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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Seems mostly reasonable, until:

Open Borders

Bunch of quokkas.

This comment was an antagonistic and low effort reply.

You have been warned and banned for this type of thing before:

  1. https://www.themotte.org/post/739/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/155911?context=8#context
  2. https://www.themotte.org/post/805/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/173812?context=8#context
  3. https://www.themotte.org/post/805/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/173836?context=8#context

3 day ban.

The reason why Open Borders is controversial in the existing system is that migrants (or their children) are given an equal share in governance - a scarce resource currently owned by the existing population. It's not clear why the existing population should give equal shares in governance to the children of new arrivals. I expect free movement of people across borders would be more popular if this were not the case.

Unstable.

Much like congress cannot bind a future congress, a country cannot credibly precommit itself to never grant political rights to a population of immigrants; once they are in the country they are a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground waiting to be picked up. It may take a generation or two, but eventually somebody is going to realize that they can gain political power by expanding the franchise in exchange for the implicit promise that the new citizens will vote for their faction, and act accordingly.

Case study: African-Americans. Explicitly imported as slaves without rights, remained so right up until Lincoln and his allies saw an opportunity to own the South by emancipating them, then cemented victory by making them citizens. Now America has to deal with a racial underclass whose primary concern at the voting booth is who will offer them the most gibs. As the saying goes, the colonists should have picked their own damn cotton. And if current year Americans were wise, they would clean their own toilets.

Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups. There are ways to suppress the majority, but they are much more difficult and costly to the country than simply having them continue to live far away outside your borders where they can't readily do those things.

In democracies those tactics are mainly relegated to groups with minority political views that can't win at the ballot box, and sometimes they get their way by caring more than the majority or having elite sympathizers, but most of the time it is advantageous to just participate in the democratic system instead. This has made democracies remarkably stable compared to other political systems. Your proposal, on the other hand, seems like it would fall to a Ghandi-style resistance campaign or violent revolution the first time there was a serious dispute between the natives and the disenfranchised descendants of immigrants.

Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups.

Which is why the Gulf States are a hotbed of insurrection?

The Gulf States keep their non-citizen migrant worker populations under control with strong repression, I don't see how this could be accomplished in a techno-progressive-libertarian-gayspacecommunism system like OP suggests.

It’s not just violent repression happening in those gulf states.

Saudi Arabia’s legitimacy rested on two key things:

  1. A deal with the clerics to keep the country religious
  2. Good governance. The regime takes a lot of money for their lifestyle but everything I’ve heard they have the best roads in the Middle East and things like that.

I was thinking more about the large migrant worker populations that are only a few steps removed from slavery, due to the discussion of open borders above.

So then admit that allowing such unrest is a choice, and not a choice we need to make.

  1. Yes, in comparison to established democracies they seem less stable and unlikely to survive as long.

  2. Like most authoritarian governments, they pay the cost to the functioning of the country I mentioned, because they are less responsive to feedback and have to keep things under control in other ways. What democratic countries would actually prefer to live under a government like Saudi Arabia in exchange for some supposed economic benefit from open borders?

  3. Remember we are talking not just about formal democracy but a "share in governance", in particular in the context of open borders. Non-democracies can still do things to keep the support of the majority of residents, both by controlling who enters (and how long they stay) and by being responsive to the desires of residents. But he was talking about a country that both let in anyone and then disregarded their opinions in favor of democratic rule by the minority of natives.

Yes, in comparison to established democracies they seem less stable and unlikely to survive as long.

They do. But I'm not inclined to blame that on immigration policy first. Resource-driven monarchies are probably less stable than an old democracy like the UK. But that doesn't mean their level of ethnic tension for their population is well below "simmering on its way to insurrection"

Like most authoritarian governments, they pay the cost to the functioning of the country I mentioned, because they are less responsive to feedback and have to keep things under control in other ways

By "feedback" I assume you mean they're ignoring some economic benefit here, because I doubt the public is calling for more foreign citizenship?

But he was talking about a country that both let in anyone and then disregarded their opinions in favor of democratic rule by the minority of natives.

Yeah, I suppose it would get tense across generations if people are allowed to stay (though in some edge cases I think migrants would be happy to avoid things like conscription). But, if they aren't citizens, the welcoming nation has options if it wants them. Which is why OP is right that it'd probably be vastly more popular. That is the first demographic you have to please after all.

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