What is wrong with the argument that people simply prefer to live with others like them? I mean, why don’t standard preference satisfaction arguments win out here?
>Some people are naturally tribal and don’t like immigration. So they’ll use whatever justifications they can come up with to argue against it....Most anti-immigration arguments can be dismissed as emotional outbursts that mask concerns people don’t want to be completely honest about.
This is true, but it's only half of the truth. The pro-immigration side are equally dishonest about their real motivations.
Having observed the debate closely for a long time, I've concluded that few of the people most engaged on the issue of mass immigration, on either side, are actually motivated primarily by its economic effects. Yet most arguments made by mainstream figures, pro and anti, are economic ones. This lack of candor creates a haze of stupidity around the topic.
One thing that I appreciate about Bryan Caplan is that he's more honest than most of the mass immigration advocates. He wrote an essay titled "They Scare Me" in which he said that he was afraid of concentrations of Mormons, even though they were "the nicest bunch [he'd] ever met", because there was always a possibility that they might come after him with torches and pitchforks if they became too numerous and cohesive. Thus he advocated open borders in order to make Mormons, and every other group, into small minorities everywhere so that he would feel more safe.
If you observe closely, you will usually find this sentiment among mass immigration advocates. They feel alienated from the majority culture in some way, feel some degree of resentment or fear towards it, and therefore want to weaken it by bringing in large numbers of people from other cultures. Generally they aren't as forthright as Caplan about this, but they eventually show what they really think in unguarded statements on camera or tweets that they later delete.
I grew up in an area where I was one of the only people who was not an immigrant, I have visited many such places, and there are many such places near me. While I've encountered a lot of white people who enjoy having diversity on tap, I've noticed that none of them actually decide to move into places like the one I grew up in.
I can't wait to a be a very small minority in a country that has laws on the books about the burning scourge of whiteness. Sounds great. White people don't view themselves as a cohesive group, but people of most other people groups do.
I agree with most of this but you still exhibit the same two colossal blind spots that so many others talking about immigration do.
1) you make no distinction whatsoever between legal and illegal immigrants, and of the enormous social consequences of throwing the southern border open to everyone without performing any sort of selection for the people coming here being educated, law-abiding, economically productive, English-speaking, etc.
2) you overlook the fallacy of the shifting denominator committed by all economists who conclude that “Americans” will be economically better off by letting in low-skilled immigrants even if per capita GDP goes down, because you are already counting the would-be immigrants as pre-Americans and including them in the collective whose good is being calculated. There is a serious and negative economic impact on a class of Americans whom the elite educated class of Americans tend to think about as little as possible: those who must survive on a below-median wage and have below-median IQs but ARE AMERICANS DAMMIT!
This is why I say fiscal conservatives are no better than social leftists. They want to replace white people too. Not just that but they dont believe in the idea of a nation state either. They believe America should just be an economic zone. Because all that matters to them is GDP
I guess this is the part where we all have to explain to the high-IQ autist that "social cohesion" is actually a necessary ingredient for modern, democratic civilization to function.
Most nations, including my own, are not nations of immigrants. The people who make up the population of the country are the same as those who occupied the land a thousand years ago. We all share the same history, have our own unique phenotype, language and culture. Many of us actually appreciate our nations and are not going to destroy them for the opportunity to damage social cohesion in the hope that people will be less likely to support gov assistance policies.
“It’s not impossible, but one might also think that more diversity will increase social tensions, enough to continue making new expansions of the welfare state impossible. It seems that, historically, people either focus on class or they focus on other forms of identity. Some leftists think that emphasizing class is better, so will criticize wokeness for being a distraction, arguing that poor people of all backgrounds need to come together and fight the rich. From my perspective, class based politics is much worse. Affirmative action is a tax that market economies can afford to pay, while trade unionism, anti-competitive regulations, and redistributionist policies are fundamentally larger threats to systems that produce wealth. “
During the time period when whites are still a majority, but the minority share of the population was growing, dumb economic preferences took a backseat to aversion to minority crime, affirmative action etc.
But when nonwhites can demographically and politically inundate whites, they will have no moral scruples with using them as a cash cow. Reduced social cohesion among nonwhite groups has not and will not prevent them from viewing whites as arch villains, and expropriating their wealth and property.
The project of tearing down civil rights laws and affirmative action becomes that much harder as the social and financial beneficiaries of those policies grow in number and political power. You characterize affirmative action as a sustainable drag on productive economies (blithely ignoring the situation of the white minority who will be dispossessed under this regime), but the situation will look different when a majority of the population is entitled to racial spoils.
Increasing the low iq segments of the population undermines both the average iq and the smart fraction. More resources and money will have to be spent babysitting low iq third worlders. (Hispanic crime tends to increase as a large portion of the children of immigrants assimilate to black norms, and in any event you still refuse to come out against subsaharan African immigration, which will be horrific for the crime situation).
You ignore zach goldberg’s data on builtin nonwhite racial resentment towards whites. You ignore decades-long efforts of compassionate conservative hispandering. (Bizarrely in your diversity good for markets piece you criticize a california proposition criticize off welfare!
This place already exist it’s called California. California is majority Mexican and Mexicans even if they don’t like blacks they dislike whites even more. There is no such thing as a natural Mexican conservative. Also always the same argument cubans and Cubans. Cubans are majority white, they are mainly fair skin , they share few things in common with most Mexicans and Central Americans the 1980s gop white family ads appealed to them and still does. Most anti left South Americans coming to Florida are white middle to upper class people. Is not the same brown migration from Mexico. And actually yes the whole point of a party is to win elections , not a single state got more republicans Bc Mexicans and Asians moved in. Also every evidence point when whites were the majority the dems were more socially moderate , when did wokeness turned off Mexicans ? Gay marriage wasn’t a big deal for them. Even today most anti woke people are whites. A 1980s demographic would crush dems electorally. Also even the average white democrat is still more pro cop and anti crime than most immigrants and their kids. Data proves u wrong. I don’t think letting america becoming like California with the Hopes it becomes moderate (with the gop losing every election) it’s a competent way to tell conservatives immigration and diversity it’s good
“The worst performing country relative to IQ is easily North Korea. It’s probably the most socially cohesive nation in the world too. Had they had some diversity, perhaps it would’ve been harder to form a totalitarian state based on a socialist ideology that starved its own people. There would’ve been too much discord and instability for one family to turn everyone into slaves.”
1) The USSR had plenty of non-Russian ethnic groups, and its most notorious totalitarian dictator was a Georgian, whose serial-killer enforcer was a Georgian Jew. Tito’s Yugoslavia also managed to combine ethnic diversity with one-party rule; once one-party rule ended, Yugoslavia fell apart.
2) Is North Korea a lot less diverse than South Korea? Not really. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan all manage to combine democracy with ethnic homogeneity. If anything, it’s ethnically mixed Singapore which has to “manage” its democracy. While North Korea is a despicable hell-hole, and I wouldn’t recommend Juche as a political system, the country has managed to develop its own nuclear bomb, which requires a certain amount of IQ brainpower.
3) Non-democratic government may actually be appealing for multi-ethnic societies, because there are plenty of minority groups with a justified fear of winner-takes-all majoritarian politics. This is one reason the Assad family has held onto dictatorial power in Syria; the alternatives all seem worse. The constitution of Lebanon - which mandates that the President must be a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni, and the Speaker a Shia - goes against the secular democratic ideals of most western societies. But it’s a realistic attempt to deal with Lebanese diversity. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland deliberately seeks to reduce straight-up majoritarian democracy, in favour of a Lebanese-type arrangement which guarantees that parties which lose elections still get government jobs. Even that’s coming under strain, as demographics change.
4) If we’re determined to go full-on with diversity, we should actually study previous attempts to deal with it, such as the Ottoman Millet system or Dutch Pillarization.
Interesting thoughts, but you’re missing the enormous impact of various forms of Affirmative Action / DEI. These are a race to mediocrity.
The idea that brain evolution was similar / identical for people whose cultures never left the Stone Age or early Bronze Age, when compared to Europe culturally, morally, tangibly is, of course, absurd. (And similar to the idea that a million years of sex roles and their impact on brain evolution are irrelevant because of suffrage.)
Simply, those who could never envision, and so could never build modernity cannot maintain it. See Zimbabwe & South Africa.
As we push away those whose cultures - and so intellectual evolution - created the modern world while pretending those who did not can both maintain what they could not build and further scientific / tech progress, those not paying attention will be surprised by the negative results. Those of us paying attention will not be.
As a native-born 75-y.o. male of Slovak-Irish heritage living in one of the most immigrant-heavy cities in the country (Glendale, California), I must say that some of the “whitest” people I encounter are Armenians, Asians, Mexicans (conservative, regular churchgoers, often anti-LGBT), while some of the least “white” people are malcontent younger (self-hating?) whites with piercings/tattoos etc. and Bernie/BLM-type allegiances. If I’m not mistaken that’s the way it is in most urban areas around the country. This relatively rapid assimilation of most immigrants becoming “normal Americans” with relatively normal voting patterns seems to me to be grossly overlooked by those worried about a decline of “White” America.
"Here’s one poll of many showing that, when it comes to basically everything government does, the vast majority of the population wants to either increase spending or spend the same amount. There is no substantial constituency for small government."
I believe it was Brian Caplan who once said, "The Left is anti-market, and the Right is anti-Left". Very true, only hardcore Hayekians really care about the free-market stuff.
Richard, the current immigration situation in Europe deserves a chapter. What you write may be true for the US, but I have yet to meet a professional who has written about the positive social impact of Somali migrants coming to Europe. If you search. You will find Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch analyses that the average Somali migrant costs the taxpayer 1-1.2 million euros net over a lifetime - and that's not even mentioning their over-representation in violent crime! Because somehow Richard, writing from gated communities, the deterioration in the average person's sense of security is not apparent. Another thing, if you use ethnically homogeneous North Korea as an example of how bad life is without migrants, how can you forget Japan? Or the Republic of South Africa, which is currently moving from being a developed industrial country to a carcass republic thanks to its great diversity. So Richard, you should be a bit more modest about the positive effects of migration...
- division is good as it avoids socialist policies which reduce wealth
- immigration good because it causes division and immigrants communities have unpredictable pathways but often positive (eg Asians)
This fails to consider why Australia, Canada and New Zealand have been so successful to date. Pretty homogenous until a few decades ago, relatively strong cultural and institutional homogeneity still. Anglo institutions matter, have not led to socialism (although more than US maybe) and still led to great GDP per capita outcomes
What is wrong with the argument that people simply prefer to live with others like them? I mean, why don’t standard preference satisfaction arguments win out here?
>Some people are naturally tribal and don’t like immigration. So they’ll use whatever justifications they can come up with to argue against it....Most anti-immigration arguments can be dismissed as emotional outbursts that mask concerns people don’t want to be completely honest about.
This is true, but it's only half of the truth. The pro-immigration side are equally dishonest about their real motivations.
Having observed the debate closely for a long time, I've concluded that few of the people most engaged on the issue of mass immigration, on either side, are actually motivated primarily by its economic effects. Yet most arguments made by mainstream figures, pro and anti, are economic ones. This lack of candor creates a haze of stupidity around the topic.
One thing that I appreciate about Bryan Caplan is that he's more honest than most of the mass immigration advocates. He wrote an essay titled "They Scare Me" in which he said that he was afraid of concentrations of Mormons, even though they were "the nicest bunch [he'd] ever met", because there was always a possibility that they might come after him with torches and pitchforks if they became too numerous and cohesive. Thus he advocated open borders in order to make Mormons, and every other group, into small minorities everywhere so that he would feel more safe.
If you observe closely, you will usually find this sentiment among mass immigration advocates. They feel alienated from the majority culture in some way, feel some degree of resentment or fear towards it, and therefore want to weaken it by bringing in large numbers of people from other cultures. Generally they aren't as forthright as Caplan about this, but they eventually show what they really think in unguarded statements on camera or tweets that they later delete.
I grew up in an area where I was one of the only people who was not an immigrant, I have visited many such places, and there are many such places near me. While I've encountered a lot of white people who enjoy having diversity on tap, I've noticed that none of them actually decide to move into places like the one I grew up in.
I can't wait to a be a very small minority in a country that has laws on the books about the burning scourge of whiteness. Sounds great. White people don't view themselves as a cohesive group, but people of most other people groups do.
I agree with most of this but you still exhibit the same two colossal blind spots that so many others talking about immigration do.
1) you make no distinction whatsoever between legal and illegal immigrants, and of the enormous social consequences of throwing the southern border open to everyone without performing any sort of selection for the people coming here being educated, law-abiding, economically productive, English-speaking, etc.
2) you overlook the fallacy of the shifting denominator committed by all economists who conclude that “Americans” will be economically better off by letting in low-skilled immigrants even if per capita GDP goes down, because you are already counting the would-be immigrants as pre-Americans and including them in the collective whose good is being calculated. There is a serious and negative economic impact on a class of Americans whom the elite educated class of Americans tend to think about as little as possible: those who must survive on a below-median wage and have below-median IQs but ARE AMERICANS DAMMIT!
This is why I say fiscal conservatives are no better than social leftists. They want to replace white people too. Not just that but they dont believe in the idea of a nation state either. They believe America should just be an economic zone. Because all that matters to them is GDP
I guess this is the part where we all have to explain to the high-IQ autist that "social cohesion" is actually a necessary ingredient for modern, democratic civilization to function.
Most nations, including my own, are not nations of immigrants. The people who make up the population of the country are the same as those who occupied the land a thousand years ago. We all share the same history, have our own unique phenotype, language and culture. Many of us actually appreciate our nations and are not going to destroy them for the opportunity to damage social cohesion in the hope that people will be less likely to support gov assistance policies.
“It’s not impossible, but one might also think that more diversity will increase social tensions, enough to continue making new expansions of the welfare state impossible. It seems that, historically, people either focus on class or they focus on other forms of identity. Some leftists think that emphasizing class is better, so will criticize wokeness for being a distraction, arguing that poor people of all backgrounds need to come together and fight the rich. From my perspective, class based politics is much worse. Affirmative action is a tax that market economies can afford to pay, while trade unionism, anti-competitive regulations, and redistributionist policies are fundamentally larger threats to systems that produce wealth. “
During the time period when whites are still a majority, but the minority share of the population was growing, dumb economic preferences took a backseat to aversion to minority crime, affirmative action etc.
But when nonwhites can demographically and politically inundate whites, they will have no moral scruples with using them as a cash cow. Reduced social cohesion among nonwhite groups has not and will not prevent them from viewing whites as arch villains, and expropriating their wealth and property.
The project of tearing down civil rights laws and affirmative action becomes that much harder as the social and financial beneficiaries of those policies grow in number and political power. You characterize affirmative action as a sustainable drag on productive economies (blithely ignoring the situation of the white minority who will be dispossessed under this regime), but the situation will look different when a majority of the population is entitled to racial spoils.
Increasing the low iq segments of the population undermines both the average iq and the smart fraction. More resources and money will have to be spent babysitting low iq third worlders. (Hispanic crime tends to increase as a large portion of the children of immigrants assimilate to black norms, and in any event you still refuse to come out against subsaharan African immigration, which will be horrific for the crime situation).
You ignore zach goldberg’s data on builtin nonwhite racial resentment towards whites. You ignore decades-long efforts of compassionate conservative hispandering. (Bizarrely in your diversity good for markets piece you criticize a california proposition criticize off welfare!
Very sinister and mendacious piece
This place already exist it’s called California. California is majority Mexican and Mexicans even if they don’t like blacks they dislike whites even more. There is no such thing as a natural Mexican conservative. Also always the same argument cubans and Cubans. Cubans are majority white, they are mainly fair skin , they share few things in common with most Mexicans and Central Americans the 1980s gop white family ads appealed to them and still does. Most anti left South Americans coming to Florida are white middle to upper class people. Is not the same brown migration from Mexico. And actually yes the whole point of a party is to win elections , not a single state got more republicans Bc Mexicans and Asians moved in. Also every evidence point when whites were the majority the dems were more socially moderate , when did wokeness turned off Mexicans ? Gay marriage wasn’t a big deal for them. Even today most anti woke people are whites. A 1980s demographic would crush dems electorally. Also even the average white democrat is still more pro cop and anti crime than most immigrants and their kids. Data proves u wrong. I don’t think letting america becoming like California with the Hopes it becomes moderate (with the gop losing every election) it’s a competent way to tell conservatives immigration and diversity it’s good
“The worst performing country relative to IQ is easily North Korea. It’s probably the most socially cohesive nation in the world too. Had they had some diversity, perhaps it would’ve been harder to form a totalitarian state based on a socialist ideology that starved its own people. There would’ve been too much discord and instability for one family to turn everyone into slaves.”
1) The USSR had plenty of non-Russian ethnic groups, and its most notorious totalitarian dictator was a Georgian, whose serial-killer enforcer was a Georgian Jew. Tito’s Yugoslavia also managed to combine ethnic diversity with one-party rule; once one-party rule ended, Yugoslavia fell apart.
2) Is North Korea a lot less diverse than South Korea? Not really. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan all manage to combine democracy with ethnic homogeneity. If anything, it’s ethnically mixed Singapore which has to “manage” its democracy. While North Korea is a despicable hell-hole, and I wouldn’t recommend Juche as a political system, the country has managed to develop its own nuclear bomb, which requires a certain amount of IQ brainpower.
3) Non-democratic government may actually be appealing for multi-ethnic societies, because there are plenty of minority groups with a justified fear of winner-takes-all majoritarian politics. This is one reason the Assad family has held onto dictatorial power in Syria; the alternatives all seem worse. The constitution of Lebanon - which mandates that the President must be a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni, and the Speaker a Shia - goes against the secular democratic ideals of most western societies. But it’s a realistic attempt to deal with Lebanese diversity. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland deliberately seeks to reduce straight-up majoritarian democracy, in favour of a Lebanese-type arrangement which guarantees that parties which lose elections still get government jobs. Even that’s coming under strain, as demographics change.
4) If we’re determined to go full-on with diversity, we should actually study previous attempts to deal with it, such as the Ottoman Millet system or Dutch Pillarization.
Interesting thoughts, but you’re missing the enormous impact of various forms of Affirmative Action / DEI. These are a race to mediocrity.
The idea that brain evolution was similar / identical for people whose cultures never left the Stone Age or early Bronze Age, when compared to Europe culturally, morally, tangibly is, of course, absurd. (And similar to the idea that a million years of sex roles and their impact on brain evolution are irrelevant because of suffrage.)
Simply, those who could never envision, and so could never build modernity cannot maintain it. See Zimbabwe & South Africa.
As we push away those whose cultures - and so intellectual evolution - created the modern world while pretending those who did not can both maintain what they could not build and further scientific / tech progress, those not paying attention will be surprised by the negative results. Those of us paying attention will not be.
As a native-born 75-y.o. male of Slovak-Irish heritage living in one of the most immigrant-heavy cities in the country (Glendale, California), I must say that some of the “whitest” people I encounter are Armenians, Asians, Mexicans (conservative, regular churchgoers, often anti-LGBT), while some of the least “white” people are malcontent younger (self-hating?) whites with piercings/tattoos etc. and Bernie/BLM-type allegiances. If I’m not mistaken that’s the way it is in most urban areas around the country. This relatively rapid assimilation of most immigrants becoming “normal Americans” with relatively normal voting patterns seems to me to be grossly overlooked by those worried about a decline of “White” America.
"Here’s one poll of many showing that, when it comes to basically everything government does, the vast majority of the population wants to either increase spending or spend the same amount. There is no substantial constituency for small government."
I believe it was Brian Caplan who once said, "The Left is anti-market, and the Right is anti-Left". Very true, only hardcore Hayekians really care about the free-market stuff.
Richard, the current immigration situation in Europe deserves a chapter. What you write may be true for the US, but I have yet to meet a professional who has written about the positive social impact of Somali migrants coming to Europe. If you search. You will find Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch analyses that the average Somali migrant costs the taxpayer 1-1.2 million euros net over a lifetime - and that's not even mentioning their over-representation in violent crime! Because somehow Richard, writing from gated communities, the deterioration in the average person's sense of security is not apparent. Another thing, if you use ethnically homogeneous North Korea as an example of how bad life is without migrants, how can you forget Japan? Or the Republic of South Africa, which is currently moving from being a developed industrial country to a carcass republic thanks to its great diversity. So Richard, you should be a bit more modest about the positive effects of migration...
I read this as:
- division is good as it avoids socialist policies which reduce wealth
- immigration good because it causes division and immigrants communities have unpredictable pathways but often positive (eg Asians)
This fails to consider why Australia, Canada and New Zealand have been so successful to date. Pretty homogenous until a few decades ago, relatively strong cultural and institutional homogeneity still. Anglo institutions matter, have not led to socialism (although more than US maybe) and still led to great GDP per capita outcomes
The opening line, after a subhead "Immigration destroys social cohesion. Good"
"Some people are naturally tribal and don’t like immigration. So they’ll use whatever justifications they can come up with to argue against it."
I dunno but it feels like Hanania is digging his own grave, I mean in so far as being taken seriously as a pundit and a thinker.