- I think it is immoral to prevent African Ali or Mexican Maria from contracting with American Andy to come over and help build his house. That's between them. You're not a party to that discussion. If you / the government is involved...then it's total government...which I'm aggressively opposed to.
- It's blatantly obvious to everyone who looks closely that for any given poor individual in the world, the single best thing you can do for them in the short term is to not stop them from peacefully moving to a (rich) place where the institutions aren't so crappy.
- There is an enormous difference between (a) a family and (b) a group of people defined by imaginary lines on a map.
- There is an enormous difference between (a) using force to prevent, (b) using force to require, (c) not using force either way.
- It's absurdly hypocritical for Americans, a country built 98% (1.7% Amerindian) by immigrants and their children to say...this was a good deal for us and our ancestors to immigrate, now stay out.
- I think the way of thinking that says "this group" did this or "this nation" did that is a broken way of thinking. It can only confuse you. Individuals do stuff. Full stop.
- I think that any case wherein a state actor is assigned greater moral authority than an individual actor is bullshit. Roughly all immigration arguments run like that.
- I universally oppose the following line of thought: The governmenet screwed up feature X. Therefore, we need more government action to add other errors to fix their prior screwup.
- We can all agree that we may well run out of something sometime in the next couple million years. How much sooner do you think we'll run out of stuff? I'd like your reasons for your guess. As someone who groks Julian Simon I will assert that your reasons are not epistemically sound because I include the historical record of people making similar predictions.
- I have zero positive emotional connection to the experience of tribal groups larger than acquaintances or wobbly's example of co-travelers (and a substantial negative emotional connection). This makes in impossible for me to give-a-shit about what appear to me to be bullshit artificial distinctions. By observation, other people with other emotional makeups see the world differently.
- UPDATE: I think that the systematic evidence we have suggests statistically (non-anecdotally) that immigrants have a positive impact on the population in general, and the worst-impacted are at worst very mildly negatively impacted, but may actually be positively impacted, with the research not in yet.
- UPDATE: I think we have strong historical evidence from the USA that immigration rates near 1% of population per year (10% per decade) are quite manageable, and do not lead to substantial destabilization. As someone who appreciates the conservative core: "don't break shit"....I would not like to start with immigration numbers above 3m/year....though I would prefer to experiment higher over time
Not trying to argue these points. I think though, that these are the lines on which my anti-immigrationist commenters disagree with me.
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26 comments:
Yeah, well you're right and they are idiots. Regardless of how "reasonable" they can make their phobia/hatred sound.
I'm going to go bullet by bullet.
1) A statement with no backup. That's fine, it just doesn't have moral weight over me.
2) Why do I care about them? What have they done for me? I have no moral obligation to life people up. This goes into #3.
3) You just say this. I agree, but I also know that means universalism is crap. You draw you arbitrary lines wherever you feel and then blast other people for drawing theirs wherever they feel. You advertise your views as the objective moral truth, but they obviously aren't. And if they are just as subjective as mine, why do I care?
4) It's all the same to me. What matters are results. Not using force and using force, who cares.
5) Most of those immigrants where white Europeans. There is a big difference between that and current immigration that should be obvious. You have to be willfully ignorant to believe otherwise.
6) Individuals do nothing without others. Any argument that ends in full stop is a shitty argument.
7) Yeah, fuck murder trials.
8) Irrelevant as far as I can tell. Not even sure why its here.
9) I'm not going to play abundance probability game, regardless our relative optimism/pessimism. The main problem is you gain wildly under abundance and others don't, while they fail wildly under scarcity and you do fine anyway. The incentives are different.
10) I'm willing to live and let live on this one. You benefit in various ways from anti-tribalism (even if only psychologically). Others don't. They do their own thing. I'm not going to lose sleep over the fact that you have a different decision set. Just don't through a bunch of objective provable morality in my face.
11) I'm not sold, though I'm sold enough to allow some immigration. I think we should have a target level based on perceived need and we should try to choose good (high IQ) immigrants rather then bad (low IQ NAM) immigrants.
A note on inclusion/exclusion:
These are just two sides of the same coin. Wobbly's community is awfully inclusive. People help each other and care about each other in ways I could never connect with my neighbors. They include people in family like ways even though they aren't family. That has enormous positive value.
Of course, its also exclusionary. That community doesn't work if a bunch of people who don't believe in that move there. All inclusion requires exclusion. Deal with it.
I feel that too often the argument that some or another policy helps some random third world person based on abstract economic theory is used by people to feel good about the fact that they don't give a fuck about those around them. The factory closed down and your neighbors can't provide for their families and are scared. Who gives a fuck, it helped Pablo in some far away land. I certainly don't need to give my neighbor some of my economic surplus that I gained from working Pablo like a slave. Aren't I such a nice person.
Universalism as practiced just seems like a way to justify someone treating medium distance neighbors like shit and justifying it by thinking that in theory some far distance human being somehow benefits in theory.
Aretae,
I can get all of this "analysis" from bloggingheads libs. You're not doing any of the following:
1)Saying anything new
2)Saying anything in a new way
3)Saying anything lyrically
4)Systematizing in a fun way
5)Systematizing in a helpful way
6)Being serious (the only people you're xenophobic towards are xenophobes? Is it possible to be more absurdly liberal?)
In the past, you've often done as many as three of those at the same time, but on this topic I may as well be reading Alex Parene... except that he writes like a fluent English speaker.
Anyway, down-vote. Don't care anymore. Sailer seems more thoughtful on this topic than you, even though I find his politics repellent!
> I think it is immoral to prevent African Ali or Mexican Maria from contracting with American Andy to come over and help build his house. That's between them. You're not a party to that discussion.
I agree, but I don't find this a good reason to support immigration, because the principle I see here cuts both ways: It should be equally immoral to demand that American Alex give Mexican Maria access to Alex's premises.
"If the government is involved" is misleading because the government is already involved in such a way that (with appropriate caveats about democracy) Alex and Andy are engaging in common decision-making over land that the two of them hold in common.
I read you as saying "Don't tell Andy what to do". In the present situation, this results in Andy telling Alex what to do.
Several of your reasons run into the same problem when I consider them: They seem to be good principles for some other situation than the present one. For instance,
> ...peacefully moving to a (rich) place where the institutions aren't so crappy
skips over questions such as who made those institutions in the first place and who is responsible for keeping the institutions non-crappy. See Occam's Butterknife.
If the immigrant could move to a place that banned immigrants from the institutions, this would be a great idea. In a place with expanding diversity quotas on institutions, this is a recipe for crapping in the institutions.
> I think though, that these are the lines on which my anti-immigrationist commenters disagree with me.
No.
Re: bullet point 5, I bet the Amerindians, in hindsight, would certainly wish that they had had the capability to exclude immigrants, considering how well open borders worked out for them. Given the history, would the Amerindians have been justified in using force to attempt to exclude European immigrants? If not, why not?
Anonymous,
American Indians DID use force in resisting their conquest and ethnic cleansing. Many of them fought like hell and gave their names to implements of destruction, like the Apache.
We should get the moral language out of discussions like this and focus on who...whom. The Bootleggers so outnumber the Baptists on this issue that the Baptists are just a historical curiousity, not something to base any kind of narrative on.
I universally oppose the following line of thought: The governmenet screwed up feature X. Therefore, we need more government action to add other errors to fix their prior screwup.
This is a highly moralistic and highly impractical attitude. It's libertarian happy-land. Whereas I find it practical, if regrettable, to work with the reality we're in.
Only certain government actions are available in the giant committee that is democracy. As Moldbug has written: "... the gigantic committee should practice wu wei [libertarianism]. But will it? Can it? Has it ever? It, too, has a nature. Before you tell us what it you're going to make it do, you might want to consider what it is."
Democracy is many things, but it is not libertarian and it has no way to become libertarian.
Democracy will make every guest worker who wants it a citizen. This is contested, but obviously the trend. Democracy has already assigned to each citizen strong and ever-growing positive rights. This is uncontested and very popular. Democracy will not racially discriminate between immigrants, but it does in at least some places discriminate based on "skills" or similarly IQ-gated things. Thus, "aggression" in the libertarian sense is ongoing. Every new child who will get more state spending than he produces in taxes is an aggression against all of us.
The question is, how do you solve this problem? The dreamer says, Hey, it's those positive rights! Let's just take those away and immigration of low-producing people is just fine! Sounds fine until you realize it is practically impossible. It's like if someone noticed the mismatch between male and female sexual desire and proposed, Hey, let's just make men want sex less. Before you tell us what it you're going to make it do, you might want to consider what it is.
Given that democracy is what it is, you cannot solve the problem of net-negative immigrants in any libertarian-approved way.
Some other reactions:
(2) Actually I think the single best thing that can happen to the poor in the world is to allow good institutions to be built where they are. Of course, the problem of democracy raises its head again, as USG won't tolerate any responsible government. Nonetheless, in terms of practicality it strikes me as much more likely that USG will tolerate "colonialism" than it will remove welfare rights from American citizens.
(5) It is not hypocritical if you believe that circumstances have changed. In particular we now have "democracy" in its modern form (strongly expressing its inherent socialism). (And also, what Nony 9:18 said.)
(6) mildly amused that you post this one immediately after (5).
(9) I am also a strong Simon advocate, but I don't see that resource non-limits relate to immigration.
(12) We have strong historical evidence from the USA that a nation that excludes almost all non-Europeans and aggressively assimilates all of its immigrants can function well. We don't have any evidence that a nation that welcomes anyone and does not attempt to assimilate them will prosper. To the contrary -- USA grew strongly before 1965; once the floodgates were opened, not so much.
byf,
LOL!
I want to hear how you see Sailer's politics as repellent! I've read a million words of his, and can't even guess what you mean. Is he actually committedly far from Moldbug or from anyone else who doesn't repel?
@Jehu. But as I understand Aretae's logic, the Amerindians were morally obliged to let white Europeans come over. The consequences of that, however, were destructive and IMO eminently predictable, people being what they are.
Unless you are willing to bite the bullet and say that the Amerindians just had to suck it up because no group larger than the family has any legitimate moral claim to territory, then we are all just haggling over the price, as it were.
Even good rules become evil when they're not consistently applied. The overwhelming majority of universalists are bootleggers. They'd never dream of applying the anti-white demands of universalism to anybody but white nations. You can put all the universalists that would take that position (the American indians were evil for resisting the invasion of the Euros) into a single SUV I wager.
Sailer (besides being the world's finest blogger) is a big-government conservative: pro-Medicare, pro-Union, pro-pension (most of which will require federal bailouts) pro-government "investment."
I'm not even sure his call to slow all immigration is the right call, but I'll be damned if Aretae doesn't display the exact same shallowness, silliness, and ick-aversion that every other leftist does when discussing this topic.
All strangers are the same!
My life is unaffected by the strangers who live near me!
Unless they're xenophobes!
Unless those xenophobes are retarded, clit-excising Muslims who would murder my family on principle!
Full Stop!
Is there some reason that people assume that the Amerindians the Europeans found were descendants of the first humans to reach America?
Besides the recent stuff on three waves of immigration, I don't find the idea too exciting when they were probably as genocidal as other humans. I doubt that there was no usurpation of land, racism, and mass murder prior to whites boating in.
I was messing around with email comments yesterday, and missed ALL of these comments.
As per my statement in the post...I was attempting to systematically lay out the points of disagreement, not to convince anyone. By observation, I have done so moderately well.
As usual, I find roughly all of the comments responding with the universal argument approach: That's not what's important.
Three things:
One, if something is communally owned, then it can only have communal and universally applied rules-like don't litter, etc. Exclusion of groups of people automatically ends "community" property. Hoppe had a big shoehorn out for reasons that are really pretty obvious-he was pandering to the nascent racism that, sadly, broods in the hearts of so many.
Two, no one opposes you controlling access to YOUR property, or being a bigot-leave me out of it.
Three, mestizos(most Mexicans)are, in fact, native Americans-they have more claim to that amorphous "community" property than any gringo does.
The immigration "debate" really rolls up into an ugly smear of bigotry and racism. I've tried to find something else in there-in between the spittle-but there just isn't anything.
There is only a vast throng of golems whipped into a frenzy of pointless hate by a handful of clever puppeteers.
Since you won't address my key points (which can't be classified as you stated here) I'll add something that can. I think you left Chicago because of the constant shootings and murder by NAMs. If I had black and half black family members (especially young males) I would be afraid of them being shot in that cesspit. I'd much prefer that they feel isolated by racists than that they die. People can thrive amongst xenophobes, but death is a different case. It's the job of a father to protect health and life more than feelings.
Just my opinion. I happily lived for years surrounded by East Asian strangers who disliked white people but they weren't shooting up the city so I didn't care very much.
BYF,
As I said before. I left Chicago because I was living in a perfectly safe western suburb of Chicago full of very racist white people, and a couple racist asians. Me and my half-black family were unwilling to live in a rich white racist community...especially with a large dark black teenage son who, when as teenage boys do, would get into trouble with his 6 white friends...he'd be the one sent to jail for 3 years, and they'd all get off with a slap on the wrist.
I never had any issue with Chicago crime. As per any real city, 65% of crime is in 4% of the city. I had issue with rich white racist Chicagoans (and poor black racist Chicagoans) and I left explicitly because of that. There's no place in the city (except 6 blocks around UChicago, and 15 blocks around Northwestern) where a mixed race couple will not get emotional shit from everyone. If my wife was oblivious to that...we might survived it, but my wife is > +5 sigma on emotional awareness. The amount of hatred/dislike from white people who'd never met her was obvious even to me who is < -1 Sigma on emotional awareness.
Is this clear now? I left rich white safe racist Western Chicago with less crime (or diversity) than Portland, and now am much happier in poorer, more diverse, less safe San Antonio. Your model of me is broken.
Anon,
Ok...you're pro-fascism, so long as it's your thugs in charge;
you believe in shooting folks, or hiring others to in order to get what you want;
You can't tell the difference between government and the society;
You think it's great if one group of medium well off folks gets together to make life crappy for some really poor folks;
got it.
I think that qualifies you clinically as a psychopath.
Leonard,
Hence my Friedman I, II, III adherence.
Governments suck, and the existence of government itself is structured so that they all necessarily move in the direction of sucking worse.
I think Moldbug is frighteningly optimistic in his thinking that some governments (with more concentrated power) won't necessarily have a "get worse" trajectory. If Moldbug is wrong (delusional) here...then he hasn't said anything new that the public choice people didn't say 40 years ago...but he's offering false hope that there is a way out inside the structure of governments.
Hence: I'm an anarchist.
All government action increases government power, which net makes things worse. Until I get countries spawning...the only thing I can do is to oppose ALL government expansions.
2. I'll agree with you...but in the last 250 years, this has happened roughly twice internally. USA founded in 1776. Dubai recently. Singapore after the Brits left. It's also happened 1x externally: Hong Kong. If Paul Romer and Patri succeed, then this becomes feasible. But as of now, we have to think of this as a pipe dream.
9. A huge amount of the (not pure don't like strangers) animosity towards immigration is purely misled understanding about scarcity of jobs.
12. Floodgates were more open in late 1800s than after 1965. But...the assimilation argument is (I think) at least suspicious. Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong all imported systems onto very different cultures, and all succeeded. It's not clear that anything more than a good system enforcing laissez faire and property rights is necessary to win.
Jehu,
I bet you could find a busload of said folks at any given libertarian convention you find.
Libertarians != leftists. Very different folks.
Mike,
Thanks for dropping in. You double-commented, so I deleted the 1st one.
Crystal clear. The characteristics of the strangers around you were very relevant to your well-being because they could affect the safety and happiness of you and yours. You focused on xenophobia in a place where that was the most relevant issue. You feared that strangers would overrespond to your son's mild crimes by imprisoning him and you didn't fear him getting shot by strangers because you somehow convinced him to avoid the scary sections of the city. San Antonio has a much, much smaller black population. By moving, you fled the effects of that. Because you could afford to live in Chicago in expensive areas away from poor blacks, you were less affected by black strangers (other than for the fact that non-black strangers would associate your family with poorer blacks.)
Disjointed but correct?
BYF,
Emphases are of course very different from how I put it...but I think there's only a few things factually incorrect.
1. San Antonio has a massive low-income mexican population, and inner city hispanic youth aren't THAT much worse about crime and shooting folks than inner city black folks.
2. It takes no work to convince anyone to avoid scary sections of the city. "This 12 block x 12 block section is where all the murders in Chicago occur". Done. Since this is true of roughly every high-crime city in the country (Sailer has maps of LA)...this really isn't an issue anywhere, despite phobias to the contrary. Further, >80% of violent crime nationwide is some poor young inner city men shooting other poor young inner city men, because of an excess of tribalism.
3. Let us be very clear about Chicago. There are rich white parts, and poor white parts. There are rich black parts and poor black parts. And every part of the whole damn city is mono-racial and racist. My wife and I hated the black racist parts as much as I hated the white racist parts. I moved to the place which had the best train transport to the city, so I could spend more time with my family...which, shockingly, was a rich white part. But there was no place available in the whole city to move to that wasn't (a) mono-racial, and (b) highly bigoted.
4. Even the Estonians and the Ukranians are nearly willing to shoot at each other, 100 years later in Chicago. The racial animosity in the city, as generated by the absurd corruption, and intrusive government is too much to live with for a multi-racial family.
5. The biggest safety issue that we Texans had with Chicago is that the average upstanding citizen isn't packing heat via Concealed Carry. We were concerned about mass shootings, because the good guys didn't carry.
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