Pro-immigration:
It is blatantly obvious and nearly indisputable that the absolute best thing that could be done for the poor of the world is to allow them to immigrate, with or without eligibility for welfare services, to rich countries.
1. It would make the poor better off by obscene amounts. 20-100x earning potential.
2. It has, according to most meta-studies, very limited impact on natives.
3. Therefore, there is NOTHING known to humankind that would more improve average quality of life for humans on earth than allowing A LOT more immigration from poor to rich countries.
Anti-immigration:
1. It might hurt some of US now. THEY don't count.
2. It might screw with the culture that causes the good that we have.
3. THEY might get welfare, or their kids might, which screws us all.
As usual for ALL arguments over all topics, there's very only minor disputes about the statements above. The real dispute is over what's important. And on that, rational folks disagree. Rather aggressively.
Whether you're pro- or anti- immigration comes down to which of these arguments you care more about. I care more about the pro- side's issues, as I am near 100% anti-tribalist (I don't have that gene, nor do I have a tribe)...and consider tribalists of all shades moderately bad people. Therefore I am pro-immigration. Ditto Caplan, etc. Others who are pro-tribalism, will obviously have different concerns, and therefore different conclusions.
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I am balking at the first #2. I don't know what a "meta-study" is but I don't trust the people inclined to perform such studies to measure the metrics I care about. Besides, all large calculations are wrong.
No, I'll evaluate for myself what impacts me negatively and what doesn't, thanks.
You're left with a claim that letting an unbounded number of foreigners move here would improve the average utility function of the world, or some such. No doubt, and no doubt this is even true if the impacts on ourselves are large and negative. (The world has lots of people, it doesn't take much for a slight uptick in their utility to outweigh our huge downtick). So the first #1 is unobjectionable.
The problem is, it's just not a convincing argument for anything. I could probably make a lot of poor people better off by plucking 10 young males from, oh I don't know, Burundi and moving them into your house. Yes, your quality of life might reduce, but think of those 10 guys!
Why aren't you doing this right now then? Because this average-utility thing is not persuasive. Indeed, it's a non-starter. So, here we are.
Yes, people don't generally use utilitarian ethics. For instance, per the IRS, I'm about +2 sigma on the virtue of generousity---enough so that they find it useful to honor me with frequent audits. But, to use an example, I spend more feeding my feline predator minion each year than would be required to feed/sponsor a third world child or two. Why is that?
Because I have a positive duty to my family's cat, but no such positive duty in the other case, the fact that I do sponsor a child or two nonwithstanding. My ethics is more duty-based, which is what at the bottom, I think most people who actually think about such things actually believe. The greatest good for the greatest number might sound nice in The Wrath of Khan, but it's not how humans actually think. If you're not there at +2 sigmas, trying to use it to organize a society is a non-starter.
"Pro immigration" is a meaningless term; you should specify just how much you love third-world immigration. Like... how can you speed it up? Almost everyone wants some immigration, so how do you want to distinguish yourself from the proles?
1)Raise taxes to pay to fly more Somalis to the US?
2)Begin a Kickstarter project to do this without taxes?
3)Address current African hyper violence in America more aggressively?
4)Induce wealthy liberals to accept projects in their own neighborhoods?
We all know that nativist whites (and nativist blacks) who don't want to sacrifice some of their contentment, wealth, etc. are just bigots, so you need to show that you and the other Caplans of the world are willing to pay some of the costs. Unlike you, I've dealt a lot and directly with people from the worst places in the world. Pocket description: gay-haaating, Socialist, clannish, dim, clit-excising, massively reproductive. Except to signal to the lib readers of your blog that you're no Sailer, I see no reason for you to reproduce this post every 10 days.
It seems there are two arguements here:
The first will be people that disagree with #2 in your list of pros. This arguement is of an entirely different nature, long, and not of interest to me now.
The second it in-group/out-group. You propose that in-group/out-group people are "bad people" and that your better then them because that part of your genes are "broken".
I both agree and disagree with this. That part of your genes are "broken" because your an exceptionally strong independent person who doesn't need to rely on any of his neighbors of community for the things he needs in life. That's a unique thing that comes with having your genes (+3-4 SD in almost every category).
I don't know if that gene would be still be broken if you were a 90 IQ factory worker whose way of life was threatened by immigration.
I think the point most regular people think about when elites support higher immigration is, "of course you support it, it benefits you and hurts me." Most immigrants, after all, aren't going to be competiting with well established elites with lots of social, human, and financial capital. They will compete with labor. And by driving down the price of labor they will benefit elites relative to labor.
So you've got one group, first world elites, asking another group, first world masses, to make sacrifices for third world masses. Then they have the nerve to claim moral superiority for the act of supporting other people making sacrifices for other people.
I agree that if there is a moral impetus for universalism, it should be embraced by the strong. The strong are in the best position to sacrifice for strangers. But it is not the strong that are sacrificing here. You aren't sending checks to third world peasents or displaced factory workers. Your just advocating policies that benefit you. There is nothing fantastically moral about that.
You kind of touch on it on #2 of the anti side, but I have come to oppose mass immigration in the belief that multiculturalism cannot work in democracy. It is a iron-clad recipe for ethnic strife -- which you don't see due to your admitted lack of the tribal gene. Still, I should think that the sort of ethnic solidarity one sees among blacks here ("no snitching"), or Muslims in Europe, or in the Balkans, or Egypt, or Rwanda, the Congo, etc. etc. should give you pause. Just because you are colorblind doesn't mean others are.
Given that we have democracy and therefore we will never again attempt to assimilate anybody, instead teaching them resentment, irredentism, and ethnic grievance according to their language and culture and race, NAM immigration is a bad idea. And even Asians we should be somewhat cautious about, although at least they will assimilate in time due to their high IQ. It is only the people progressives loathe, whites, who are safe, and it exactly because progressives loathe them (and thus value their culture at subzero and eagerly demand their assimilation) that they are safe. And who knows -- perhaps in future the progressives will discover they can create white ethnic blocs loyal to them; then even whites won't be safe any more.
This is all sad, because I do generally agree with your pro-immigration points, outside of the context of democracy. A rainbow neocameral state could be a light to the world. Perhaps Moldbug is wrong and Romer will succeed with his charter cities in spite of their obvious non-orthodoxy. Then we shall see.
How do you reconcile your support for uncontrolled immigration with the fact that it will be basically impossible, as a practical matter, to unwind this experiment if it turns out the pro-immigration side is wrong? ("Oops, sorry we trashed your country because of our excessive confidence in our understanding of immigration" isn't really going to help.)
I think you have an unjustifiably high degree of certainty regarding why places like the U.S. are as relatively good as they are, and systematically underestimate the importance of shared cultural norms in allowing people to interact in win-win ways. The studies I have read about seem to show that increasing diversity decreases social trust; rolling the dice that things won't get significantly worse along this axis if you radically increase diversity via unrestricted immigration is, IMO, irresponsible and reckless.
Also, you basically have to throw democracy over the side completely in order to try this--importing lots of new people who have, on average, different political views, from the natives substantially changes political outcomes in a democracy. I know you don't care about that, but it seems to me that non-bad people can and do. The only way to avoid that result is to eliminate birthright citizenship, which you might be fine with but is not practical in the real world. It's not like 100 million third world immigrants are going to become dyed-in-the-wool anti-statists any time soon, so you probably should care. lol
I should think that ethically, a right of free association would preclude unlimited immigration. You are in essence asserting that I can have no moral, legal, or ethical right to say that I don't want to live in a place with near-infinite numbers of people who do not share my culture, attitudes, values.
You moved to Austin, and expressed your happiness at being in a more congenial clime. I moved to a rural location and achieved an uptick in my satisfaction. But if most of the third world moved here, I doubt either of us would easily find "nice" places to live. Our new neighbors would in fact be on the whole "gay-hating, Socialist, clannish, dim, clit-excising, massively reproductive" - and to which list we might also reasonably add violent, religious extremist, bigoted, and anti-left-libertarian.
To be somewhat more pithy: you may not be interested in tribalism, but tribalism is interested in you.
Aretae,
You've expressed pride in your children and other family members before. Does this not count as tribalism? Do you feel pride when other American children learn to read? Aren't you just exhibiting the normal left loyalty model of self, family, like-minded colleagues, SKIP, SKIP, people from other countries (no matter how their values are counter your professed values.)
I clicked hoping to see exactly what I see: Commenters crushing it!! Especially backyardfoundry.
Aretae DOES sound hilariously out-of-touch trying to enumerate the Anti- position. I think he clearly should take another shot.
Aratae's attempt at the anti-position doesn't work well at all.
Someone from the anti-position needs to formulate a short, 3 line summary of the position. Then a discussion can begin starting with a balanced question.
I can't do it myself, I favour the Pro position more than most commenters in this thread.
drpat,
This isn't an on/off proposition. When people come to the US they bring their politics and values with them. There is nothing inherently convincing about the concepts of: capitalism, secularism, Christianity, church/state separation, or universal rights of citizens. Recent immigrants to the US have changed SoCal. This is acknowledged by even many of those immigrants. The people who are negatively affected are not well-off and cloistered braggarts like Caplan, so they find it simple to discount the arguments against unfettered immigration as dumb racism. And they don't talk about how to make immigration easier by removing federal policies that make it onerous. Example: here's Caplan completely brushing aside most of the costs of affirmative action in a piece where he calls immigration restriction affirmative action for prole Americans:
"We enforce standard affirmative action with sporadic lawsuits against employers. The government occasionally plays the role of the plaintiff, but for the most part we wait for an employee to file a grievance. The worse-case scenario: The employer pays hefty financial damages and rehires the plaintiff."
??? Standard attitude from a liberal not directly affected by govt policy. And dumb. All of the usual libertarian critiques about seen/unseen forgotten because it's more important to deride the proles.
I'd recommend that leftists and left-libertarians follow international news about the transformation of first world cities that have embraced refugees, but they don't like to read stuff that disagrees with their views. The stuff is icky and unmentionable.
backyardfoundry,
Not bad, but you need to shrink it down a bit to match the 3 point format, otherwise it isn't a good comparison.
drpat,
I think that aretae first needs to say how much immigration he's talking about (100 million/year?) before I even know that I'm on the anti-side. Then, address whether this is meant as a trial number, whether the worst elements of AA and disparate impact insanity are to change, whether he's got some grand plan for forcing libs like him self to live in the exact same place with IQ 70 Muslims so that they can experience the feedback, etc.
His point about metastudies isn't even a real point and he seems to be just waaay to confident and snide in his assertions for someone who spends most of his time lambasting overconfidence.
This is the first time I've ever heard Aretae called a "lib".
Unless by someone using the original meaning of the word, or the Australian.
Be that as it may, your point about excessive certainty is valid. This leads back to the real meaning of conservatism: If people are wrong 99.9% of the time (about difficult subjects like social restructuring or economics)then one must be VERY careful about making changes.
The problem with all of these arguments about immigration is what else gets held constant. It's like talking about how changes in supply will affect prices without talking about demand. The problem is immigration plus democracy plus etc. Arguments about immigration are actually blind-men-and-the-elephant arguments about these other things, and a textarea is apparently not big enough to hold three ideas.
What makes rich countries rich is their high trust culture and high IQ. Unlimited immigration will, therefore, make rich countries poor.
Unlimited immigration will only work if the existing inhabitants get to rule over the new comers - no votes, and no welfare, for low IQ newcomers.
>1. It would make the poor better off by obscene amounts. 20-100x earning potential.
Where did these numbers come from?
>2. It has, according to most meta-studies, very limited impact on natives.
Which of these meta-studies investigated the impact of the radical open-borders policies you are proposing?
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