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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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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.