Which American Dream Do You Mean?

Abstract

According to the latest U.S. Census projection, the arrival of immigrants and their higher birthrates, projected forward at current rates, will turn the U.S. into a “minority–majority” society in 2042, 8 years earlier than the Census used to predict. Liberals tend to view immigration to the U.S. as a human right, but many employers prefer to hire immigrants because they can be paid less than the cost of reproducing their labor-that is, the cost of keeping an American family above the poverty line. One way of looking at the resulting debates over U.S. immigration policy is in terms of moral economy, that is, how different factions compete for moral authority in order to gain control over a desired good. In this case, the desired good is American citizenship, including access to the highest consumption rates on the planet, and national definitions of citizenship are competing with transnational or globalist definitions of citizenship. Constructing moral rhetoric for either national or transnational definitions of citizenship requires excluding information that does not serve the cause. One way of spotlighting the omissions is to look at each moral economy as a highly selective version of the American Dream.