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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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The behavior of the federal government here is bizarre.

In the US, how many people are open-borders advocates? 5% 10%? And yet, the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders. Let's be honest. Most of the people who are processed, shipped to another state, and given a court date years in the future will be here for good.

There appear to be two paths to US citizenship. A legal route, which is nearly impossible for most people, and an illegal route which gets easier and easier.

Recently a school in Brooklyn was shut down (for one day) to house illegal migrants. Source, with bonus inaccurate fact check:

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-house-migrants-school-shut-down-673190116310

New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies. Why? Just to stick it to Trump? To me it seems only fair that migrants be housed in the communities that explicitly claim to want them.

This has to be the number issue for every Republican candidate in 2024. It seems that the European migrant problems have made it to America. The situation seems to be getting out of control.

There appear to be two paths to US citizenship. A legal route, which is nearly impossible for most people, and an illegal route which gets easier and easier.

I am given to understand the situation is more an abuse of the asylum system. Somebody comes in, gets caught, and requests asylum, with a halfway-plausible story. It gets provisionally accepted, but the backlog for formal evaluation is like a decade long, so they get to stay in the US until that happens. Even if the formal hearing results in them getting booted out immediately, they still had a decade in the country, and can do it all again the next day.

And in turn, it is promoted by pro-immigration NGOs that coach every immigrant to plead the threshold claim necessary to get an asylum decision.

A similar thing would happen in the criminal justice system if every offender demanded a trial by jury. They don't, because sentences are high enough that they'll take a plea, but there is no such incentive in immigration courts.

[ Amusingly enough, a trial by jury is unquestionably a defendant's right under the BOR and goes back centuries, but the asylum debacle was created whole cloth by Congress in the last 70 years. ]

In the US, how many people are open-borders advocates?

There aren't many open borders advocates, but there are lots of left-leaning people who are advocates of not looking like racists or Republicans. And lots of other more left-leaning people willing to throw those accusations at anyone who wants to crack down on illegal immigration.

In the US, how many people are open-borders advocates?

To take a term already used in this thread de facto vs de jour. Vast majority would not say that they are for "open-borders" but opinion change when there's any kind of filmable enforcement action. "I'm not for open borders but don't do that." Similar to cutting spending, many maybe most want to "cut" federal spending then you give them a list of programs to cut or expand and people in effect want more spending.

The US government arent - for the most part - open border advocates. They just don’t care enough to be closed border advocates. One sees this pattern all across the West with the center-right. Nominally many are in favor of immigration restrictionism, but when it comes to it it’s just too hard to implement, there are too many legal challenges, they have other priorities.

If you want to end mass immigration (and only one Western country - Denmark - is really trying to) from the third world you need to make it the central pillar of your government. Every resource must be devoted to it. All your parliamentarians must be ideologically committed to it. You must stack the judiciary. You must devote yourself to it utterly. You need a combination of public, political and institutional support, exactly what the anti-abortion movement did in the US over decades.

Biden doesn’t need to be pro-mass-immigration for it to happen. He just needs to not be deeply ideologically committed to anti-immigration policy. Anything less than Zemmour-level devotion to nativism and inertia keeps the gates open.

The behavior of the federal government here is bizarre.

How so?

In the US, how many people are open-borders advocates? 5% 10%? And yet, the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders.

What do these two points have to do with each other? If "the people who pull the strings in the federal government" are okay with something, what does it matter how much the powerless peasant masses disagree?

Why? Just to stick it to Trump?

They want to replace and degrade whites and white men in particular. There's an elite consensus that this is the way to go.

Economically - diversity quotas, govt contracts favouring non-white companies, hostile workplace environment lawsuits and affirmative action. We see various leaked information showing how white men were disfavoured in RAF hiring, how the USAF plans to make its staff more representative of America, how 20% of HR workers admit they've done it, IIRC.

Socially - see https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds for a huge list of examples in advertising. I can't think of any modern ads that sneer at blacks, with the exception of that Chinese ad where a young woman put her black suitor in the washing machine until he turned Chinese. There's also historical revision to prioritize the black-slavery/civil rights narrative in US history. I know enough about historiography to know that you can present and choose different facts to produce hugely different narratives, even before you start lying outright. There's also the whole concept of white privilege.

Physically - see mass immigration, both legal and illegal is the most obvious case. I suppose one could also argue that progressive taxation takes from whites and Asians, gives to blacks and browns, artificially lowering the fertility of productive groups and raising that of less productive groups.

Categorically - see the developing practice of capitalizing 'Black' and 'Brown' while decapitalizing 'white'. Delta Airlines sent a memo specifying this just the other day. The old rule was that ethnicities, regions and states like Caucasian, European or French were capitalized while colours weren't. The new rule clearly singles out whites as not being a real group with a shared identity. See also Ignatiev's theoretical work on undermining whiteness as an identity.

Alternately, observe how traditionally white countries like England are being recategorized as 'nations of immigrants', how the BBC works hard to find and fabricate diversity in history. A Doctor Who episode set in the Victorian era showed 1/3 of London being black/brown with the Doctor remarking that 'history was a whitewash'.

It's easily within the US's capabilities to prevent illegal immigration. This isn't the Russian or Chinese army on the other side of the world (which the US plans to defeat). It's unarmed, disorganized, poorly funded people right next to the US, in a hemisphere the US dominates, hoping to enter and work a job without being imprisoned or deported. Illegal immigration is a political choice for any rich, strong power.

It's hard to deny that a lot of this is true. I've noticed that a large number of ads seem to fall into the "white man is disrespected by woman/minority" category. The Hanes ads where Charlie Sheen tried to be friends with Michael Jordan but was rejected seem to be patient zero. Although obviously the sitcom trope of "husband is stupid oaf / wife is smart" goes back to at least the Simpsons if not further.

I honestly don't understand how these commercials could possibly sell product, so I assume they are just pushing the agendas of the ad execs.

I honestly don't understand how these commercials could possibly sell product, so I assume they are just pushing the agendas of the ad execs.

"product?"

It's easily within the US's capabilities to prevent illegal immigration. This isn't the Russian or Chinese army on the other side of the world (which the US plans to defeat). It's unarmed, disorganized, poorly funded people right next to the US, in a hemisphere the US dominates, hoping to enter and work a job without being imprisoned or deported. Illegal immigration is a political choice for any rich, strong power.

While the US becoming minority-White might be an added bonus for plenty of establishment democrats with a lot of sway over US immigration policy, the federal government doesn't have the state capacity to deport 10 million people and it won't for the foreseeable future. Nor does it have the state capacity to consistently enforce labor laws for natives, who are better tracked. There's also no good replacement for illegal labor in the US economy; absent migrants working below market wages in jobs no-one else not on probation is willing to take food prices would skyrocket and absent illegals working 12 hour days construction would get even slower and more difficult. This is politically untenable so no one wants to do it.

Now the US can do a lot to slow the tide(like cracking down on sanctuary cities), but it's not just that we can't deport 11 million people, it's that we don't really know how to run a society without them. They do a lot of important jobs Americans refuse to and that's a travesty, but no one knows how to fix it.

They do a lot of important jobs Americans refuse to (construction, food)

Back in the 1950s and 1960s the US could construct things quickly and simply, Eisenhower built the national highway system even as he expelled a million illegal immigrants. If food prices rise, they could try subsidizing or mechanizing labour-intensive work. There are non-trivial expenses in health/education spending on illegal immigrants, that money could be redirected to subsidies. Illegal immigrants undercut domestic workers, it would logically raise employment and wages amongst the working class.

Nobody had this helpless attitude for the other major problems the US faced. When the Arabs launched an oil embargo and plunged the developed world into a recession, the US didn't give up on supporting Israel. They rationed petrol, they launched fuel-efficiency programs, they looked into nuclear energy and renewables.

The US state apparatus is way larger today and has all kinds of fancy AI/surveillance tools, it's well within their abilities to launch Operation Wetback 2.0.

Back in the 50s and 60s Americans were young and thin and quite a bit less rich.

They certainly don't seem to feel rich today, what with the common complaints about rent and healthcare and being unable to support a family on a single income anymore.

Perhaps single income only felt rich before because men were effectively earning their wife's share in the market and their wife felt rich as long as her husband was, resulting in some kind of positive-sum richness feeling?

Most Americans can, in fact, support a family on a single income. Yes, a 50’s size family.

They don’t do it because of lifestyle constraints- every adult has a car and everyone in the house has a room and multiple sets of nice clothes and we eat at restaurants a lot and at home we don’t have beanie weenies is not how the fifties single earner families lived.

You can confiscate the wealth of illegal aliens to fund sending them back. You can implement work ID laws that incentivize migrants to take a ticket back to the US. You can trawl social media etc to find the communities comprised of mostly illegal migrants. You can fine businesses who use illegal labor.

Food prices would only increase as a proportion of income for the already wealthy; the lower class will now find significantly more demand for their labor and can pick and choose which businesses to work for to maximize their quality of life. (We saw this happen with the peasants after the black plague in Europe; fewer peasants = more demand for their labor = a natural wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the poor). They would make more money than the price of food increases. The eradication of remittance payments means more funds in US economy. Would be enormously beneficial for the lower and middle class and really only hurt the very wealthy white collar workers who are far removed from the economic competition of lower/middle class.

You can confiscate the wealth of illegal aliens to fund sending them back.

That would be astoundingly cruel and inhumane.

Who's going to pick fruit and work in slaughterhouses, hmm? I suppose you can use prison labor, but it's not like there's a bottomless well of that either and it's not well-distributed or trustworthy enough.

The poor can go back to eating rice and beans, I guess. But there isn't a scenario where meat and fruits and vegetables prices rise lower than the wages of the american poor and working class. That's assuming the wages of nativeborn workers go up very much at all; illegals mostly work in different industries(eg fruit picking) than the native poor.

If the US government could control immigration, they could let in people who would credibly fill the roles that most need filling, if the polity wills it. And not let in, say, pregnant women who want citizenship with publicly funded healthcare and schooling for their baby, unless the polity actually wants that.

But, yes, the first part is still very difficult under current circumstances.

The pregnant women are more sympathetic than the workers, so the people who would be let in are reversed from how you've described it.

Possibly so, there’s nothing to say even a more functional democracy than ours currently is needs to optimize entirely for economics.

Who does that in Japan? Who does it in Iceland (well they don’t have fruit, but slaughter houses apply)? Millions would be happy to do these jobs once the pay rises, just like you have dudes doing underwater welding. And the pay will rise in the absence of a pseudo slave labor class.

there isn't a scenario where meat and fruits and vegetables prices rise lower than the wages of the american poor and working class [rises]

Sure there is. All of the increase in payment to “food companies” due to the rise in food prices is going to the lower class employee base (who need the money more), yet this increase in payment is paid for by everyone (lower-to-highest classes), meaning you necessarily see a transfer of wealth from upper to lower class; and on top of this, the increased cost of food for the wealthy makes prices more salient, leading to more cost-saving consumer practices which winds up enforcing more competition among food-related businesses.

It's not slave labor when someone voluntarily sells their time at a rate you don't like. It's not even pseudo slave labor.

not even pseudo slave labor

It’s not slave labor, and it’s also not “not genuine” slave labor? That’s what pseudo means. The simplified point is that, just like slave labor is great for the wealthy employers but bad for the non-slave wage competitor, so is it bad when you import a class of people who are practically economic serfs within a given industry: no hope of ever obtaining a better position because of the language barrier / citizenship barrier / possibly no degree at all even in Mexico/Honduras/etc.

Actual slave wages are zero. People talking about "slave wages" are simply trying to use the negative affect of "slavery" (or "serfdom") to tar something that's entirely unlike slavery rather than argue against it on the merits.

There are people who will probably work low level jobs their entire life, yes. Some of them are (illegal) immigrants. Maybe this is bad, but I can't see how it's bad because they agreed on a wage you don't like. These people are free to go home if they don't like their conditions (and in fact some of them do).

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Who does that in Japan?

Fruit and meat are very expensive in Japan per google. Citrus(the largest crop there that needs to be picked by hand) production per this source(https://calfreshfruit.com/2022/02/22/challenges-for-the-japanese-citrus-market/) is declining in part due to a labor shortage. Japan is a major importer of every category of foodstuff IIRC because the terrain's not suitable for mass agriculture, so I suppose agriculture works differently there. Oh, and Japan has southeast Asian guest workers harvesting crops(https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Agriculture/Japanese-farms-turn-to-foreign-workers-as-rural-population-ages).

Who does it in Iceland (well they don’t have fruit, but slaughter houses apply)?

This reddit thread(https://old.reddit.com/r/Iceland/comments/chin8z/what_is_animal_agriculture_like_in_iceland/) claims that there aren't enough slaughterhouses but I would take that with a grain of salt.

According to the Iceland review(I don't read Icelandic so this is probably the best source I can find easily-https://www.icelandreview.com/economy/without-foreign-workers-slaughterhouses-face-staffing-shortages/), foreigners.

It seriously looks like the native lower-classes of wealthy countries cannot be convinced to do these kinds of jobs absent compulsion(slaughterhouses in the US are well known for using parolees who will be imprisoned if they don't work), and there will be a shortage if foreign labor isn't available. I would rather have Hondurans do it than Indonesians, personally.

I'm not excluding that some automation improvements can reduce labor but I think all of the low hanging fruit has probably already been picked, considering getting labor is so difficult.

It does not appear that foreign workers are big source of Japan’s agricultural workforce: https://fas.usda.gov/data/japan-foreign-farm-labors-role-growing-japan

In the past 10 years, the percentage of foreign farm workers as a share of the total agricultural population has increased fourfold from 0.5 percent to two percent

Just half a percent of the agricultural population in 2010.

https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a06003/

Only 25k “guest workers” out of 1.5 million total agricultural workers, so 1.5%. This number is increasing though, coincidentally as the Japanese feel poorer and poorer…

It seriously looks like the native lower-classes of wealthy countries cannot be convinced to do these kinds of jobs

We can convince them to spend 12 years in brutal school/residency to stab utensils in human flesh for 16 hour periods at a time, for nothing but money and respect. I promise you we can convince them to pick fruit — forestry workers have some of the highest life satisfaction and doctors perhaps the lowest.

I also looked and it seems that American born employees account for a little over 60% of slaughterhouse workers

https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographics/

In Iceland a lot of the butchers come from Sweden: https://www.icelandreview.com/news/hundreds-foreigners-work-slaughterhouses/#:~:text=Foreign%2Dborn%20workers%20are%20now,further%20away%2C%20even%20New%20Zealand.

Also think people are missing the elephant in the room for agricultural work. Isn’t this something AI solves? We already have fruit picking robots and I think it’s fair to say they will continue to improve.

If we didn’t have illegals we would in time just automate fruit picking. Prices would spike for a few years and then my guess would be lower fruit prices. Same thing as in 2008 when oil hit $150 we invented shale oil a few years later. Getting rid of illegals would just speed up the automation process and by 2030 my guess is a fully automated fruit picking system.

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I lived in Japan from '07 to '11 and haven't been back since, so this may be out of date, but the idea that fruit and veggies are very expensive matches my memories, but is a little incomplete. Sushi and ramen are incredibly cheap in Japan, and I would extrapolate that most of the food-service labor force is somehow attached to those two parts of the industry--sushi because Japan just plain has the best fish, ramen because that's usually served with beer or on a chuhai run.

I do wish that they just stuck to having borders and made legal immigration much easier. It would make it easier to get jobs etc, for the immigrants. It would mean that we wouldn't be selecting for people who are willing to break the law.

But this position has now become toxic across the board, especially in the GOP base.

the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders.

Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.

The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.

New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies.

NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.

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If nothing is done, the immigration will not necessarily be Latin American.

We are already seeing people flying to Latin America from India/Africa with the intention of migrating to the U.S. Oh, you think that they were simply tourists who wanted to visit the wonderful country of El Salvador?

https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-travelers-fee-migration-dd176d85871e54a9eb8695f8fb03a65d

The cost to secure the Southern Border is trivial compared to the costs of unlimited immigration. Honestly, I hate to say it, but Donald Trump was right about the wall. It's the right thing to do and it wouldn't be that expensive.

We'd still have to deal with the problem of people flying in on tourist visas though.

If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.

Immigration is unfathomably high right now.

in a country where half the people hate them

There are some people who hate hispanics, but most people see illegals as unfortunates, generally good people, but we really need to not have any more of them. They run into condescension and annoyance at poor English language skills but actual hatred for these people is not socially acceptable or common.

The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.

As opposed to the cooperative and non-disruptive way they cross the southern border? It's obviously just blue cities arguing Texas should have to deal with the negative externalities which are inevitable when hundreds of thousands of third worlders stream across the border.

The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.

As opposed to the hundreds of thousands streaming across the border, which is done in a minimally disruptive and maximally co-operative way? If the sanctuary cities don't like the reality of how illegal immigration actually is done, maybe they should stop finger-wagging at the states that have to bear the brunt of the migrants turning up on the other bank of the river first thing.

Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border.

Are they really that exorbitant? The US could secure a much shorter southern Mexican border, or the even shorter southern Guatemalan border. The latter is just 459km vs 3145km between the US and Mexico, almost seven times shorter.

They’re probably not the exorbitant. For comparison , Israel used to face a similar issue with it’s Egypt border, where African economic migrants would just stroll in. We built a fence. The border is roughly 125 miles long, in a desert area. The US-Mexico border is about 2000 miles long, so it’s about a 1:16 length ratio. The population ratio between Israel and the US is about 1:37, and the gdp ratio is about 47. Fudge a little for the US border being more remote in some places, but it’s clear that y’all can totally afford a border fence.

A decent chunk of the US-Mexico border is not passable anyways, so the remoteness probably cancels out.

The real barrier is just Israel being willing to do things the west won’t.

Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them.

If you’re correct that other non-violent measures are exorbitantly expensive and/or ineffective, I am in fact willing to countenance just shooting them. You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming. (Or would start openly acting like proper invaders, in which case a lot more people would start being okay with shooting a lot more of them.)

I agree with you but when you look at the fact that the Europeans let in millions of Syrians because of a single picture of a Kurdish kid washed up on a beach you realize pretty quickly that gunning down migrants doesn’t have majority support.

Enough terror attacks in Europe and I can see the Europeans hardening to the point that they do it, but the thing about Guatemalans is that they’re Christians and they don’t practice the same overt cultural and religious hostility to Europeans that many migrants from the Islamic world do, so the public is unlikely ever to have enough contempt to resort to those tactics in the US.

Fear is what leads to policy like that, and while Europeans are increasingly scared of large scale MENA immigration (see Houellebecq, Zemmour, etc), Americans aren’t very scared of Central American immigration even if they oppose it.

The first time CBP mows down a family of six, public support would evaporate in an instant (though the odds of such a policy ever making it to implementation are basically zero, since it would be comically unpopular and probably unconstitutional to boot).

Or would start openly acting like proper invaders

How many people do you think will continue buying "invader" rhetoric when the bodies of children are being paraded around on every media outlet in the world?

The overwhelming majority of the people currently streaming across the border are military-age men. If shooting broke out, the odds of a family of children getting smoked is far lower than the odds of some brazen young men.

Whether "mostly military-age men" it is or isn't true, it would be astronomically unlikely there wouldn't be at least one adorable family among the body count. All one has to do then is find them, take a bunch of pictures of the bodies, and distribute them widely, while completely ignoring the rest, and your work is done.

Even if there are literally zero adorable families naturally coming over, the cartels running the operation on the other side aren't stupid. Surely they would be willing to ensure there are a few like that and make sure they get covered.

In the name of equity and inclusion, I’d be more than okay to go without age- and gender-discrimination when it comes to distributing bullets for border enforcement.

In which case:

You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming.

Would apply even moreso, as military-age men are presumably the most risk-tolerant group.

Source? This does not look like the overwhelming majority are men, especially once you ignore the more action-laden pictures of fence climbing and violent clashes. Are you sure you are not just instinctively copying points from the European migrant crisis?

This could be a result of selective reporting on the part of either right-wing media, left-wing media, or both. I have seen tons of video of migrant caravans, and of migrants camped out near border checkpoints or in front of migrant processing centers, and it’s always at least 75% young men. Now, again, this could be due to the narrative being pushed by the sources of media that I consume. And, similarly, I’m sure you can acknowledge that The Atlantic is strongly pro-migrant and would at least be tempted to selectively display the most sympathetic images possible.

There are some attempts at statistics, claiming 46% female. You could of course choose to extend your argument by saying that these too are fake, but at that point, what would be sufficient evidence to persuade you?

I recently looked up the numbers after @Steffieri called me out on the same assumption. Women are in the majority among legal migrants, and make up 45-47% of illegal migrants depending on survey. It's not overwhelmingly male, but it's not majority families either.

It's tough to get numbers for different kinds of illegal immigration, though. "Streaming across the southern border" isn't even the most common form of illegal immigration most years.

Easy - kill the men, deport the women and children.

From a blue stater perspective, I'd be surprised if even 5% are true open border types. Most seem to want some sort of process for asylum seekers that seems, in theory anyway, fairly defensible. In practice, all the immigration judges in the world couldn't give everyone that sets foot in Texas a decent hearing even if they worked without vacation for the next 2 years.

The problem being that “asylum” isn’t what liberals think it is. The definition of what would allow someone to seek asylum is pretty wide and includes economic hardship. It’s not for true emergencies (say: being included in a general political or ethnic purge) but just about anything that a person would want to leave their home country for. Rubber stamping 3 million “refugees” instead of just letting them cross and disappear is a joke. The difference is paperwork. And all of that makes the generous assumption that they actually risk deportation if they decide to never show up to the hearing.

Indeed, but making that determination is a fact-based inquiry and if every individual demands one, there’s no way to keep up.

New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies.

Because they, or at least enough of those in charge, are true believers in the idea that these "compassionate" policies make them The Good People. Abbott is just making them pay the price for their compassion.

It's not the percentage of the people, it's the percentage of the donor class that supports easy immigration.

Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed? I think there are some true open border believers in the far left, and that the rest of blob is just sort of going with the flow.

The dominant theme of the post Covid period has been that incentives don't matter and we can't enforce rules on anyone. So maybe we are theoretically against open borders, but we also can't actually enforce any rules (that's mean!), so we end up with defacto open borders.

2024 will be the true Red Wave if Democrats can't get their shit figured out on immigration quick. "Biden's border crisis" has a nice ring and it also happens to be true. Biden looks weak as hell here.

Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed? I think there are some true open border believers in the far left, and that the rest of blob is just sort of going with the flow.

This touches another one of those thoughts that would coagulate into an effort post if I had the will. I watch people believing obviously absurd and horrible things ("We should let infinite numbers of people across the border", "Trans women have no advantage in sports" while staring at a 250-pound "female" rugby player, etc.) and my conclusion, from being in a pretty Blue bubble with mostly leftist friends, is that you are underestimating both the number of true believers and the degree to which normies don't notice and don't care until their schools are actually being taken over by illegal immigrants.

Yes, a lot of lefties (and not just the "far" left, but mainstream liberals) literally cannot imagine that letting more people across the border is anything but good. It's a combination of "They are poor refugees fleeing oppression and it would be immoral to turn them back" and "We need more people who will become good productive American tax payers." Any suggestion that a lot of these people becoming criminals and/or net drags on the social welfare system? That's racism.

When I was younger, even on the left, "I support immigration but not illegal immigration, we welcome new Americans as long as they come the right way" was the mainstream position. Now that's racism and dangerous Trumpism.

And the normies who don't pay much attention except when a picture of people flooding across the borders hits the news? They vaguely understand that there are poor people who want to come here, as there always have been, and we have some sort of immigration system that's supposed to filter them, but to speak up and say that there seem to be some problems and maybe too many people are getting through would make you sound like a MAGA or something.

The dominant theme of the post Covid period has been that incentives don't matter and we can't enforce rules on anyone. So maybe we are theoretically against open borders, but we also can't actually enforce any rules (that's mean!), so we end up with defacto open borders.

From talking to a number of my true blue Democrat-voting friends (but who would not describe themselves as "leftists"), yes, this is pretty much the case. Ask them if they are literally in favor of open borders and they will say no. But ask them what sort of restrictions we should have, and what measures they would consider acceptable to keep undesirables out, and the best they'll come up with is "Well, maybe not someone with a violent criminal record." (As if we have access to that information for hundreds of thousands of people coming from dozens of countries.) Like, in theory they'll allow that letting Cartel soldiers just come across the border is probably bad, but anything that resembles strict enforcement makes them cry about children in cages.

Any suggestion that a lot of these people becoming criminals and/or net drags on the social welfare system?

Do you have statistics to back this?

Bluntly, this is a perfect example of the obnoxious "Cite?" demand that isn't really expressing skepticism or a desire for evidence, it's just saying "I dislike your argument so I will try to force you to waste time looking up citations which I can then dismiss."

I do not believe that you actually believe that the statement "a lot (illegal immigrants) become criminals and/or net drags on the social welfare system" is false. You might disagree with me over how much "a lot" is (a number I made no effort to quantify, but let's stipulate that I implied it's large enough to be a significant problem, and you could reasonably disagree), but you don't actually disagree that it happens with measurable frequency. You are just testing me to find out if I keep bookmarks handy for my arguments, or how much time you can get me to waste Googling something.

I actually started to do this. But I'm not going to post the links (you can use Google as well as I can) because I realized that you wouldn't actually care.

(Unsurprisingly, what you will discover is that in raw numbers, it's pretty indisputable that illegal immigrants are a net loss economically. Groups that are anti-immigration highlight the raw numbers and dismiss potential long-term benefits (how many of them eventually become citizens, or produce children who become citizens and taxpayers), while groups that are pro-immigration highlight the fact that illegal immigrants aren't technically eligible for most social welfare programs, and downplay the fact that many receiving benefits either married a US citizen or have children here who then become eligible, as well as ignoring things harder to quantify like downward pressure on wages, increased presence of organized crime, etc.)

Did more searching and found this: https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-migrants-take-the-jobs-of-native-workers

It's been a while and you still haven't responded to my follow up, so I now doubt that you do have sources and am now more convinced that immigration is actually a positive for jobs and economy.

It takes time and effort to find good sources. If you have good resources to share, I will read them and maybe learn a thing or two about immigration in the US.

"you wouldn't actually care"

Even being pro immigration, I would want to know if immigrants are far more likely to be criminals or net negatives because that would influence the kind of policies I would want to see pursued or how I would argue.

When I google, all the top results (from Penn Wharton, from CBPP, from AIC, from NBER) say immigrants are good for local economies. I would share links except I don't know if any of them are actually good sources or not.

Bad faith accusation. Takes a simple request to provide evidence for inflammatory claims as a personal insult.

I tend to agree as my personal journey on the issue was pro-open borders. If we let the migrants in today then tomorrow they are more wealthy American citizens.

One thing to not is there is I believe a Milton Friedman type school of thought that illegal immigration is better than legal migration. Illegal provides a selection effect for the hungriest immigrants willing to do the work Americans don’t want to do. And from a selection effect the illegal immigrant today has more selection effect for the American characteristics (prior immigrant waves having a much harder journey so selects for entrepreneurship etc).

My journey on immigration likely went from a “Why Nation’s Fail” type mindset where the primary reasons some nations fail are bad institutions, lack of property rights, corruption etc. My guess is this is still the dominant elite view and therefore more immigration into a society with good institutions translates into a huge net positive for humanity. You then summarize into some sort of Yglesias thesis of “One Billion Americans” who I believe is considered slightly a center right writer.

The work of Garret Jones on national average IQ being the driving force of a national wealth drives my thinking much more, but George Masons Econ department sits outside elite consensus. Even at that school he can’t specifically make hbd arguments. If you want to explain why some countries always have poor institutions then you end up using Jones arguments.

In summary I completely agree it’s very tough in America to make strong anti-immigration arguments especially in elite circles. The very best you can do is find agreement that the border needs to be secure enough to limit the pace of illegal migration to allow our economy to have enough low-end work and public resources to turn migrants into American citizens.

Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed?

But who is going to landscape their estates if they have to pay grubby white Americans to do it, darling?

Landscaping is actually one of the easier things to replace illegal labor in; the American elite reticence towards mass deportations goes much farther down the social ladder than people who have estates landscaped precisely because everyone middle class and higher understands that there aren't enough parolees(yes, parolees. No Americans will do those jobs without being required to by law) to replace the illegals picking fruit and killing chickens and digging ditches.

Might they prefer Hondurans to be flown into their meatpacking plant in the midwest or rural south, and then flown right back out when their contract ends, UAE-style? Yes. But American income inequality being what it is, their children don't compete with each other economically, so it's not that big a deal.

I do realise that agricultural work is the huge soak-pit of illegal immigrant labour, and the farm owners who have the supply cut off are now looking to mechanisation, rather than raising wages to attract native workers, because they claim they will go under if they have to pay going rates.

But my view of "why don't the rich care?" is because the truly rich don't interact with the illegals competing for jobs with native working-class, and if they do encounter them it's in the aspect of 'working on the landscaping crew' or 'contract cleaners who arrive to clean the house every week' - that is, their staff hire them to do the jobs so the rich only glimpse them as figures toiling in their peripheral view but never around for a long time. So it's easy to be compassionate in the abstract, about "no human is illegal", like the Martha's Vineyarders with their signs - until those same immigrants and refugees start physically turning up in the community, and then it's a different question.

C'mon. You know better than to talk like that.

You might be able to justifiably claim that the "rich" may consider poor white Americans as being somehow worse than illegal Hispanic immigrants. You can't get away with being condescending to someone you disagree with, not when it's a habit.

I won't construe this is a formal warning or anything, but you got 5 AAQCs last month, surely you can adhere to better standards.

Edit: Never mind, I'm taking the mod hat off this thing, it's not an infraction that is worth it really.

Mod hat on, mod hat off? I'm sorry to be confusing you at this early stage in your moderatorhood, I wasn't intending to be condescending, more referencing this meme.

Welcome to dealing with the Awkward Squad! And believe me, I'm even more confused than you about how the heck I managed to garner five AAQCs, I genuinely never set out to deliberately write anything that might be nominated, so it's a mystery to me!

I did take the mod hat off by my own initiative, it's not like the others yelled at me haha.

You're a regular here, we might bicker but I can't ever deny that your net contribution is very positive, even if you have your own quirks that make me raise an eyebrow, or on certain topics, want to claw my eyes out.

So my initial annoyance that motivated me to put the mod hat on was swiftly overruled by me sighing deeply and accepting that it wouldn't make a difference plus it wasn't a big deal in the first place. I suppose the fact that you were referencing a meme from a show that I haven't watched does make sense!

I haven't even watched the show myself, it's just been floating around on social media for years about "people so far removed from the actuality of the situation they may as well be living on another planet".

It has also been a favourite gambit of media in the UK to ask politicians who try to lean too hard on the "man of the people" bit questions such as "so how much does a litre of milk cost?" and watch them squirm as they have no idea, never having gone grocery shopping themselves or if they have, never having to care about the cost of whatever they want to grab off the shelves.

Do most people who buy groceries every week know the current price, offhand, of every single one of the 30+ items they buy?

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Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed?

As TIRM notes, it's not their communities. I've seen plenty of libertarian types point out that one can find enclaves of "1st world" living conditions in most any destitute "3rd world" country — you just have to be rich enough to afford it. And if you're the right kind of rich, then importing a lot of "cheap servants" will make you even richer — or at least make this sort of gated community cheaper — even as the country as a whole declines.

(Again, I like to point to open borders advocate Nathan Smith's "How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity?", because I much appreciate his forthrightness about the outcomes he prefers — though I think a better comparison than the Roman or British Empires would be the UAE.)

The UAE is the ideal situation for American immigration policy because migrants get deported immediately when their economic use ends and have zero recourse to citizenship, ever. That’s hardly a cautionary tale, it’s an ideal.

their communities

Adjacent communities perhaps. But their private schools and nice neighborhoods aren't being overwhelmed with false asylum seekers. They don't pay the price.

"Our local schools are being overwhelmed by this!" A few of the worse off public ones sure are. But that's not their community, not their problem.

Who said anything about their community.

The west's wealthy have long now abolished any covenant they had with nation or race.

The people getting hurt by this are just cogs in a system they are using. Cogs that aren't having enough children and are too expensive. So they're just swapping them out. Mechanical maintenance of the economic zone.

Cogs that aren't having enough children and are too expensive.

Funny thing really. The way you can tell that all the talk about "dysgenics" is bullshit is that it's not "the help" who are dying out, it's the fagot/tranny/elf brahmins.

the fagot/tranny/elf brahmins

Obnoxious, antagonistic, boo outgrouping, and whether meant ironically or not, clearly not the kind of argument we want to see made here. No, not because you used no-no words, but because you used them in a way calculated to be antagonistic.

I'm feeling mellow today, so 1-day ban. You really seem determined to once again see how many infractions you can accumulate before you get permabanned. Frankly, you only haven't been permabanned because as polarizing a figure as you are, a lot of people like you and you rack up a lot of AAQCs along with your shitposting. But the forbearance is not going to last forever. If your goal is just to push us to a final ban so you can go back to DSL or wherever to crow about how you finally "proved" something (whatever it is you think you're trying to prove) then just do your big flaming swan song and get it over with (and please make it worthy). Otherwise, knock this shit off - for someone who talks so much about discipline and being a grizzled NCO who's seen the world and survived some shit and knows what for, you do not get to pretend you can't help yourself or don't know what you're doing.

Obnoxious, antagonistic, boo outgrouping, and whether meant ironically or not, clearly not the kind of argument we want to see made here.

Is it not though?

I'll grant that my specific choice of words could be interpreted as uncharitable but at the same time I was specifically echoing the rhetoric used by others in this thread an elsewhere. @Hoffmeister25 is correct, and yes, a significant part of my motivation here is to highlight the contradiction.

The sort of rhetoric that you casually dismiss when aimed at the outgroup doesn't feel so good when it's aimed back towards the ingroup does it?

The sort of rhetoric that you casually dismiss when aimed at the outgroup

What rhetoric directed at the outgroup are you claiming I failed to mod?

doesn't feel so good when it's aimed back towards the ingroup does it?

Are you really claiming that I modded you because you attacked "my" ingroup?

Is that really what you're claiming?

Are you really claiming that I modded you because you attacked "my" ingroup?

Not you in particular so much as the community in general. To be blunt causal dehumanization and eliminationist rhetoric are pretty common here.

Someone here goes on a tear about how much normies suck, republicans are retarded, and the Jews deserved it, they're as liable to get two-dozen up votes and an AAQC because that's the outgroup.

Meanwhile if someone comes out against the race essentialist prog consensus or refers to a queer theater kid by anything other than xer preferred pronouns and suddenly the down votes and the mod-hats come out.

That dichotomy and very clear double standard is what I'm referring to when I talk about "heightening the contradiction."

The Funny thing that I don't really think that Zorba or Trace ever properly grasped is that I sincerely believe in the sub's foundation, and I believe that Rome is worth a man's life.

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not because you used no-no words, but because you used them in a way calculated to be antagonistic.

Honest question: is there an example of anyone using similar no-no words that isn't judged as being "calculated to be antagonistic"?

Use-mention distinction.

If you are referring to other people as faggots or trannies or niggers or whatever, it would be hard to convince me that your intent was anything other than to be insulting and inflammatory.

So when you started the phrase with:

not because you used no-no words

You meant, "Not because you mentioned no-no words, but because you used them," and the following clause was superfluous?

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Real world grim and stupid politics snipped, let us move to our favorite fantasy world (for the same thing, but WITH DRAGONS!)

Obssessive political crap is over, obssessive nerd crap starts now!

elf brahmins

Can there be such thing?

Of course!

Ed Greenwood's fantasy kitchen sink world is place for everything and everyone, and place of pseudo-Hindu fantasy copycat culture are the Shining Lands.

Var, Durpar and Estagund are lands following the Adama faith, religion based on reincarnation, oneness of all things and strict caste boundaries.

And since Shining Lands are properly free of racism and speciesism (as it should be in these types of fantasy world to prevent them from being even bigger Grand Guignol charnel houses that they are)

Just like the gods were aspects of the Adama, so too were the various species of the world. No follower of the Adama would turn away anyone based on their race alone.

yes, when Baldur Gate 4 comes out, you can legitimately and canonically play elf brahmin.

Yes, even DARK ELF BRAHMIN! Here comes Nivray the Rotspider, ready to save the world with his wise and brilliant advice!

edit: yes, the links work now

Yes, even DARK ELF BRAHMIN! Here comes Nivray the Rotspider, ready to save the world with his wise and brilliant advice!

Finally some Tamil-Brahmin representation that isn't in theoretical mathematics 🙏

I don't know what he means by "elf"(I don't think it makes any sense as a slur for Williams syndrome in context) but it is literally factually true that the gays and trans have extremely low TFR and disproportionately come from not-poor backgrounds.

He’s making a reference to Curtis Yarvin’s “dark elves and hobbits” essay.

In that case it's just false; blue tribe conservatives seem like they have very similar TFR to the core red tribe.

The super rich actually have more kids than almost anyone else in the US.

Right, they've set up policies that drive their competition extinct while multiplying their servants. Classic high-low vs middle.

Part of the donor class wants a new voting base especially in certain states, the other wants cheap labor. Their goals are closely enough aligned they can unite to easily overcome the few populists who get elected, since Regean's amnesty in the 80s.

I've been voting for border enforcement for nearly 30 years, I have no expectation that anything close to my wishes will ever be done about it. Of course I didn't think the court would overturn Roe either, so perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised someday.

Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants

That’s a massive understatement of the role of illegal labor in the economy; construction and meatpacking and agriculture all rely on huge illegal immigrant populations to function the way they do in the US.

A fair point, and a good reason why "the rich" aren't worried, because they're not seeing the masses of migrants who end up in those jobs, or have them living anywhere remotely near them. It's the abstract, theoretical numbers for them, which means it's not a problem they worry about, it's someone else's problem where they end up living and working.

It's a negative feedback loop -- illegal immigration makes a political settlement on legal immigration for those folks that actually work untenable. That in turn fuels further demand for illegal immigration to the point where it's too baked in to do much about.

One cautionary lesson of the last few years and the result of inflationary pressure is that the subjective wellbeing of Americans at all income levels is coupled to cheap goods. It's not just the rich that are attracted to the fruits of cheap labor, but it goes all the way down the income chart.

Yeah, I suspect people really don't consider the degree to which illegal labor props up some low prices. I suspect that a lot of stuff (like house remodeling, landscape jobs, etc.) would undergo decent price spikes if someone snapped their fingers and relocated illegal immigrants back to their home countries – at least regionally. But a regional spike in something like meatpacking can raise prices nationwide.

Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed?

It's not "their communities" that's the thing. The Rich can afford private schools and private security. They're rich, why would they give a shit about the plebs?

Edit: I continue to maintain that this here, is the core reason for all the derangement and freak-outery surrounding Trump. It's classism all the way down.

Well, the other argument is that if the people you let in will vote democrat then it makes sense for Biden provided the loss of historic voters is less than the new votes.

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