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But some of your people IN your country support immigration. When they say yes, come on in, your position applies to them just as much.
I don’t think this works. If my sister and I were living in a shared house, it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to invite random people to come and live with us.
Sure it would. Absent any other agreement, you both have equal rights to decide who lives there. She can move Bob into her bedroom, its her house too after all.
My point was that SS did not advance an argument beyond if i don't want it, it shouldn't happen, but absent some actual structure on why, that is exactly equally countered by someone else saying I do want it so it should happen.
It's an argument that can be used for anything for or against. Which means it isn't a very good argument at all.
If you don't want Bob in the house you are likely going to have to convince your sister with an actual argument. There isn't enough room, you can't afford the extra food, and so on.
Certainly for my sister, if i tell her not to do something she wants to do, she is going to want a reason, beyond I don't want you to.
Your intuition may differ, but SS was making the same point that I was: to me, it seems obviously unacceptable for one party to make significant unilateral changes to shared living conditions without getting clear buy-in from everyone else involved.
That doesn’t mean you have a license to block all changes just for the fun of it but ‘I don’t want to share my house with strangers’ is an entirely valid reason. It just seems totally obvious to me that you don’t get to install strangers in somebody else’s house just because it’s your house too. Personally I think this is a common assumption, which is why politicians constantly lie to give the impression they respect it.
Once that’s assumed, SS is arguing (correctly in my opinion) that he and other anti-immigration advocates possess the inalienable right of veto. He doesn’t need to convince his countrymen, they actively need to convince him to permit immigration. “I’ve known Bob for ages, he’s a great guy, he does DIY and I’ll tell him to move out if he’s a nuisance, please give him a chance.”
The problem is that this is status quo bias. Absent an actual agreement, you can't assume this is true. You then have to convince the other person they should agree that how things stand now are how they should stay. If you think buy in is required, that is something you NEED to have agreed in the first place, in order to establish you have the same expectations.
This is a fundamental difference that you cannot take for granted. Because it means someone has a unilateral right to prevent any change, which is also obviously unacceptable in exactly the same way you complain about making changes.
Of course it is. Albeit at a strictly limited level: no large-scale, permanent changes that affect other people without their consent. I wouldn’t expect my sister to need permission for a new coffee table or to re-paper her bedroom, but I would expect to be consulted before she repainted the house or knocked through a wall.
Moving on from the slightly tortured metaphor, the vast majority of things you can do to a country are local and/or in principle reversible. Taxes once increased can be lowered, buildings destroyed can be rebuilt. I disapprove of ‘ratchet’ politics: policies enacted in the deliberate knowledge that they are not reversible, enacting long term change over the wishes of others. And mass immigration stands out above all others as a policy that affects everyone and can be reversed only by ethnic cleansing or genocide. It astounds me that pro-immigration advocates are so selfish and so cavalier in their treatment of the subject.
I can’t find a nice throughline but I think we can both agree that this isn’t practical. Nobody sits down to sign the social contract; I did not agree to taxation before allowing myself to be born. I can moralise all I want but practice all that really matters is the cultural expectations of those with power, which is why I think the Right should seek power much more openly and enforce its will more forcefully.
74% of white Americans want to either increase or keep immigration at current levels and 68% of Republicans feel the same way.
Why should a minority have veto power over the wishes of others?
I’m not American, so it doesn’t really have much to do with me. In the UK, the majority party promised explicitly to bring down immigration and instead raised it to a million a year, so the majority is on my side. The problem is duplicity, not democracy.
That said, I note from your link that a clear majority of white/black Americans want immigration kept the same or lower. (As far as I’m concerned you can’t import immigrant voters and then have them call for immigration, that’s just laundering votes). So at the very least there is no mandate for expansion. I also strongly suspect that the ‘stay the same’ voters are not aware of true immigration levels or of the consequences of differential relative birth rates, and I bet you could peel off at least 10%. But as I say, it’s not really my business.
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