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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.

The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.

So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.

The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."

Given that the argument here is about crime committed by the British-born son of immigrants, we don’t get to choose at that level of detail. (You get to choose the parents of your 2nd-generation immigrants, but anyone who has raised kids knows that only gets you so far.) If your goal is zero serious crime committed by descendants of immigrants, the only way to get there is zero immigration.

The UK breaks out crime statistics by folk racial categories which don’t distinguish between “Black” sub-populations (Jamaicans and Somalis are the high-crime groups) in the way you would need to do to answer this question properly, but anecdotally immigrants from Christian Africa in the UK and their descendants are better behaved than the natives.

Similarly in the US, Nigerian Americans will happily point out that African Americans are the ones being 13/52.

Nigerian Americans

I don't actually think I have ever met anyone in my life that had anything bad to say about the Nigerian Americans.