Most Americans are concerned about the current state of higher education. It’s no secret that mainstream U.S. universities have morphed from hubs for objective scholarly inquiry into radical left indoctrination centers. And students transgress against the anti-American open borders orthodoxy at their own peril. However, a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, “Like it or Not, Immigrant Children Are Our Future,” reveals just how far off the rails twenty-first century academics have drifted.
The essay was authored by Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, the Dean of the Graduate School of Education at UCLA and Carola Suárez-Orozco, the co-director of the Institute for Immigration, Globalization and Education at UCLA. Both hold PhDs. And both have had lengthy careers in academia. Yet, even working as co-authors, neither seems to be able to say anything relevant about immigration.
They begin with this jargon-laden nonsense: “An entirely new cartography of immigration is unfolding in real time.” If you’re scratching your head, don’t beat yourself up. I have almost as many degrees as the Suárez-Orozcos – and two decades of practical experience dealing with immigration issues – and I have no idea what that means either.
And, over the course of roughly 800 words, it doesn’t become any clearer. According to the Professors Suárez-Orozcos, “there are a cluster of impediments to integration that are particular to the current era of globalization.” But fear not, “scholars, educators and practitioners are coming together in a global ‘network of networks,’ endeavoring to move the needle in supporting immigrant youth.”
So…what’s the actual conundrum being addressed? It appears to be some vague riff on the standard far-left narrative: Developing-world immigrants are somehow more motivated than the current populations of the nations they seek to enter, and therefore essential to the continued success of those countries. Citizens of receiving nations who believe in borders and sovereignty are racist, rather than merely patriotic or practical. It is malice that blinds the citizens of Western democracies to all of the benefits of “diversity” that come with unchecked mass migration. We need immigrants to “fix” Judeo-Christian culture and save it from itself. Ergo, any limits on immigration are “racist” or “xenophobic” rather than reasonable or practical.
That narrative is absurd on its face. And the lack of coherence behind the argument is exactly why it must be expressed using highfalutin gobbledygook, instead of clear, analytical prose. Immigration is a complex issue that implicates everything from sovereignty to charity and all that lies between. It cannot be reduced to absurd ad hominem simplicities like “racism” or “xenophobia,” even when those over-simplifications are couched in complicated-sounding academic lingo.
Thus, we live in a world where average citizens regularly make substantive, useful observations about immigration policy in 280-character tweets but two PhDs drone on for 800 plus words and succeed only in saying absolutely nothing about the very same issues.