What Cannot be Discussed
Immigration and the North-South Conflict
In his new book The Geek Way, Andrew McAfee quotes Marc Andreessen as having tweeted:
The most serious problem in any organization is the one that cannot be discussed
McAfee stresses that when top executives make it clear that a certain topic is taboo, there is a good chance that the firm is vulnerable on that issue, both financially and morally. He argues that openness and transparency are better for the organization, even if in the short run it makes executives uncomfortable.
I think that we can interpret the political tension in the United States and Western Europe in Andreessen’s terms. The political elites do not want to discuss the issue of how to handle large-scale migration of people from the global South to the global North. Underlying this is an unwillingness to discuss cultural differences between the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and the rest. And an unwillingness to favor the former over the latter. Consequently, these leaders face populist revolts, surprising them with Donald Trump, Brexit, Geert Wilders, and the Irish anti-immigrant riot. On the latter, Ed West writes,
It is hardly surprising that trust in the media has plummeted when news organisations report events so dishonestly, a dishonesty that becomes second nature to utopian regimes in which reality is so distant from the idea. After a while, honest discussion simply becomes impossible.
Ireland’s prime minister has since demanded that Irish people stop linking immigration and crime, but there is a very simple solution to this – publish the crime figures, and openly debate them. What they’d show is that some immigrant groups have much higher crime rates than the native population, while some have lower, but the overall trend in Europe is negative - even if immigration is by no means the main cause of rising crime (in Ireland’s case, rates of violence shot up in 1990s, before mass migration).
the majority of people in European society is opposed to mass migration and that their policy on this subject lacks legitimacy To overcome their isolation on this subject the political elites have adopted the strategy of preventing citizens from openly voicing their views on this subject. Through demonising and even criminalising any expression of anti-migration sentiment they seek to shut down discussion on the subject.
The Gaza conflict in North-South terms
As an aside, one can view the conflict between Israel and various radical groups in North-South terms. Israel’s advocates will complain that the phrase “settler colonialism” is not accurate. The discovery of ancient Hebrew manuscripts shows that Jews are indigenous. Moreover, close to half of Israel’s Jewish population are descended from Jews who had lived for centuries in Arab states under Muslim rule, and who fled to Israel during and after Israel’s war for independence.
But one cannot deny that Israel’s culture and institutions resemble those of America and Western Europe more than they do the Arab Muslim world. In that respect, Israel is an outpost of the global North sitting in the middle of the global South.
We see the North-South divide in the reaction to the conflict in Gaza. Countries in the global South are much more likely to be critical of Israel and sympathetic to Hamas. And the pro-Hamas demonstrations in Europe are populated mostly by immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.
The Assimilation Taboo
The biggest taboo topic relative to immigration concerns assimilation. Elites behave as if assimilation into Western culture by immigrants is not a policy problem. Any suggestion otherwise is branded as racist.
But people outside the progressive elites can see with our own eyes that immigrants from the global South into Western Europe are not assimilating. Right-wing intellectuals use expressions like “invasion” or “great replacement.” But their fears are not allowed to be discussed in polite company. As Matt Goodwin has pointed out repeatedly, in the UK even the Tory party is unwilling to raise the issue.
The Asylum Loophole Taboo
I am optimistic that the assimilation model can still work in the United States. Immigrants from Latin America tend to believe in assimilation. They do not belong to a Muslim culture that is hostile to ours. But the Democratic left does not want to champion assimilation, because doing so would concede the conservative proposition that our culture is in some respects superior and worth assimilating into.
What annoys many Americans is illegal immigration. This in turn is encouraged by the perverse way that we deal with asylum requests, as Noah Smith has pointed out.
The way U.S. asylum law works is that if you show up at the border requesting asylum, you’ll either have to wait a long time outside the U.S. for your request to be heard, or you’ll be denied entry outright. But if you manage to cross the border illegally and then turn yourself in to the Border Patrol, you’re on U.S. soil, so you’re legally entitled to request asylum. During the time that you’re waiting for your asylum hearing, you’re typically allowed to stay in the U.S. If you decide not to take your chances on the hearing, you can always not show up, and stay in the U.S. as an unauthorized (“illegal”) immigrant.
If only we could have an above-board conversation about asylum. Suppose that we close the asylum loophole and take other steps to tilt the incentives in favor of legal immigration rather than illegal border-crossing. Then I think that we can have much less chaos at the border. But first our elites must be willing to have that discussion.
In Europe, the situation has gotten much further out of hand. Demographers and economists have predicted that pressures to migrate from the global South to the global North would rise. But political elites say that the problems this poses cannot be discussed. Hence, it festers as a serious problem.
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"If only we could have an above-board conversation about asylum." Maybe that's just about possible in the US. In the US - although it notoriously has perhaps the most up-itself Social Justice religious mania anywhere in the Western world - there seems also to be a large enough (40%?) sane, socially conservative voting constituency to make such a conversation just about possible given the right political circumstances. Plus, as you say, the hispanic immigrants are inherently more assimilable. Europe is different. Continental Europe has a significant socially conservative population but it is an angry one and its anger is up against a vast entrenched smug bureaucracy that is literally too stupid to know how to 'converse' about anything. And then there's the UK. The UK population has absorbed so much BBC smug-fest-type nonsense - and over so many decades now - that it has become effectively a suicidal basket case.
I think there are many topics that cannot be discussed in polite public discussion.
Global warming: "everyone" has agreed that global warming is real, it is caused by humans, it is harmful and will become disastrous, and that prevention of future warming is both vitally necessary and feasible. There's plenty of evidence that the climate has warmed over the past 10 or 20 decades, and it seems implausible that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have nothing to do with the warming. Beyond that, though, there's no scientific basis that warming is more harmful than other environmental challenges that have been met in the past, or that future warming will be disastrous, and there's no reason to think that anything like a modern lifestyle can be maintained with a carbon-free economy within the lifetime of anyone currently living. But, since "everyone" knows "what must be done", we blindly waste hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing feel-good activities that may do no good at all.
Diversity: I think nearly anyone would agree that people should be treated fairly, but current Diversity Ideology contends, without evidence, that all differences in circumstances between identifiable demographic groups are due to invidious discrimination, and that public policy and private institutions must discriminate to equalize outcomes. But the institutions that pursue such discrimination work very hard to hide the nature and extent of their discrimination. This applies not just to colleges and universities, but also government offices and programs, and many major employers. When I worked for a large company, the company claimed that "Diversity" was necessary for various reasons: First, that different groups had different ways of thinking, and we needed different ways of thinking to make the best decisions. Of course, no one attempted to measure different people's "ways of thinking", and no one seemed to notice that different ways of thinking might imply that some people are better suited to some functions than other people. Or why there might be a "Black" perspective on structures engineering, or a "women's" approach to cost accounting.
Governance: the elites seem to take it as axiomatic that politics is an inefficient way to decide and implement policy, and that they should take action to implement their ideal policies, hopefully without attracting the notice of the uninformed masses who might object. The elites themselves are insulated from the difficult consequences of their decisions, but the majority can see them clearly. I think this is much more of a problem in Europe than in the US, but in both cases the uninformed masses are noticing, and objecting. I think this is the root cause of the populist anti-establishment excesses. If the people have no one better than Donald Trump or Viktor Orban to champion their cause, they'll win.