cal, and moral rev­o­lu­tion which is both nec­es­sary and inevitable.

Or if we must med­dle, as we have always done, let us med­dle for a change in a con­struc­tive way. Stop every campesino at our south­ern bor­der, give him a hand­gun, a good rifle, and a case of ammu­ni­tion, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wish­es. The peo­ple know who their ene­mies are.

Need­less to say, I’m not endors­ing seal­ing the bor­ders, nor am I in favor of foment­ing and arm­ing vio­lent revolts through­out Latin Amer­i­ca. Our nation’s his­to­ry teach­es the dan­gers inher­ent in that course of action.

But the peo­ple do know who their ene­mies are, and guns are not the only tools avail­able to them to fix their prob­lems. At the end of the day, the flow of immi­grants from Latin Amer­i­ca is a sim­ple con­se­quence of our nation’s eco­nom­ic suc­cess, and the crush­ing eco­nom­ic fail­ure of their own gov­ern­ments’ eco­nom­ic poli­cies. Unless we can raise the cost of cross­ing the bor­der any­where close to the prof­it to be made by cross­ing it, the flow of immi­grants, legal or ille­gal, will not stop. 

This gives us three options. Raise the cost of cross­ing the bor­der enor­mous­ly high. Low­er our stan­dard of liv­ing. Raise their stan­dard of liv­ing. I con­sid­er the first unre­al­is­ti­cal­ly expen­sive, and deci­sive­ly inhu­mane. The sec­ond option would be silli­ness, and prob­a­bly not pos­si­ble with­out actu­al­ly destroy­ing infra­struc­ture. I favor the third option as both the most moral­ly ide­al and most feasible.

The evi­dence from sim­ple things like aver­age heights or com­pli­cat­ed things like polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic free­dom in indus­tri­al­iz­ing coun­tries all tells us that pro­found social changes fol­low from increas­es in what Abbey above refers to as social equi­ty. Indeed, social equi­ty is a force that dri­ves the sec­ond force Abbey refers to: birth con­trol. But that’s a top­ic for anoth­er day.