New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | April 7, 2006

Brian Doherty has an univision of natives and immigrants living in harmony--without a welfare state.

Comments

|4.7.06 @ 6:57PM|#

Thank Gawd for Reason; it's one of the few places one can get any rational discourse on the subject.

|4.8.06 @ 1:48AM|#

"I won't pretend my own personal anecdotes define the overall meaning of any mass social phenomenon."

Well, that's a relief. An awareness that one is spouting meaningless drivel is somehwate mitigating, I suppose. But why do it at all?

|4.8.06 @ 8:53PM|#

Uri-

An awareness that one is spouting meaningless drivel is somewhat mitigating, I suppose. But why do it at all?

Indeed!

Why do you bother to post your 'meaningless drivel'?

|4.8.06 @ 10:22PM|#

Geez, I thought pointing out meaningless drivel was somehow meaningful.

|4.9.06 @ 9:27PM|#

Brian,

Great points in your article! Surely the prosperous and amicable melting pot of American culture would have been much less so if the gargantuan government sector that plagues us now would now would have existed during the previous episodes of mass immigration to our country.

|4.9.06 @ 9:49PM|#

Uri ben Tzvi,

Your comment was rude and sans foundation. Brian's interesting anecdote nicely illustrated his point about the social lubrication that the free market affords among different peoples:

The free market, as it usually does, has created a system of mutually satisfactory interdependence, all of us serving each other and helping each other get what we want.

But Uri, all you offered was to call Brian's experience, "meaningless drivel". I thinking yours is a case of small minds-petty comments.

Wild Pegasus|4.10.06 @ 1:35AM|#

Different people are swayed by different things. Some people are swayed by statistics. Others are swayed by rational discourse. Others are swayed by emotional appeals and poignant anecdotes. A persuasive argument should have all three.

- Josh

clarityiniowa|4.10.06 @ 6:53AM|#

In mild and halfhearted defense of Uri, I have noticed a huge downward trend in tone in Reason articles generally over the past couple of years. While I am a fan of irony - even sarcasm - in social commentary from time to time, when it becomes a primary vehicle for argumentation, it simply becomes tiresome. In true Libertarian spirit I have voted with my feet, and mostly quit reading the magazine and website. I check in from time to time, but almost inevitably come up disappointed. Brian, is this the best you can do? You're a better writer than this.

s.m. koppelman|4.10.06 @ 9:18AM|#

I wholeheartedly agree that the current Congressional pushes to create a gästarbeiter program and make felons of millions of people are wrong and awful.

The jump to pinning the blame on the welfare state, though, is horsehit of the highest order. America has had strong nativist and anti-immigrant movements a lot longer than it's had Social Security, food stamps, worker protections, public community colleges and Medicaid.

Xenophobia and sometimes-legitimate concerns about depressed wages and competition for jobs in some sectors -- both of which would only be exacerbated by a guest-worker program -- did just fine in accounting for past waves of anti-immigrant sentiment as we know it, going back at least as far as the first half of the 19th Century.

The status quo is no good. Large "illegal immigrant" populations of workers suceptible to coercion and threats of expulsion distort wages in a more pronoounced way and in turn provide a bigger hook for the racist, xenophobic crap than legal immigration. But since the economy seems to have absorbed the influx of the last couple of decades and indeed expanded thanks directly to it, the most sensible policy response would seem to be a massive expansion of legal immigration quotas into a virtual open-door policy toward most of the countries currently supplying today's "illegals", and not to try to make what looks like an unfounded argument that getting rid of public schools and Workers' Comp would have an appreciable positive effect on attitudes toward immigration.

|4.10.06 @ 10:06PM|#

I second s. m. koppelman's opinion. There was no welfare state in the nineteenth century. So why all the riots, and the lynching directed against inmigrants?

Since we do not see Mexicans swinging from lamposts and being set on fire, nor Know-nothings complaing about Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, we can say that things have improved in that respect....

That may be an argument for the welfare state, that it tames down the Beast...