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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.
Well, there are different approaches. The US did start with such a document to outline the shared expectations. Which didn't prohibit immigration for example.
Now I do agree, the problem with that is everyone who wrote and agreed to it, is dead. Should it have any force on people hundreds of years later who happened to be born in that "house"? Or not?
I agree practically might (or voting/influence) is what will impact how much immigration is allowed, but that isn't actually creating an argument to convince others. You did at least (which SS didn't do) mention some actual things you saw as negatives. That is much better. I completely agree there are likely to be negatives with large scale immigration. I'm not an open borders advocate.
I'm just pointing out might makes right isn't an actual argument for or against any specific position AND you cannot assume everyone has the same fundamental assumptions about things like whether the status quo is good or should be taken into account at all.
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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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