As someone who grew up in an immigrant community and married into one, I think from a policy perspective there needs to be some boring limiting principles. I.e, maybe total % of population born outside the US, plus some sort of metrics around low vs high skilled immigrants.
Nativists have never been able to articulate a philosophical principle around nativism because there really isn’t one. In that way, the turn to “preferences” is refreshingly honest. That said, I think MOST people would agree that bringing in 1 billion non-Americans right now would be bad, regardless of their composition (as a hypothetical). With that context, the non US-born population is at all time highs, surpassing its late 19th-century record. There’s a reason why opposition to immigrants was an animating issue during times of high immigration and not, for instance, in the 1950s.
Articulating some sort of limiting principles in a way that appeals to both the restrictionists and the progressives (for whom this issue is not a priority) will be critical for achieving reform. Otherwise it will remain a hobby horse for the worst sorts of demagogues. Denmark has made meaningful progress here, and other western countries should take note.
I think if you had written this piece during a period of history when illegal immigration was low, I would have thought it appropriate and thoughtful, and mostly agreed with it (Though I think you do yourself a disservice to ignore people complaining about relatively recent developments with the abuse and expansion of H1B visa to hire skilled foreign workers in tech mostly to undercut American salaries, because they’re cheaper and have directly harmed the job market for tech workers. These tech workers are complaining about the immigration of “skilled” Indian workers precisely because they tend on average to be lower skilled than themselves, but also because they are being directly economically harmed. It would be worth acknowledging that many people do have real or perceived economic complaints even about legal immigration that are not based on racial bias. Even if you think they’re wrong to be worried, you should acknowledge the fear is based on immediate economic concerns, rather than other bases.)
But either way it’s hard to write this piece ranting about people who hate legal immigration being bad when it comes on the heels of long periods of sky high illegal immigration, and public sentiment on illegal immigration is very different, with most people thinking it is distinctly bad and wanting to slow it down and stop it. When it comes to immigration, it matters a lot which specific question is asked, and about the only area with broad support is the question of legal, skilled immigration. The anti-immigration parties are getting the support they’re getting precisely because elite party members have ignored and failed to address majority positions on controlling illegal immigration, and study after study have shown that (at least 2-4 years ago), the deepest misalignment between the general population and elected officials was their position on immigration and elected officials stance against broadly making serious efforts to control illegal immigration.
So yes, most people support legal skilled immigration. But your piece inexplicably ignores that the current noise and volume on immigration and support for anti-immigration parties comes from a majority desire to make it a controlled and orderly process, and a response against the broad idea and ethos behind decriminalizing illegal immigration (as many 2020 Democratic candidates endorsed).
Have you been following the news the last year or two? We have an administration that stopped illegal immigration and is seeking to shut down skilled immigration too to the greatest extent it can.
Yes, illegal immigration is currently mostly stopped, but the spigot being currently stopped doesn’t address the reality of the spigot having been wide open for a large enough period of time that there are currently huge populations of illegal immigrants recently arrived and how to address this. It doesn’t alter the fact that the current landscape on immigration sentiment is impacted by the reality of the presence of huge volumes of illegal immigration and the reality that foreign born population % is at an all-time historic high, in large part due to illegal immigration, and that this reality and efforts to address this (good, bad and ugly) are dominating immigration sentiment and discourse everywhere.
Also, we all know that if a Democrat gets back in the White House, illegal immigration will resume unchecked. The threat isn't actually gone, just temporarily delayed.
Exactly. This article represents a tone-deaf position on the real issues at hand.
The abuse of the immigration system by bad actors (on all sides) has put immense pressure on the system's ability to produce effective results. To call people who have been cast aside by dissociative global interests 'racist' because they still depend on their immediate environment, is terribly disingenuous.
True nativists are low-hanging fruit and not interesting. Richard does not address the real issues that, I believe, are animating the energy around an increased skepticism toward immigration.
I don't like the part of skilled immigrants for the tech sector because of many things: Indians bring their own prejudiced attitudes by importing their caste system which adds to already prejudice we've been grappling with the for some time. In addition when they stay and cripple the family reunification processes for us citizens to bring here their spouses and children while they import total families who bring more of the activities we don't allow like fmd to the detriment to society and our culture.
One H1B person in Nevada brought in 96 relatives. Skilled workers should be limited to the initial time of the contract and forced to return home and wait at least three years before they can apply to emigrate.
By overwhelming the immigration system my niece had to wait two years for her fiance from France to come here,!
Firstly, to the extent they are intellectually dishonest, that's bad in general.
Secondly, if they think the juice of ethnic homogeneity is worth the squeeze of ethnic cleansing (with the inevitable violence and disruption that is entailed), that's a bad tradeoff, and they're bad people for preferring it.
The motivations for restricting immigration from Trump and his goon administration (headed by Stephen Miller who thinks, talks and acts like a Nazi) is pure racism of the worst kind.
The vilification of Haitians, with the repulsive and ridiculous “they are eating your pets” bullcrap….to “shithole countries” …to calling some immigrant “animals”….to “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” ….to “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, amid one rant against immigrants, by far the most popular target of hate for his fans. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he added.” ….to Trump’s claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S….and on and on and on.
The most glaring evidence of pure racist animus that is the basis for Trump’s actions concerning immigration is when he cut off ALL refugee immigration (almost all non-white people who have been vetted for more than a year, sometimes several years) but, FAST TRACKED white Afrikaners (5,000) with the absurd and false accusation of them being victims of “genocide”.
Mr. Haninia asks the question “Are immigration Restrictionists Bad People?”…
In the Trump administration the answer is unequivocally YES!!!
These are racist scumbags to the core headed up by the Racist-in-chief, Donald Trump and his right-hand Joseph Goebbels Stephen Miller.
1. Personal note: I'm a Jew from the Bronx. My experience is that if I live where everybody is like me, I get bored. If I live where nobody is like me, I get lonesome.
2. I'm also a scientist. And yes, I think that those with special skills, not only in science, but in the arts, too, should be shoo-ins for immigration. (My wife was Lebanese and a jewelry designer. She gained US citizenship at least partly on the strength of her portfolio and recommendation letters, presented during her interview.)
3. On the other hand, the large increase in trucking cost is due not only to fuel shortages but to driver shortages, since about 200K truck drivers with valid work permits have now been forbidden to drive because they don't speak English well enough. Anthony Bourdain pointed out that the restaurants he worked in in NY could not have survived without an army of low paid and hard working Hispanics doing all kinds of work behind the scenes. The slaves built the cotton industry. The Chinese and Irish built the railroads. The Germans contributed the largest contribution to our blood and fought with us against their country of ancestral origin. French soldiers and sailors arriving during the American revolution reported surprise over the observation that about 1/4 of the Patriot forces consisted of blacks, many of whom were runaway slaves.
4. Those on the right who oppose immigration are often the same ones complaining that our birth rate is down and we are going to experience a population deficit. I don't have statistics on this, but my guess is that our population growth in the past has been significantly assisted by immigration. And those immigrants and their descendents have fought for our country.
5. Recall that in 1987, under Reagan, Federal law granted amnesty to immigrants who had been here some length of time. However, the law also made it impossible to vet or reject new immigrants applying for work. It actually became illegal for someone applying for a job in America to be asked whether they had a legal right to work here. And there were virtually no penalties for hiring illegal immigrants. To this day, as far as I know, meatpacking companies who knowingly built a workforce consisting almost entirely of illegal immigrants have never been prosecuted. (If you know otherwise, I'd like to know.) The law was built to be flauted, and that is largely responsible for the situation we are in now. On the other hand, to his credit, Reagan said "Nobody can become an Englishman, but anybody can become an American." I didn't vote for him, but I admire that sentiment.
What’s the evidence that illegal immigration is good? The trades are heavily impacted by illegal immigration. When a Mexican comes to town illegally for example, they charge much less for their services, driving down the wages for natives. This is why most southerners don’t like illegal immigration, because it actually impacts their businesses and economies, whereas in the north, they are more so only impacted by legal immigration.
Yes, but it conveniently leaves out that most of these extreme positions arise when exposed to the illegal kind. I know some people just hate it in general no matter what, and he makes the argument against that. Fine. That’s not the problem.
I definitely agree with this. Illegal immigration is the elephant in the room which is so large it’s crazy he doesn’t at least dedicate a paragraph to stating it’s a different issue with different preferences but is not the subject of this piece. Because large majorities of people in all countries, including the US, do not like illegal immigration and have very serious issues with how, say, Biden, let in huge numbers.
I think you are being entirely too charitable to the legal immigration restrictionists. They know what they're asking for and why. They say so! Again, that's what the piece is about, not what you think it should be about.
I'm not sure why you are asking me this question. The only thing I said about illegal immigration is that Reagan's amnesty law made it virtually impossible for an employer to vet a new employee to make sure he was legal, and that was bad. I always viewed that part of the law as a gift to Republican business owners to get cheap labor through the back door.
I think every country needs an immigration policy — or at least mine does — and that the discussion should be mainly about what that policy should be. But right now, even legal immigrants are being barred from some forms of employment. The illegal immigrants who have entered since 1987 have lived and thrived here because of the brain-dead unenforceability of vetting the legality of job candidates enshrined in the Reagan amnesty bill.
There is too much reductionism going on this article for it to have any utility. The situation in Europe cannot be conflated with the US. Athough I agree that there is nothing wrong with nativists there saying, we don't want to be minoritized in our thousand year homeland.
With respect to the US, how are you defining "nativist?" You really didn't, although you seem to lump into the category anyone who supports any rules or restrictions whatsoever on immigration.
“I don’t care if you personally like such individuals or want them as neighbors. But to want fewer of them in the country reflects a diseased mindset.” — Hear, hear!
What about when they bring with them the diseased mindset of CASTE! AND ADD to existing prejudice by adding more? I assure you they don't bring more accepting concepts of the place of women for example
I'm not sure I really believe that though. People who choose to come to a new society are already signalling they have a greater than average acceptance of the values of that society even if they are not "completely on board" (and our society doesn't even agree with *itself* so what does "completely on board" even entail?) Secondly, the values of the new society tend to rub off further, especially on the children. (tension between conservative first generation immigrants who want the kids to stick to the old ways and their children who embrace the new ways of the new country is practically a staple of fiction).
Yes, assimilation can fail for various reasons (see Muslims in Europe), but that's not what I see happening in North America. That photo of the Indian students cheering at the Texas football game... I mean how much more assimilated can you be? What's the real ask? (the real, usually unstated, ask is "don't be brown", which is RH's point).
What about when they bring with them the diseased mindset of CASTE! AND ADD to existing prejudice by adding more? I assure you they don't bring more accepting concepts of the place of women for example
Ironically, the presence of Elon Musk in America with the resulting poorly thought out DOGE cuts is an argument against allowing skilled immigrants into this country.
I think an important point is that the “homogeneity” argument is particularly hard to make for the US and other settler colonial societies like Australia or Canada. Heritage American discourse is silly because on some level all Americans are immigrants and in fact nearly everyone prominent rightoid has immigrants in their families including Trump, Vance and Rufo.
This type of homogeneity argument makes much more sense in places like Japan where I think something genuinely would be lost if it stopped being majority ethnic Japanese. Arguably countries like France have become irreversibly worse places due to immigration. Ironically European leftists often use “nation of immigrants” style discourse to justify mass immigration, confusing their countries history with America’s. It’s almost like European leftists want to LARP as if they lived in a US style settler colonial stare and American rightoids want to LARP as if they lived in a European ethnostate, all while ironically centering a large part of their political identity around disdain towards the continent they are attempting to emulate.
>Restricting immigration means excluding people from living in the country of their choice. That’s a pretty extreme step, and inflicts a major harm on them.<
This is like saying that restricting a homeless person from living in my house is inflicting a major harm on him because I'm excluding him from living in the space of his choice.
Yes, it is like saying that. But haven't you missed the point of his comment?
"In contrast, if my preference led me to demand that people with tattoos be banned from my town, or taxed at much higher rates, others would judge me harshly for this, as they should. A preference is not a carte blanche to treat others however we feel like. It’s what we do or advocate for based on our preferences that matters.
Restricting immigration means excluding people from living in the country of their choice. That’s a pretty extreme step, and inflicts a major harm on them."
You have a right to exclude a homeless person because while housing him would have significantly helped him, it would also impose substantial harm on you. You don't have a right to impose great harm on a potential high skilled immigrant just because you don't like their skin color--a trivial factor. Richard isn't saying you can never have policies that impose harm on people, rather he's saying they need to be justified.
"There’s an unstated assumption here that most Americans agree with nativists."
I think a very large chunk and possibly an outright majority prefer homogeneity. However, this truth contains nuances that nativists aren't dealing with. It doesn't mean what they think it means.
One is that a preference for homogeneity is often not a preference for some kind of ancient "blood and soil" thing but is just status quo bias and anti-uncertainty. Things changing means that a person's familiarity and position may become more tenuous. A legible terrain is one they can navigate. Someone who is confident in their capacity to navigate uncertainty and to learn how to map new territories cares less about the environment staying the same. Most people are not actually upset about living next door to Mexicans because of some deep affinity for whiteness or being WASP or whatever. They are concerned about what the Mexicans may mean for the legibility of the territory. When they manage to navigate the new circumstances (and they pretty much always do), they just stop caring about Mexicans because they are now a legible part of the territory.
Two is that even if people dislike Mexicans/whoever as such, it does not mean that they put this considerably high on their prioritization list. Lots of people care about abortion one way or the other, but the number of people who are consistently abortion #1 issue voters (either for or against) is not very large. I'm from the rural South. I know a ton of old people who just generically dislike black people. And almost none of these old people make that their #1 or often even top ten things they think or care about on any given day. They will mutter a racial slur because some dude is blasting hip hop at the gas station and then forget about it. They will also go on daily tirades about the price of canned goods or spend hours consuming Fox content about what people with blue hair are doing in San Francisco.
In other words, these preferences for status quo and some amount of generic distaste does not translate into wide enthusiastic support for social engineering projects to preserve the white majority with jack booted thug tactics or doing things that tank the economy.
Rights precede government. If there is only one lesson we should learn from this anniversary year if we took the time to actually read carefully the Declaration of Independence is that fact. Rights precede government. And for the first hundred years, more or less, we had an open border as a consequence of that understanding that rights precede government. The omission in the Constitution of any role for the federal government in immigration but only naturalization was not an oversight but intentional. So yes, anyone who expects to enjoy an unalienable right yet deprive others of it is a bad person, IMO.
Whaa? In what sense can there be anything called a "right" (that isn't just a fuzzy woo nonsense word) that isn't a) explicitly spelled out in some form and b) protected and enforced somehow. And at the point that it's spelled out and enforced, how is that not government?
Like the aspirational *idea* of rights precedes their explicit documentation and enforcement, but they do not exist as anything but ideals beforehand. And even this aspirational idea of rights is in no way universal or consistent across time and space.
*Edit*
I am a liberal, but this is a consistent liberal blind spot. This idea that human rights are *real* in the way that like gravity and math is real. They aren't. They are human defined and contingent on local circumstances (specifically usually health and stability of local institutions).
It often leads people to declaring that people must have things (housing, free speech, healthcare, education, whatever) without bothering to actually answer the boring question, "yes, but *how?*" (Let alone "why?")
Let me try to keep this simple. The Constitution granted the federal government a limited set of enumerated rights. The Bill of Rights reasserts and reconfirmed that. What is not enumerated in the Constitution was left to the states and the people. The federal government was granted no right wrt immigration. Naturalization, yes. Immigration, no.
The federal power which now almost everyone takes for granted, was invented by the Supreme Court in 1889, the Chinese Exclusion Case. Not derived from any clause in the Constitution.
The Constitution was designed to be changed two ways. An amendment. Or a new convention. But a corrupt people who want their way even when they cannot get the consent of the people still want their way with as little consent as possible. Ergo, judicial fiat. Win the Congress. Select the judges. Change the constitution by controlling the courts. Getting judges to rewrite the Constitution and avoid the process delineated by the Constitution itself. An act of hubris. Vanity. And authoritarian. And most people are closet authoritarians. Some more overt than others.
"Rights precede government." You did not add to this a qualification that meant "became common law was a thing in Anglo legal systems." But even if you did, common law (which is where the unenumerated rights you are talking about like as an example the general right to move around public spaces where you want without needing some kind of permit or permission) is a component of government.
"Unenumerated rights" as they existed in common law are not the same thing that Enlightenment philosophers like Thomas Jefferson meant by inalienable rights. Common law rights are rights that come from tradition and are enforced by more organic or ad hoc styles of governance. "Natural/inalienable/human" rights are magical woo things we supposedly got from a usually pretty deistic God that the Enlightenment liked.
By your definition rights do not exist at all. Only privileges either conveyed or withheld by government. At their discretion. And your claim would also assert that the people who wrote the Constitution, voted to ratify the Constitution were all willing to surrender their personal sovereignty to the State. I think most liberals think that. Which is why I believe most, if not all liberals are authoritarians. They believe I am not a sovereign individual but an indentured servant to the State. Which is also why I am so amused at liberals calling Trump and Trumpers authoritarian. They should look in the mirror.
"By your definition rights do not exist at all. Only privileges either conveyed or withheld by government. At their discretion."
Correct. Which is why the only way people can define and have reliable rights at all is to build government with inbuilt checks and balances and components for the people to amend or change it at their discretion. Without the government, they are at the mercy of arbitrary tyranny from other individuals. Without the limitations and amendment tools, they are at the mercy of the arbitrary power of government.
Your capacity for sovereignty absent these mechanisms is 100% contingent on your personal ability to project power. And if you can't because somebody else is stronger than you and wants to stop you, you are just shit out of luck.
“In contrast, if my preference led me to demand that people with tattoos be banned from my town, or taxed at much higher rates, others would judge me harshly for this, as they should. A preference is not a carte blanche to treat others however we feel like. It’s what we do or advocate for based on our preferences that matters.”
Under libertarianism, people could (if not easily) live in communities that banned tattoos. Once you discard road communism (i.e., the idea that the entire world owns the roads in the U.S. or the West), then immigration looks very differently. Obviously, you would not insist that Keeperman invite unwanted immigrants into his house, yard, driveway, etc. But what about his residential street? Do you begin moralizing against racism at the edge of his driveway?
"Once you discard road communism (i.e., the idea that the entire world owns the roads in the U.S. or the West),"
You have to pay some kind of fee to legally use every public road in the USA. Directly in the case of toll roads or indirectly in the form of things like vehicle registration fees, gasoline taxes, etc. It's also borderline impossible for an illegal immigrant to get a drivers' license or vehicle insurance in most places. There is no sense that a guy with no license and an unregistered car has a right to drive down the interstate. Ths is explicitly illegal. Problems like derelict vehicles clogging up public parking spots and so on can be solved by some mix of allowing people to build things (both out and up - box stores with giant parking lots *and* public transit) and by actually enforcing traffic laws.
The idea I can arbitrarily forbid you from driving down my residential street because you don't live there is inane. If you don't want randos parking/driving near your house, you should buy acreage in the country, build a private road, and build your house well away from the public road. My house growing up was 1/4 mile up a private dirt road my dad maintained. You couldn't even see a public road from our house. We had a gate by the highway that blocked entry. You could build an ethnic enclave behind the gate with private roads and nobody could stop you. This is precisely how religious compounds work. If you aren't rich enough, you could pool resources with people who want the same thing.
Suppose the US had this "open borders for educated professionals" system for a few generations, wouldn't the US have turned into China by now? Are we saying that would be a good thing?
China used to be extremely poor, so the incentive to do whatever it takes to qualify would be very strong. Unless the masses were actively prevented from teaching/learning, I don't see anything that would preclude the most talented third or more from becoming educated professionals and moving to the US. That's hundreds of millions.
They would of course also want their families to be able to join them and politically it would be difficult to oppose such a large constituency.
That's not even getting into inevitable issues of such an immigration system being gamed by fake employment, fake credentials, bribes and so on.
You could add in the rest of the west on one side of the ledger, but then you have to add in the rest of the third world on the other side and ask the same question, wouldn't the west have turned into the third world by now?
Now one could argue that the backlash to such an immigration policy would prevent any of that from actually happening, or that bureaucratic hurdles to proving "educated professional"-status would clog up the system. But if one is counting on one's proposals being practically impossible then what's the point in making them?
One problem here is most Indian immigrants do not understand the importance of traditional gender roles in American culture. They probably read Reddit and watch TikTok and take the superficially egalitarian values at face value. The men then act in this submissive, emotionally expressive, ‘nice’, internalizing-like way, that almost reads as homosexual in American culture, and it gives conservatives the ‘ick’. Even when they get buff, the physical appearance paired with the psychological androgyny still comes off as what a gay man would do.
Indian men need not go as far as some cultural groups in this regard. But it would likely endear them to the right more if their men embraced stoicism, dominance, overconfidence, externalizing, and possessing sadistic and cruel tendencies more. This is the same problem that many contemporary liberal politicians have. Figures like Bill Clinton, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and George W. Bush, are good examples of how people can work hard and succeed while also successfully adhering to America’s rigid gender norms.
One of the criticisms of Indians from the right is that they are glib talkers (and not quiet doers like the Chinese).
Indians anyway have no need for Stoicism since they adhere to a philosophy of dispassionate action as prescribed in the Bhagwad Gita.
All of these suggestions almost always seem just so. The right will always find a way to dislike you no matter what you do. So the best thing is to just ignore them and not let them have political power.
As someone who grew up in an immigrant community and married into one, I think from a policy perspective there needs to be some boring limiting principles. I.e, maybe total % of population born outside the US, plus some sort of metrics around low vs high skilled immigrants.
Nativists have never been able to articulate a philosophical principle around nativism because there really isn’t one. In that way, the turn to “preferences” is refreshingly honest. That said, I think MOST people would agree that bringing in 1 billion non-Americans right now would be bad, regardless of their composition (as a hypothetical). With that context, the non US-born population is at all time highs, surpassing its late 19th-century record. There’s a reason why opposition to immigrants was an animating issue during times of high immigration and not, for instance, in the 1950s.
Articulating some sort of limiting principles in a way that appeals to both the restrictionists and the progressives (for whom this issue is not a priority) will be critical for achieving reform. Otherwise it will remain a hobby horse for the worst sorts of demagogues. Denmark has made meaningful progress here, and other western countries should take note.
I think if you had written this piece during a period of history when illegal immigration was low, I would have thought it appropriate and thoughtful, and mostly agreed with it (Though I think you do yourself a disservice to ignore people complaining about relatively recent developments with the abuse and expansion of H1B visa to hire skilled foreign workers in tech mostly to undercut American salaries, because they’re cheaper and have directly harmed the job market for tech workers. These tech workers are complaining about the immigration of “skilled” Indian workers precisely because they tend on average to be lower skilled than themselves, but also because they are being directly economically harmed. It would be worth acknowledging that many people do have real or perceived economic complaints even about legal immigration that are not based on racial bias. Even if you think they’re wrong to be worried, you should acknowledge the fear is based on immediate economic concerns, rather than other bases.)
But either way it’s hard to write this piece ranting about people who hate legal immigration being bad when it comes on the heels of long periods of sky high illegal immigration, and public sentiment on illegal immigration is very different, with most people thinking it is distinctly bad and wanting to slow it down and stop it. When it comes to immigration, it matters a lot which specific question is asked, and about the only area with broad support is the question of legal, skilled immigration. The anti-immigration parties are getting the support they’re getting precisely because elite party members have ignored and failed to address majority positions on controlling illegal immigration, and study after study have shown that (at least 2-4 years ago), the deepest misalignment between the general population and elected officials was their position on immigration and elected officials stance against broadly making serious efforts to control illegal immigration.
So yes, most people support legal skilled immigration. But your piece inexplicably ignores that the current noise and volume on immigration and support for anti-immigration parties comes from a majority desire to make it a controlled and orderly process, and a response against the broad idea and ethos behind decriminalizing illegal immigration (as many 2020 Democratic candidates endorsed).
Have you been following the news the last year or two? We have an administration that stopped illegal immigration and is seeking to shut down skilled immigration too to the greatest extent it can.
Yes, illegal immigration is currently mostly stopped, but the spigot being currently stopped doesn’t address the reality of the spigot having been wide open for a large enough period of time that there are currently huge populations of illegal immigrants recently arrived and how to address this. It doesn’t alter the fact that the current landscape on immigration sentiment is impacted by the reality of the presence of huge volumes of illegal immigration and the reality that foreign born population % is at an all-time historic high, in large part due to illegal immigration, and that this reality and efforts to address this (good, bad and ugly) are dominating immigration sentiment and discourse everywhere.
Also, we all know that if a Democrat gets back in the White House, illegal immigration will resume unchecked. The threat isn't actually gone, just temporarily delayed.
Exactly. This article represents a tone-deaf position on the real issues at hand.
The abuse of the immigration system by bad actors (on all sides) has put immense pressure on the system's ability to produce effective results. To call people who have been cast aside by dissociative global interests 'racist' because they still depend on their immediate environment, is terribly disingenuous.
True nativists are low-hanging fruit and not interesting. Richard does not address the real issues that, I believe, are animating the energy around an increased skepticism toward immigration.
I don't like the part of skilled immigrants for the tech sector because of many things: Indians bring their own prejudiced attitudes by importing their caste system which adds to already prejudice we've been grappling with the for some time. In addition when they stay and cripple the family reunification processes for us citizens to bring here their spouses and children while they import total families who bring more of the activities we don't allow like fmd to the detriment to society and our culture.
One H1B person in Nevada brought in 96 relatives. Skilled workers should be limited to the initial time of the contract and forced to return home and wait at least three years before they can apply to emigrate.
By overwhelming the immigration system my niece had to wait two years for her fiance from France to come here,!
Yes, they are bad people, for two reasons.
Firstly, to the extent they are intellectually dishonest, that's bad in general.
Secondly, if they think the juice of ethnic homogeneity is worth the squeeze of ethnic cleansing (with the inevitable violence and disruption that is entailed), that's a bad tradeoff, and they're bad people for preferring it.
The motivations for restricting immigration from Trump and his goon administration (headed by Stephen Miller who thinks, talks and acts like a Nazi) is pure racism of the worst kind.
The vilification of Haitians, with the repulsive and ridiculous “they are eating your pets” bullcrap….to “shithole countries” …to calling some immigrant “animals”….to “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” ….to “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, amid one rant against immigrants, by far the most popular target of hate for his fans. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he added.” ….to Trump’s claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S….and on and on and on.
The most glaring evidence of pure racist animus that is the basis for Trump’s actions concerning immigration is when he cut off ALL refugee immigration (almost all non-white people who have been vetted for more than a year, sometimes several years) but, FAST TRACKED white Afrikaners (5,000) with the absurd and false accusation of them being victims of “genocide”.
Mr. Haninia asks the question “Are immigration Restrictionists Bad People?”…
In the Trump administration the answer is unequivocally YES!!!
These are racist scumbags to the core headed up by the Racist-in-chief, Donald Trump and his right-hand Joseph Goebbels Stephen Miller.
1. Personal note: I'm a Jew from the Bronx. My experience is that if I live where everybody is like me, I get bored. If I live where nobody is like me, I get lonesome.
2. I'm also a scientist. And yes, I think that those with special skills, not only in science, but in the arts, too, should be shoo-ins for immigration. (My wife was Lebanese and a jewelry designer. She gained US citizenship at least partly on the strength of her portfolio and recommendation letters, presented during her interview.)
3. On the other hand, the large increase in trucking cost is due not only to fuel shortages but to driver shortages, since about 200K truck drivers with valid work permits have now been forbidden to drive because they don't speak English well enough. Anthony Bourdain pointed out that the restaurants he worked in in NY could not have survived without an army of low paid and hard working Hispanics doing all kinds of work behind the scenes. The slaves built the cotton industry. The Chinese and Irish built the railroads. The Germans contributed the largest contribution to our blood and fought with us against their country of ancestral origin. French soldiers and sailors arriving during the American revolution reported surprise over the observation that about 1/4 of the Patriot forces consisted of blacks, many of whom were runaway slaves.
4. Those on the right who oppose immigration are often the same ones complaining that our birth rate is down and we are going to experience a population deficit. I don't have statistics on this, but my guess is that our population growth in the past has been significantly assisted by immigration. And those immigrants and their descendents have fought for our country.
5. Recall that in 1987, under Reagan, Federal law granted amnesty to immigrants who had been here some length of time. However, the law also made it impossible to vet or reject new immigrants applying for work. It actually became illegal for someone applying for a job in America to be asked whether they had a legal right to work here. And there were virtually no penalties for hiring illegal immigrants. To this day, as far as I know, meatpacking companies who knowingly built a workforce consisting almost entirely of illegal immigrants have never been prosecuted. (If you know otherwise, I'd like to know.) The law was built to be flauted, and that is largely responsible for the situation we are in now. On the other hand, to his credit, Reagan said "Nobody can become an Englishman, but anybody can become an American." I didn't vote for him, but I admire that sentiment.
As a coda, populism can work both ways. Here's Merle Haggard, with "The Immigrant":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6UfoWdRcU8
What’s the evidence that illegal immigration is good? The trades are heavily impacted by illegal immigration. When a Mexican comes to town illegally for example, they charge much less for their services, driving down the wages for natives. This is why most southerners don’t like illegal immigration, because it actually impacts their businesses and economies, whereas in the north, they are more so only impacted by legal immigration.
The article is not about illegal immigration though.
Yes, but it conveniently leaves out that most of these extreme positions arise when exposed to the illegal kind. I know some people just hate it in general no matter what, and he makes the argument against that. Fine. That’s not the problem.
I definitely agree with this. Illegal immigration is the elephant in the room which is so large it’s crazy he doesn’t at least dedicate a paragraph to stating it’s a different issue with different preferences but is not the subject of this piece. Because large majorities of people in all countries, including the US, do not like illegal immigration and have very serious issues with how, say, Biden, let in huge numbers.
I think you are being entirely too charitable to the legal immigration restrictionists. They know what they're asking for and why. They say so! Again, that's what the piece is about, not what you think it should be about.
I'm not sure why you are asking me this question. The only thing I said about illegal immigration is that Reagan's amnesty law made it virtually impossible for an employer to vet a new employee to make sure he was legal, and that was bad. I always viewed that part of the law as a gift to Republican business owners to get cheap labor through the back door.
I think every country needs an immigration policy — or at least mine does — and that the discussion should be mainly about what that policy should be. But right now, even legal immigrants are being barred from some forms of employment. The illegal immigrants who have entered since 1987 have lived and thrived here because of the brain-dead unenforceability of vetting the legality of job candidates enshrined in the Reagan amnesty bill.
There is too much reductionism going on this article for it to have any utility. The situation in Europe cannot be conflated with the US. Athough I agree that there is nothing wrong with nativists there saying, we don't want to be minoritized in our thousand year homeland.
With respect to the US, how are you defining "nativist?" You really didn't, although you seem to lump into the category anyone who supports any rules or restrictions whatsoever on immigration.
“I don’t care if you personally like such individuals or want them as neighbors. But to want fewer of them in the country reflects a diseased mindset.” — Hear, hear!
What about when they bring with them the diseased mindset of CASTE! AND ADD to existing prejudice by adding more? I assure you they don't bring more accepting concepts of the place of women for example
I'm not sure I really believe that though. People who choose to come to a new society are already signalling they have a greater than average acceptance of the values of that society even if they are not "completely on board" (and our society doesn't even agree with *itself* so what does "completely on board" even entail?) Secondly, the values of the new society tend to rub off further, especially on the children. (tension between conservative first generation immigrants who want the kids to stick to the old ways and their children who embrace the new ways of the new country is practically a staple of fiction).
Yes, assimilation can fail for various reasons (see Muslims in Europe), but that's not what I see happening in North America. That photo of the Indian students cheering at the Texas football game... I mean how much more assimilated can you be? What's the real ask? (the real, usually unstated, ask is "don't be brown", which is RH's point).
What about when they bring with them the diseased mindset of CASTE! AND ADD to existing prejudice by adding more? I assure you they don't bring more accepting concepts of the place of women for example
Is there any evidence for this outside of hysteria by left wing NGOs?
The U.S. already has a caste system. It is one based on race, with darker-skinned people in the bottom caste.
Have you read the book “Caste?” It explains this reality quite well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste:_The_Origins_of_Our_Discontents
Ironically, the presence of Elon Musk in America with the resulting poorly thought out DOGE cuts is an argument against allowing skilled immigrants into this country.
I think an important point is that the “homogeneity” argument is particularly hard to make for the US and other settler colonial societies like Australia or Canada. Heritage American discourse is silly because on some level all Americans are immigrants and in fact nearly everyone prominent rightoid has immigrants in their families including Trump, Vance and Rufo.
This type of homogeneity argument makes much more sense in places like Japan where I think something genuinely would be lost if it stopped being majority ethnic Japanese. Arguably countries like France have become irreversibly worse places due to immigration. Ironically European leftists often use “nation of immigrants” style discourse to justify mass immigration, confusing their countries history with America’s. It’s almost like European leftists want to LARP as if they lived in a US style settler colonial stare and American rightoids want to LARP as if they lived in a European ethnostate, all while ironically centering a large part of their political identity around disdain towards the continent they are attempting to emulate.
>Restricting immigration means excluding people from living in the country of their choice. That’s a pretty extreme step, and inflicts a major harm on them.<
This is like saying that restricting a homeless person from living in my house is inflicting a major harm on him because I'm excluding him from living in the space of his choice.
Yes, it is like saying that. But haven't you missed the point of his comment?
"In contrast, if my preference led me to demand that people with tattoos be banned from my town, or taxed at much higher rates, others would judge me harshly for this, as they should. A preference is not a carte blanche to treat others however we feel like. It’s what we do or advocate for based on our preferences that matters.
Restricting immigration means excluding people from living in the country of their choice. That’s a pretty extreme step, and inflicts a major harm on them."
You have a right to exclude a homeless person because while housing him would have significantly helped him, it would also impose substantial harm on you. You don't have a right to impose great harm on a potential high skilled immigrant just because you don't like their skin color--a trivial factor. Richard isn't saying you can never have policies that impose harm on people, rather he's saying they need to be justified.
"There’s an unstated assumption here that most Americans agree with nativists."
I think a very large chunk and possibly an outright majority prefer homogeneity. However, this truth contains nuances that nativists aren't dealing with. It doesn't mean what they think it means.
One is that a preference for homogeneity is often not a preference for some kind of ancient "blood and soil" thing but is just status quo bias and anti-uncertainty. Things changing means that a person's familiarity and position may become more tenuous. A legible terrain is one they can navigate. Someone who is confident in their capacity to navigate uncertainty and to learn how to map new territories cares less about the environment staying the same. Most people are not actually upset about living next door to Mexicans because of some deep affinity for whiteness or being WASP or whatever. They are concerned about what the Mexicans may mean for the legibility of the territory. When they manage to navigate the new circumstances (and they pretty much always do), they just stop caring about Mexicans because they are now a legible part of the territory.
Two is that even if people dislike Mexicans/whoever as such, it does not mean that they put this considerably high on their prioritization list. Lots of people care about abortion one way or the other, but the number of people who are consistently abortion #1 issue voters (either for or against) is not very large. I'm from the rural South. I know a ton of old people who just generically dislike black people. And almost none of these old people make that their #1 or often even top ten things they think or care about on any given day. They will mutter a racial slur because some dude is blasting hip hop at the gas station and then forget about it. They will also go on daily tirades about the price of canned goods or spend hours consuming Fox content about what people with blue hair are doing in San Francisco.
In other words, these preferences for status quo and some amount of generic distaste does not translate into wide enthusiastic support for social engineering projects to preserve the white majority with jack booted thug tactics or doing things that tank the economy.
Rights precede government. If there is only one lesson we should learn from this anniversary year if we took the time to actually read carefully the Declaration of Independence is that fact. Rights precede government. And for the first hundred years, more or less, we had an open border as a consequence of that understanding that rights precede government. The omission in the Constitution of any role for the federal government in immigration but only naturalization was not an oversight but intentional. So yes, anyone who expects to enjoy an unalienable right yet deprive others of it is a bad person, IMO.
Whaa? In what sense can there be anything called a "right" (that isn't just a fuzzy woo nonsense word) that isn't a) explicitly spelled out in some form and b) protected and enforced somehow. And at the point that it's spelled out and enforced, how is that not government?
Like the aspirational *idea* of rights precedes their explicit documentation and enforcement, but they do not exist as anything but ideals beforehand. And even this aspirational idea of rights is in no way universal or consistent across time and space.
*Edit*
I am a liberal, but this is a consistent liberal blind spot. This idea that human rights are *real* in the way that like gravity and math is real. They aren't. They are human defined and contingent on local circumstances (specifically usually health and stability of local institutions).
It often leads people to declaring that people must have things (housing, free speech, healthcare, education, whatever) without bothering to actually answer the boring question, "yes, but *how?*" (Let alone "why?")
Let me try to keep this simple. The Constitution granted the federal government a limited set of enumerated rights. The Bill of Rights reasserts and reconfirmed that. What is not enumerated in the Constitution was left to the states and the people. The federal government was granted no right wrt immigration. Naturalization, yes. Immigration, no.
The federal power which now almost everyone takes for granted, was invented by the Supreme Court in 1889, the Chinese Exclusion Case. Not derived from any clause in the Constitution.
The Constitution was designed to be changed two ways. An amendment. Or a new convention. But a corrupt people who want their way even when they cannot get the consent of the people still want their way with as little consent as possible. Ergo, judicial fiat. Win the Congress. Select the judges. Change the constitution by controlling the courts. Getting judges to rewrite the Constitution and avoid the process delineated by the Constitution itself. An act of hubris. Vanity. And authoritarian. And most people are closet authoritarians. Some more overt than others.
"Rights precede government." You did not add to this a qualification that meant "became common law was a thing in Anglo legal systems." But even if you did, common law (which is where the unenumerated rights you are talking about like as an example the general right to move around public spaces where you want without needing some kind of permit or permission) is a component of government.
"Unenumerated rights" as they existed in common law are not the same thing that Enlightenment philosophers like Thomas Jefferson meant by inalienable rights. Common law rights are rights that come from tradition and are enforced by more organic or ad hoc styles of governance. "Natural/inalienable/human" rights are magical woo things we supposedly got from a usually pretty deistic God that the Enlightenment liked.
By your definition rights do not exist at all. Only privileges either conveyed or withheld by government. At their discretion. And your claim would also assert that the people who wrote the Constitution, voted to ratify the Constitution were all willing to surrender their personal sovereignty to the State. I think most liberals think that. Which is why I believe most, if not all liberals are authoritarians. They believe I am not a sovereign individual but an indentured servant to the State. Which is also why I am so amused at liberals calling Trump and Trumpers authoritarian. They should look in the mirror.
"By your definition rights do not exist at all. Only privileges either conveyed or withheld by government. At their discretion."
Correct. Which is why the only way people can define and have reliable rights at all is to build government with inbuilt checks and balances and components for the people to amend or change it at their discretion. Without the government, they are at the mercy of arbitrary tyranny from other individuals. Without the limitations and amendment tools, they are at the mercy of the arbitrary power of government.
Your capacity for sovereignty absent these mechanisms is 100% contingent on your personal ability to project power. And if you can't because somebody else is stronger than you and wants to stop you, you are just shit out of luck.
“In contrast, if my preference led me to demand that people with tattoos be banned from my town, or taxed at much higher rates, others would judge me harshly for this, as they should. A preference is not a carte blanche to treat others however we feel like. It’s what we do or advocate for based on our preferences that matters.”
Under libertarianism, people could (if not easily) live in communities that banned tattoos. Once you discard road communism (i.e., the idea that the entire world owns the roads in the U.S. or the West), then immigration looks very differently. Obviously, you would not insist that Keeperman invite unwanted immigrants into his house, yard, driveway, etc. But what about his residential street? Do you begin moralizing against racism at the edge of his driveway?
"Once you discard road communism (i.e., the idea that the entire world owns the roads in the U.S. or the West),"
You have to pay some kind of fee to legally use every public road in the USA. Directly in the case of toll roads or indirectly in the form of things like vehicle registration fees, gasoline taxes, etc. It's also borderline impossible for an illegal immigrant to get a drivers' license or vehicle insurance in most places. There is no sense that a guy with no license and an unregistered car has a right to drive down the interstate. Ths is explicitly illegal. Problems like derelict vehicles clogging up public parking spots and so on can be solved by some mix of allowing people to build things (both out and up - box stores with giant parking lots *and* public transit) and by actually enforcing traffic laws.
The idea I can arbitrarily forbid you from driving down my residential street because you don't live there is inane. If you don't want randos parking/driving near your house, you should buy acreage in the country, build a private road, and build your house well away from the public road. My house growing up was 1/4 mile up a private dirt road my dad maintained. You couldn't even see a public road from our house. We had a gate by the highway that blocked entry. You could build an ethnic enclave behind the gate with private roads and nobody could stop you. This is precisely how religious compounds work. If you aren't rich enough, you could pool resources with people who want the same thing.
Suppose the US had this "open borders for educated professionals" system for a few generations, wouldn't the US have turned into China by now? Are we saying that would be a good thing?
China used to be extremely poor, so the incentive to do whatever it takes to qualify would be very strong. Unless the masses were actively prevented from teaching/learning, I don't see anything that would preclude the most talented third or more from becoming educated professionals and moving to the US. That's hundreds of millions.
They would of course also want their families to be able to join them and politically it would be difficult to oppose such a large constituency.
That's not even getting into inevitable issues of such an immigration system being gamed by fake employment, fake credentials, bribes and so on.
You could add in the rest of the west on one side of the ledger, but then you have to add in the rest of the third world on the other side and ask the same question, wouldn't the west have turned into the third world by now?
Now one could argue that the backlash to such an immigration policy would prevent any of that from actually happening, or that bureaucratic hurdles to proving "educated professional"-status would clog up the system. But if one is counting on one's proposals being practically impossible then what's the point in making them?
One problem here is most Indian immigrants do not understand the importance of traditional gender roles in American culture. They probably read Reddit and watch TikTok and take the superficially egalitarian values at face value. The men then act in this submissive, emotionally expressive, ‘nice’, internalizing-like way, that almost reads as homosexual in American culture, and it gives conservatives the ‘ick’. Even when they get buff, the physical appearance paired with the psychological androgyny still comes off as what a gay man would do.
Indian men need not go as far as some cultural groups in this regard. But it would likely endear them to the right more if their men embraced stoicism, dominance, overconfidence, externalizing, and possessing sadistic and cruel tendencies more. This is the same problem that many contemporary liberal politicians have. Figures like Bill Clinton, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and George W. Bush, are good examples of how people can work hard and succeed while also successfully adhering to America’s rigid gender norms.
One of the criticisms of Indians from the right is that they are glib talkers (and not quiet doers like the Chinese).
Indians anyway have no need for Stoicism since they adhere to a philosophy of dispassionate action as prescribed in the Bhagwad Gita.
All of these suggestions almost always seem just so. The right will always find a way to dislike you no matter what you do. So the best thing is to just ignore them and not let them have political power.
Isn't this just because most of these high-skilled immigrants are nerds of various kinds?