Ian Leslie on the political age/gender divide; John Cochrane on Trump supporters; Alice Evans on the fertility drop; Asymmetric insights about the border crisis
"And note that Mr. Trump does not want Congressional Republicans to do anything about border security this year, presumably because he wants to run on the issue rather than have it appear to be resolved."
I do not follow day to day politics so I don't know if that is correct or not. I do know that the "bipartisan" bill that was recently reported (and then died) in the Senate was pretty much "dead on arrival" before Trump said anything. That is because, as anyone who follows Mickey Kaus knows, it wouldn't have done much for "border security", may even have made it worse by explicitly giving the president power to let people in that he now claims but does not have clear statutory approval for. That, of course, doesn't mean much by itself, but the Speaker of the House was against it and the House had already passed a very strict border security bill that the Speaker wasn't going to give up without serious concessions from the Senate, which the bipartisan bill did not contain.
As a swing voter, I endorse the idea that "Elites being incompetent" is a major driving force for my recent anti-establishment votes. I don't think it's just me -- I think that competency shows up by supporting a society that is productive with functioning markets & rule of law, and the general populace can see the state worsening or improving.
No doubt politics was always dirty business, and there were many regrettable policies dating back 100 years, but it really feels like "this time is different" and the wheels have come off in the past 15 years. Both parties promote policies that sound good but would be terrible. The entrenched left no longer stands for liberal values but unapologetic marxism. The ascendant right no longer stands for smaller government and is hard to characterize as anything but reactionary and stupid. The result is that both have succeeded - spending is out of control, criminals are not prosecuted, the state takes more and more population into the welfare state and NGO activist-as-a-fake-job realm, while micromanaging outcomes by demographic elsewhere.
Perhaps the natural incentives of the system were kept in relative check for so long by no need to pander/grandstand to voters on TV and Social Media. Mainstream politics today is complete demagoguery. I'm disappointed that Vivek's downsizing platform do not seem to have penetrated into the realm of things that could happen. Just like in a private sector, restructuring and downsizing and doing less would be a great thing to improve quality.
I like what you say with one big thing exception. While a large and increasing share of liberals are very socialist, anti-capitalist and maybe Marxist in their views, I don't see anything I'd say is close to Marxism in Democrat policy. I see government expansion, mostly transfer payments, that is something akin to nanny state. For example, calls for increasing govt role in healthcare have not called for govt Drs or hospitals.
If the government is the one paying most of the doctors bills, how far are we from government doctors and hospitals.
If the government decides that "health equity" is going to be a metric that effects reimbursement rates, even if the entities reacting to that are "private", the effect is still going to be government directed goal setting.
In a way it's a lot like National Socialism. The state didn't confiscate the industrial businesses, but its not as if the owners of Junkers could decide to defy the parties objectives.
Yes, I agree with your observation that actual Democrat policy is far to the right of what seems to be their current views.
But here is the counterpoint:
1. The "Final form" of Civil Rights law being promoted (until just recently, hopefully) seems to be extremely socialist/fascist. CA still is passing unconstitutional laws about demographic makeup.
2. Many of the most essential activities are heavily micromanaged and funded by the Government. Education, housing, healthcare are the big three. I think it's uncontroversial to say that the results are predictably in line with what socialism delivers, unless you have the means to opt-out of the system.
At a big picture, I'm not sure if the USA system looks more like capitalism than socialism? Centralized control by the government via detailed regulations which mandate reporting at a minimum (in the remaining free sectors), and requirements, costs, outcomes in the more regulated sectors. And if you don't generally do what is asked via soft power then they make an example of you a la Elon. It seems not so dissimilar to China, except in degree.
The big success is that software / internet has been mostly unregulated and doesn't conflict with building regulations / or require physical space. Hopefully that's not changing with the manufactured panics around Social Media and AI.
Glenn Reynolds is right on immigration. Progressives in the western world are aiming at creating a new voting base after losing the working class (partly because there are fewer blue collars). They need people who buy into their false promises and utopian views.
I think Arnold needs to get familiar with the work of Ruy Teixeira and John Judis from around 2002 if he thinks Reynolds has an asymmetric insight on immigration. They were pretty darn explicit that an increasing non-white population, at least partially due to immigration, was going to create an invincible Democrat electoral majority. It was generally well received by Democrats, at least until the 'replacement theory' gaslighting started.
Teixeira has, since the election of Trump, done some work to try to tamp down over-enthusiastic interpretations of their theory. (See his 'The Liberal Patriot' here at SubStack). He's pretty careful now to emphasize they never said Democrats should abandon white working-class voting concerns, and he's been banging the drum for the last few years that abandoning working-class values in favor of faculty lounge identity politics is costing Democrats support among both white and now non-white working-class voters.
"Celebration parallax": If you advocate this outcome, you're allowed to describe it. If you criticize it, you're a conspiracy theorist who unfairly hallucinates your opponents' motivation.
Probably truth in that but seems like chasing their own tail. Hispanics seems like a growth opportunity for conservatives and that seems even more true for the Chinese starting to flood in.
Nah, it's identity politics all the way down, and material self-interest. The latter can sometimes be recruited to the services of running for office as a Republican, sure, obviously. My favorite trope down here is the lady candidate who has married an Anglo, so makes sure in her political career to emphasize her maiden name, no matter how unwieldy the result.
Im not sure what you are referring to but I think we are talking about different things. I wasn't clear that I was commenting on Democrats wanting more people who will vote for them.
Of course Democrats want that - they don't even need to want it, it is basically just a gift to them; somebody with a sharp memory of the West Wing show which (has been) the Bible for young liberal Dems entering politics/government since it aired - even recalled that the thesis of replacement or whatever you want to call it, once furnished a plot point of the show!
There is no evidence whatsoever that entering Hispanics or God forbid Chinese have any concept of conservatism, let alone any interest in conserving anything that lies in the American or Anglo tradition.
When people say/think this, "Catholic" tends to be doing a lot of the work. There is nothing conservative about Latin American Catholicism. As far as family goes, sure - Mexicans have strong family values. That doesn't translate into anything society-wise beyond having lots of babies, and lots of family parties. Abortion is commonplace in Mexico.
I used to say, years ago - "One thing you never see is a Mexican panhandler." I figured Mexicans took care of their own somehow.
I don't say that anymore.
There is no less dysfunction in the Hispanic community, and identity politics goes down very well with them, when it involves themselves. They are going to be a severe disappointment if there really is a "pan-POC" goal.
Cochrane writes “Lockdowns destroyed lives. Officials made up rules and ramped up censorship. Inquiries about whether the virus came from a lab leak, or anything negative about masks or vaccines, became ‘misinformation’ subject to censorship. Trump supporters saw media, tech companies and national-security bigwigs suppress the news of the Hunter Biden laptop just in time for the election.” Arnold writes, “He implies that elites would garner support if they were more competent.” How about if they were less corrupt?
I agree with all of the above complaints, yet I think that a steel-man could explain everything by incompetence and incentives without resorting to allegations of corruption. It seems plausible that they thought they knew what is best and used the mechanisms of control available to them to try do what they thought was right. I think the conclusion to be drawn is not "they were corrupt and we just need to elect different people". I think the right conclusion is "those mechanisms of control should not be available".
Government's incentives is to take more power, as in any organization. Perhaps the big success of USA was to limit the power available, such that it took a while to "interpret" the constitution to end up with government powers so clearly outside its bounds.
The corruption actually seems to be dumbing down, from the days of disguising billing along a chain. It is ordinary stuff like bogus "Covid outreach campaigns" (as if anybody hadn't heard of it) using federal funds, steered to woman-owned business (no experience required) pal of Democrat machinery insiders, as happened in my hometown. Indeed, the whole HUB thing seems to invite corruption by limiting the pool of vendors to either a small number of people, or to those who (fraudulently) set themselves up as a minority-figureheaded business. See the Georgia woman who pretended she could supply meals to Puerto Rico after the hurricane. (Georgia seems to be a hotbed for this stuff.)
The mechanism is light or no oversight of these sorts of contracts, used to enrich supporters and ensure that government is viewed as the source of wealth.
I am not sure there is a meaningful distinction between following personal incentives that are contrary to the stated goals of your role and corruption. I absolutely agree that the conclusion of "those mechanisms of control should not be available" is spot on. However, corruption usually looks a lot like doing what you think is best but just happening to make poor decisions that just happen to get you want you want, at least in a half way functional polity. Obvious corruption like siphoning off funds, or giving your private businesses a pass to stay open while forcing competitors to close, that is a bit more rare. Doing subtle things that are easier to explain away if you get caught is where most of the corruption action is.
Ding ding ding ding!!! That sound means that Rob F will be moving onto our final round; squaring off against reigning champion Arnold Kling! Stay tuned for more after this short commercial break. (Arnold - in addition to FITs, AI Grader, NBU, AI Mentor, and your Top Secret Project X—can you create an intellectual game show where we can debate and be entertained by topics like this? I mean, like, In My Tribe is rad, but we need some slot machine noises. Please). Thanks Rob.
It seemed unserious but not humorous. Like you were looking down on Arnold and the commenters--"look how much better I am than all this; see how I make fun of them"--without telling us why this is bad and you are better.
Complete misread on your part. I liked Rob F’s reply so much that I felt like showering it with praise. It reminded me of Milton Friedman. My respect for Arnold is to the point of gushing. Reigning champion is a sincere compliment.
Yes, my statement was out of place, and random, but it was also fun and I think funny.
Assymetric insight might be ok when people are making "elephant in the brain" claims that their opponents have deluded themselves into hypocritical false consciousness about the real, subconscious reasons behind their behaviors. Even then, the whole book by that title is a mountain of evidence that a big collection of such insights are, you know, true, so, what, we shouldn't start from a position of the truth about human nature when discussing politics?
But it isn't a psychological insight when it is suspected of being perfectly intentional. Disputed claims are always 'asymmetric', but saying someone is being dishonest about their motives is not claiming special insight, and indeed, if the accusation is true, then the belief about dishonesty is symmetric! The accusor thinks the liar is lying, and the liar knows he is lying. People lie about their true motives in politics literally all the time, like they lie about their true motives in life all the time, trying to see what they can get away with in the various games of life by fooling others by offering in bad faith some rationalization or plausibly alternative 'innocent' explanation or excuse for norm-violating behavior. To label every common-sense suspicion that such lying is going on in the context of high stakes, long-term political strategy "assymetric insight" that should be discouraged is overbroad and insists on a discourse characterized by gullibility and naivete.
You don't need people to explicitly spell out their true political motives because, just as in the law, we can infer these motivates from a collection of other consistent, corroborating behaviors and testing whether there are any limiting principles and so forth.
Having said nice things about "The Elephant in the Brain", I should add that I think Andy Clark offers a better explanation of some of the things in it in his The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Pantheon, 2023). Clark's book is a well-written popularization of predictive processing theory.
The book is by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, Oxford University Press, 2018. It's pretty interesting, and pretty well-written. As Handle says, it's about how we often don't realize why we do or think something--and so misrepresent to ourselves and others--not about deliberate lying.
"[Cochrane] would have Mr. Trump 'Understand that this election isn’t about him.' I would, too, but then he wouldn’t be Trump."
You assume without argument that "Mr. Trump’s bitterness over the last election" is just an expression of self-importance, and has nothing to do with a genuine belief that the election was stolen through systemic fraud.
When the possibility of election fraud is raised, you retreat to the position that elections basically matter only because they facilitate peaceful transfer of power, and so you're not interested in exploring evidence of fraud.
Failure to consider the evidence excludes you from anything like serious analysis of Trump's motivations. Perhaps he thinks the same cabal that cooked up the "Russian collusion" hoax also disenfranchised the majority of voters, who happen to be his supporters. Maybe that angers him because he has a different conception than you do of the purpose and value of representative democracy.
I see the phrase "show your work" thrown around a lot in these circles, but I don't see you showing any of your work. You begin with 1) a moral assumption about the purpose of representative democracy, and 2) personal distaste for Trump's manner and policies, and that lets you draw the desired conclusion without having to do the work necessary to justify your beliefs.
PS: If you take seriously what you've written about asymmetric insight, you're not in a good position to dismissively speculate about what drives Trump.
Voter Crowd folks are the ones that need to show their work.
I am persuaded that fraud is possible and that the current system going into 2024 makes it far too easy. I think the Voter Fraud crowd has made a big contribution to raising awareness of that that I don't want to minimize.
However, I am not aware of any convincing evidence that fraud occurred to tip the 2020 election. I am more persuaded by the many legal proceedings which found the opposite, none of which occurred in Democrat strongholds. Some of the claims I've seen on Twitter/X since then which have purported to provide that evidence have come out as fabricated. Other claims don't even pretend to be rigorous / admissable, e.g. crowd sizes, the fact that mail-in ballots were overwhelming for Biden, etc.
"I am more persuaded by the many legal proceedings which found the opposite, none of which occurred in Democrat strongholds."
Virtually every 2020 election fraud lawsuit I'm aware of was dismissed on procedural grounds, and did not actually involve a trial that examined factual evidence in detail.
I have not followed it in such detail, so I could be wrong. My understanding is that there were dozens of cases filed and at least some of them offered opportunity to present evidence & testify. I do not believe that any credible issues of sufficient scale were identified. In many cases Republicans or Republican-appointed folks were in charge of proceedings.
Saying "dismissed on procedural grounds", seems to imply that it wasn't given a fair hearing. My recollection of what happened (again, as a mildly interested distant observer) was that if they were dismissed on procedural grounds it was because they had no case to argue. That would be the opposite conclusion - that they were found to be frivolous or immaterial.
Please post a link to any legal proceeding where the evidence was evaluated and found false. The assumption that the election was clean puts the burden of proof on those claiming fraud, beyond a reasonable doubt. In order to avoid a T1 error of falsely calling a clean election “stolen”, there’s lots of deep state support for accepting T2 errors of falsely calling a stolen election “clean”. Like 1960.
Censorship of Biden corruption evidence on the laptop, alone, is enough to call the election NOT 100% free and fair, thus stolen (or “rigged “).
Burden of proof is on the folks calling foul. Is the election nullified automatically unless someone challenges it proving that it was clean? Please link to the place where evidence was evaluated and found to be (a) true beyond a reasonable doubt and (b) sufficient to sway the election result.
I agree that the laptop censorship was foul play, especially after it came out that they knew without a doubt that it was accurate/true. But that is not related to the question of ballot integrity, which has been the central claim of "stop the steal".
I will grant you that the Democrats have done their best to reduce voting requirements and leftists tend to be comfortable not following the rules. But saying it's stolen because it lacks a "proof of security" is unfalsifiable. There has been plenty of time to chase down evidence and ample opportunity to release proof on X (I don't know about the courts), but no proof of cheating substantial enough to swing the election has been released to my knowledge.
Absolutely right, burden of proof on those calling foul. Or, in Trump’s case, those claiming he’s lying when says it was stolen. Trump didn’t prove it was stolen, none of his critics are even trying to prove it wasn’t, they assume it and claim that lack of proof of being stolen is proof of not being stolen. Which of course is false.
OJ was found Not Guilty, not proven beyond reasonable doubt. But that doesn’t prove him innocent, it is only the presumption. And there was a preponderance of evidence.
You, and all including Kling, who say Trump is lying, have burden of proof to claim it was proven, not merely assumed, not stolen. (OJ not proven guilty, but many think he did it. I do, do you?) Critics should say Trump’s claim of a stolen election is not proven, but that is much less demonizing.
Part of such proof would show how much fraud/ dead folk/ bad mail-in signatures there were, especially in those states where ballot counting was paused for a couple hours.
How many mail ballots did NOT have full documentation and chain of custody?
It’s quite rational to believe the election was stolen, and I believe that is unproven truth. I also don’t believe Epstein killed himself, nor that Biden’s laptop was disinformation, nor that Obama did not spy on Trump’s campaign in 2016. Three deep state lies-why should I assume they would be honest about the election?
How many of the 65 million mail in ballots had their envelopes with signatures verified & checked by Republicans? And it’s my claim, not Trump’s, that the Biden laptop lie makes the election stolen—tho I also think he should claim it more, too.
> It’s quite rational to believe the election was stolen, and I believe that is unproven truth
That's the issue. It is an article of faith for you, but it is not for anyone outside of the personality cult. That includes most of the country, including many who vote R.
Anyone who is "sure" - or IMO even "almost positive" - that the 2020 election was stolen is delusional, incompetent or lying.
OTOH, anyone who suggests that there definitely wasn't fraud, or even that there definitely wasn't sufficient fraud to change the results of the election, is also either delusional, incompetent or lying.
Personally, I think there is something like a 10% - 20% chance that fraud in 2-4 key states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) did change the results of the election.
I doubt we will ever find out whether this was true. But the claim that there is *no* chance that fraud swung the results of GA and PA is just as absurd as the claim that *of course* the election was stolen.
FWIW - Dr. Kling chooses to link to John Cochrane's WSJ article rather than Cochrane's much more fulsome discussion at the Grumpy Economist substack which is not behind a paywall: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/understanding-trumpers-c25 Well worth reading both.
It is trivially easy to google and learn that Chinese nationals are the fastest-growing segment of border crossers, albeit a small minority. That growth was roughly tenfold each of the last two years. It doesn't much matter if they're being "sent" - it's interesting that they are being allowed to use these migrant channels, which are clearly orchestrated.
First, I have no doubt most of these Chinese are not being sent. They are leaving to escape repression. That said, I assumed "sent" referred to spies or similar. Yes?
Who do you think is orchestrating and what exactly?
It used to be you’d see clothes on the American bank of the Rio Grande.
I am interested in the arrival of well-dressed, non-tired looking people from all over the world coming with cell phones and what appear to be instructions. They’ve not walked any great distance. They have been told exactly what to say and to bring no papers. They are getting from A to B (Senegal to Eagle Pass) in a coordinated way and I assume non-profits are involved. In my city it’s the Catholic Church. The church has a migrant shelter, with a quietly created waiting facility at the city-owned airport for people to wait for planes whose fares I am not convinced they’ve paid for as without ID - how could they be on the manifest?
Somebody is directing all this traffic. I think the usual bogeyman is one suspect but I think others must be involved.
With China - I expect they know exactly who’s leaving and their permitting them to leave is evidence of their tacit involvement. Others can play a much longer game than America can.
I have seen a number of reports over the past few months of military age Chinese men being found coming across the southern border. I don't really look for that sort of thing, nor do I follow it, but there does seem to be some reporting on the matter. Enough and sufficiently varied that it can't be written off as just a minor thing completely spun into a crazy theory, at least.
Instapundit has a lot of posts about how badly the Chinese economy is doing and about how young people are losing hope. I suspect this is exaggerated but it would help explain "military age Chinese men" trying to get to America.
That's true, I have read/heard about the Chinese economy's struggles from a few different sources as well. There are definitely a few different reasons they could be coming over as they are, and probably quite a few are all true at the same time. There is a lot of Chinese and a lot of China, after all, so it wouldn't surprise me to find that there are a ton of different reasons people are coming over even just depending on the province.
Listener's comment that they, "haven’t seen any coverage of this topic that seems important in mainstream media," is more revealing about what they pay attention to than anything else!
1) I just had my third at 40, a boy. I suspect he won't have kids until he is around my age (if at all). That means I will either be dead (likely with my health ailments) or pretty informed in terms of being able to play with grandkids.
The thing about delayed childrearing is once you combine two generations of it you really aren't going to play with your grandchildren all that much.
2) Stopping illegal immigration would require doing things at are "cruel".
If you think illegal immigration is going to destroy your way of life, then cruelty is a reasonable price to pay. Hence conservatives are against it.
If you think its going to enhance your way of life (because they are going to increase your political and cultural power in the long run) then there isn't an incentive to do things that are "cruel".
So what we get is Democrats acknowledge that we should have a border, but won't acknowledge any of the means it would take to secure it. And they give us bogus "reform" packages that amount to "we will legalize two million (or more) illegals a year and probably just let more in anyway".
The definition of who constitutes the "elite" gets fuzzier and fuzzier. Your own education? Your parents' education? Something else? Joe Biden's parents were not college graduates, and since very early in life their family had limited means and no connections. Is he of the "elite"?
Donald Trump's father attended Pratt Institute. Does that make him an elite? Or do you need good manners to be one?
I am a regular listener to Bret and Heather's Darkhorse podcast. Their progressive worldview often clashes with my conservative worldview, but even though I disagree with them on certain important topics, I have more faith in what Bret has to say than any scholar affiliated with one of the faux conservative 'think tanks' like the Hoover Institute. In particular, Bret's view that the so-called 'covid vaccine' is neither effective nor safe has been vindicated. Bret's model/'conspiracy theory' on the topic of the covid vaccine is consistent with a standard tenet of health care economics, namely, that given imperfect/asymmetric information, MD's may have the ability and incentive to manipulate demand for their services (for example, the prominent DC allergy doctor who put a concerned look on his face in an effort to convince me to take allergy shots; it didn't work, partly because his argument that the shots would be covered by my insurance rubbed the economist in me the wrong way). The model/conspiracy theory predicts that the drug companies (in collaboration with the government and medical establishment) would boost demand for their 'vaccines' by manipulating information about its effectiveness and safety. And that's what happened. We were told that the 'vaccine' would protect us from getting covid. That turned out to be a lie. The protection, if any, was fleeting at best. Never fear, we have a booster for you! Ka ching, ka ching, just like the steady stream of patients lining up for their allergy shots at that DC doctor's office. Then they slow-walked the news that the 'vaccine' is associated with a risk of myocarditis and other heart ailments, among other potential adverse side effects. If you really want to indulge in reality or fear mongering, depending on your point of view, listen to John Campbell's youtube interviews with prominent doctors and other professionals raising concerns about the possible link between the covid 'vaccine' and cancer. So I respectfully disagree with the characterization of Bret Weinstein as a conspiracy theorist, but then again, I didn't take any boosters. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool my twice, shame on me.
"faux conservative 'think tanks' like the Hoover Institute"
you realize you undercut all credibility, and cause a fair number of us to disregard your post and your opinions entirely, with this outrageous, *at best* mostly false and I would argue entirely gratuitous shot.
This is one of the few blogs where I read the comments because usually they are enlightening and reasonable. but based on this early snippet alone I will do my best not to read yours.
By 'faux conservative,' I mean think tanks that are propaganda outlets for the view that the goal of US foreign and military policy is to spread 'liberal democracy' around the world, while utterly failing to conserve the foundations of liberal democracy (freedom of speech, equality before the law, freedom of religion, and so forth) here at home (holding an occasional conference lamenting the erosion of liberal democracy in the West doesn't cut it).
If you want to believe the covid vaccine offered you and your family some kind of protection against covid, that is your prerogative. I'm agnostic. We were told that the vaccine would protect us from covid, full stop. That was a lie. They (the drug companies, government health agencies, medical practitioners) couldn't possibly have known that prior to the rollout of the vaccination, but they kept saying it even after it became clear that the protection afforded by the vaccine was limited with respect to time, variant, and possibly other factors (quality of the batch, how it was injected, etc.). They also lied by omission with respect to the adverse health effects of the vaccine, and they continue to do so. Once someone lies to me, I find it difficult to attach any credibility to anything else they say. Feel free to avoid reading my comments. I couldn't care less.
I forgot to mention the information campaign and 'studies' designed to cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of alternative drug treatments for covid such as Ivermectin ('horse paste') and hydroxychloroquine. The lack of alternative treatments was required for the emergency use authorization for the covid 'vaccine.' Just another conspiracy theory. As for resolving the border security problem, you might ask why the Biden administration doesn't just pull the rug out from under Trump's campaign by using existing law to stop the flow of migrants. Instead, the Senate's draft agreement not only would have largely preserved the existing flow of migrants, but it would have prevented Trump from controlling illegal immigration if he did manage to get elected. Evidently the border security measures were just a fig leaf to pour another $60B down the Ukrainian drain. And still Kling blames Trump for the failure to resolve border security, and he remains mystified by Trump's continued support. But at least he will have someone to mow his lawn.
I want a very different country, too! [I really HATE the "Again" in MAGA!] But it's a very different country from Trump's principally one in which people who disagree with me about immigration, or vaccines, or pronoun use, or taxes/deficits, or climate change do not consider me their ENEMY!
I disagree with parts of your posts, often, and am glad you are here to argue those positions.
Like an immigration policy that is … stupid? Lousy? A big political loser (the main criterion to justify stupid)? It seems dumb to talk a lot about any new laws if you don’t support enforcing actual, current laws.
But I do support enforcing the law to the extent possible, but we do nt have the numbers of people needed to hear the great number of asylum cases. A new law could narrow the grounds for asylum. Now I will say that the main reason for reducing the numbers of asylum seekers is political, to make it possible to greatly expand the numbers of high skilled immigrants. A few thousand low skilled immigrants (and not ALL asylum seekers ARE low skilled) more o less is not a big deal economically. It is pretty hard for a person who enters and works not to be a least a small net benefit to existing residents.
" It is pretty hard for a person who enters and works not to be a least a small net benefit to existing residents."
For the record, I am all for more *legal* immigration - both virtually unlimited immigration of high-skill immigrants, but also a fair amount of low-skill as well.
Immigrants who come in and work for their drug-lord benefactors in gangs or in the human trafficking sex trade (depending on your POV of the latter, especially given that some are underage) are probably not a net benefit to existing residents.
Under catch and release, illegals do not have authorization to work here legally. You can't seriously be arguing that catch and release is a good, sane immigration policy, can you?
Sorry, I should have said works in a normal league activity. Working as a hitman would not count. :)
I don't want to do catch and release, but process the claims of entrants, let those with valid claims enter ad return the other to there place of origin. I just think that Type II errors are not very costly.
Ok, I'll bite. In your estimation, what percentage of the illegal immigrants entering the country in the last 3 years would be allowed to remain in the country under your proposal, PENDING THEIR APPEARANCE before a judge, and which would not?
Because unless your answer is a tiny percentage, you are literally not saying anything other than you want to keep the current insane system, complete with its obvious terrible incentives, in place.
Separately, I notice with some interest that you did not answer my question about how exactly illegal immigrants are supposed to work in this country *legally*. Again, I am for more *legal* immigration; with mass illegal immigration your claims about each person being a net positive are specious, and even if true, continue to undermine the rule of law.
Yes, I suppose it would be a tiny fraction <5%. Most asylum seekers are just looking for a better life. I don't blame and some would be able to enter legally if we had a merit based system, but that's not the law right now.
If we had merely kept "Remain in Mexico" in place, the number of cases that would have been and will be scheduled, would go down *dramatically*. Incentives matter.
...whatever your opinions are on other present points, or what the law should be and how/whether it is enforced.
My understanding is that the legal authority for that was the PH emergency. I want to control the border not only efficiently and humanely, but legally, too.
I am not defending all the decisions that were made. _I_ would have included money in ARA for asylum clearing agents to hear cases w/o providing cannon fodder for Abbott and DeSantis to demagogue with.
Your understanding about the legal authority for Remain in Mexico is simply wrong. Biden's removal of the high successful policy was purely political.
The millions who are coming across the border illegally each year are not "cannon fodder".
And I note with some interest that when Adams of NYC or the mayor of D.C. or the leaders of Martha's Vineyard complain about the comparative trickle of illegal immigrants into their cities, you don't refer to that as demagoguery...
I admit to making a judgement about DeSantis and Abbot's motives.
?? The policy might have been successful but illegal. But I do agree that if on admittance, their claims should be heard and dispatched expeditiously. I assu most are not valid.
OK. I think vaccines worked quite well, although I think that the emphasis on how "safe" they were, compared to just how effective, was counterproductive. NPI (semi-compulsory restriction of certain kind of interactions) are completely OK in principle; we should and could have had a better conversation about which ones when and where were cost effective.
It's a sign we have a great country that so many people want to come here and we ought to be allowing, indeed recruiting more skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants. We also need to reform the law to allow some real asylum seekers and some people who want to work initially in low-skilled occupations to enter and to legally and humanely deter others.
And can we just let school boards and city councils work out who gets to use which bathroom and not make a national issue of it?
And boy am I ticked off at first Regan then GWB and then Ryan/Trump for passing revenue-reducing-deficit increasing tax cuts, and worse that high income people were the direct beneficiaries.
I think you’re asking too much of the citizenry, at least with the Constitution and discourse platforms we have. The fix can’t be: to appeal to hearts. It has to be about changing incentives.
Listener's comment that they, "haven’t seen any coverage of this topic that seems important in mainstream media," is more revealing about what they pay attention to than anything else!
I posted this in response to another comment. But, to be more direct, people shouldn't get their immigration politics from the plot of Red Dawn!
There has been extensive coverage of Chinese asylum seekers coming to the US.
Hi Josh - thanks for adding the link on my substack so I could come over and give more flavor. Appreciate you assembling the links above. No question the ethnic mix of migrants has been covered. My perspective was the corporate structure, NGO organized feel to the immigration as well as parallel migration apparatuses was an angle I hadn't heard before. Not sure how accurate, but an interesting angle to explore.
Re: the comments on asymmetric insights and Glenn Reynolds, of course both Kling's and his can be right - and IMO most likely are.
For the average Democrat voter, I think Kling's claim that they are against it because Trump is for it is most likely most applicable.
OTOH, for the Democrat politicians (those controlling the Biden administration - which is surely not Biden himself) implementing the policy, who see well that it hurts their short-term election chances, what other possible reason can there be than that they want to change the electoral calculus longer term?
I guess there is one - the theory that Obama and some liberal elites literally dislike the country so much that they want to cause harm to it, while benefitting (some) non-Americans along the way. Sadly, I find that theory plausible; however, it is not more likely than Reynold's assertion as an explanation.
"We are going to really appreciate having grandchildren, so let’s take the necessary intermediate step."
Most people's discount rates are far higher than this. If people's discount rates were this low, we'd not need old-age retirement programs like social security, because people would save for themselves. Telling people to think about issues that will arise in decades doesn't work at any scale.
The Brooks column is not awful, but his early-on claim that DEI on campus is a problem, but *less* of a problem than the growth in administrators, shows again that he doesn't really get it.
...or that he "knows" he must kow-tow to the wokeness at the NYT in order to ensure they keep paying him. It is admittedly difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and evil.
"And note that Mr. Trump does not want Congressional Republicans to do anything about border security this year, presumably because he wants to run on the issue rather than have it appear to be resolved."
I do not follow day to day politics so I don't know if that is correct or not. I do know that the "bipartisan" bill that was recently reported (and then died) in the Senate was pretty much "dead on arrival" before Trump said anything. That is because, as anyone who follows Mickey Kaus knows, it wouldn't have done much for "border security", may even have made it worse by explicitly giving the president power to let people in that he now claims but does not have clear statutory approval for. That, of course, doesn't mean much by itself, but the Speaker of the House was against it and the House had already passed a very strict border security bill that the Speaker wasn't going to give up without serious concessions from the Senate, which the bipartisan bill did not contain.
As a swing voter, I endorse the idea that "Elites being incompetent" is a major driving force for my recent anti-establishment votes. I don't think it's just me -- I think that competency shows up by supporting a society that is productive with functioning markets & rule of law, and the general populace can see the state worsening or improving.
No doubt politics was always dirty business, and there were many regrettable policies dating back 100 years, but it really feels like "this time is different" and the wheels have come off in the past 15 years. Both parties promote policies that sound good but would be terrible. The entrenched left no longer stands for liberal values but unapologetic marxism. The ascendant right no longer stands for smaller government and is hard to characterize as anything but reactionary and stupid. The result is that both have succeeded - spending is out of control, criminals are not prosecuted, the state takes more and more population into the welfare state and NGO activist-as-a-fake-job realm, while micromanaging outcomes by demographic elsewhere.
Perhaps the natural incentives of the system were kept in relative check for so long by no need to pander/grandstand to voters on TV and Social Media. Mainstream politics today is complete demagoguery. I'm disappointed that Vivek's downsizing platform do not seem to have penetrated into the realm of things that could happen. Just like in a private sector, restructuring and downsizing and doing less would be a great thing to improve quality.
I like what you say with one big thing exception. While a large and increasing share of liberals are very socialist, anti-capitalist and maybe Marxist in their views, I don't see anything I'd say is close to Marxism in Democrat policy. I see government expansion, mostly transfer payments, that is something akin to nanny state. For example, calls for increasing govt role in healthcare have not called for govt Drs or hospitals.
If the government is the one paying most of the doctors bills, how far are we from government doctors and hospitals.
If the government decides that "health equity" is going to be a metric that effects reimbursement rates, even if the entities reacting to that are "private", the effect is still going to be government directed goal setting.
In a way it's a lot like National Socialism. The state didn't confiscate the industrial businesses, but its not as if the owners of Junkers could decide to defy the parties objectives.
Yes, I agree with your observation that actual Democrat policy is far to the right of what seems to be their current views.
But here is the counterpoint:
1. The "Final form" of Civil Rights law being promoted (until just recently, hopefully) seems to be extremely socialist/fascist. CA still is passing unconstitutional laws about demographic makeup.
2. Many of the most essential activities are heavily micromanaged and funded by the Government. Education, housing, healthcare are the big three. I think it's uncontroversial to say that the results are predictably in line with what socialism delivers, unless you have the means to opt-out of the system.
At a big picture, I'm not sure if the USA system looks more like capitalism than socialism? Centralized control by the government via detailed regulations which mandate reporting at a minimum (in the remaining free sectors), and requirements, costs, outcomes in the more regulated sectors. And if you don't generally do what is asked via soft power then they make an example of you a la Elon. It seems not so dissimilar to China, except in degree.
The big success is that software / internet has been mostly unregulated and doesn't conflict with building regulations / or require physical space. Hopefully that's not changing with the manufactured panics around Social Media and AI.
Glenn Reynolds is right on immigration. Progressives in the western world are aiming at creating a new voting base after losing the working class (partly because there are fewer blue collars). They need people who buy into their false promises and utopian views.
I think Arnold needs to get familiar with the work of Ruy Teixeira and John Judis from around 2002 if he thinks Reynolds has an asymmetric insight on immigration. They were pretty darn explicit that an increasing non-white population, at least partially due to immigration, was going to create an invincible Democrat electoral majority. It was generally well received by Democrats, at least until the 'replacement theory' gaslighting started.
Teixeira has, since the election of Trump, done some work to try to tamp down over-enthusiastic interpretations of their theory. (See his 'The Liberal Patriot' here at SubStack). He's pretty careful now to emphasize they never said Democrats should abandon white working-class voting concerns, and he's been banging the drum for the last few years that abandoning working-class values in favor of faculty lounge identity politics is costing Democrats support among both white and now non-white working-class voters.
Joe Biden (2015): "An unrelenting stream of immigration" will cause whites to become a minority, and "that's a source of our strength."
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1526922290570600448
"Celebration parallax": If you advocate this outcome, you're allowed to describe it. If you criticize it, you're a conspiracy theorist who unfairly hallucinates your opponents' motivation.
https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1403552676722393088
Concur. In 2014 Biden went on record declaring illegals are already American citizens and "should participate fully." https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/201972-biden-illegal-immigrants-already-americans/. No evidence he has strayed from that extremist position.
Probably truth in that but seems like chasing their own tail. Hispanics seems like a growth opportunity for conservatives and that seems even more true for the Chinese starting to flood in.
Nah, it's identity politics all the way down, and material self-interest. The latter can sometimes be recruited to the services of running for office as a Republican, sure, obviously. My favorite trope down here is the lady candidate who has married an Anglo, so makes sure in her political career to emphasize her maiden name, no matter how unwieldy the result.
Im not sure what you are referring to but I think we are talking about different things. I wasn't clear that I was commenting on Democrats wanting more people who will vote for them.
Of course Democrats want that - they don't even need to want it, it is basically just a gift to them; somebody with a sharp memory of the West Wing show which (has been) the Bible for young liberal Dems entering politics/government since it aired - even recalled that the thesis of replacement or whatever you want to call it, once furnished a plot point of the show!
There is no evidence whatsoever that entering Hispanics or God forbid Chinese have any concept of conservatism, let alone any interest in conserving anything that lies in the American or Anglo tradition.
When people say/think this, "Catholic" tends to be doing a lot of the work. There is nothing conservative about Latin American Catholicism. As far as family goes, sure - Mexicans have strong family values. That doesn't translate into anything society-wise beyond having lots of babies, and lots of family parties. Abortion is commonplace in Mexico.
I used to say, years ago - "One thing you never see is a Mexican panhandler." I figured Mexicans took care of their own somehow.
I don't say that anymore.
There is no less dysfunction in the Hispanic community, and identity politics goes down very well with them, when it involves themselves. They are going to be a severe disappointment if there really is a "pan-POC" goal.
Cochrane writes “Lockdowns destroyed lives. Officials made up rules and ramped up censorship. Inquiries about whether the virus came from a lab leak, or anything negative about masks or vaccines, became ‘misinformation’ subject to censorship. Trump supporters saw media, tech companies and national-security bigwigs suppress the news of the Hunter Biden laptop just in time for the election.” Arnold writes, “He implies that elites would garner support if they were more competent.” How about if they were less corrupt?
I agree with all of the above complaints, yet I think that a steel-man could explain everything by incompetence and incentives without resorting to allegations of corruption. It seems plausible that they thought they knew what is best and used the mechanisms of control available to them to try do what they thought was right. I think the conclusion to be drawn is not "they were corrupt and we just need to elect different people". I think the right conclusion is "those mechanisms of control should not be available".
Government's incentives is to take more power, as in any organization. Perhaps the big success of USA was to limit the power available, such that it took a while to "interpret" the constitution to end up with government powers so clearly outside its bounds.
The corruption actually seems to be dumbing down, from the days of disguising billing along a chain. It is ordinary stuff like bogus "Covid outreach campaigns" (as if anybody hadn't heard of it) using federal funds, steered to woman-owned business (no experience required) pal of Democrat machinery insiders, as happened in my hometown. Indeed, the whole HUB thing seems to invite corruption by limiting the pool of vendors to either a small number of people, or to those who (fraudulently) set themselves up as a minority-figureheaded business. See the Georgia woman who pretended she could supply meals to Puerto Rico after the hurricane. (Georgia seems to be a hotbed for this stuff.)
The mechanism is light or no oversight of these sorts of contracts, used to enrich supporters and ensure that government is viewed as the source of wealth.
I am not sure there is a meaningful distinction between following personal incentives that are contrary to the stated goals of your role and corruption. I absolutely agree that the conclusion of "those mechanisms of control should not be available" is spot on. However, corruption usually looks a lot like doing what you think is best but just happening to make poor decisions that just happen to get you want you want, at least in a half way functional polity. Obvious corruption like siphoning off funds, or giving your private businesses a pass to stay open while forcing competitors to close, that is a bit more rare. Doing subtle things that are easier to explain away if you get caught is where most of the corruption action is.
Ding ding ding ding!!! That sound means that Rob F will be moving onto our final round; squaring off against reigning champion Arnold Kling! Stay tuned for more after this short commercial break. (Arnold - in addition to FITs, AI Grader, NBU, AI Mentor, and your Top Secret Project X—can you create an intellectual game show where we can debate and be entertained by topics like this? I mean, like, In My Tribe is rad, but we need some slot machine noises. Please). Thanks Rob.
No doubt I am not being charitable, but this seemed stupid and annoying.
What seemed stupid and annoying?
It seemed unserious but not humorous. Like you were looking down on Arnold and the commenters--"look how much better I am than all this; see how I make fun of them"--without telling us why this is bad and you are better.
Complete misread on your part. I liked Rob F’s reply so much that I felt like showering it with praise. It reminded me of Milton Friedman. My respect for Arnold is to the point of gushing. Reigning champion is a sincere compliment.
Yes, my statement was out of place, and random, but it was also fun and I think funny.
Assymetric insight might be ok when people are making "elephant in the brain" claims that their opponents have deluded themselves into hypocritical false consciousness about the real, subconscious reasons behind their behaviors. Even then, the whole book by that title is a mountain of evidence that a big collection of such insights are, you know, true, so, what, we shouldn't start from a position of the truth about human nature when discussing politics?
But it isn't a psychological insight when it is suspected of being perfectly intentional. Disputed claims are always 'asymmetric', but saying someone is being dishonest about their motives is not claiming special insight, and indeed, if the accusation is true, then the belief about dishonesty is symmetric! The accusor thinks the liar is lying, and the liar knows he is lying. People lie about their true motives in politics literally all the time, like they lie about their true motives in life all the time, trying to see what they can get away with in the various games of life by fooling others by offering in bad faith some rationalization or plausibly alternative 'innocent' explanation or excuse for norm-violating behavior. To label every common-sense suspicion that such lying is going on in the context of high stakes, long-term political strategy "assymetric insight" that should be discouraged is overbroad and insists on a discourse characterized by gullibility and naivete.
You don't need people to explicitly spell out their true political motives because, just as in the law, we can infer these motivates from a collection of other consistent, corroborating behaviors and testing whether there are any limiting principles and so forth.
Having said nice things about "The Elephant in the Brain", I should add that I think Andy Clark offers a better explanation of some of the things in it in his The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Pantheon, 2023). Clark's book is a well-written popularization of predictive processing theory.
The book is by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, Oxford University Press, 2018. It's pretty interesting, and pretty well-written. As Handle says, it's about how we often don't realize why we do or think something--and so misrepresent to ourselves and others--not about deliberate lying.
"[Cochrane] would have Mr. Trump 'Understand that this election isn’t about him.' I would, too, but then he wouldn’t be Trump."
You assume without argument that "Mr. Trump’s bitterness over the last election" is just an expression of self-importance, and has nothing to do with a genuine belief that the election was stolen through systemic fraud.
When the possibility of election fraud is raised, you retreat to the position that elections basically matter only because they facilitate peaceful transfer of power, and so you're not interested in exploring evidence of fraud.
Failure to consider the evidence excludes you from anything like serious analysis of Trump's motivations. Perhaps he thinks the same cabal that cooked up the "Russian collusion" hoax also disenfranchised the majority of voters, who happen to be his supporters. Maybe that angers him because he has a different conception than you do of the purpose and value of representative democracy.
I see the phrase "show your work" thrown around a lot in these circles, but I don't see you showing any of your work. You begin with 1) a moral assumption about the purpose of representative democracy, and 2) personal distaste for Trump's manner and policies, and that lets you draw the desired conclusion without having to do the work necessary to justify your beliefs.
PS: If you take seriously what you've written about asymmetric insight, you're not in a good position to dismissively speculate about what drives Trump.
Voter Crowd folks are the ones that need to show their work.
I am persuaded that fraud is possible and that the current system going into 2024 makes it far too easy. I think the Voter Fraud crowd has made a big contribution to raising awareness of that that I don't want to minimize.
However, I am not aware of any convincing evidence that fraud occurred to tip the 2020 election. I am more persuaded by the many legal proceedings which found the opposite, none of which occurred in Democrat strongholds. Some of the claims I've seen on Twitter/X since then which have purported to provide that evidence have come out as fabricated. Other claims don't even pretend to be rigorous / admissable, e.g. crowd sizes, the fact that mail-in ballots were overwhelming for Biden, etc.
"I am more persuaded by the many legal proceedings which found the opposite, none of which occurred in Democrat strongholds."
Virtually every 2020 election fraud lawsuit I'm aware of was dismissed on procedural grounds, and did not actually involve a trial that examined factual evidence in detail.
I have not followed it in such detail, so I could be wrong. My understanding is that there were dozens of cases filed and at least some of them offered opportunity to present evidence & testify. I do not believe that any credible issues of sufficient scale were identified. In many cases Republicans or Republican-appointed folks were in charge of proceedings.
Saying "dismissed on procedural grounds", seems to imply that it wasn't given a fair hearing. My recollection of what happened (again, as a mildly interested distant observer) was that if they were dismissed on procedural grounds it was because they had no case to argue. That would be the opposite conclusion - that they were found to be frivolous or immaterial.
Please post a link to any legal proceeding where the evidence was evaluated and found false. The assumption that the election was clean puts the burden of proof on those claiming fraud, beyond a reasonable doubt. In order to avoid a T1 error of falsely calling a clean election “stolen”, there’s lots of deep state support for accepting T2 errors of falsely calling a stolen election “clean”. Like 1960.
Censorship of Biden corruption evidence on the laptop, alone, is enough to call the election NOT 100% free and fair, thus stolen (or “rigged “).
Burden of proof is on the folks calling foul. Is the election nullified automatically unless someone challenges it proving that it was clean? Please link to the place where evidence was evaluated and found to be (a) true beyond a reasonable doubt and (b) sufficient to sway the election result.
I agree that the laptop censorship was foul play, especially after it came out that they knew without a doubt that it was accurate/true. But that is not related to the question of ballot integrity, which has been the central claim of "stop the steal".
I will grant you that the Democrats have done their best to reduce voting requirements and leftists tend to be comfortable not following the rules. But saying it's stolen because it lacks a "proof of security" is unfalsifiable. There has been plenty of time to chase down evidence and ample opportunity to release proof on X (I don't know about the courts), but no proof of cheating substantial enough to swing the election has been released to my knowledge.
Absolutely right, burden of proof on those calling foul. Or, in Trump’s case, those claiming he’s lying when says it was stolen. Trump didn’t prove it was stolen, none of his critics are even trying to prove it wasn’t, they assume it and claim that lack of proof of being stolen is proof of not being stolen. Which of course is false.
OJ was found Not Guilty, not proven beyond reasonable doubt. But that doesn’t prove him innocent, it is only the presumption. And there was a preponderance of evidence.
You, and all including Kling, who say Trump is lying, have burden of proof to claim it was proven, not merely assumed, not stolen. (OJ not proven guilty, but many think he did it. I do, do you?) Critics should say Trump’s claim of a stolen election is not proven, but that is much less demonizing.
Part of such proof would show how much fraud/ dead folk/ bad mail-in signatures there were, especially in those states where ballot counting was paused for a couple hours.
How many mail ballots did NOT have full documentation and chain of custody?
It’s quite rational to believe the election was stolen, and I believe that is unproven truth. I also don’t believe Epstein killed himself, nor that Biden’s laptop was disinformation, nor that Obama did not spy on Trump’s campaign in 2016. Three deep state lies-why should I assume they would be honest about the election?
How many of the 65 million mail in ballots had their envelopes with signatures verified & checked by Republicans? And it’s my claim, not Trump’s, that the Biden laptop lie makes the election stolen—tho I also think he should claim it more, too.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/mail-ballot-fraud-study-finds-trump-almost-certainly-won-2020
> It’s quite rational to believe the election was stolen, and I believe that is unproven truth
That's the issue. It is an article of faith for you, but it is not for anyone outside of the personality cult. That includes most of the country, including many who vote R.
Anyone who is "sure" - or IMO even "almost positive" - that the 2020 election was stolen is delusional, incompetent or lying.
OTOH, anyone who suggests that there definitely wasn't fraud, or even that there definitely wasn't sufficient fraud to change the results of the election, is also either delusional, incompetent or lying.
Personally, I think there is something like a 10% - 20% chance that fraud in 2-4 key states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) did change the results of the election.
I doubt we will ever find out whether this was true. But the claim that there is *no* chance that fraud swung the results of GA and PA is just as absurd as the claim that *of course* the election was stolen.
FWIW - Dr. Kling chooses to link to John Cochrane's WSJ article rather than Cochrane's much more fulsome discussion at the Grumpy Economist substack which is not behind a paywall: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/understanding-trumpers-c25 Well worth reading both.
"Bret insinuates that China is sending military-aged men up through Latin America."
I'm extremely skeptical. It seems far more effective to send them legally to US universities.
It is trivially easy to google and learn that Chinese nationals are the fastest-growing segment of border crossers, albeit a small minority. That growth was roughly tenfold each of the last two years. It doesn't much matter if they're being "sent" - it's interesting that they are being allowed to use these migrant channels, which are clearly orchestrated.
First, I have no doubt most of these Chinese are not being sent. They are leaving to escape repression. That said, I assumed "sent" referred to spies or similar. Yes?
Who do you think is orchestrating and what exactly?
It used to be you’d see clothes on the American bank of the Rio Grande.
I am interested in the arrival of well-dressed, non-tired looking people from all over the world coming with cell phones and what appear to be instructions. They’ve not walked any great distance. They have been told exactly what to say and to bring no papers. They are getting from A to B (Senegal to Eagle Pass) in a coordinated way and I assume non-profits are involved. In my city it’s the Catholic Church. The church has a migrant shelter, with a quietly created waiting facility at the city-owned airport for people to wait for planes whose fares I am not convinced they’ve paid for as without ID - how could they be on the manifest?
Somebody is directing all this traffic. I think the usual bogeyman is one suspect but I think others must be involved.
With China - I expect they know exactly who’s leaving and their permitting them to leave is evidence of their tacit involvement. Others can play a much longer game than America can.
Would it not be simple enough if some sort of people, maybe call them reporters, actually went to Darien Pass to check it out?
Of course some of them are military age men. My skepticism is about whether China is SENDING them.
I have seen a number of reports over the past few months of military age Chinese men being found coming across the southern border. I don't really look for that sort of thing, nor do I follow it, but there does seem to be some reporting on the matter. Enough and sufficiently varied that it can't be written off as just a minor thing completely spun into a crazy theory, at least.
Instapundit has a lot of posts about how badly the Chinese economy is doing and about how young people are losing hope. I suspect this is exaggerated but it would help explain "military age Chinese men" trying to get to America.
That's true, I have read/heard about the Chinese economy's struggles from a few different sources as well. There are definitely a few different reasons they could be coming over as they are, and probably quite a few are all true at the same time. There is a lot of Chinese and a lot of China, after all, so it wouldn't surprise me to find that there are a ton of different reasons people are coming over even just depending on the province.
There has been extensive coverage of Chinese asylumseekers coming to the US.
The January edition of the Economist had this article: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/americas-southern-border-has-become-a-global-crossroads
But so did the 2023 1843 Magazine: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/08/14/return-to-china-xing-would-rather-die-in-the-jungle
And July 2021 covered the rising number! https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/28/under-xi-jinping-the-number-of-chinese-asylum-seekers-has-shot-up
And if you want to look outside of The Economist, here's the AP back in October: https://apnews.com/article/chinese-emigration-us-mexico-border-darien-381c215ff30f0f2349c2ea118aa280c6
Listener's comment that they, "haven’t seen any coverage of this topic that seems important in mainstream media," is more revealing about what they pay attention to than anything else!
1) I just had my third at 40, a boy. I suspect he won't have kids until he is around my age (if at all). That means I will either be dead (likely with my health ailments) or pretty informed in terms of being able to play with grandkids.
The thing about delayed childrearing is once you combine two generations of it you really aren't going to play with your grandchildren all that much.
2) Stopping illegal immigration would require doing things at are "cruel".
If you think illegal immigration is going to destroy your way of life, then cruelty is a reasonable price to pay. Hence conservatives are against it.
If you think its going to enhance your way of life (because they are going to increase your political and cultural power in the long run) then there isn't an incentive to do things that are "cruel".
So what we get is Democrats acknowledge that we should have a border, but won't acknowledge any of the means it would take to secure it. And they give us bogus "reform" packages that amount to "we will legalize two million (or more) illegals a year and probably just let more in anyway".
The definition of who constitutes the "elite" gets fuzzier and fuzzier. Your own education? Your parents' education? Something else? Joe Biden's parents were not college graduates, and since very early in life their family had limited means and no connections. Is he of the "elite"?
Donald Trump's father attended Pratt Institute. Does that make him an elite? Or do you need good manners to be one?
I am a regular listener to Bret and Heather's Darkhorse podcast. Their progressive worldview often clashes with my conservative worldview, but even though I disagree with them on certain important topics, I have more faith in what Bret has to say than any scholar affiliated with one of the faux conservative 'think tanks' like the Hoover Institute. In particular, Bret's view that the so-called 'covid vaccine' is neither effective nor safe has been vindicated. Bret's model/'conspiracy theory' on the topic of the covid vaccine is consistent with a standard tenet of health care economics, namely, that given imperfect/asymmetric information, MD's may have the ability and incentive to manipulate demand for their services (for example, the prominent DC allergy doctor who put a concerned look on his face in an effort to convince me to take allergy shots; it didn't work, partly because his argument that the shots would be covered by my insurance rubbed the economist in me the wrong way). The model/conspiracy theory predicts that the drug companies (in collaboration with the government and medical establishment) would boost demand for their 'vaccines' by manipulating information about its effectiveness and safety. And that's what happened. We were told that the 'vaccine' would protect us from getting covid. That turned out to be a lie. The protection, if any, was fleeting at best. Never fear, we have a booster for you! Ka ching, ka ching, just like the steady stream of patients lining up for their allergy shots at that DC doctor's office. Then they slow-walked the news that the 'vaccine' is associated with a risk of myocarditis and other heart ailments, among other potential adverse side effects. If you really want to indulge in reality or fear mongering, depending on your point of view, listen to John Campbell's youtube interviews with prominent doctors and other professionals raising concerns about the possible link between the covid 'vaccine' and cancer. So I respectfully disagree with the characterization of Bret Weinstein as a conspiracy theorist, but then again, I didn't take any boosters. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool my twice, shame on me.
"faux conservative 'think tanks' like the Hoover Institute"
you realize you undercut all credibility, and cause a fair number of us to disregard your post and your opinions entirely, with this outrageous, *at best* mostly false and I would argue entirely gratuitous shot.
This is one of the few blogs where I read the comments because usually they are enlightening and reasonable. but based on this early snippet alone I will do my best not to read yours.
By 'faux conservative,' I mean think tanks that are propaganda outlets for the view that the goal of US foreign and military policy is to spread 'liberal democracy' around the world, while utterly failing to conserve the foundations of liberal democracy (freedom of speech, equality before the law, freedom of religion, and so forth) here at home (holding an occasional conference lamenting the erosion of liberal democracy in the West doesn't cut it).
If you want to believe the covid vaccine offered you and your family some kind of protection against covid, that is your prerogative. I'm agnostic. We were told that the vaccine would protect us from covid, full stop. That was a lie. They (the drug companies, government health agencies, medical practitioners) couldn't possibly have known that prior to the rollout of the vaccination, but they kept saying it even after it became clear that the protection afforded by the vaccine was limited with respect to time, variant, and possibly other factors (quality of the batch, how it was injected, etc.). They also lied by omission with respect to the adverse health effects of the vaccine, and they continue to do so. Once someone lies to me, I find it difficult to attach any credibility to anything else they say. Feel free to avoid reading my comments. I couldn't care less.
I forgot to mention the information campaign and 'studies' designed to cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of alternative drug treatments for covid such as Ivermectin ('horse paste') and hydroxychloroquine. The lack of alternative treatments was required for the emergency use authorization for the covid 'vaccine.' Just another conspiracy theory. As for resolving the border security problem, you might ask why the Biden administration doesn't just pull the rug out from under Trump's campaign by using existing law to stop the flow of migrants. Instead, the Senate's draft agreement not only would have largely preserved the existing flow of migrants, but it would have prevented Trump from controlling illegal immigration if he did manage to get elected. Evidently the border security measures were just a fig leaf to pour another $60B down the Ukrainian drain. And still Kling blames Trump for the failure to resolve border security, and he remains mystified by Trump's continued support. But at least he will have someone to mow his lawn.
I want a very different country, too! [I really HATE the "Again" in MAGA!] But it's a very different country from Trump's principally one in which people who disagree with me about immigration, or vaccines, or pronoun use, or taxes/deficits, or climate change do not consider me their ENEMY!
I disagree with parts of your posts, often, and am glad you are here to argue those positions.
Like an immigration policy that is … stupid? Lousy? A big political loser (the main criterion to justify stupid)? It seems dumb to talk a lot about any new laws if you don’t support enforcing actual, current laws.
But I do support enforcing the law to the extent possible, but we do nt have the numbers of people needed to hear the great number of asylum cases. A new law could narrow the grounds for asylum. Now I will say that the main reason for reducing the numbers of asylum seekers is political, to make it possible to greatly expand the numbers of high skilled immigrants. A few thousand low skilled immigrants (and not ALL asylum seekers ARE low skilled) more o less is not a big deal economically. It is pretty hard for a person who enters and works not to be a least a small net benefit to existing residents.
" It is pretty hard for a person who enters and works not to be a least a small net benefit to existing residents."
For the record, I am all for more *legal* immigration - both virtually unlimited immigration of high-skill immigrants, but also a fair amount of low-skill as well.
Immigrants who come in and work for their drug-lord benefactors in gangs or in the human trafficking sex trade (depending on your POV of the latter, especially given that some are underage) are probably not a net benefit to existing residents.
Under catch and release, illegals do not have authorization to work here legally. You can't seriously be arguing that catch and release is a good, sane immigration policy, can you?
Sorry, I should have said works in a normal league activity. Working as a hitman would not count. :)
I don't want to do catch and release, but process the claims of entrants, let those with valid claims enter ad return the other to there place of origin. I just think that Type II errors are not very costly.
Ok, I'll bite. In your estimation, what percentage of the illegal immigrants entering the country in the last 3 years would be allowed to remain in the country under your proposal, PENDING THEIR APPEARANCE before a judge, and which would not?
Because unless your answer is a tiny percentage, you are literally not saying anything other than you want to keep the current insane system, complete with its obvious terrible incentives, in place.
Separately, I notice with some interest that you did not answer my question about how exactly illegal immigrants are supposed to work in this country *legally*. Again, I am for more *legal* immigration; with mass illegal immigration your claims about each person being a net positive are specious, and even if true, continue to undermine the rule of law.
Yes, I suppose it would be a tiny fraction <5%. Most asylum seekers are just looking for a better life. I don't blame and some would be able to enter legally if we had a merit based system, but that's not the law right now.
If we had merely kept "Remain in Mexico" in place, the number of cases that would have been and will be scheduled, would go down *dramatically*. Incentives matter.
...whatever your opinions are on other present points, or what the law should be and how/whether it is enforced.
My understanding is that the legal authority for that was the PH emergency. I want to control the border not only efficiently and humanely, but legally, too.
I am not defending all the decisions that were made. _I_ would have included money in ARA for asylum clearing agents to hear cases w/o providing cannon fodder for Abbott and DeSantis to demagogue with.
Your understanding about the legal authority for Remain in Mexico is simply wrong. Biden's removal of the high successful policy was purely political.
The millions who are coming across the border illegally each year are not "cannon fodder".
And I note with some interest that when Adams of NYC or the mayor of D.C. or the leaders of Martha's Vineyard complain about the comparative trickle of illegal immigrants into their cities, you don't refer to that as demagoguery...
I admit to making a judgement about DeSantis and Abbot's motives.
?? The policy might have been successful but illegal. But I do agree that if on admittance, their claims should be heard and dispatched expeditiously. I assu most are not valid.
I’m not understanding your comment. Can you clarify?
OK. I think vaccines worked quite well, although I think that the emphasis on how "safe" they were, compared to just how effective, was counterproductive. NPI (semi-compulsory restriction of certain kind of interactions) are completely OK in principle; we should and could have had a better conversation about which ones when and where were cost effective.
It's a sign we have a great country that so many people want to come here and we ought to be allowing, indeed recruiting more skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants. We also need to reform the law to allow some real asylum seekers and some people who want to work initially in low-skilled occupations to enter and to legally and humanely deter others.
And can we just let school boards and city councils work out who gets to use which bathroom and not make a national issue of it?
And boy am I ticked off at first Regan then GWB and then Ryan/Trump for passing revenue-reducing-deficit increasing tax cuts, and worse that high income people were the direct beneficiaries.
I think you’re asking too much of the citizenry, at least with the Constitution and discourse platforms we have. The fix can’t be: to appeal to hearts. It has to be about changing incentives.
https://open.substack.com/pub/scottgibb/p/discourse-platforms?r=nb3bl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Wolverines! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REKLC3s30Mw)
Listener's comment that they, "haven’t seen any coverage of this topic that seems important in mainstream media," is more revealing about what they pay attention to than anything else!
I posted this in response to another comment. But, to be more direct, people shouldn't get their immigration politics from the plot of Red Dawn!
There has been extensive coverage of Chinese asylum seekers coming to the US.
The January edition of the Economist had this article: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/americas-southern-border-has-become-a-global-crossroads
But so did the 2023 1843 Magazine: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/08/14/return-to-china-xing-would-rather-die-in-the-jungle
And July 2021 covered the rising number! https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/28/under-xi-jinping-the-number-of-chinese-asylum-seekers-has-shot-up
And if you want to look outside of The Economist, here's the AP back in October: https://apnews.com/article/chinese-emigration-us-mexico-border-darien-381c215ff30f0f2349c2ea118aa280c6
And NYT in November: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/us/politics/china-migrants-us-border.html
Hi Josh - thanks for adding the link on my substack so I could come over and give more flavor. Appreciate you assembling the links above. No question the ethnic mix of migrants has been covered. My perspective was the corporate structure, NGO organized feel to the immigration as well as parallel migration apparatuses was an angle I hadn't heard before. Not sure how accurate, but an interesting angle to explore.
Re: the comments on asymmetric insights and Glenn Reynolds, of course both Kling's and his can be right - and IMO most likely are.
For the average Democrat voter, I think Kling's claim that they are against it because Trump is for it is most likely most applicable.
OTOH, for the Democrat politicians (those controlling the Biden administration - which is surely not Biden himself) implementing the policy, who see well that it hurts their short-term election chances, what other possible reason can there be than that they want to change the electoral calculus longer term?
I guess there is one - the theory that Obama and some liberal elites literally dislike the country so much that they want to cause harm to it, while benefitting (some) non-Americans along the way. Sadly, I find that theory plausible; however, it is not more likely than Reynold's assertion as an explanation.
"We are going to really appreciate having grandchildren, so let’s take the necessary intermediate step."
Most people's discount rates are far higher than this. If people's discount rates were this low, we'd not need old-age retirement programs like social security, because people would save for themselves. Telling people to think about issues that will arise in decades doesn't work at any scale.
I found David Brooks' column on death by 1000 paper cuts more useful than, but also complementary to, Cochrane's piece. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/american-life-bureaucracy.html
The Brooks column is not awful, but his early-on claim that DEI on campus is a problem, but *less* of a problem than the growth in administrators, shows again that he doesn't really get it.
...or that he "knows" he must kow-tow to the wokeness at the NYT in order to ensure they keep paying him. It is admittedly difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and evil.