On a spate of issues, Democrats in America love to idealize the liberal policies of other countries. Whether on healthcare, education or the prison system, there is no shortage of left-wing pundits and politicians admonishing American practices and praising those of other countries.

Canada is a frequent recipient of this praise. On a recent trip to Toronto, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) lauded the Canadian healthcare system, proclaiming that “Our job in the U.S. is to learn from Canada and learn from other countries in the world.” But if the U.S. can learn so much from the healthcare system in Canada and the Scandinavian welfare states, why shouldn’t it do the same with regards to immigration?

Canada boasts one of the most well-integrated and economically successful immigrant populations in the world. The per-capita immigration rate in Canada is one of the highest in the world and about three times greater than America’s – even after accounting for illegal immigrants in the U.S. figures. In spite of increasing immigration levels, economic challenges and the pervasive threat of terrorism in recent years, support for immigration in Canada has not wavered. On the contrary, it recently reached an all-time high. Over 80 percent of Canadian voters view immigration as beneficial to the national economy, and over two-thirds consider multiculturalism as one of Canada’s “key positive features.

Many on the left in the US attribute the success of Canada’s immigration policies to a perception that our neighbors to the north are simply better-natured and more accepting of others than are most Americans – at least, the deplorable basket of Americans. As can be imagined, and politics aside, the reality is both far more nuanced and far more instructive.

In his compelling book The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline, Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman points out that Canada was not always such an immigrant-loving country. It may be surprising to some, but until 1960 Canada strictly adhered to a “White Canada” policy with regards to immigration so as to not “make a fundamental alteration in the character” of the country.

That policy distinguished between three types of would-be immigrants: “preferred,” “non-preferred,” and “excluded.” Canada actively sought immigrants from the first bucket, which included the British Isles and Northern Europe. The second bucket referred to applicants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The third was comprised, in effect, of everybody else.

So what happened? How did Canada go from institutionalizing “White Canada” and arguing that “Canada’s Northern environment is only suited to … white Northern races,” to embracing multiculturalism so staunchly just 50 years later?  

According to Tepperman, Canada’s 180-degree shift on immigration was largely the result of societal and economic necessity–“the country embraced immigration because it had to.” By the 1960s Canada was facing an existential crisis. Socially, ethnic tensions were coming to a head. In addition to cries for equality from the Francophone population, a new rainbow coalition of foreign-born Canadians was beginning to take shape. This so-called “Third Force” made up approximately 26% of the country’s population at the time, and, along with Canada’s Francophones, were demanding equal treatment under the law as well as equal opportunity in fact.

Economically, Canada was booming. GDP grew from 5.7 billion in 1939 to 36 billion in 1962, but a sparse population and tightening labor market were threatening to stall continuing expansion. The situation was so dire that in 1957 Prime Minister John Diefenbaker famously warned that “Canada must populate or perish.” To make matters worse, the U.S. economy was growing at an even faster clip, and in so doing, attracting the so-called “preferred” immigrants.

Canada’s answer was to transition to a merit-based immigration system. The new system did not stress either race or birthplace, but rather graded applicants on the basis of nine criteria – factors such as education, age, fluency in English or French, and “whether or not their skills fit Canada’s economic needs.” The results, we now know, have been impressive. According to the OECD, Canadian immigrants are almost 10 percent less likely to live in poverty than their American counterparts, and more than half enter the country with a college degree (vs. 27 percent in the U.S.).

Compare this to America’s professedly compassionate but practically bone-headed immigration policy.

Nearly 70 percent of immigrants come to America on the basis of what is called “family reunification.” No other developed nation employs this factor to such an extent. On the surface, the policy may seem socially constructive and even progressive. That said, one does not have to be a bigot to believe that deciding who becomes an American on the basis of sheer luck and increasingly tenuous connections does not make for an altogether rational system. Nor is it the best way to fuel economic growth or to supply America’s tightening labor market with the skilled workers it desperately needs.  

Another contentious facet of the American immigration system that is rife with Obama-era virtue signaling is the Diversity Visa Lottery Program. The program allocates 55,000 green cards annually to individuals from “underrepresented countries.” This is nearly 10 percent of America’s annual intake of  immigrants. In sum, nearly 80% of immigrants arrive as a result of family ties or ethnic draw. It bewilders me to think that the best way to build this country is through such overwhelming reliance on any form of lottery.  

America claims the most advanced, dynamic economy in the world. Unfortunately, the structure of the current immigration system undermines many of its exemplary features and hampers the American economy by perpetuating income inequality and slow wage growth for the working class – ironically two key Democratic policy objectives.

Diversity lottery and family-based immigration programs supply the U.S. economy with many workers who lack the tools needed to succeed by creating at least two problems. First, many immigrants’ lack of tools – such as proficiency in English, a college education, relevant job experience, etc. – makes economic mobility exceedingly difficult. Second, a flow of working-class immigrants into America has been suppressing wage growth for so-called “rank and file” employees, even as pay levels have increased at their fastest rate since 2009 for management and skilled workers. These structural problems have produced a regrettable outcome wherein immigrant families are now 20 percent more likely to become dependent on America’s growing welfare state than non-immigrant households.

It is against this backdrop that many Americans rightly question whether or not their country’s immigration system is in its best interests. Regrettably, some wrongly translate that rational concern into racial anxiety. In Canada, by contrast, where immigrants “create more businesses and typically use fewer welfare dollars than do their native-born compatriots,” attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism are, unsurprisingly, less tense.  

As America enters an era of heightened economic and geopolitical competition, it should be doing everything in its power once again to attract the best and brightest, even as it continues to be a beacon of hope and opportunity for “the tired, the poor and those yearning to breathe free.”

In conclusion, here’s some quick and easy advice for America’s immigration policy-makers: For some better ideas and some better results, look north.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

In a well-researched article, Glimpse Staff Correspondent Katya Lopatko examines the nationalist movements bubbling up on both sides of the Atlantic, represented best by Donald Trump, Brexit and the far-right parties gaining a following across Europe. Without making any particularly sweeping statements or claims, Lopatko pretty fairly documents the “Isolationist” phenomenon as it relates to international integration, immigration, trade and other issues.

In my opinion, though, there are two interrelated themes Lopatko’s reporting misses, their absence evidenced in her conclusory depiction of resistance to globalization as “understandable, but ultimately futile.”

First, the notion that there is a class divide between elites and commoners in the debate over globalization; and second, the notion that globalization is not an inevitable process, but in some ways is a set of policies states can choose or not choose to make (and, being a set of policies, is a project that can fail or succeed). We will examine these two contentions in turn.

Globalization and the Class Divide

Various scholars and pundits, including my boss Joel Kotkin and the young New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, have opined something which I believe future historians will take for granted as a basic fact of the early 21^st Century—namely, that there has risen an internationalist governing elite across the Western world. This elite tends to be buttressed by the educated professional industries, such as academia, law, finance and technology, and in its values it is solidly cosmopolitan and liberal. Take the economic interests and sociopolitical and cultural views of your average liberal arts graduate going into law or business, and mature them by thirty-five years or so and you’ve got Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and the recently-resigned David Cameron.

Meanwhile, as Kotkin and Douthat note, the vast working-class and middle-class majorities of these Western nations’ populations have directly contrary views and interests. By and large, they tend to be socially more traditionalist and parochial, and their economic fortunes are more or less tied to industries such as manufacturing, energy, construction, shipping and agriculture. In normal political times these class-and-culture divides need not produce existential conflict; but in times of international upheaval and economic sluggishness (sound familiar?) class consciousness and class identity can easily come to dominate political debates in ways ideology only rarely does.

Traditionalist lower classes tied to physical industries, and cosmopolitan upper classes tied to knowledge-based industries. Take a guess—which is more likely to support increased global integration, multiculturalism, and free trade and immigration flows? Which is more likely to oppose them?

Globalization as Process, Globalization as Policy

The argument is sometimes made that globalization is basically a natural process, inherent to international trade and the resulting cross-cultural interaction. I don’t disagree; it seems to me that so long as you have an international economic order, as there has almost always been since Antiquity, you will have international supply chains and trading routes abetting cultural interaction and evolution. Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Zheng He witnessed this cosmopolitan empire of international commerce firsthand centuries ago; the technological booms of the last five centuries have only amplified the process. Railing against such inevitable progress, it would seem, is about as worthwhile as spitting in the wind.

This is all true—but at the same time, states and other polities retain significant power to react to the aforementioned globalizing trends. Aside from the basic pressure market forces put on states to modernize, there is no inevitable direction towards totally free international markets. Expanding states with productive industrial sectors tend to favor other states opening up their markets and buying their mass-produced goods; stagnant or declining states with less competitive industries tend to oppose openness for the sake of preserving their economic independence. Culturally homogeneous states feel threatened by greater openness, while culturally cosmopolitan states have no such scruples. Moreover, different social classes and ethnic groups within the same society, competing over control of the state apparatus, can have very different views on how a state should react to globalizing processes, resulting in seemingly incoherent compromises.

In the last thirty or forty years, the policy choices Western states made in reaction to globalization tended to smooth the cross-border flow of labor and capital, while weakening the coordinative economic power of the nation-state. This was by no means inevitable; export-oriented trade deals rather than free trade deals, high-skilled immigration quotas rather than mass acceptance of low-skilled workers, and other such policy alternatives have been pursued by developing powers – and incidentally, it is in these economically nationalist states in the developing world where middle-class and lower-class fortunes are rising, as opposed to in developed states where middle-class fortunes are stagnant. This chart by the historian Nils Gilman depicts the phenomenon.

It is primarily in Western Europe and the United States where internationalism of various sorts has replaced the hard-nosed nationalism being practiced elsewhere. The reassertion of national-interest realism in Western states could partially alleviate labor conditions, and if properly pursued, cultivate more international understanding in the long term than internationalist dreams of global integration and universal markets.

The neoliberal-internationalist policies of the last three decades or so—expansion of free trade, open-borders immigration, international financial deregulation, etc., coupled with the expansion of multilateral institutions- have made it harder for countries to control their own labor markets and industry, while making it easier for corporate entities to pursue their particular goals and interests across fluid borders without being subjected to crippling regulation. This segregation of political power and economic power at the highest levels has, of course, struck hard at Western publics’ self-images of self-determination and fed the plausible narrative that internationalist elites are not working in sync with the interests of their home nation. The weakened states are less able to provide security and stability for their angered citizenries, and the present wave of nationalist revolts follows.

The rise of radical ideologies at the beginning of the 20^th Century in Europe was fed, in part, by the Romanov and Weimar elites’ inabilities to provide material and moral dignity for their peoples the way the English and Americans could. There’s something to be said for the stabilizing and pacifying nature of a strong and well-distributed national economy.

Lopatko seems to acknowledge that policy can champion or discourage the natural trends of globalization, but brushes aside the notion that nation-centric policies would be of any use in the world of the 21^st Century. “Eventually, this [nationalist]approach will fall through and we will be forced to address problems that only intensify the longer we push them away.”

On this point, she and I strongly disagree.

Healthy Nationalism

The sentiments Lopatko reports on and labels “Isolationist” are indeed distasteful and vulgar to the cultivated sensibility. But they do not arise merely from hatred and racial supremacy on the part of lower-class boors at Trump rallies.

They are, rather, what happens when large groups of people feel disenfranchised and betrayed by their rulers, particularly on the question of national identity. When you delegitimize a people’s healthy, open, and reasonably inclusive national identity and replace it with something alien and unfamiliar, like multiculturalism or global cosmopolitanism, you pave the way for their embrace of far darker and more exclusivist expressions of national identity. It happened when “Frenchman” and “Briton” were replaced by “European,” and when “Americanism” was replaced by “Multiculturalism,” by the West’s cognitive ruling elites. Feeling that their true identities were under siege, the working-class traditionalist majorities of America and Europe turned to figures like Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, who advocated returning to the “good old days,” and spouted a nationalism better described as ethno-nationalism or racial nationalism.

Ethno-nationalism, of course, is very different than the benign and inclusive nationalism peddled by figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. This form of liberal or civic nationalism tied to culture and language but unmoored to race emphasizes, simultaneously, racial equality and national distinction, seeking to bring diverse classes and ethnicities into a common assimilationist fold. It’s what Benjamin Disraeli spoke of when he referenced “one-nation conservatism” and what Theodore Roosevelt meant when he championed “100% Americanism.”

Though in the 19^th Century this multiracial community was primarily limited to those of European descent (bear in mind Irish and Italians and Anglos were considered to be different races back then) some tried to bring the same model into the mid-20^th Century and make it work between those of European, African, Latin, Asian, and other descents. This work informed some northern factions of the American Civil Rights movement. Its focus was reconciling and assimilating diverse groups into the national community—and that last word, community, is key. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in an  essay for The American Interest magazine:

“Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.

…There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust.”

But healthy nationalism is more than simply a cultural phenomenon—for it to mean anything, it must be politically protected. Indeed, for a people to really benefit from nationalism, nationalist policies must be pursued in at least three areas—cultural nationhood, political sovereignty and economic independence. Lacking any of these would either render the nation nonexistent or put it at the mercy of other nations not necessarily concerned with its best interests.

Nationalism’s Three Components and What They Look Like

Let’s take a quick look at the three aspects of healthy nationalism:

Cultural nationhood: the set of policies contributing to the preservation of national culture and national identity and providing for the assimilation of newcomers into the national community.

Political sovereignty: the ability for a people to conduct affairs of governance by its own legitimate means, unmolested by any outside force, be it another nation, overreaching international institutions, or sub-state actors like corporations, criminal syndicates, and secessionist insurgencies.

Economic independence: a nation-state’s ability to conduct its relations with the outside world on its own terms, rather than on terms imposed upon it. This requires the maintenance of a diverse economy, a vibrant population base and sufficient capital-production capabilities based in the homeland.

Multicultural cosmopolitanism, the formation of international institutions, and economic globalization do not necessarily negate these expressions of sovereignty and nationhood and independence—indeed, they can buttress and support them—but taken in excess, the forces of globalization do undermine nationalism and easily lead publics to believe that their cultural, political, and economic sovereignty are at stake; hence the “take our country back” spirit of Western populist movements.

As my friend and mentor Michael Lind wrote a while back, in a magisterial must-read study of the history of liberalism and republicanism, if the Western nations and their elites practiced nationalism properly, the West would:

“…resemble the world order favoured by the so-called ‘sovereigntists’ in Beijing, New Delhi, Brasilia and Moscow more than that favored by contemporary Washington and Brussels….

The globalist liberal goal of a single, rule-governed, borderless global economy would be rejected. There would be an eclectic mix of free trade, managed trade, and protectionism, with developing nations allowed to protect their ‘infant industries’ as did Britain, the US, Germany and Japan when they were rising industrial nations. Immigration would be regulated in different ways by different countries in the interest of their working-class majorities.”

The primary reason such a nationalism is not pursued in the West at the moment, of course, is because the West is ruled by cosmopolitan internationalist elites.

Moving Forward

As suggested earlier, there really is no way to get around the question of national identity and its political consequence, nationalism. Like all things integral to the human condition, it must be accepted and managed, not expunged.

I’m as terrified of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen as anybody else, and I probably detest them even more than most liberal cosmopolitans do, because they make a mockery of the nationalism I revere, bastardizing it into something contorted, disgusting and unrecognizable. But Western elites won’t be able to manage that populism simply by condemning it and doubling down on internationalist and cosmopolitan policies. At some point they must recognize the concerns of large swathes of the public, and like all good politicians, balance those concerns and interests with those of other groups under their jurisdiction.

All this requires a reorientation of policy in the West towards some form of inclusive nationalism rather than the cosmopolitan globalism epitomized by the present elites and their policies. It’s not forthcoming anytime soon. But hopefully with time, the elites will start to get it.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

Major Issues and Recommendations for a Stronger US Cyber Defense Capability

A comprehensive report recently released by Mandiant, a private information security firm, has confirmed China’s expansive cyber espionage operations against US private industry. This report has aroused debate in the public sphere regarding US cyber vulnerabilities. However, state-sponsored cyber espionage has been well documented as early as 2006 and has resulted in at least hundreds of terabytes of data theft (Mandiant 2013, 20). The main perpetrators have been identified as China, Russia, France, Israel, and most recently, countries in the Middle East such as Iran (Booz Allen Hamilton 2012, 8). Due to the increasing number of monthly cyber attacks on US economic interests, information security professionals in the private and public sectors have criticized the US Government’s inability to effectively address this growing concern. While the threat of catastrophic cyber warfare is often overhyped, the threat of economic espionage through cyber attacks is not, and public criticism of US cyber security vulnerabilities is valid.

Cyber espionage endangers America’s global economic prowess and national security. China, Russia, and other states continuously steal many years worth of R&D from private US companies to expedite their economic development. It is estimated that these efforts to increase political and military power via cyber espionage have resulted in the loss of tens of billions of dollars from US firms (Nakashima 2013). If left unaddressed, this growing threat could result in the theft of sensitive trade secrets that would severely impact national security, especially if the companies and data involved contain sensitive military secrets such as classified aircraft designs.

One of the greatest challenges in addressing cyber espionage is the current lack of effective attribution methods. This critical absence of sufficient detection techniques allows both state and non-state actors to conceal their roles in cyber espionage and therefore avoid public reprimands from the US Government and the international community (Economist 2012). In Russia, for example, the unique nexus between government, organized crime, and business makes Russian cyber attacks very difficult to track, especially since the government purportedly employs underground youth hacking networks to achieve its cyber espionage objectives (Smith 2012, 3). The US Government needs to increase its coordination efforts with private industry to develop more sophisticated cyber attack attribution techniques in order deter state actors from committing further economic espionage.

Efforts at collaboration between US Government entities and the private sector are hampered by a secretive and inconsistent US cyber policy. The Obama Administration has apparently begun drafting internal cyber security policy and has directed certain agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, to allocate more funding for cyber security initiatives (Sanger and Shanker 2013). However, many outside experts have indicated that the US Government and the private sector are not sufficiently collaborating to ameliorate the cyber threat (Wolf 2012, 11). The US Government cannot expect private businesses to defend themselves against the penetration efforts of foreign intelligence services. Therefore, policymakers and private industry leaders need to forge closer relations, develop a more coherent cyber defense policy, and share information regarding current threats and trends to provide for a stronger US cyber defense capability.