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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Any crime [committed] by an immigrant, is a crime which wouldn't have happened had the immigrant been prevented from entering the country. Your general dismissal of "counterfactuals" leads to erasure of immigrant crime.

That is only relevant if one already assumes the ethnonationalist world-view; namely the propositions that countries exist for a select group defined by blood, that moral concern is rightfully extended only to that group, and that anyone else being allowed to exist in their territory is a supererogatory courtesy.

As someone with a more pan-humanist world-view, I don't see 'immigrant crime' as a category that carves reality at its joints; and excluding immigrants does not prevent the crimes a few of them would have committed, but merely moves them to another place; lowering the crime rate in England, while increasing it in Rwanda by the same amount, for no change in the total, at the cost of the stifling of opportunity (and infliction of indignity attendant on any form of discrimination) for countless innocent Rwandans, does not, in my view, seem advisable if one considers an umpteenth-generation Englishman and a Rwandan immigrant (or his son) to be equal in terms of moral worth.

lowering the crime rate in England, while increasing it in Rwanda by the same amount, for no change in the total,

This is only true if there's no change in birth rates downstream of immigration relieving/causing crowding. At the opposite extreme where birth rates/death rates totally compensate for the population transfer, then the cashed-out result is that instead of a Rwandan in England and a Rwandan in Rwanda you have an Englishman in England and a Rwandan in Rwanda, and if Rwandans in England commit more crime than Englishmen in England then there's less total crime.

Now, of course, there's not perfect compensation, particularly on the European end (on the African end there potentially is enough food scarcity to compensate). But I don't think it's zero on the European end either; housing prices would be lower with less immigrants, and housing affordability seems to be related to white birth rates.