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This is a theory of international relations where America is bidding against themselves in an auction. The rest of the world largely does not just let illegal immigration happen. But they largely do like free trade. A few countries might say hypocrisy or something but if we just change the rules and say countries don’t need to take refugees then everyone will agree with us. America is constantly hypocritical in international relations.
If we banned illegal immigrants but pushed free trade everyone is just going to follow along.
I think a better theory is that most elites just don’t recognize hbd. They don’t realize many of these immigrants won’t assimilate. They think they will be like the Italians and Irish who just became white Americans. They support immigration because they think it’s a huge utility gain for both sides to have more people following western norms. You average Syrian refugees kids will become Frenchmen who pray at Mosques and your average subsaharan African will have kids who become Harvard educated Doctors is how they think it will play out.
Yeah, people come up with all kinds of theories about really complicated political schemes and intrigues but history shows that elites for the most part are not super-human Machiavellian manipulators, even if they would like to be. I think that they certainly are a bit smarter than non-elites on average, but for the most part they are not genius-level political masterminds from a comic book.
The simpler explanation is that to the average left-leaning elite, HBD = racism and racism = bad, end of story. And to the average right-leaning elite, HBD might make a bit of sense but it's not the sort of thing one brings up in polite company and anyway who cares, it's not like my mansion is going to be besieged by mobs of illegal immigrants any time soon.
I would also note that in America, illegal immigrants actually do assimilate pretty well on average. America's chief racial divide has to do with a group of people who have been living here for hundreds of years and whose ancestors got kidnapped and forced to work by America's founders. In Europe, which does not have the guilt that comes with something like that, and which deals with immigrants who assimilate less well on average than Latin American immigrants do in the US, political voices that are in favor of less third-world immigration are actually doing pretty well right now. For example, /r/europe is basically far-right on this topic by Reddit standards.
I share your thoughts. I don’t have a huge problem with illegal immigration in the US for the most part. Hispanics tend to assimilate in the ways they are ok. Generally they haven’t matched IQ testing or educational attainment but second and third generation have reduced criminality to the US white level. But the immigrants Europe gets I am not sure that will be achieved.
Hispanics who have assimilated still vote Democrat at rates far beyond those of average Americans.
Who are assimilated Hispanics, though? Second generation Californians whose ancestors came over in the early 80s, or 15th generation Texan ranchers who still have a vaguely Hispanic last name? White Cubans, or 90% indigenous Mayans? They’re a pretty heterogenous group in a way that ‘pure’ Irish or Swedish Americans aren’t.
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They could stop illegal immigration if they wanted to though. This isn't some impossible task. There just isn't political will among the elites. Pakistan deported over a million Afghans: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistans-plan-expel-over-1-million-afghans-living-country-illegally-2023-10-31/
Are you trying to tell me the US couldn't do this if they wanted to? The government just doesn't want to for [insert reason here]. You didn't agree with mine, which is fine, but I hope you don't think the US actually couldn't if there was the political will.
And I mean they kind or are Machiavellian manipulators, considering it's an extremely unpopular thing politically yet they've managed to let mass immigration go on for over 4 decades, completely reshaping the demographics permanently of this country. Trump got elected to finally do something about it, and he was unable to do anything to curb it. Part of that is on Trump's incompetence, but more of it is that very powerful people and institutions resisted and thwarted him every time.
One of my favourite trolls is to ask people who claim that this would be an impossible task to just go on the record as saying that it'd be impossible for a government to round up and deport (or otherwise deal with) 6 million people.
I don't think the government with the silly mustache guy and the Hindu good luck symbol cared if they accidentally rounded up a small number of non-Eskimos as collateral damage - particularly because they were mostly rounding up and deporting citizens of defeated enemy countries. A single citizen deported by mistake is enough to sink a mass-deportation programme in a Western democracy (and probably should be).
This happened in the UK with the Windrush Scandal. The problem is particularly bad in the UK because the mess created by changing citizenship laws as the British Empire as dismantled - the scandal concerned people who immigrated from the Caribbean before their birth countries became independent (and were therefore born and remained British and never crossed a border) or between independence and 1973 (in which case they lost British citizenship when their home countries became independent, but were not subject to British immigration control and therefore would have arrived without paperwork). But I'm sure the INS has had paperwork screwups similar to the UK decision to destroy the old disembarkation records in 2010 which left us unable to work out which long-resident undocumented Caribbean immigrants were citizens, which ones were legal permanent residents, and which ones were deportable.
Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people - and the people who favour mass deportations generally think that keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.
I appreciate the historical information - thank you for giving me some interesting material to read and learn about. However I have to disagree with a point you've made in your last paragraph. Specifically...
This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds. The sheer amount of data and processing they have, along with their access to Meta and Google's advertising databases means that they'd be able to organise the deportation and identify the illegals in a single SQL query.
Those people are correct! That doesn't change anything about it already existing, however.
Winston Smith was born in 1970 in a poor rural county which never digitised its birth records. He has never had a passport. The SSA has long-since lost any copies they kept of the documents he submitted when he first applied for an SSN in 1986.
Yossarian was brought to the US by his parents as a teenager in 1983. His shitlib high school guidance councillor helped him acquire an SSN in 1986 using the US birth certificate of a baby who died shortly after being born in 1970. (Back then birth and death certificates were not positively matched, so you could use a dead person's birth certificate). His parents' visas have long since expired, and they were out of status when they died in the 1990s.
How does the NSA know which one is a US citizen and which one is an illegal?
The problem with a mass roundup-and-deport is with corner cases like these, not people who entered the country on a 4-year visa 5 years ago.
I am not quite sure you understand the depth and level of tracking that's taking place here. This Winston Smith character must have had no interactions with the financial system, no bank account, no driver's license, no on-the-record job, no interaction with the political system at all, no tax events, no phone, no internet usage and no education. How many Mowglis do you think there are in the USA?
You haven't presented anything that their panopticon wouldn't be able to resolve, and even then the amount of reaching you had to do in order to find extreme edge cases that might throw up a challenge means that it would be a trivial job for a single field office to spend a week going through the outliers. How many people do you think fall into those weird edge-case categories? I don't think that number is high enough to make this an actual problem in practice.
How do any of those establish citizenship? Lots of non-citizens have US bank accounts - I had one when I was working dubiously legally in the US (technically I was an academic visitor being paid a per diem rather than salary) with no SSN. Driver's licenses explicitly don't require proof of legal immigration status in most blue states (and no state actually checked immigration status for new license applicants when Winston Smith first got his). An on-the-record job requires an SSN, but even if we ignore the possibility of a fraudulent SSN application made back in the days when the checks were less stringent (as I am positing Yossarian did), having an SSN just proves that you were in a legal status that allowed working at the time you got it (and lots of illegal immigrants are doing on-the-record jobs using SSNs that don't belong to them). The only thing on the list which would be evidence of citizenship is voting, and the same people who want to get tough on illegal immigration tend to believe that large numbers of non-citizen immigrants are voting illegally given how lax the checks are.
If you are a natural born US citizen who has never had a passport, the only original document that proves your citizenship is your birth certificate. (The situation is even worse in the UK, because we don't have birthright citizenship, so to prove citizenship you need not only your birth certificate but information about your parents' immigration status at the time you were born. The flip side is that a much higher percentage of British citizens have had passports at some point in their lives, giving them simple biometric-enhanced proof of citizenship, because we are a smaller country.)
The panopticon didn't exist when the events that distinguished Winston Smith from Yossarian happened. I agree with you that the NSA is probably able to verify the citizenship and/or immigration status of anyone who most recently entered the US after the panopticon was put in place post-911. But as most illegal immigrants stay in the US (they can't get back in if they leave), that leaves out a lot of people. The reason why the debate around the Dreamers exists is because the anti-illegal-immigration right is explicitly not willing to do another general amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been in the US for decades without getting caught.
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What's the problem? Let them stay if it's ambiguous. The optimal number of illegal immigrants in the country is not zero.
Agreed. But the noises that Trump is making now, and that the British Tories were making in the leadup to the Windrush Scandal, are that a de facto amnesty for long-term illegal residents is precisely what they don't want. The problem is with the actual behaviour of anti-immigrant populists, which tends to be "if you have dark skin and no papers we're coming for you". (Joe Arpaio's immigrant roundups in Arizona also caught significant numbers of US citizens by mistake, which is why the Feds eventually stopped co-operating with him.)
A bureaucratic process that takes care not to deport Winston Smith is going to struggle to deport anyone who has been physically present in the US for 10+ years. And empirically that isn't good enough for a grandstanding right-populist government.
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"They could, and then we'd Nuremberg them and throw their ideas out of the Overton window" doesn't strike me as a solution to immigration, though. Certainly not a final one.
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