Just like the culture and identity of universities changed with affirmative action and diversity efforts, the same is true is a country.
The same issue that Richard hates about affirmative action in acedemia is ultimately the same of immigration and America. America was altered through immigration before Hart-Cellar. That immigration led to something like Hart-Cellar being past (and for the universities changing for the worse in the 60s).
America was the product of a very particular group of people from one small region of the world. It didn't get founded anywhere else. Other countries can't even merely adopt it and make it work, let alone produce it.
It is now declining in large part due to immigration altering the country, as well as government policies favoring immigrants over natives. South Asians have qualified for SBA loans by mere virtue of their nation origin since the 1980s. It makes no sense, just like filling quotas spots for blacks with people from Ghana.
But how many Indians in the US took advantage of this (in a way that would sound unfair to just about everyone)?
I'm Indian who lived in the US for a long time but moved back to India. In my experience, the modal Indian American is someone with an advanced degree waiting an insanely long amount of time (compared to nationals of almost every other country) to get a green card. Or the family member of such a person.
I suppose we (you, me, Amy Wax) can all cherrypick whatever sample set we please to support whatever political position most appeals to us. I'm not sure if it's helpful to the discourse though, honesty or otherwise (I'm alluding to Richard's reference about Wax, which I agree with.)
There is no reason that South Asians, or any other immigrant group, should receive any government program over any natural born US citizen of any color or ethnicity. These programs should instead favor natural born citizens.
Thousands of motels and convenience stores in America are owned by South Asians. These were financed by the SBA through a program that South Asians qualify for even purely based on national origin.
South Asians also come from the most racist society on earth and then are heavily involved in supporting Democrat policies, especially diversity and inclusion efforts.
Yes, let's blame the nameless bureaucrats who inserted the changes into the system, as well as the politicians who continue it.
But let's blame the people who took something that they shouldn't have been entitled to receive, as well. They are not innocent. They are exploiters of a system they didn't create, taking from others. Not everyone who sees a lost wallet on the street takes the money. Some people actually have enough dignity and self respect not to take something they know they shouldn't get and don't deserve.
>Some people actually have enough dignity and self respect not to take something they know they shouldn't get and don't deserve.
The problem is that they're overwhelmingly disproportionately white gentiles, so pointing to this as a virtue is both racist and anti-semitic by dint of its disparate impact. You bigot.
Re: immigration. Aside from the issues raised by Prof. Wax, immigration and multiculturalism *in and of themselves* make society worse by lowering social trust. See Putnam's research on this subject. Freedom of association is not a solution to this, merely a coping mechanism to mitigate the damage.
That’s a fine attitude for a socialist to have. I’m a capitalist though, so freedom of association is not a “cope” to me but the basis of human freedom and progress.
It's not clear how freedom of association is relevant to the contemporary immigration debate.
Imagine if I were to promote some expansion of government power because I believed in the divine right of kings, and I were confident that a righteous monarch would use the new powers for good. Whatever philosophers might say about monarchy, the practical objection would be that the US isn't a monarchy, and shows no signs of becoming one. In the real world, the new powers would simply enable woke bureaucrats to promote wokeness.
The federal government ended freedom of association at bayonet point in the 1960s. Restoring it is nearly as far outside the Overton Window as instituting a monarchy. No current American has freedom to abstain from associating with any group once he steps out of the front door of his single-family home. Civil rights law ensures this, and anyone who challenges it will be mercilessly crushed by the full weight of the legal system and by corporate power. So, if managing immigration successfully relies upon freedom of association, we should seriously reconsider immigration until the legal situation is quite different than it is now.
>It's not clear how freedom of association is relevant to the contemporary immigration debate.
It's relevant in that claiming to support freedom of association is how libertarians avoid dealing with the fact that immigrants do not generally make desirable neighbors for natives. "I don't think you should have to deal directly with these new people you don't like, which should nullify your objection to them living here." This is when they bother to deal with the fact that immigrants tend to make undesirable neighbors at all and don't just lean on their personal interactions to draw a mistaken conclusion. ("All the immigrants I know in my upper-class bubble are great; that means the average immigrant must also be great!")
As the rest of your comment correctly points out, this is somewhat farcical. But I'm not claiming that supporting FoA *should* justify supporting immigration, only that this is the basis by which actually existing libertarians (such as our esteemed host) *do* justify said support. Strip them of the ability to point to their support for FoA, and they'd be left without a leg to stand on.
You think poor Americans make desirable neighbors? Poor immigrants are infinitely better. You want to take away my ability to choose them as handymen and neighbors.
>You think poor Americans make desirable neighbors? Poor immigrants are infinitely better.
Poor Americans, when choosing where to live, seem not to agree with you. They overwhelmingly elect not to live in immigrant enclaves and prefer their own kind. As a general rule, people tend to prefer others like themselves over others not like themselves. So it isn't crazy to think that native Americans would prefer other native Americans as their neighbors rather than immigrants.
Your preferences are highly unusual in this regard, and it's worth pointing out that you aren't really much of an American yourself. This isn't some racist or xenophobic point (not that I'm allergic to making such points when appropriate) about how your parents were immigrants or whatever. I actually think there are plenty of immigrants/children of immigrants who are EXTREMELY American. It's merely an observation that you're more attached to your ideas than you are to this country. Like most liberals/libertarians, you are a rootless cosmopolitan. Not an insult, just an observation. I like you just fine - that's why I read your blog. But you are not one of us.
>You want to take away my ability to choose them as handymen and neighbors.
By importing foreigners, you impose negative externalities on Americans, making the place less comfortable for the rest of us. If you want them as handymen and neighbors so bad, then you are welcome to leave this country and settle in theirs. You won't, because that would strip you of the ability to benefit from the positive externalities created by *actual* Americans. You're trying to free-ride. The rest of us are justified in trying to stop you.
Americans of all backgrounds associate with immigrants. Americans voluntarily hire them, buy products and services from them, etc. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here. And it’s not all because of anti-discrimination law, illegal immigrants get jobs even though the government requires you to only employ citizens. So you speak confidently about what Americans do or don’t want, but it doesn’t match reality.
And no offense taken, I don’t want to be “one of you.”
I agree with you about the role that the "based right-wing bargain" plays in libertarian immigration advocacy. Bryan Caplan does this. ("Don't like how immigrants vote? Let them in, but don't let them vote. Don't want immigrants to receive welfare? Let them in, but don't give them welfare." Etc.)
There are two objections to these proposals. The first is that most of them are laughably unrealistic; they have less than zero chance of being passed in 2020s America. They're really just talking points that can be tossed out to temporarily neutralize a right-wing opponent in a debate.
The second is that even the bargains that could pass would not be sustained. The bargains are asymmetrical; the pro-immigration side gets something that's effectively irreversible (legal residency granted to immigrants) while the anti side gets something that has to be maintained indefinitely and could be reversed at any time. And it WOULD be reversed, because an army of left-wing civil rights lawyers would immediately attack it (after the new immigrants have been given legal status, of course).
We saw this after the Reagan amnesty. The amnesty happened quickly and irreversibly, but the penalties meant to keep employers from hiring illegals turned out to be racist violations of civil rights law. Fool me once...etc.
I’d say the spergs punching above their weight in influence are the reason we have markets despite typicals hating them, and why civilization exists in the first place. We hold the rest of you on our shoulders.
And I'd retort that this is yet another example of spergs taking an idea to its (il)logical conclusion.
Freedom of association is not an absolute or unalloyed good. It produces certain benefits and imposes certain costs. Whether the former outweigh the latter is a question to be decided on a case-by-case basis rather than as a matter of principle.
Spergs punching above their weight while having their excesses and faults reined in may be why civilization exists in the first place, but letting them go too far will destroy it.
Cliffs: Aristotle had it figured out. Seek the golden mean in everything.
Multiculturalism does not have to be a byproduct of immigration. It's a choice.
Putnam's research is well-known. But declaring that immigration will reduce social trust and throwing up one's hands about it sounds like a bigger cope to me than what you accuse Richard of. There are lots of ways to enhance fraternization and trust. It requires will though.
Your comment about assimilation reminded me of some observations by Rakib Ehsan (a sort of dissident sociology writer living and working in Britain).
He compared three groups of post-WW2 immigrants to Britain - black Carribeans, subcontinental Hindus from India, and subcontinental Muslims from Pakistan/Bangladesh - and concluded that there appears to be an assimilation "sweet spot" whereby the ideal outcome is for immigrants and their descendants to adopt the good, functional and prosocial elements of the majority culture, but to retain the elements of their own cultures that are superior to the host culture.
So: black immigrants assimilated TOO well - they have the highest rates of intermarriage with whites, for example, and follow the mainstream secular culture, but this simply means that they have adopted all the worst elements of that mainstream culture, especially at the lower socioeconomic end of the class system (e.g. family breakdown, illegitimacy, crime). They have simply replaced one set of pathologies with another.
At the other extreme, you have Muslims who are totally unassimilated - this means that (to their relative credit) they are yet to be mind-poisoned by feminism, wokeness, and LGBT ideology, but neither have they committed to becoming part of functional mainstream British society.
In the middle, the Goldilocks option as it were, you have the Indian-origin Hindus who have assimilated to the positive elements of the host culture (e.g. hard work, capitalism, self-sufficiency, educational ambition, law-abiding), but have kept traditional social values too (e.g. very low rates of divorce or illegitimate birth, very little indulgence of wokeness or trans nonsense). Sometimes they marry whites, sometimes they don't, but this seems to be irrelevant either way. Politicians like Rishi Sunak or Priti Patel are platonic ideals of this level of assimilation.
Whilst there are critiques of this overall categorisation to be made, I found it to be an insightful take on the subject, and generally I think Ehsan is a writer worth reading for his heterodox views.
The missing piece is that America is an empire these days, not a republic. America has a large geopolitical swath, with something like 800 bases in foreign lands, and American ("multinational") corporations are doing business all over the world. Free trade and open borders, beyond jets and carriers, are part of the lubricant that allows that to happen. The institutional power centers support the status quo, and if anything seek to expand it. You can't very well say, we want to trade with you but don't obtain a green card in my country. There is also an ideological justification in all of this diversity, with attacks on other countries for human rights violations and for oppression of ethnic minorities.
Republicans and Democrats are not going to oppose these institutional power centers, they won't even oppose donors. It is possible if Buchanan had won in 92, something could have been done, but Buchanan didn't win, and you could even say that Buchanan not winning was baked into the outcome back then. I know Hanania doesn't like all this "leftist" discussion of economics, but the Ayn Rand fantasy is that you have a bunch of rugged individualist tycoons running everything, when in the real world, you have George Soros and EEOC and Raytheon.
Wokeness will take care of itself, the same way metastatic cancer ends. No political solution is possible, anymore than there is a political solution to stage IV lung cancer. The Empire is not going to survive with idiots running it, and with ideological purity and toadyism being the sole criterion in awarding decision-making authority. The only real question is whether the idiots will start a nuclear war on their way out.
American institutional incentives are all short-term. So if you can engineer a train wreck in slow motion over 30 years like affirmative action, such that after decades people gradually wake up and discover their institutions no longer function because of incompetence and corruption, there is no institutional means of defense as the consequences are generational, they won't affect the next 8 quarters.
On top of this, U.S. government has a separation of powers. Bicarmeral Congress with filibuster means no real legislation can pass, and if it does, the Courts can just declare it unconstitutional, and on the Executive side, you have an unaccountable administrative state that can just ignore or neglect to implement executive orders. There are no incentives to do anything, and there is no means of doing anything. We will not vote ourselves out of this mess, and there will not be a revolution (unless it is astroturfed by Deep State), just secular decline, then collapse, then chaos, and then who knows.
It would have been interesting if you had asked about how much the issue of elite competition informs Wax's skepticism or hostility to immigration. Currently most of the competition for Jewish American elites for elite positions comes from Asian immigrants and descendants. It seems that liberal Jewish elites' advocacy of affirmative action for underrepresented minorities curbs competition from Asians to an extent, while more right wing Jewish elites like Wax respond by opposing immigration.
Also regarding the issue of an assimilationist party, how possible or likely is it if there is at least some demand on the right for an implicitly white indentitarian party? Being too welcoming or assimilationist and simply having too many non-white voters could conflict with conservative/right wing voters who want to some extent an at least implicitly white identitarian party.
To correct Professor Wax, low corruption is also the norm in East Asia - specifically, those countries that belong to Chinese-derived civilization.
And as someone who studied at an East Asian plurality college, even 10 years ago, the Asian character of the student body felt like a force of normality pushing back against the neuroses of white liberal America that would otherwise have dominated the campus.
"specifically, those countries that belong to Chinese-derived civilization."
Um. What? You're insane. Chinese cheating is infamous. The international SAT is corrupt. The GRE isn't allowed to be given in China because of the cheating. The gaokao is rife with corruption.
"There is no fairness if we cannot cheat!"
Chinese and generally east Asian cheating over here was a big problem, but it's lessened somewhat because the elites are just ending testing altogether.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all have very low levels of public corruption, and high confidence in capability of government. They're at least on par with the Anglo world.
Great interview. I really liked the conversation about whether NOT assimilating immigrants might actually be the more "conservative" posture, given that the ruling ideology of the United States has more or less become woke neo-Marxism.
What to do? Legally take away tax-exempt status from educational institutions which discriminate against Republicans, or against legal free speech, as well as no Fed loans, no Fed research.
What can people do? Vote Republican. Tell & show Dem friends that the Democrats are imposing the censors against free speech, and destroying academia.
When Reps gain power - define "diversity" in law to include meaning diverse political opinions. On abortion, on immigration, on affirmative action, on meritocracy; on political parties. Support false advertising lawsuits against colleges which claimed the students would be exposed to diverse viewpoints when there are less than 20% Republican professors.
Immigration policy is not about "the labor market". Immigration policy is about the fact that my US citizenship is a valuable asset, one that certain people wish to steal from me and give to their friends.
Amy is smart and brave, but I'm curious if she has the self-awareness to recognize that the mid century high point that she is describing was brought down by the same dynamics of multiculturalism that she sees on overdrive now. This is an unscientific observation based on my age cohort and personal background, but it sure looks to me like once the Anglos let a critical mass of Catholics and Jews in the country, that altered the dynamic in a way that made Hart-Cellar and its consequences possible.
I'm saying this as an Ellis Islander myself. We did make an effort to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant norm, but it just wasn't enough to prevent us from actively and passively moving the culture in the direction that led to the floodgates being opened.
Most of the new immigrants are Hispanic and their surge occurred despite Hart-Cellar.
That's because there were no quotas for the Latin American countries before 1965, but Hart-Cellar imposed hard quotas on them.
Mexico went from annually 450,000 guestworker visas and theoretically unlimited (in practice, around 50,000) resident visas to no guestworker visas and yearly 20,000 resident visas, and illegal immigration surged as a result.
My kids will all be hitting university age in 10-15 years and my question is what I should advise them to do, or to skip the whole process entirely.
I live in Europe, and while US university fads will arrive with a lag of a decade, at least university education is a lot cheaper.
But seriously, what should I advise my kids to do? From what I can tell the humanties and social sciences are are already finished, and hard science with any kind of a social aspect (epidemiology for example) is getting more and politicised. Economics in the "Freakonomics" era used to be all about guys proving counter-intuitive insights via very hard math but now it seems mainly about underrepresented minorities and the like. Law is going in the same direction. The one potential holdout is the business faculty. Profit and loss and balance sheets just can't really be politicised, and the students are much less likely to care too. Engineering is another potential holdout. You can't really talk about the exclusionary politics of circuits and bridges.
I am a strong Caplanian in the sense that I believe general cognitive ability is the biggest explanatory variable and college is for most people just about proving conformity and conscientiousness. So for my own kids I don't think I will explicitly advise not going to college as there would be decades-long earnings penalty. However I am not convinced that the undergrad experience is all that fun compared to working in low-wage employment age the same age. Youth is its very own special privilege.
I would love if some kind of start-up third-level education system would emerge, and emerge quickly. Something that promised to:
1) teach a mix of abstract and vocational topics
2) demonstrate cognitive ability, conformism, and conscientiousness to employers
Oh, better yet, ask Bryan Caplan why he wants to force kids out of education at 6th grade or so because it's not worth educating them AND have open borders so that we can be flooded with cheap labor.
Caplan is profoundly dishonest about the impact of his policies and his education book is just flat out misrepresentation. But then, anyone writing about education who doesn't mention race is doing exactly what the media wants, so no wonder he's popular.
The idea of white men outperforming other groups in every academic field is a huge exaggeration of a small forbidden kernel of truth.
Women today outnumber men in medical schools, and as far as I know are equally good doctors as men.
The movement to get more women into medicine happened in the 70s under the umbrella of the Feminism of that time. For someone who lived through that time (who had the same political impulses as the readership of your blog), I'm sure the movement would have seemed woke and stupid. Doctors were overwhelmingly men throughout history. Look at these silly women trying to guilt trip their way into the surgeon's gown, inventing dumb fields like gynecology.
Let's give credit where credit's due. Feminism was 95% correct that women's lack of representation across various prestigious fields was due to cultural biases and barriers, rather than biological differences.
Really the only kernel of truth is that Black people have been doing worse than everyone else, with little improvement from affirmative action. Compare white people against other groups and whites don't look so great.
The leap that the principles of the enlightenment are inherent to white men in some essentialist way is really unsubstantiated. Here's an alternative simpler explanation of non-White (including Jews), non-Black university ethnic groups being in support of wokery:
Woke ideology is both appealing (to a certain type of person) on its own, and is dominant and high status in the academy. Many white students are also woke warriors at the barricades (probably a plurality too). For any ethnic group in the US, a portion of them will be leftists because they genuinely buy in to leftism, rather than there being some nefarious group strategy. But why do Non-White, non-Black, economically successful groups like East Asians, South Asians, and Jews buy in proportionally more than Whites? When nebulous White Supremacy is blamed for things, non-Whites can rest assured it's not them being attacked, while a White person is less likely to stomach being villianized. They also feel a certain sense of alienation from society due to being different that woke ideology capitalizes on.
Just like the culture and identity of universities changed with affirmative action and diversity efforts, the same is true is a country.
The same issue that Richard hates about affirmative action in acedemia is ultimately the same of immigration and America. America was altered through immigration before Hart-Cellar. That immigration led to something like Hart-Cellar being past (and for the universities changing for the worse in the 60s).
America was the product of a very particular group of people from one small region of the world. It didn't get founded anywhere else. Other countries can't even merely adopt it and make it work, let alone produce it.
It is now declining in large part due to immigration altering the country, as well as government policies favoring immigrants over natives. South Asians have qualified for SBA loans by mere virtue of their nation origin since the 1980s. It makes no sense, just like filling quotas spots for blacks with people from Ghana.
"South Asians have qualified for SBA loans"
But how many Indians in the US took advantage of this (in a way that would sound unfair to just about everyone)?
I'm Indian who lived in the US for a long time but moved back to India. In my experience, the modal Indian American is someone with an advanced degree waiting an insanely long amount of time (compared to nationals of almost every other country) to get a green card. Or the family member of such a person.
I suppose we (you, me, Amy Wax) can all cherrypick whatever sample set we please to support whatever political position most appeals to us. I'm not sure if it's helpful to the discourse though, honesty or otherwise (I'm alluding to Richard's reference about Wax, which I agree with.)
There is no reason that South Asians, or any other immigrant group, should receive any government program over any natural born US citizen of any color or ethnicity. These programs should instead favor natural born citizens.
Thousands of motels and convenience stores in America are owned by South Asians. These were financed by the SBA through a program that South Asians qualify for even purely based on national origin.
South Asians also come from the most racist society on earth and then are heavily involved in supporting Democrat policies, especially diversity and inclusion efforts.
Who gave those loans and why did they give them? Blame the people who gave the freebies, and not the people who took them.
Yes, let's blame the nameless bureaucrats who inserted the changes into the system, as well as the politicians who continue it.
But let's blame the people who took something that they shouldn't have been entitled to receive, as well. They are not innocent. They are exploiters of a system they didn't create, taking from others. Not everyone who sees a lost wallet on the street takes the money. Some people actually have enough dignity and self respect not to take something they know they shouldn't get and don't deserve.
>Some people actually have enough dignity and self respect not to take something they know they shouldn't get and don't deserve.
The problem is that they're overwhelmingly disproportionately white gentiles, so pointing to this as a virtue is both racist and anti-semitic by dint of its disparate impact. You bigot.
Re: immigration. Aside from the issues raised by Prof. Wax, immigration and multiculturalism *in and of themselves* make society worse by lowering social trust. See Putnam's research on this subject. Freedom of association is not a solution to this, merely a coping mechanism to mitigate the damage.
That’s a fine attitude for a socialist to have. I’m a capitalist though, so freedom of association is not a “cope” to me but the basis of human freedom and progress.
It's not clear how freedom of association is relevant to the contemporary immigration debate.
Imagine if I were to promote some expansion of government power because I believed in the divine right of kings, and I were confident that a righteous monarch would use the new powers for good. Whatever philosophers might say about monarchy, the practical objection would be that the US isn't a monarchy, and shows no signs of becoming one. In the real world, the new powers would simply enable woke bureaucrats to promote wokeness.
The federal government ended freedom of association at bayonet point in the 1960s. Restoring it is nearly as far outside the Overton Window as instituting a monarchy. No current American has freedom to abstain from associating with any group once he steps out of the front door of his single-family home. Civil rights law ensures this, and anyone who challenges it will be mercilessly crushed by the full weight of the legal system and by corporate power. So, if managing immigration successfully relies upon freedom of association, we should seriously reconsider immigration until the legal situation is quite different than it is now.
My view isn't that immigration needs freedom of association to be beneficial to the country.
Even without freedom of association, the economic and cultural benefits of immigration are so extreme that it's still a net benefit for the country.
Now, immigration does cause some problems, and those could be solved by freedom of association. But it's not necessary to support immigration.
>It's not clear how freedom of association is relevant to the contemporary immigration debate.
It's relevant in that claiming to support freedom of association is how libertarians avoid dealing with the fact that immigrants do not generally make desirable neighbors for natives. "I don't think you should have to deal directly with these new people you don't like, which should nullify your objection to them living here." This is when they bother to deal with the fact that immigrants tend to make undesirable neighbors at all and don't just lean on their personal interactions to draw a mistaken conclusion. ("All the immigrants I know in my upper-class bubble are great; that means the average immigrant must also be great!")
As the rest of your comment correctly points out, this is somewhat farcical. But I'm not claiming that supporting FoA *should* justify supporting immigration, only that this is the basis by which actually existing libertarians (such as our esteemed host) *do* justify said support. Strip them of the ability to point to their support for FoA, and they'd be left without a leg to stand on.
You think poor Americans make desirable neighbors? Poor immigrants are infinitely better. You want to take away my ability to choose them as handymen and neighbors.
You want to give them my country.
>You think poor Americans make desirable neighbors? Poor immigrants are infinitely better.
Poor Americans, when choosing where to live, seem not to agree with you. They overwhelmingly elect not to live in immigrant enclaves and prefer their own kind. As a general rule, people tend to prefer others like themselves over others not like themselves. So it isn't crazy to think that native Americans would prefer other native Americans as their neighbors rather than immigrants.
Your preferences are highly unusual in this regard, and it's worth pointing out that you aren't really much of an American yourself. This isn't some racist or xenophobic point (not that I'm allergic to making such points when appropriate) about how your parents were immigrants or whatever. I actually think there are plenty of immigrants/children of immigrants who are EXTREMELY American. It's merely an observation that you're more attached to your ideas than you are to this country. Like most liberals/libertarians, you are a rootless cosmopolitan. Not an insult, just an observation. I like you just fine - that's why I read your blog. But you are not one of us.
>You want to take away my ability to choose them as handymen and neighbors.
Yes.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-chad
By importing foreigners, you impose negative externalities on Americans, making the place less comfortable for the rest of us. If you want them as handymen and neighbors so bad, then you are welcome to leave this country and settle in theirs. You won't, because that would strip you of the ability to benefit from the positive externalities created by *actual* Americans. You're trying to free-ride. The rest of us are justified in trying to stop you.
Americans of all backgrounds associate with immigrants. Americans voluntarily hire them, buy products and services from them, etc. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here. And it’s not all because of anti-discrimination law, illegal immigrants get jobs even though the government requires you to only employ citizens. So you speak confidently about what Americans do or don’t want, but it doesn’t match reality.
And no offense taken, I don’t want to be “one of you.”
I agree with you about the role that the "based right-wing bargain" plays in libertarian immigration advocacy. Bryan Caplan does this. ("Don't like how immigrants vote? Let them in, but don't let them vote. Don't want immigrants to receive welfare? Let them in, but don't give them welfare." Etc.)
There are two objections to these proposals. The first is that most of them are laughably unrealistic; they have less than zero chance of being passed in 2020s America. They're really just talking points that can be tossed out to temporarily neutralize a right-wing opponent in a debate.
The second is that even the bargains that could pass would not be sustained. The bargains are asymmetrical; the pro-immigration side gets something that's effectively irreversible (legal residency granted to immigrants) while the anti side gets something that has to be maintained indefinitely and could be reversed at any time. And it WOULD be reversed, because an army of left-wing civil rights lawyers would immediately attack it (after the new immigrants have been given legal status, of course).
We saw this after the Reagan amnesty. The amnesty happened quickly and irreversibly, but the penalties meant to keep employers from hiring illegals turned out to be racist violations of civil rights law. Fool me once...etc.
Replace "socialist" with "neurotypical" and "capitalist" with "sperg" and the above comment makes a lot more sense.
I’d say the spergs punching above their weight in influence are the reason we have markets despite typicals hating them, and why civilization exists in the first place. We hold the rest of you on our shoulders.
And I'd retort that this is yet another example of spergs taking an idea to its (il)logical conclusion.
Freedom of association is not an absolute or unalloyed good. It produces certain benefits and imposes certain costs. Whether the former outweigh the latter is a question to be decided on a case-by-case basis rather than as a matter of principle.
Spergs punching above their weight while having their excesses and faults reined in may be why civilization exists in the first place, but letting them go too far will destroy it.
Cliffs: Aristotle had it figured out. Seek the golden mean in everything.
Multiculturalism does not have to be a byproduct of immigration. It's a choice.
Putnam's research is well-known. But declaring that immigration will reduce social trust and throwing up one's hands about it sounds like a bigger cope to me than what you accuse Richard of. There are lots of ways to enhance fraternization and trust. It requires will though.
Singapore.
Richard,
Your comment about assimilation reminded me of some observations by Rakib Ehsan (a sort of dissident sociology writer living and working in Britain).
He compared three groups of post-WW2 immigrants to Britain - black Carribeans, subcontinental Hindus from India, and subcontinental Muslims from Pakistan/Bangladesh - and concluded that there appears to be an assimilation "sweet spot" whereby the ideal outcome is for immigrants and their descendants to adopt the good, functional and prosocial elements of the majority culture, but to retain the elements of their own cultures that are superior to the host culture.
So: black immigrants assimilated TOO well - they have the highest rates of intermarriage with whites, for example, and follow the mainstream secular culture, but this simply means that they have adopted all the worst elements of that mainstream culture, especially at the lower socioeconomic end of the class system (e.g. family breakdown, illegitimacy, crime). They have simply replaced one set of pathologies with another.
At the other extreme, you have Muslims who are totally unassimilated - this means that (to their relative credit) they are yet to be mind-poisoned by feminism, wokeness, and LGBT ideology, but neither have they committed to becoming part of functional mainstream British society.
In the middle, the Goldilocks option as it were, you have the Indian-origin Hindus who have assimilated to the positive elements of the host culture (e.g. hard work, capitalism, self-sufficiency, educational ambition, law-abiding), but have kept traditional social values too (e.g. very low rates of divorce or illegitimate birth, very little indulgence of wokeness or trans nonsense). Sometimes they marry whites, sometimes they don't, but this seems to be irrelevant either way. Politicians like Rishi Sunak or Priti Patel are platonic ideals of this level of assimilation.
Whilst there are critiques of this overall categorisation to be made, I found it to be an insightful take on the subject, and generally I think Ehsan is a writer worth reading for his heterodox views.
(See, e.g. here: https://capx.co/is-integration-always-a-good-thing-its-complicated/)
The missing piece is that America is an empire these days, not a republic. America has a large geopolitical swath, with something like 800 bases in foreign lands, and American ("multinational") corporations are doing business all over the world. Free trade and open borders, beyond jets and carriers, are part of the lubricant that allows that to happen. The institutional power centers support the status quo, and if anything seek to expand it. You can't very well say, we want to trade with you but don't obtain a green card in my country. There is also an ideological justification in all of this diversity, with attacks on other countries for human rights violations and for oppression of ethnic minorities.
Republicans and Democrats are not going to oppose these institutional power centers, they won't even oppose donors. It is possible if Buchanan had won in 92, something could have been done, but Buchanan didn't win, and you could even say that Buchanan not winning was baked into the outcome back then. I know Hanania doesn't like all this "leftist" discussion of economics, but the Ayn Rand fantasy is that you have a bunch of rugged individualist tycoons running everything, when in the real world, you have George Soros and EEOC and Raytheon.
Wokeness will take care of itself, the same way metastatic cancer ends. No political solution is possible, anymore than there is a political solution to stage IV lung cancer. The Empire is not going to survive with idiots running it, and with ideological purity and toadyism being the sole criterion in awarding decision-making authority. The only real question is whether the idiots will start a nuclear war on their way out.
American institutional incentives are all short-term. So if you can engineer a train wreck in slow motion over 30 years like affirmative action, such that after decades people gradually wake up and discover their institutions no longer function because of incompetence and corruption, there is no institutional means of defense as the consequences are generational, they won't affect the next 8 quarters.
On top of this, U.S. government has a separation of powers. Bicarmeral Congress with filibuster means no real legislation can pass, and if it does, the Courts can just declare it unconstitutional, and on the Executive side, you have an unaccountable administrative state that can just ignore or neglect to implement executive orders. There are no incentives to do anything, and there is no means of doing anything. We will not vote ourselves out of this mess, and there will not be a revolution (unless it is astroturfed by Deep State), just secular decline, then collapse, then chaos, and then who knows.
Great interview.
It would have been interesting if you had asked about how much the issue of elite competition informs Wax's skepticism or hostility to immigration. Currently most of the competition for Jewish American elites for elite positions comes from Asian immigrants and descendants. It seems that liberal Jewish elites' advocacy of affirmative action for underrepresented minorities curbs competition from Asians to an extent, while more right wing Jewish elites like Wax respond by opposing immigration.
Also regarding the issue of an assimilationist party, how possible or likely is it if there is at least some demand on the right for an implicitly white indentitarian party? Being too welcoming or assimilationist and simply having too many non-white voters could conflict with conservative/right wing voters who want to some extent an at least implicitly white identitarian party.
To correct Professor Wax, low corruption is also the norm in East Asia - specifically, those countries that belong to Chinese-derived civilization.
And as someone who studied at an East Asian plurality college, even 10 years ago, the Asian character of the student body felt like a force of normality pushing back against the neuroses of white liberal America that would otherwise have dominated the campus.
"specifically, those countries that belong to Chinese-derived civilization."
Um. What? You're insane. Chinese cheating is infamous. The international SAT is corrupt. The GRE isn't allowed to be given in China because of the cheating. The gaokao is rife with corruption.
"There is no fairness if we cannot cheat!"
Chinese and generally east Asian cheating over here was a big problem, but it's lessened somewhat because the elites are just ending testing altogether.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/asian-immigrants-and-what-no-one-mentions-aloud/
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all have very low levels of public corruption, and high confidence in capability of government. They're at least on par with the Anglo world.
Great interview. I really liked the conversation about whether NOT assimilating immigrants might actually be the more "conservative" posture, given that the ruling ideology of the United States has more or less become woke neo-Marxism.
I felt the immigration discussion was too much demonstration of attitude rather than a real argument on merits of meritocratic immigration.
What to do? Legally take away tax-exempt status from educational institutions which discriminate against Republicans, or against legal free speech, as well as no Fed loans, no Fed research.
What can people do? Vote Republican. Tell & show Dem friends that the Democrats are imposing the censors against free speech, and destroying academia.
When Reps gain power - define "diversity" in law to include meaning diverse political opinions. On abortion, on immigration, on affirmative action, on meritocracy; on political parties. Support false advertising lawsuits against colleges which claimed the students would be exposed to diverse viewpoints when there are less than 20% Republican professors.
Great interview, thanks for being free!
Immigration policy is not about "the labor market". Immigration policy is about the fact that my US citizenship is a valuable asset, one that certain people wish to steal from me and give to their friends.
Amy is smart and brave, but I'm curious if she has the self-awareness to recognize that the mid century high point that she is describing was brought down by the same dynamics of multiculturalism that she sees on overdrive now. This is an unscientific observation based on my age cohort and personal background, but it sure looks to me like once the Anglos let a critical mass of Catholics and Jews in the country, that altered the dynamic in a way that made Hart-Cellar and its consequences possible.
I'm saying this as an Ellis Islander myself. We did make an effort to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant norm, but it just wasn't enough to prevent us from actively and passively moving the culture in the direction that led to the floodgates being opened.
Most of the new immigrants are Hispanic and their surge occurred despite Hart-Cellar.
That's because there were no quotas for the Latin American countries before 1965, but Hart-Cellar imposed hard quotas on them.
Mexico went from annually 450,000 guestworker visas and theoretically unlimited (in practice, around 50,000) resident visas to no guestworker visas and yearly 20,000 resident visas, and illegal immigration surged as a result.
My kids will all be hitting university age in 10-15 years and my question is what I should advise them to do, or to skip the whole process entirely.
I live in Europe, and while US university fads will arrive with a lag of a decade, at least university education is a lot cheaper.
But seriously, what should I advise my kids to do? From what I can tell the humanties and social sciences are are already finished, and hard science with any kind of a social aspect (epidemiology for example) is getting more and politicised. Economics in the "Freakonomics" era used to be all about guys proving counter-intuitive insights via very hard math but now it seems mainly about underrepresented minorities and the like. Law is going in the same direction. The one potential holdout is the business faculty. Profit and loss and balance sheets just can't really be politicised, and the students are much less likely to care too. Engineering is another potential holdout. You can't really talk about the exclusionary politics of circuits and bridges.
I am a strong Caplanian in the sense that I believe general cognitive ability is the biggest explanatory variable and college is for most people just about proving conformity and conscientiousness. So for my own kids I don't think I will explicitly advise not going to college as there would be decades-long earnings penalty. However I am not convinced that the undergrad experience is all that fun compared to working in low-wage employment age the same age. Youth is its very own special privilege.
I would love if some kind of start-up third-level education system would emerge, and emerge quickly. Something that promised to:
1) teach a mix of abstract and vocational topics
2) demonstrate cognitive ability, conformism, and conscientiousness to employers
3) avoid politicised content
I am sadly not all that hopeful
Great conversation!
You should really talk to Bryan Caplan regarding immigration.
I think he already did, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JejGm9G8V7w , but I could be wrong.
Oh, better yet, ask Bryan Caplan why he wants to force kids out of education at 6th grade or so because it's not worth educating them AND have open borders so that we can be flooded with cheap labor.
No, better yet, ignore Caplan.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-average-was-always-over/
Caplan is profoundly dishonest about the impact of his policies and his education book is just flat out misrepresentation. But then, anyone writing about education who doesn't mention race is doing exactly what the media wants, so no wonder he's popular.
The idea of white men outperforming other groups in every academic field is a huge exaggeration of a small forbidden kernel of truth.
Women today outnumber men in medical schools, and as far as I know are equally good doctors as men.
The movement to get more women into medicine happened in the 70s under the umbrella of the Feminism of that time. For someone who lived through that time (who had the same political impulses as the readership of your blog), I'm sure the movement would have seemed woke and stupid. Doctors were overwhelmingly men throughout history. Look at these silly women trying to guilt trip their way into the surgeon's gown, inventing dumb fields like gynecology.
Let's give credit where credit's due. Feminism was 95% correct that women's lack of representation across various prestigious fields was due to cultural biases and barriers, rather than biological differences.
Really the only kernel of truth is that Black people have been doing worse than everyone else, with little improvement from affirmative action. Compare white people against other groups and whites don't look so great.
The leap that the principles of the enlightenment are inherent to white men in some essentialist way is really unsubstantiated. Here's an alternative simpler explanation of non-White (including Jews), non-Black university ethnic groups being in support of wokery:
Woke ideology is both appealing (to a certain type of person) on its own, and is dominant and high status in the academy. Many white students are also woke warriors at the barricades (probably a plurality too). For any ethnic group in the US, a portion of them will be leftists because they genuinely buy in to leftism, rather than there being some nefarious group strategy. But why do Non-White, non-Black, economically successful groups like East Asians, South Asians, and Jews buy in proportionally more than Whites? When nebulous White Supremacy is blamed for things, non-Whites can rest assured it's not them being attacked, while a White person is less likely to stomach being villianized. They also feel a certain sense of alienation from society due to being different that woke ideology capitalizes on.
Yes, I think this is closer to the truth than the belief that somehow 'white men were preordained to rule the world'
I hope it does, because there is a world of books to read not written in Western Culture.
Reading this, I thought of this Ryan Long skit about immigrant parents and their conservative views.
https://youtu.be/Z1mUowuFULI