Dec 3, 2023·edited Dec 3, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
"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.
Alex Nowrasteh at Cato provides IMO a good example of how to forthrightly discuss legitimate concerns about crime and assimilation from a pro-immigration viewpoint, without trying to shame or dismiss those who hold those concerns. If pro-immigration establishment figures, especially in Europe, would follow his example the debate would be much more productive.
Such a debate, though, should also include the fact that enforcement of modern immigration restrictions invariably involves the infliction of extraordinary cruelty, cruelty we would consider impermissible in most other contexts even if favored by a majority, upon large numbers of people the vast majority of whom are peaceable innocents. This reality is in turn something the anti-immigration right often wishes to rationalize or dismiss because it complicates their preferred narrative.
Immigration is also far from the only issue these days where public debate is mostly dishonest because of the strength of the incentives all major participants face to rationalize away inconvenient complications. At the very least abortion and gender issues have to be put in this bucket too, and probably you can think of others.
"enforcement of modern immigration restrictions invariably involves the infliction of extraordinary cruelty, cruelty we would consider impermissible in most other contexts ... "
This is a wild exaggeration. For example, if someone is petitioning for asylum because they are claiming they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country, then how is it extraordinary cruelty, as opposed to, you know, entirely reasonable, to tell that person that if that were truly the case, they should have put down stakes in the first place without the threat and made their asylum application to the first safe country they reach, which is likely to be closer to their family, and metaphorically closer culturally, linguistically, climatically, and so forth? Instead of, you know, going through a dozen other increasingly foreign borders to get to, say, North America or Northern Europe?
The cruelty is in the means of enforcement: in the US, the kids in cages; in Europe, the migrants left to drown in the Mediterranean. People who have done nothing worse, and intend nothing worse, than try to make a better life for themselves are subject, operationally, to often capricious and extreme coercion to keep them from crossing a fundamentally arbitrary line on a map. That is not made any less cruel by their lack of a "legitimate" asylum claim: it is the state preventing peaceful people from crossing borders at gunpoint that needs justification, not their reason for wanting to cross.
Oh please man, save the lofty emotional rhetoric for something else. The immigration laws span volumes and most provisions are just as reasonable as I've explained.
*Every* real property boundary is a fundamentally arbitrary line, those with title to that property - collective entities count! - still have the right to control access and exclude, and all that is enforced coercively and by violence if necessary, like the rest of law. All law enforcement is cruel because people are too tough to be deterred by anything less than cruelty. There are plenty of laws that libertarians object to because they consider them "victimless" or consensual or whatever, but to say it isn't simply typical government behavior which we all tolerate every day for a million other things is an absurd exaggeration.
Yeah, the analogy to other victimless crimes is right, it's basically the same kind of cruelty and despicable for the same reasons. Whether it's immigration or drugs or whatever, of that many basically decent people go to that great a length to violate a malum prohibitum law, and you end up having to do things like taking kids away from their parents and put them in cages to try and stop them, the law is evil and its enforcement inexcusable.
Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. You can whine all you like about it being cruel and despicable to enforce immigration law, but the lack of enforcement has had very bad effects. Not the least of which is the growing disrespect for the law in general.
Because I'm a woman before I'm a misanthrope, and this is the way we operate - in the anecdotal - I think of the eleven-year-old girl, in photos sweet-faced but a little wary; not enrolled in school, herself an illegal immigrant in the care of her father, away from her mother and family, raped and killed and pushed under the bed by yet another Central American let into the country just months earlier (with nothing to do and no reason to be here) who observed she was left alone in the apartment during the day. (Why did her father bring her? So she could cook for him? A mystery, but the media wasn't interested in the light this tragedy might have shed on anything beyond the crime.)
Good, quick work by the sheriff's department there - most of the time what goes on in such communities is a black box. But - the authorities have ceded the ground to the illegals and their traffickers and whoever supplies their substandard housing: no one was ever going to check on that little girl, or wonder why she didn't go to school. Because that's not important for people like her, in the stratified Third World we're deliberately reproducing here. Nobody really expects the American experience for those people.
Rather than inflicting cruelty, a little earlier enforcement, at two possible points, would have prevented the whole thing from happening
I keep hoping the Israel/Hamas situation will be the spark to make space to discuss these kinds of issues. It certainly makes some of the silliness evident. Oppressor/oppressed has some value. But it's far from the only dimension in the determination of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad. Long live the melting pot!
No, it has no value. Identity-blindness, or "power-dynamic"-blindness, however naïve, still has real value when it comes to law and ethics. O/O stands for the annihilation of that value, and was intentionally conceived precisely in order to do so.
It's like saying Communism has some merit. Don't be fooled: whatever value it might have in theory, in practice, Communism has been a completely catastrophic disaster in literally any place it has been tried in earnest. Likewise, O/O thinking has been the most socially destructive organizing focal point and perspective for political analysis and action in the past few centuries. Yes, worse than fascism, and all the rest too.
The reason is that O/O is corrosive of our One Neat Trick that is the civilizational breakthrough at the heart of pleasant, functional, prosperous society with classically liberal elements. That Trick is the successful de-personalization of social rules and principles, that is, the nature of the fundamental political meta-rule prescribing how power itself may be wielded. This is an ancient idea (see, e.g., Aristotle's Politics, Book III) but major advances in the direction of successful implementation occurred during the European Enlightenment, in part inspired by writings from Antiquity.
Hayek described all this in detail in his "The Decline of the Rule of Law" article, still fresh though it's from 70 years ago. Consider: "The attack on the principles of the Rule of Law was part of the general movement away from liberalism which began about 1870. It came almost entirely from the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement. They directed their criticism against practically every one of the principles which together make up the Rule of Law. But initially it was aimed mainly against the ideal of equality before the law. The socialists understood that if the state was to correct the unequal results which in a free society different gifts and different luck would bring to different people, these had to be treated unequally.
...
A few years later, Anatole France was to give wide circulation to the similar ideas of his French socialist friends in the much quoted gibe about "the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, to steal bread." Little did the countless well-meaning persons who have since repeated this phrase realize that they were giving currency to one of the cleverest attacks on the fundamental principles of liberal society."
Any constraints on the use of state power stand in the way of many very valuable opportunities to exploit such uses for political advantage. The Rule of Law is -most definitely- just such a constraint, as it blocks the ability to play favorites with power to help friends and hurt enemies.
And so any movement seeking to exploit such opportunities but currently thwarted by the constraint is incredibly motivated to allocate incredible efforts into discovering some method that will allow them to circumvent the constraint and see if they can get away with what was previously widely considered to be clear abuses of discretion and power.
The temptation to loosen the constraint is irresistible by any merely internal sources of discipline, so its preservation depends on being checked and balanced by external political competition. But that just focuses the efforts on some kind of general-purpose "Socially Accepted Excuse" which one can pretend provides an ideological justification for -any- exception or deviation your own side wants to make, but -never- provides it to one's political opponents. This requires fooling your opponents into thinking this excuse "has some value" and could somehow be utilized in a way that was both rare and fair, when the reality will always be anything but.
Well, they found it! That's O/O! It is a nuclear trump card that gives the progressives the ability to justify playing favorites in violation of every possible political rule or ethical principle, to adjudicate cases based on nothing else than the group identity of the people in various roles and by Lenin's "Who, Whom?"
The progressives like to pretend their political positions are the logical implications of some kind of set of principles, but notice how you can never get them to actually articulate those principles in detail without their principle-neutralizing and nullifying insertion of an infinitely flexible, blank-check caveat that the answer depends on whose ox is getting gored.
You can say, "The Law of War says ... " and they will say, "I condemn violation of the law of war, but it's excusable and thus not really a violation if it favors the oppressed over their oppressors." You can say, "The standard of evidence for conviction is ... " and they will say, "I condemn convicting people on insufficient evidence, but it's excusable and not really insufficient it the person convicted is an oppressor."
See the problem? Literally nothing of actual value can stand and survive when dissolved in the acid of this universal one-sided excuse-generator, which by its very nature inherently tears down the entire structure of a liberal order in favor of the nasty domination of pure power politics, infectious of literally every sphere of life.
O/O puts the cart of "who should win the case" in front of the horse of "the merits of the case." That is what 'Tribalism' and 'bias' mean. For no other subject matter is this more clearly evident than on the issue of Israel v Hamas. You simply cannot get the progressives to articulate the specifics of any possible and feasible rules, laws, principles, or standards of what Israel should be entitled to do to defend itself, because they don't believe that any such set of principles -could- be valid and legitimate, because they already deem with prejudice that Hamas must emerge as the moral victor. And thus any argument - which if manifested in action would produce consequences opposing Hamas' interests - is perforce invalid.
Power corrupts. It's OK to be skeptical of those in power, especially government power. The best example are police. We need good, trusted, accountable police. Not the poor performers who get the city sued for abuse and/or incompetence. Power imbalance is an important part of the analysis of the issue. And as I said 'it's far from the only dimension in the determination of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad'.
"Power imbalance is an important part of the analysis of the issue. And as I said 'it's far from the only dimension in the determination of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad'."
No, it's not an important part of any analysis. The Founders were already quite familiar - indeed obsessed with - the terrifying capacity the state could use to easily and unjustly roll over the interests of any individual standing in the way of its aims, because it had so much more power than the individual. The (mostly culturally inherited) liberal answers they settled upon were to place extra burdens on the state prior to its exercise of the most concerning powers but these constraints were specifically of the sort that insisted on identity-neutrality, the equal protection of the laws, and which forbade the state from discriminating from one case to another based on their personal characteristics, for instance, however much money or power the individual or the groups to which he belonged possessed, being -presumptively irrelevant- factors in the adjudication of any questions of fact or law.
You are letting the left play this word game on you where by using some academic hack's inventions of impersonal and abstract vocabulary they are able to successfully mislead you into thinking they are using the term "power imbalance" in some kind of impersonal, identity-neutral way that would be fairly applied to every individual in every situation without regard to group characteristics except insofar as that is a relevant and probative fact in the individualized analytic process.
But if you give them this inch then they'll take every mile you've got left. What the left actually means by "power imbalance" is simply *tribal* "group identity: and "Who, Whom?" that fits the narrative and political formula behind their clientelist spoils system. The civilizational breakthrough that made flourishing liberal society possible was precisely to -reject- the notion that any of that was an important part of an analysis.
Identity neutrality is indeed in the statutes. Yet look at the criminal justice system in reality. You don't have to be any kind of a social justice warrior to see how it regularly takes advantage of poor people of all colors and ethnicities from the street to the courthouse to the prison. Prisons are inhumane as a rule, not exception. America's underbelly. That doesn't mean that criminals should not be held accountable!
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.
When reality fails to match their model of the world, most people change their model. Others double down. For example, the poverty rate was declining apace in the U.S. prior to the implementation of LBJ’s Great Society programs. Over fifty years and $25 trillion later, the poverty rate is about where it was when the programs kicked in.
Instead of admitting the malign impact of their beloved policies, many on the left explained the failure by declaring that America was far more racist and corrupt than even they had imagined. The result is the “woke” movement.
I think the same sort of thing is happening with immigration. The results of open border policies didn’t meet expectations. But as the fault can’t be with the policies - and certainly not with the immigrants - it must lie with citizens who are either malign, stupid, or blinded by false consciousness. Such people must be either suppressed or reeducated.
But the Great Society has been a success! The poverty rate may not have changed, and the dysfunction may only have increased, and the big cities' once-hopeful efforts at beautification and quality-of-life improvements abandoned - but there are *more* of those people than before - and both the left and the GOP unite in counting that a utilitarian win.
"The biggest taboo topic relative to immigration concerns assimilation. Elites behave as if assimilation into Western culture by immigrants is not a policy problem."
And non-elites behave as if assimilation into Western culture by immigrants is not possible. Both are wrong, but non-elites are more wrong.
Reforming both the selection of immigrants and the assimilation mechanisms are necessary to maximize the benefits of immigration.
I don't know if "more wrong" is correct, but the people who believe immigrants can't assimilate are very wrong too. The culture of the USA was built by immigrants who assimilated. Nobody thinks of descendants of Italians, Germans, Irish immigrants as anything other than 'American'. The path for those groups to assimilate was not always smooth but it happened. There's no reason to believe that other groups cannot assimilate in the same manner. Perhaps the best modern example are Indian immigrants. They seem to be pretty far along on the assimilation road even without any encouragement to assimilate. Ultimately the USA needs immigrants due to demographic trends of the current population. Better to figure out how to do it well.
A counterpoint though is Hawaii where the "locals" still haven't assimilated after over a century. Chinese kids grow up here fourth generation and still never learn English. The king is still venerated and prayers to him are still forced in public school . Nearly every tradition or institution we would associate with being an American doesn't exist or, when it does, only on paper and not practice. Hell Honolulu doesn't even do 4th of July fireworks. Nearly every modern problem in Hawaii can be traced to the same root cause, a outright refusal and hostility by the majority of local sub ethnic groups to assimilate at all even today.
Shall we talk about the assimilation of America Samoa too? If you think Americans living in a tribal fishing village complete with a chief and communal property outside Pago Pago are practicing American traditions or that they have any respect for traditional western values, you obviously never been there.
"There's no reason to believe that other groups cannot assimilate in the same manner."
Most people who are anti-immigration believe in HBD and racial genetics, so they think there is a difference between Germans and Arabs or whatever. If you don't accept this fact there is going to be little to discuss.
"Perhaps the best modern example are Indian immigrants. They seem to be pretty far along on the assimilation road even without any encouragement to assimilate."
Sort of. They have assimilated to coastal urban progressive professional norms. That's a mixed blessing if you don't like those norms.
It is worth noting that those "coastal urban progressive professional norms" are also "the norms that get enforced with high regularity." I think a large part of our immigrant problem is really a lack of law enforcement problem. Conveniently, that also addresses why native urban populations don't assimilate into what we would consider proper cultural behavior.
Put another away, I think looking at immigration problems and native problems as separate issues is a mistake, when native populations are so bad as well. When your native urban populations are engaging in crime at very high levels, seemingly without correction, well, who is to say immigrants don't assimilate quickly but just into a group you don't like?
"who is to say immigrants don't assimilate quickly but just into a group you don't like?"
I think there is some truth to this, but the Swedes didn't have a high crime native population to assimilate to and the Arabs became high crime anyway.
I also agree that Indians/Asians would assimilate to different norms if our native UMC coastal elites had different norms. However, in my experience there are also inherent racial traits even to high IQ groups (East Asian conformity for instance). Our schools shut down and masked kids because the Asian immigrants supported it.
As to immigrant assimilation I would note two things:
1) For all sorts of reasons immigrants are going to tend to congregate in cities and on the coast, so they are going to lean left.
2) I would describe American society as rewarding both the high and the low at the expense of the middle. It is no surprise then that immigrants tend to lean high and low rather than middle (global demographics would point in that direction anyway). You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax.
"Italians, Germans, Irish" immigrants assimilated well because they are European, so similar Western culture. Asian Indians assimilated well, because they were a British colony, and absorbed much of that Western culture. Latin Americans are not as Western, but they are very Catholic which is a Western religion. And at least Mexicans are physically closer to the US so they've absorbed some western culture through proximity.
Muslim cultures have a different religion, are not physically close, and are "less western" in their culture--good or bad--and so they don't assimilate as well. End of story.
I'm aware of very few groups that don't assimilate by second or third generation. American Indians, US born blacks (rather contradictorily, black immigrants tend to be much more inclined to assimilate.)
There are also religious groups like Amish, Mennonite, and maybe ultra-conservative Jews but in some ways these are more assimilated economically.
Yes and. The assimilation process matters. For example you don't want new immigrants assimilated into the gang culture of Chicago. IMO the US needs to bring back middle school civics. It's OK to recognize and be proud of the good parts of the USA.
Civics sounds good. I'd be even more in favor of statistics in high school, preferably to include risk and uncertainty.
Assimilation - it's been a few years since I looked but Hispanic immigrations were statistically low for crimes unrelated to immigration but after a generation or two their rates were pretty typical of other citizens.
You should read "The Culture Transplant." Assimilation is mostly not real; the resulting society is closer to a fusion of the original + immigrants rather than the immigrants joining the original society. This is OK if there are not large differences in societal quality, but very much not so if there aren't. A halfway house between British and German is fine; a halfway house between American and Mexican, Canadian and Indian, or French and Algerian is not.
Fertility rates in the Global North are collapsing and are already well below replacement almost everywhere. If we restrict immigration who is going to push all the wheelchairs as we in the north all die of old age?
Western civilization is a failed idea. That’s the truth that cannot be faced.
Yes, low birth rates in Europe seem like a root cause of immigration to Europe from Africa.
When European birth rates were high and longevity was extending in Europe, Europeans were pushing into short lifespan low density areas; Africa, Asia, the Americas.
It’s almost more akin to a physics problem. High pressure moves toward low pressure.
One underlying assumption seems to be that if only “the elites” weren’t so stupid “they” could stop immigration. Maybe that’s a false assumption.
Marc Andreessen is riffing on an insight first offered by Chris Argyris, who brilliantly identified and described Organizational Defensive Routines. And a defensive routine has four steps that make it self-sealing: (1) Craft messages that contain inconsistencies. (2) Act as if the messages are not inconsistent. In other words, behave as though something is so that is not so. (3) Make the ambiguity and inconsistency undiscussable. (4) Make the undiscussability of the undiscussable also undiscussable. To do otherwise is to question the prerogative of management to define reality -- even when the defined reality is patently false. Because that's such high-risk behavior, organizations regularly manufacture and enforce organizational defensive routines. This is especially pernicious when managers claim "openness" or a willingness to discuss "anything at any time" but behave in ways showing they are impervious to actual influence. Openness becomes a strategy to actually resist influence.
Israelis claiming to be "indigenous" is like the guy coming to the bar and complaining that you're on his stool. "II sat here every night for 2 years." Buddy, I've been sitting here three times a week for the last 5 years and I've never seen you. "Yeah, I was travelling, but now I want my seat back.
I like this post, but let’s be careful - there’s a difference between “cannot be discussed” and “political elites do not want to discuss.”
To discuss immigration would require caring about immigrants more than other topics, i.e., more than trans, Trump, and Teslas; more than climate, COVID, and Kavanaugh.
Let’s take off our Andreesen hat and put on our Smithian hat. What would Smith ask about the immigration discussion? He would point out that we care less about those far from us, not just geographically, but economically, culturally, intellectually, etc.
So it’s not that we can’t discuss; it’s that we don’t care as much about immigrants as we do our careers, our credentials or our credit scores.
We should care though. We should be asking, “What can we do to make the situation at the border better?” or “What can I do to improve the immigration process?” or “What do I know that immigrants might want to learn?”
There are opportunities to serve immigrants. All it takes is asking the right questions.
Let’s forget about the elites and focus on asking questions that are productive, helpful and positive. What can Arnold Kling do? What can I do? Let’s look at our comparative advantage, our competition and the immigrants. I would make a list of books by Tyler Cowen and ask what is missing from this list that will help immigrants? We can always ask, what would Jesus do? And we can ask, what Elon would do, what business should I start?
So with our Smithian hat still on we should ask, “How can I align my self-interest with the interests of immigrants to create value and to be valued?”
Point of detail with respect to European immigration: it is nearly all illegal - mostly male, juveniles and young men, Muslim with little/no education, no skills, many from conflict zones, agressive, violent, with no respect for European female adults and children whom they attack fir their pleasures. The problem is further increased by the number... millions. In Britain it is costing £1billion a week to keep many of them in hotels - food and board - mostly 3* and 4* hotels. Our hotels are largely full of them, some hotels no longer taking paying guests. Most of the hotel staff are fired to keep costs down as full hotel service is not required, keeping just a few for weekly cleaning. This is causing unemployment problems in many communities where hotels are an important employer.
Other things Govt won’t discuss: the obsession with climate change and Net Zero; the horrible damage done/being done with CoVid vaccines.
"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.
"up-itself" Imma stealing that
Alex Nowrasteh at Cato provides IMO a good example of how to forthrightly discuss legitimate concerns about crime and assimilation from a pro-immigration viewpoint, without trying to shame or dismiss those who hold those concerns. If pro-immigration establishment figures, especially in Europe, would follow his example the debate would be much more productive.
Such a debate, though, should also include the fact that enforcement of modern immigration restrictions invariably involves the infliction of extraordinary cruelty, cruelty we would consider impermissible in most other contexts even if favored by a majority, upon large numbers of people the vast majority of whom are peaceable innocents. This reality is in turn something the anti-immigration right often wishes to rationalize or dismiss because it complicates their preferred narrative.
Immigration is also far from the only issue these days where public debate is mostly dishonest because of the strength of the incentives all major participants face to rationalize away inconvenient complications. At the very least abortion and gender issues have to be put in this bucket too, and probably you can think of others.
"enforcement of modern immigration restrictions invariably involves the infliction of extraordinary cruelty, cruelty we would consider impermissible in most other contexts ... "
This is a wild exaggeration. For example, if someone is petitioning for asylum because they are claiming they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country, then how is it extraordinary cruelty, as opposed to, you know, entirely reasonable, to tell that person that if that were truly the case, they should have put down stakes in the first place without the threat and made their asylum application to the first safe country they reach, which is likely to be closer to their family, and metaphorically closer culturally, linguistically, climatically, and so forth? Instead of, you know, going through a dozen other increasingly foreign borders to get to, say, North America or Northern Europe?
The cruelty is in the means of enforcement: in the US, the kids in cages; in Europe, the migrants left to drown in the Mediterranean. People who have done nothing worse, and intend nothing worse, than try to make a better life for themselves are subject, operationally, to often capricious and extreme coercion to keep them from crossing a fundamentally arbitrary line on a map. That is not made any less cruel by their lack of a "legitimate" asylum claim: it is the state preventing peaceful people from crossing borders at gunpoint that needs justification, not their reason for wanting to cross.
Oh please man, save the lofty emotional rhetoric for something else. The immigration laws span volumes and most provisions are just as reasonable as I've explained.
*Every* real property boundary is a fundamentally arbitrary line, those with title to that property - collective entities count! - still have the right to control access and exclude, and all that is enforced coercively and by violence if necessary, like the rest of law. All law enforcement is cruel because people are too tough to be deterred by anything less than cruelty. There are plenty of laws that libertarians object to because they consider them "victimless" or consensual or whatever, but to say it isn't simply typical government behavior which we all tolerate every day for a million other things is an absurd exaggeration.
Yeah, the analogy to other victimless crimes is right, it's basically the same kind of cruelty and despicable for the same reasons. Whether it's immigration or drugs or whatever, of that many basically decent people go to that great a length to violate a malum prohibitum law, and you end up having to do things like taking kids away from their parents and put them in cages to try and stop them, the law is evil and its enforcement inexcusable.
Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. You can whine all you like about it being cruel and despicable to enforce immigration law, but the lack of enforcement has had very bad effects. Not the least of which is the growing disrespect for the law in general.
The best available evidence says otherwise. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-10/working-paper-60.pdf
I've often wondered the same.
Because I'm a woman before I'm a misanthrope, and this is the way we operate - in the anecdotal - I think of the eleven-year-old girl, in photos sweet-faced but a little wary; not enrolled in school, herself an illegal immigrant in the care of her father, away from her mother and family, raped and killed and pushed under the bed by yet another Central American let into the country just months earlier (with nothing to do and no reason to be here) who observed she was left alone in the apartment during the day. (Why did her father bring her? So she could cook for him? A mystery, but the media wasn't interested in the light this tragedy might have shed on anything beyond the crime.)
Good, quick work by the sheriff's department there - most of the time what goes on in such communities is a black box. But - the authorities have ceded the ground to the illegals and their traffickers and whoever supplies their substandard housing: no one was ever going to check on that little girl, or wonder why she didn't go to school. Because that's not important for people like her, in the stratified Third World we're deliberately reproducing here. Nobody really expects the American experience for those people.
Rather than inflicting cruelty, a little earlier enforcement, at two possible points, would have prevented the whole thing from happening
Fair questions though I would also be especially interested in reading what you think smart libertarians are afraid to discuss.
How are smart libertarians different than libertarians?
Wasn't specifically about libertarians. I think a smart X is likely to be more self aware and thus able to see their own side more clearly.
I keep hoping the Israel/Hamas situation will be the spark to make space to discuss these kinds of issues. It certainly makes some of the silliness evident. Oppressor/oppressed has some value. But it's far from the only dimension in the determination of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad. Long live the melting pot!
No, it has no value. Identity-blindness, or "power-dynamic"-blindness, however naïve, still has real value when it comes to law and ethics. O/O stands for the annihilation of that value, and was intentionally conceived precisely in order to do so.
It's like saying Communism has some merit. Don't be fooled: whatever value it might have in theory, in practice, Communism has been a completely catastrophic disaster in literally any place it has been tried in earnest. Likewise, O/O thinking has been the most socially destructive organizing focal point and perspective for political analysis and action in the past few centuries. Yes, worse than fascism, and all the rest too.
The reason is that O/O is corrosive of our One Neat Trick that is the civilizational breakthrough at the heart of pleasant, functional, prosperous society with classically liberal elements. That Trick is the successful de-personalization of social rules and principles, that is, the nature of the fundamental political meta-rule prescribing how power itself may be wielded. This is an ancient idea (see, e.g., Aristotle's Politics, Book III) but major advances in the direction of successful implementation occurred during the European Enlightenment, in part inspired by writings from Antiquity.
Hayek described all this in detail in his "The Decline of the Rule of Law" article, still fresh though it's from 70 years ago. Consider: "The attack on the principles of the Rule of Law was part of the general movement away from liberalism which began about 1870. It came almost entirely from the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement. They directed their criticism against practically every one of the principles which together make up the Rule of Law. But initially it was aimed mainly against the ideal of equality before the law. The socialists understood that if the state was to correct the unequal results which in a free society different gifts and different luck would bring to different people, these had to be treated unequally.
...
A few years later, Anatole France was to give wide circulation to the similar ideas of his French socialist friends in the much quoted gibe about "the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, to steal bread." Little did the countless well-meaning persons who have since repeated this phrase realize that they were giving currency to one of the cleverest attacks on the fundamental principles of liberal society."
Any constraints on the use of state power stand in the way of many very valuable opportunities to exploit such uses for political advantage. The Rule of Law is -most definitely- just such a constraint, as it blocks the ability to play favorites with power to help friends and hurt enemies.
And so any movement seeking to exploit such opportunities but currently thwarted by the constraint is incredibly motivated to allocate incredible efforts into discovering some method that will allow them to circumvent the constraint and see if they can get away with what was previously widely considered to be clear abuses of discretion and power.
The temptation to loosen the constraint is irresistible by any merely internal sources of discipline, so its preservation depends on being checked and balanced by external political competition. But that just focuses the efforts on some kind of general-purpose "Socially Accepted Excuse" which one can pretend provides an ideological justification for -any- exception or deviation your own side wants to make, but -never- provides it to one's political opponents. This requires fooling your opponents into thinking this excuse "has some value" and could somehow be utilized in a way that was both rare and fair, when the reality will always be anything but.
Well, they found it! That's O/O! It is a nuclear trump card that gives the progressives the ability to justify playing favorites in violation of every possible political rule or ethical principle, to adjudicate cases based on nothing else than the group identity of the people in various roles and by Lenin's "Who, Whom?"
The progressives like to pretend their political positions are the logical implications of some kind of set of principles, but notice how you can never get them to actually articulate those principles in detail without their principle-neutralizing and nullifying insertion of an infinitely flexible, blank-check caveat that the answer depends on whose ox is getting gored.
You can say, "The Law of War says ... " and they will say, "I condemn violation of the law of war, but it's excusable and thus not really a violation if it favors the oppressed over their oppressors." You can say, "The standard of evidence for conviction is ... " and they will say, "I condemn convicting people on insufficient evidence, but it's excusable and not really insufficient it the person convicted is an oppressor."
See the problem? Literally nothing of actual value can stand and survive when dissolved in the acid of this universal one-sided excuse-generator, which by its very nature inherently tears down the entire structure of a liberal order in favor of the nasty domination of pure power politics, infectious of literally every sphere of life.
O/O puts the cart of "who should win the case" in front of the horse of "the merits of the case." That is what 'Tribalism' and 'bias' mean. For no other subject matter is this more clearly evident than on the issue of Israel v Hamas. You simply cannot get the progressives to articulate the specifics of any possible and feasible rules, laws, principles, or standards of what Israel should be entitled to do to defend itself, because they don't believe that any such set of principles -could- be valid and legitimate, because they already deem with prejudice that Hamas must emerge as the moral victor. And thus any argument - which if manifested in action would produce consequences opposing Hamas' interests - is perforce invalid.
Power corrupts. It's OK to be skeptical of those in power, especially government power. The best example are police. We need good, trusted, accountable police. Not the poor performers who get the city sued for abuse and/or incompetence. Power imbalance is an important part of the analysis of the issue. And as I said 'it's far from the only dimension in the determination of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad'.
"Power imbalance is an important part of the analysis of the issue. And as I said 'it's far from the only dimension in the determination of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad'."
No, it's not an important part of any analysis. The Founders were already quite familiar - indeed obsessed with - the terrifying capacity the state could use to easily and unjustly roll over the interests of any individual standing in the way of its aims, because it had so much more power than the individual. The (mostly culturally inherited) liberal answers they settled upon were to place extra burdens on the state prior to its exercise of the most concerning powers but these constraints were specifically of the sort that insisted on identity-neutrality, the equal protection of the laws, and which forbade the state from discriminating from one case to another based on their personal characteristics, for instance, however much money or power the individual or the groups to which he belonged possessed, being -presumptively irrelevant- factors in the adjudication of any questions of fact or law.
You are letting the left play this word game on you where by using some academic hack's inventions of impersonal and abstract vocabulary they are able to successfully mislead you into thinking they are using the term "power imbalance" in some kind of impersonal, identity-neutral way that would be fairly applied to every individual in every situation without regard to group characteristics except insofar as that is a relevant and probative fact in the individualized analytic process.
But if you give them this inch then they'll take every mile you've got left. What the left actually means by "power imbalance" is simply *tribal* "group identity: and "Who, Whom?" that fits the narrative and political formula behind their clientelist spoils system. The civilizational breakthrough that made flourishing liberal society possible was precisely to -reject- the notion that any of that was an important part of an analysis.
Identity neutrality is indeed in the statutes. Yet look at the criminal justice system in reality. You don't have to be any kind of a social justice warrior to see how it regularly takes advantage of poor people of all colors and ethnicities from the street to the courthouse to the prison. Prisons are inhumane as a rule, not exception. America's underbelly. That doesn't mean that criminals should not be held accountable!
It depends what lessons Jews take away from it. It could be a wake up call, but bigger things have been rationalized in the past.
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.
When reality fails to match their model of the world, most people change their model. Others double down. For example, the poverty rate was declining apace in the U.S. prior to the implementation of LBJ’s Great Society programs. Over fifty years and $25 trillion later, the poverty rate is about where it was when the programs kicked in.
Instead of admitting the malign impact of their beloved policies, many on the left explained the failure by declaring that America was far more racist and corrupt than even they had imagined. The result is the “woke” movement.
I think the same sort of thing is happening with immigration. The results of open border policies didn’t meet expectations. But as the fault can’t be with the policies - and certainly not with the immigrants - it must lie with citizens who are either malign, stupid, or blinded by false consciousness. Such people must be either suppressed or reeducated.
But the Great Society has been a success! The poverty rate may not have changed, and the dysfunction may only have increased, and the big cities' once-hopeful efforts at beautification and quality-of-life improvements abandoned - but there are *more* of those people than before - and both the left and the GOP unite in counting that a utilitarian win.
"The biggest taboo topic relative to immigration concerns assimilation. Elites behave as if assimilation into Western culture by immigrants is not a policy problem."
And non-elites behave as if assimilation into Western culture by immigrants is not possible. Both are wrong, but non-elites are more wrong.
Reforming both the selection of immigrants and the assimilation mechanisms are necessary to maximize the benefits of immigration.
Thomas, how are we " more wrong"?
I don't know if "more wrong" is correct, but the people who believe immigrants can't assimilate are very wrong too. The culture of the USA was built by immigrants who assimilated. Nobody thinks of descendants of Italians, Germans, Irish immigrants as anything other than 'American'. The path for those groups to assimilate was not always smooth but it happened. There's no reason to believe that other groups cannot assimilate in the same manner. Perhaps the best modern example are Indian immigrants. They seem to be pretty far along on the assimilation road even without any encouragement to assimilate. Ultimately the USA needs immigrants due to demographic trends of the current population. Better to figure out how to do it well.
A counterpoint though is Hawaii where the "locals" still haven't assimilated after over a century. Chinese kids grow up here fourth generation and still never learn English. The king is still venerated and prayers to him are still forced in public school . Nearly every tradition or institution we would associate with being an American doesn't exist or, when it does, only on paper and not practice. Hell Honolulu doesn't even do 4th of July fireworks. Nearly every modern problem in Hawaii can be traced to the same root cause, a outright refusal and hostility by the majority of local sub ethnic groups to assimilate at all even today.
Shall we talk about the assimilation of America Samoa too? If you think Americans living in a tribal fishing village complete with a chief and communal property outside Pago Pago are practicing American traditions or that they have any respect for traditional western values, you obviously never been there.
"There's no reason to believe that other groups cannot assimilate in the same manner."
Most people who are anti-immigration believe in HBD and racial genetics, so they think there is a difference between Germans and Arabs or whatever. If you don't accept this fact there is going to be little to discuss.
"Perhaps the best modern example are Indian immigrants. They seem to be pretty far along on the assimilation road even without any encouragement to assimilate."
Sort of. They have assimilated to coastal urban progressive professional norms. That's a mixed blessing if you don't like those norms.
It is worth noting that those "coastal urban progressive professional norms" are also "the norms that get enforced with high regularity." I think a large part of our immigrant problem is really a lack of law enforcement problem. Conveniently, that also addresses why native urban populations don't assimilate into what we would consider proper cultural behavior.
Put another away, I think looking at immigration problems and native problems as separate issues is a mistake, when native populations are so bad as well. When your native urban populations are engaging in crime at very high levels, seemingly without correction, well, who is to say immigrants don't assimilate quickly but just into a group you don't like?
"who is to say immigrants don't assimilate quickly but just into a group you don't like?"
I think there is some truth to this, but the Swedes didn't have a high crime native population to assimilate to and the Arabs became high crime anyway.
I also agree that Indians/Asians would assimilate to different norms if our native UMC coastal elites had different norms. However, in my experience there are also inherent racial traits even to high IQ groups (East Asian conformity for instance). Our schools shut down and masked kids because the Asian immigrants supported it.
As to immigrant assimilation I would note two things:
1) For all sorts of reasons immigrants are going to tend to congregate in cities and on the coast, so they are going to lean left.
2) I would describe American society as rewarding both the high and the low at the expense of the middle. It is no surprise then that immigrants tend to lean high and low rather than middle (global demographics would point in that direction anyway). You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax.
"Italians, Germans, Irish" immigrants assimilated well because they are European, so similar Western culture. Asian Indians assimilated well, because they were a British colony, and absorbed much of that Western culture. Latin Americans are not as Western, but they are very Catholic which is a Western religion. And at least Mexicans are physically closer to the US so they've absorbed some western culture through proximity.
Muslim cultures have a different religion, are not physically close, and are "less western" in their culture--good or bad--and so they don't assimilate as well. End of story.
I'm aware of very few groups that don't assimilate by second or third generation. American Indians, US born blacks (rather contradictorily, black immigrants tend to be much more inclined to assimilate.)
There are also religious groups like Amish, Mennonite, and maybe ultra-conservative Jews but in some ways these are more assimilated economically.
Yes and. The assimilation process matters. For example you don't want new immigrants assimilated into the gang culture of Chicago. IMO the US needs to bring back middle school civics. It's OK to recognize and be proud of the good parts of the USA.
Civics sounds good. I'd be even more in favor of statistics in high school, preferably to include risk and uncertainty.
Assimilation - it's been a few years since I looked but Hispanic immigrations were statistically low for crimes unrelated to immigration but after a generation or two their rates were pretty typical of other citizens.
You should read "The Culture Transplant." Assimilation is mostly not real; the resulting society is closer to a fusion of the original + immigrants rather than the immigrants joining the original society. This is OK if there are not large differences in societal quality, but very much not so if there aren't. A halfway house between British and German is fine; a halfway house between American and Mexican, Canadian and Indian, or French and Algerian is not.
Fertility rates in the Global North are collapsing and are already well below replacement almost everywhere. If we restrict immigration who is going to push all the wheelchairs as we in the north all die of old age?
Western civilization is a failed idea. That’s the truth that cannot be faced.
Yes, low birth rates in Europe seem like a root cause of immigration to Europe from Africa.
When European birth rates were high and longevity was extending in Europe, Europeans were pushing into short lifespan low density areas; Africa, Asia, the Americas.
It’s almost more akin to a physics problem. High pressure moves toward low pressure.
One underlying assumption seems to be that if only “the elites” weren’t so stupid “they” could stop immigration. Maybe that’s a false assumption.
A passing problem.
An interesting stat I read the other day:
"The 26,715 Nigerians given health and social care visas in the last year (mostly carers) brought 45,203 dependents with them."
Who is going to push their wheelchairs? Who is going to pay for everything cradle to grave? Who is going to babysit their children in "school"?
Marc Andreessen is riffing on an insight first offered by Chris Argyris, who brilliantly identified and described Organizational Defensive Routines. And a defensive routine has four steps that make it self-sealing: (1) Craft messages that contain inconsistencies. (2) Act as if the messages are not inconsistent. In other words, behave as though something is so that is not so. (3) Make the ambiguity and inconsistency undiscussable. (4) Make the undiscussability of the undiscussable also undiscussable. To do otherwise is to question the prerogative of management to define reality -- even when the defined reality is patently false. Because that's such high-risk behavior, organizations regularly manufacture and enforce organizational defensive routines. This is especially pernicious when managers claim "openness" or a willingness to discuss "anything at any time" but behave in ways showing they are impervious to actual influence. Openness becomes a strategy to actually resist influence.
Arnold
One other topic that’s verboten is the positive role of Judeo/christian culture.
Recently read Rodney Stark’s “How the West was Won:The neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity”.
Detailed, researched, persuasive.
If the reason for benefits is credited with the failures . . . wrong conclusions from wrong assumptions.
Forbidden topics are not automatically wrong.
Thanks
Clay
Israelis claiming to be "indigenous" is like the guy coming to the bar and complaining that you're on his stool. "II sat here every night for 2 years." Buddy, I've been sitting here three times a week for the last 5 years and I've never seen you. "Yeah, I was travelling, but now I want my seat back.
Arnold,
I like this post, but let’s be careful - there’s a difference between “cannot be discussed” and “political elites do not want to discuss.”
To discuss immigration would require caring about immigrants more than other topics, i.e., more than trans, Trump, and Teslas; more than climate, COVID, and Kavanaugh.
Let’s take off our Andreesen hat and put on our Smithian hat. What would Smith ask about the immigration discussion? He would point out that we care less about those far from us, not just geographically, but economically, culturally, intellectually, etc.
So it’s not that we can’t discuss; it’s that we don’t care as much about immigrants as we do our careers, our credentials or our credit scores.
We should care though. We should be asking, “What can we do to make the situation at the border better?” or “What can I do to improve the immigration process?” or “What do I know that immigrants might want to learn?”
There are opportunities to serve immigrants. All it takes is asking the right questions.
Let’s forget about the elites and focus on asking questions that are productive, helpful and positive. What can Arnold Kling do? What can I do? Let’s look at our comparative advantage, our competition and the immigrants. I would make a list of books by Tyler Cowen and ask what is missing from this list that will help immigrants? We can always ask, what would Jesus do? And we can ask, what Elon would do, what business should I start?
So with our Smithian hat still on we should ask, “How can I align my self-interest with the interests of immigrants to create value and to be valued?”
Every time Instapundit links something about censorship, it makes me gag because Reynolds engages in the practice himself
Point of detail with respect to European immigration: it is nearly all illegal - mostly male, juveniles and young men, Muslim with little/no education, no skills, many from conflict zones, agressive, violent, with no respect for European female adults and children whom they attack fir their pleasures. The problem is further increased by the number... millions. In Britain it is costing £1billion a week to keep many of them in hotels - food and board - mostly 3* and 4* hotels. Our hotels are largely full of them, some hotels no longer taking paying guests. Most of the hotel staff are fired to keep costs down as full hotel service is not required, keeping just a few for weekly cleaning. This is causing unemployment problems in many communities where hotels are an important employer.
Other things Govt won’t discuss: the obsession with climate change and Net Zero; the horrible damage done/being done with CoVid vaccines.
One of many things that can't be discussed.
We must change the terminology: we are being colonized as is Western Europe. https://americanmind.org/salvo/settlers-versus-migrants/"