Trump's Tribal Immigration Policies Hit a Wall of Facts
America is not under siege.
President Trump and his myrmidons are in a state over the possibility that a "caravan" of somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 Latin Americans are heading north toward Mexico, and some percentage of them might travel so far as the United States. "Must build Wall," Trump tweeted about this the other day. Wall good! Hulk like Wall.
As of this writing, Trump has posted 10 tweets on immigration since the first of the month, which is the equivalent of a Ph.D. dissertation for anyone else. Like so many things the president utters, though, his immigration tweets are not on good terms with the truth.
He says the caravan and other migrants from the south represent a "massive inflow" of people. But border crossings have fallen sharply, and about the caravan a Border Patrol agent says: "Not to be flippant, but it's similar numbers to what we are seeing every day pretty much."
Trump says illegal aliens bring "drugs and crime." As Cato Institute scholar Alex Nowrasteh has pointed out, "The vast majority of research finds that immigrants do not increase local crime rates and that they are less likely to cause crime and less likely to be incarcerated than their native-born peers." Besides: A wall would do almost nothing to stanch the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S., most of which comes through legal ports of entry.
The president laments that "our country is being stolen!" This doesn't hold up under even a moment's scrutiny. In any other milieu, having more people join qualifies as a good thing. A thousand new members of the Republican Party? Sign them up. A record-breaking freshman class at State U.? All the better for State U.
The reverse is also true: Here in Virginia, it is cause for alarm that more people are moving out of the state than moving into it—and that has been the case for four years running. It is cause for alarm because a slow or negative rate of population growth impedes economic growth. Economic growth is a function of two factors: worker productivity and population. It is not surprising that Trump fails to grasp this, given his associated belief that Americans can be made better off by using tariffs to raise the price of things Americans want to buy.
More immigration is better for America economically for a second reason: Immigrants are more likely to start a business than native-born Americans. Harvard Business Review reports that "immigrants constitute 15 percent of the general U.S. workforce, but they account for around a quarter of U.S. entrepreneurs."
(Pre-emptive retort to rebuttals: While Trump lately has focused on illegal immigration, that focus is part of a general hostility to immigration overall: He supports proposals to cut legal immigration in half and to make it harder for refugees to obtain asylum, for instance.)
The president's fans like to echo his claim that "a nation without borders is not a nation at all." An editorial Tuesday in The Washington Examiner went so far as to contend that "border enforcement isn't any old aspect of law enforcement. Democratic self-determination and the rule of law hinge on it. … In a democratic nation, self-determination includes determining who is part of the nation. If we really believe in the ideas of the Enlightenment, then we have to believe in self-determining, democratic nations. That means we have to believe in immigration control."
The Enlightenment? Zowie.
Pause for a moment to unpack this. Sure, geographic limits help define a political entity. But it hardly follows that controlling who crosses those boundaries is a necessary condition for democracy and self-determination. If that were the case, then every one of America's 50 states would lack both.
States let people move freely across the border all the time. They don't issue visas. They don't require passports. They don't make buying a house or taking a job contingent on legal residency. And yet even states with large immigrant populations, such as California, New York, Florida, Arizona, and Texas, somehow manage to sustain vibrant democratic traditions. (The Enlightenment seems to be getting along OK, too.)
By Trump's tribalist logic, people who move from New York to Georgia are trying to "steal" Georgia, and Georgians would be much better off if they built a wall around the Peach State, slashed the number of people moving into it, and imposed steep taxes on anything made outside of it.
It's too bad we can't build a wall to protect America from that kind of foolishness.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Re: Dajjal,
I won’t question your sincerity the moment you advocate the same standard for anyone who dares beget children, that is: require them to sign an oath of loyalty to those principles lest they prefer to live with cats.
Intellectually lazy people push a moral code on to others by force as a prerequisite to their existence or staying, rather than burdening themselves with the difficult and messy process of convincing people through sound reasoning and argumentation. Why bother? We can just violate their rights if they don’t acquiesce!
Wow – do you hear that, OM? That’s the sound of the tables turning…..
I’m making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life.
This is what I do… http://www.onlinecareer10.com
I’m making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life.
This is what I do..look here more
http://www.richdeck.com
I am making $200 to $300 by simply working for just 3 hours on Facebook. It gives me an exceptionally well sum for every month. With this sum i can meet my costs effectively and easily. this work is such a great amount of simple for a client. the event that you appreciate my work then you can check my working points of interest by tapping the site join below
look here more http://www.richdeck.com
Start making extra cash from home and get paid weekly… By completing freelance jobs you get online… I do this three hr every day, for five days weekly and I earn in this way an extra $2500 each week… Go this web and start your work.. Good luck… http://www.jobs63.com
Sure, why don’t you go down to central america and convince them. Then there would be no reason to leave where they are. Good luck with that.
Re: John,
I don’t need to. If immigrants are attracted to the U.S. then logically they’re attracted to the same ideas.
Please stop showcasing your ignorance, John. There are plenty of reasons to migrate, the most important one being to improve the value of one’s labor. That’s why people move from state to state.
Who is Atta?
According to the government media military industrial Neo-Cohen complex conspiracy theory, he is one of the 19 men who somehow managed to take down 4 airliners, armed with box-cutters, while evading the multi-billion dollar air defenses of Leviathan.
Oh this is fucking precious. The illiterate Mexican retard too stupid to know who Mohammad Atta was and the basement dwelling weeb 9/11 Truther rushing to his defense.
“If immigrants are attracted to the U.S. then logically they’re attracted to the same ideas”
Ha!
Seriously though, that’s the dumbest kost obtuse comment in the history of the internet. It DOES NOT follow logically, they could just as logically be here for money, and not give two shits about ideology.
Start making extra cash from home and get paid weekly… By completing freelance jobs you get online… I do this three hr every day, for five days weekly and I earn in this way an extra $2500 each week…
Go this web and start your work.. Good luck… http://www.jobs63.com
Yes, because as we all know illegal immigrants in particular are more resistant to offers of free money than any other group.
They only come here for the freedom is hilarious. It assumes much about the inherent nature of immigrants vs. natives even while both are clearly the same species and thus have the same foibles.
Sorry OM, you wouldn’t recognize logic or intellectual consistency if it punched you in the gonads.
They only come here for the freedom is hilarious
Yes, adding the word “only” does that.
I don’t need to. If immigrants are attracted to the U.S. then logically they’re attracted to the same ideas.
I guess you could read ‘same idea’s’ to cover outright socialism since one of our two major political parties is essentially socialist…which gives certain anti-freedom immigrants some cover to make this statement true.
A large amount of people in our government don’t even support those things, why hold immigrants to a higher standard?
” I am no nativist and support immigration (which is currently net negative).”
Correction, the U.S. grants residency to over one million legal immigrants, yearly.
It is a lie that that many illegals go home – one promoted by the open borders crowd, like Cato.
people who move from New York to Georgia are trying to “steal” Georgia, and Georgians would be much better off if they built a wall around the Peach State
This might just be my wild imagination, but I’ll bet tons of people from Georgia would like this idea.
CO has certainly been blessed with having CA idiots move in and vote for the same asinine policies that fucked over CA. Ditto New England states getting Boston folks.
New Hampshire hears you.
Arizona hears him as well. It’s not too bad yet – we have a scary amount of guns here. 😉
Immigrants are more likely to start a business than native-born Americans. Harvard Business Review reports that “immigrants constitute 15 percent of the general U.S. workforce, but they account for around a quarter of U.S. entrepreneurs.”
When did 25% become greater than 75%?
Learn math.
Oh, sorry, Trumpista. You’re ‘special’.
Hey look, Captain Retard Pants showed up. How surprising.
Because immigrants are a small percentage of the population, for them to be 25% of U.S. entrepreneurs then a greater percentage of immigrants must be starting businesses relative to the rest of the population.
Don’t worry Mexi fry, us ‘Trumpistas’ are going to secure the border and Make America Great Again. Build the wall.. No more illegals.
You have a Trumptastic day.
I thought most immigrants overstayed visas.
They’re next.
One group of law-breakers, at a time.
That may be true, as far as it goes. Of course, the part you’re leaving out is that the immigrants that are starting businesses are from Asia and Europe, not South America and Africa.
I think we can safely cite this as an example of lying by omission.
I thought they were coming to do the jobs Americans don’t want to do? I guess Americans don’t want to start businesses.
See, it’s not just that, they keep leaving the word ‘illegal’ off.
What legal immigrants (we call them ‘Americans’) do isn’t the issue. At all.
It’s what ILLEGAL immigrants do that grinds people gears.
Yep. More legals, but no illegals.
More legals:
when the unemployment rate is zero and the workforce participation rate is 100%.
No immigration when there are Americans, available to work.
Now, if we could only eliminate the competition of free money for not working, that is offered to workers by the welfare system, that would improve.
Economic growth is a function of two factors: worker productivity and population.
So population going up isn’t the greatest thing in the world if productivity is going down, right?* Is that like making up for losing money on an item by selling more of that item?
*I’m sure some brilliant economist has run the numbers on productivity. That brilliant economist is not me.
Re: Spar… Whatever,
The only way possible productivity can go down in this economy is if all machines rusted shut instantly. Or if the Zombie Apocalypse fell upon us. Otherwise, you are asking for a severe thrashing, Trumpista.
Why do Trumpistas come here to showcase their economic incompetence?
I admire your capability to be a complete dolt.
Why do Trumpistas come here to showcase their economic incompetence?
It ain’t just Trump supporters who are economicus ignoramicus. Hildabots and Berniebots fit the bill as well. Hell, economic literacy is a rarity these days.
Re: sarcasmic,
Indeed but it has been of late that Trumpistas have elected to suspend any sense of self-respect and come tom these pages to spew economically-illiterate pap only because their fearless leader tweeted it last night. What amazes me is that they’re able to keep up with it.
Trumpistas
Any day now you’ll have rooted out all those pesky Trumpistas and the world will once again be safe for old Mexicans.
I appreciate your sentiment but I think Trumpistas will be here for a long time, along with cockroaches and COBOL.
COBOL? Nooooooo!
You and lc1789 should see if you can arrange some sort of winner-take-all Trumpistas vs lefties battle.
You and lc1789 should see if you can arrange some sort of winner-take-all Trumpistas vs lefties battle.
New brackets for Red Tony to run
Old Mexican hasn’t taken an economics class in their entire life, and to those who have it’s incredibly obvious.
Or if the Zombie Apocalypse fell upon us.
Out of curiosity, why do zombies always cause apocalypse? Everyone is smart enough to shoot/stab them in the head. I can never figure out how the problem gets completely out of control.
This is called the Zombie Paradox. It is why most zombie movies and shows are a clusterfuck of logic fallacies.
My son watches The Walking Dead and every time I see 5 guys mow down 100 zombies I think “just imagine what they could do with a tank”. There’s no way the world could be overrun.
Or a truck with spinning helicopter blades installed on the roof.
There is a tank in season 4. An M-60 Patton tank and it works. Like most of the show the other survivors are more of a problem than the zombies. It is used by “the governor” and his forces to attack and ultimately destroy the prison where Rick & Co. have taken refuge.
Besides while a tank would be a great thing to have it would only attract more zombies who would eventually swarm it leaving those inside trapped. This happens in season 1 with an armored personnel carrier.
Ok I am a zombie nerd.
Didn’t Walking Dead opine that since EVERYBODY who dies becomes one, then the graveyards would have zombies ambling out en masse?
I didn’t see it from the beginning so I don’t know if that’s the case. Or if they explained how the zombies managed to dig themselves out. Or how every dead body was well preserved enough to become a zombie.
That is how they explain the outbreak. The virus spreads rapidly and everyone is infected. You become a zombie if you die or are bitten. So the show begins with Rick waking up in a hospital which would be an obvious epicenter.
Because people have no idea what is happening or how to fight it at first the zombies could reach a critical mass quickly in population centers. Then it spreads from there.
The underlying question is will humanity survive, not just from the zombies but each other. Thus far it does not look like it.
They better learn to get along, settle,down, and start having babies soon or there won’t be. Another long term issue is if there are enough people left to maintain enough genetic diversity over generations for humanity to remain viable.
(A) I think you everestimate how many folks are genre-savvy.
(B) Yeah, the question of “how did this happen” is one that most zombie horror stories avoid because it’s
(i) complicated, and
(ii) often not a good dramatic story.
That said, while I’m not a big zombie-fan I did enjoy the book World War Z, which was written as a quasi “mockumentary”, detailing the (fake) rise and fall of a zombie apocalypse with relatively realistic government and social reactions to it. I believe there’s a movie based on the book, but I’ve never seen it and can’t recommend (or warn away from) it.
You might also like The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks (the son of Mel Brooks and he has his fathers sense of humor).
Nah. I’m close enough to a military research base. I’ll either be wiped out in the first wave (’cause they’re the source) or get sucked up into the totalitarian stronghold as they seize power.
Enjoyed that book and while I hate to be that guy that says “The book was better”, well, the book WAS better. The movie has almost no intersection with the book other than the title, and suffers for it.
Fav zombie book ever: Zone One by Colson Whitehead.
Which is a shame. If they’d gone as a collection of vignettes (similar to Pulp Fiction or Sin City) they could have at least stuck to the style of the book, even if they were making it more action-movie along the way.
The movie was all about Brad Pitt, single handedly saving the human race.
They paid lobbyists and Facebook to get gun control enacted before the first zombie strike.
The only way possible productivity can go down in this economy is if all machines rusted shut instantly. Or if the Zombie Apocalypse fell upon us. Otherwise, you are asking for a severe thrashing, Trumpista.
He posts at 12:24 pm on a workday.
Whatever the nature of the “caravan” the question remains as to why we should accept it as a given that Mexico should get to be merely a conduit for passing all those people coming from further south on up to the United States instead of Mexico granting them asylum in their own country?
Where is it written that the United States is supposed to be designated country to absorb everyone in Latin America who wants asylum?
That would be our own laws regarding who and why we grant Asylum to.
Can you tell us what particular US law regarding application for asylum mentions anything at all about illegal immigrants from South America passing through Mexico you retarded fucking faggot?
I say send them all to Canada.
I know, why stop the caravan’s momentum? Canada could just give them a good push up into the arctic. I hear it’s nice and toasty up there now.
If I were a billionaire, I would buy a bunch of houses in Trudeau’s neighborhood and move the caravan of people into his neighborhood. Giving them free housing there. I would also do the same thing in Beverly Hills or wherever all the progtard celebrities live.
Standard international law is that any state the refugee arrives at after the first is entitled to deport them back down the chain, basically because you’re only a refugee when you first escape wherever, after that you’re just a “migrant”.
I thought it was rather nervy of Mexico to claim they were “deporting” the people in the caravan, when all they did was tell them they had a couple of weeks to leave Mexico, and that leaving Mexico by way of the US border was fine. They really ARE acting with utter contempt towards the US, routinely, on this subject.
If all it takes to become a “refugee” is to state that my home country is a shithole, then most of the world would be considered to be “refugees”.
Economic growth is a function of two factors: worker productivity and population
That is just retarded. Economic growth is entirely independent of population. You can have economic growth without any population increase or even a decrease. Moreover, wealth and standard of living often have an inverse relationship to population.
Reason seems to be incapable of having an honest discussion about the subject of immigration. They will deny any fact and misrepresent any principle of economics to further their point of view. As someone who objects to open borders, I increasingly see reason as an ally in the cause, because if it were a false flag operation whose purpose was to make open borders advocates look dishonest and stupid, it wouldn’t act any differently than it is.
Re: John,
And you’re basing that piece of economic ignorance on…. what, exactly?
What do you think people produce stuff for, John, if not to trade it with others? And if there are LESS people to trade with than more, where is then the economic growth coming from? Please, explain it to me, in a way that doesn’t sound retarded.
Economic growth is the product of increased production of goods and services. You can get that by increasing the productivity of the people you have. You don’t necessarily need to increase your population to have economic growth.
Moreover, adding population does not necessarily increase your standard of living. It depends on what kind of population you add. Add people who consume more than they produce and your standard of living and wealth goes down. Add people who maybe produce as much as they consume, your standard of living might not go down but in a world where social services like schools are available to all, the quality of those services very well may go down because they are diluted and your quality of life with it. It just depends on who shows up.
You are just pig ignorant Mexican. and you are a racist on top of that. Don’t comment on economics. You don’t know anything and have no interest in learning. I have seen you rape this subject enough.
It is true. Mexican is quite honest in his belief Hispanics as a group is superior to other groups. He is just another tribalist. And the fact that he thinks population growth is a necessary component of economic growth makes his ignorance of economics self-evident.
It’s just funny that you make a racist statement in the same sentence in which you accuse someone of being a racist. Don’t ever change.
What racist statement did I make? Show your work doofus.
You called him a pig ignorant Mexican.
That is a description. I said he was pig ignorant and a Mexican. Saying that doesn’t say anything about other Mexicans. It just says Old Mexican is dumb as a post and a Mexican. So that wasn’t racist. He calls himself a Mexican. So I don’t see how saying he is a Mexican can be racist.
So, try again.
Ok, John, go up to your nearest black co-worker and call him a “dumb black guy.” See how long it is before you are having a talk with human resources.
If the guy is stupid and walks around calling himself “old black guy”, I don’t see where he will have anything to complain about other my calling him stupid.
Just because you are a tribalist and think that Mexican because he is a sacred Mexican can’t be held to the same intellectual standards as an actual human being doesn’t mean I am. the fact that he is a Mexican doesn’t make it any less obvious how stupid he is.
But he didn’t do that. You added the letter “a” which turns it into an epithet, when all John did was shorten his screenname.
You owe John an apology.
No I don’t. My interpretation is much funnier.
“You called him a pig ignorant Mexican.”
No he didn’t.
“You are just pig ignorant Mexican”
Mexicans are not a race.
Elias,
Don’t go getting all “facty” about this argument.
This is like the pot calling the kettle… white?
This is like the pot calling the kettle… white?
Dammit! I just snorted Pepsi out my nose!
Re: John,
The Soviet Union produced many goods and services. It did it for decades. Paul Samuelson really thought the Soviet Union would overtake the US in GDP by 1990.
Merely producing stuff is not the measure of economic growth. The measure is the increase of WEALTH, and WEALTH only comes by an increase in TRADES – that is, with more people, not less people.
Sure, but WHAT FOR?
You keep insisting on OBVIATING the number one reason why people produce things in excess of their consumption: TO TRADE, with OTHERS.
Gawd-damned, John! You’re on fire today! Not only am I a pig but a collectivist pig (racism is a collectivist political view) one to boot! Wow!
I don’t “comment”. I argue sound economics.
The Soviet Union produced many goods and services. It did it for decades.
Sure it did. And the Soviet Union was not devoid of wealth. The Soviet Union’s problem was that many of the goods were such that they didn’t add any value to the materials that they were made from. The other problem it had was that even when it did, the flaws of central planning and communism meant they didn’t produce enough. The Soviet Union was poor because it didn’t produce enough goods and services to make it wealthy. No shit. God you are stupid.
People produce goods and services because they are in demand. But supply also creates demand. it is called Saye’s Law. Adding people to an economy makes an economy larger, but it doesn’t necessarily make it wealthier. It just depends on who you add. And if you don’t add anyone, the economy can still get wealthier because the people you do have get more productive.
You are just stupid Mexican. How much more can you embarrass yourself here? I am a little embarrassed for you. How do believe this bullshit? Did you ever go to college and take anything other than the C you got in conversational Spanish?
John, I know you borrowed that last line from Cheech and Chong.
Mexican Americans go to night school and take Spanish and get a C.
Cheech Marin is a comic genius.
Another point the Mexican retard misses is that his fellow cockroaches don’t produce anything in excess of their consumption. Their purchasing power is sub-subsistence level and supplemented by billions of dollars in transfer payments from the productive class. They are growing the GDP by precisely as much as the government has to spend to keep them fat and happy.
This is why someone said that we are a people, not an economy. Most Americans care about the average income, not the total GDP. The total GDP matters the most to politicians who see it as the pie they get to take a slice from through taxation.
I know being a Mexican your IQ is about 18 points lower on average but there’s this thing called “international trade” where your trading partners don’t have to be subsistence laborers living in the same neighborhood as you. It’s how a country like Italy with half the population of Mexico can have nearly twice the GDP.
The scarcest resource for economic productivity is human capital. As in people. When people moved from the farms to the cities, that human capital allowed for industry to thrive. Everyone put out of work by automation is now available to do something new. Another way to increase human capital, and thus increase productivity, is to increase population. You seem to operate under the assumption that there are a fixed number of jobs out there. It’s not a zero-sum game, dude.
The scarcest resource for economic productivity is human capital.
No it’s not. And human capital is a product of the volume and the quality. Adding untrained workers does not increase the quality of your human capital or solve any shortage of it beyond a shortage of unskilled workers if there is such a thing, which there almost never is.
Not every immigrant is an addition to the economy. Some are and some are not. And some more than others. To pretend they all are is just as stupid as saying they are all criminals and welfare queens.
I’m sorry John, but you need to study up a bit on economics.
No I don’t. You need to shut the fuck up and use your head and learn something. You are not a stupid person. But you allow your politics to make you stupid. The facts of the labor market are what they are.
I bet John is close to throwing shit at his monitor in his cubicle at DHS.
I bet John is close to throwing shit at his monitor in his cubicle at DHS.
I’m sure he’s had to wipe spittle off it at least twice since posting on this article.
Whether he is or not, he’s right. That appears to really bother some folks around here.
Project much? I’m simply stating some basic rules of economics. You’re the one who is allowing your politics to make you stupid. You have such a blind hatred of immigrants that you want to rewrite economics textbooks to justify your politics.
You forgot to yell Strawman Sarcasmic. Make a sensible response to my point and I will get back to you. Otherwise, there is nothing else to say to you because you seem incapable of saying something that is worthy of response.
K, John-boy. I never really thought of you as an economicus ignoramicus, but it seems your politics and hatred of immigrants has turned you into such.
More like the obsession with open borders has destroyed the common sense of so many here.
Not every immigrant is an addition to the economy.
Show me where I made that argument.
To pretend they all are is just as stupid as saying they are all criminals and welfare queens.
If I felt like looking I believe I could show you where you made that argument.
Untrained workers can be trained. Were you always trained at what you do?
Yes some are criminals. Yes some go on welfare. Others work very hard. Some start businesses.
My point was that you need people to produce stuff. You can get more people producing stuff in two ways: by freeing them from other work, or by increasing the population.
If you deny that then you’re simply being willfully ignorant of basic economics in order to justify your blind hatred of brown people from south of the border.
Can you get a new move Sarcasmic. If not every immigrant is an addition to the economy, you just conceded my argument. So now that I won the argument, go away.
If not every immigrant is an addition to the economy, you just conceded my argument.
Not every immigrant adding to the economy negates the argument that you need human capital to produce stuff? Seriously?
You go completely off the rails on this subject, and become downright hostile to anyone who doesn’t completely agree with you.
Why are you so emotionally involved in this? Did a Mexican rape your wife or something?
“Not every immigrant adding to the economy negates the argument that you need human capital to produce stuff? Seriously?”
Seriously, the US not being a lifeless wasteland, the fact that you need human capital to produce stuff really has no immediate implications for immigration. We HAVE human capital, and the amount of it necessary for a certain amount of production isn’t fixed.
Untrained workers can be trained. Were you always trained at what you do?
The problem with your assumption here sarcasmic is this supposition that anyone can be trained to anything. We know this is not true. There are plenty of stats to show that when factory workers lose their jobs and “retrain” they do not fair that well on average.
You have physical limits. We all do. Part of that is your intellectual capacity and ability to be retrained. No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to take a bunch of 80IQ folks–regardless of where they are from–and retrain them to surgeons. IQ plays a lot into this equation. And we are eliminating low IQ work at a rapid pace.
If you lose 1,000,000 jobs to automation, and another 1,000,000 open up somewhere else in the economy–which is NOT a given–it will mean little if the group unemployed can’t physically hack the work.
The problem with your assumption here sarcasmic is this supposition that anyone can be trained to anything.
I never said that. The assertion I was responding to was that you can’t allow untrained immigrants into the country because they will never gain any skills ever, and will always be a drag on society.
Sarcasmic, the immigrants you are talking about are from populations with an average IQ of 80-85.
They aren’t going to retrain to surgeons or masters of tech. They are going to (by and large) be unskilled / low-skilled workers for life.
Thank you for pointing this out. I often wonder why people (immigrants or otherwise) are seen as static entities.
For one thing, most immigrants tend to be fairly young. We’re not talking 80-year-olds who are stuck in their ways. I would not only expect them to learn new skills and at least desire to makes some kind of career for themselves, but I would also not expect them to have some set-in-stone political beliefs they’ve imported from the old country. For one thing, if they loved the politics in the old country (and more importantly, if those politics actually worked for them) they probably wouldn’t be leaving in the first place!
I have a several friends who, independently of one another, immigrated from Venezuela in the mid-20s to mid-30s. Every single one of them is intelligent, ambitious, very friendly, freedom-loving, and genuine nice. I finally asked one of them what’s up with this. “Is everyone like that in Venezuela, or is it just the good ones that leave and the crappy people are the ones that elect to stay?” He told me that it’s pretty much the latter.
Re: Kivlor,
a) You can’t know that for a fact and b) that’s not what sarcasmic is saying. He’s saying that untrained WORKERS can be trained.
So? And?
What the…. Who the FUCK is saying that, you bloviating fool? Where has anyone said that? The fact of the matter is that it is not conducive for a growing economy to have people of IQs of 130 doing menial tasks only because you prefer not to allow people of lower IQs enter the market. You, just like the rest of the economically-incompetent Trumpistas, ignore or choose to ignore Division of Labor, Specialization and Comparative Advantage. The influx of unskilled labor RELEASES the more skilled labor for more PROFITABLE endeavors. P-R-O-F-I-T-A-B-L-E. You prefer to obviate that concept because of your misguided chauvinism.
Okay, what percentage of menial tasks in the US are performed by 130I+Q individuals? Wanna take a guess?
I’m going to go with “a very small fraction” for $10,000. Because we have plenty of evidence that IQ is the BEST indicator for individual income. Sure, some of us don’t work in fields that put our brains to the test for other reasons, but that’s a rarity. And it has to be the case because we make up ~2% of the population.
Re: Kivlor,
Wanna take a guess that most have to clean their homes themselves and thus waste their talents because house cleaning labor is rather UNAFORDABLE because of xenophobic Trumpista assholes?
USE YOUR BRAINS for once.
**** DIVISION OF LABOR
**** SPECIALIZATION
**** COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
So FUCKING what? So what? So WHAT? So WHAT if IQ is an indicator of whatever the fucking point you’re trying to make with such level of clumsiness. So fucking what?
Non Sequitur. You’re not even trying to make a point. Make a point!
Wanna take a guess that most have to clean their homes themselves and thus waste their talents because house cleaning labor is rather UNAFORDABLE because of xenophobic Trumpista assholes?
Intelligent people choosing to make their beds is BAD because they could be producing more for the economy if they didn’t have to waste their time. Right. You realize people don’t exist to serve the economy, right? Jesus, and they call me authoritarian.
OM, just go home. You’re making a fool of yourself. The point about IQ was very clear, but sadly it sailed over your low-IQ brain. It’s to be expected. I mean, you’re proudly proclaiming you come from such a population.
Wanna take a guess that most have to clean their homes themselves and thus waste their talents because house cleaning labor is rather UNAFORDABLE because of xenophobic Trumpista assholes?
I’m sorry but this argument is really, really, REALLY stupid. To say that intelligent people should be hiring low-skill, low-wage workers to clean house so they can do something better with their time is just out there. I suppose they shouldn’t be tending their own gardens either.
Oh look the stupid Mexican is raging and becoming hysterical. Way to fight those stereotypes. Now get back to cleaning the shit off my boots and maybe I’ll vote to increase your welfare check.
“If you deny that……..”
It’s not about denying anything. It’s about making immigration work for us and our needs, not whatever any foreigner that feels like coming here wants. Shit tons of foreigners want to ctake me here. MYou got as well cherry pick based on what benefits us.
Re: John,
YES, it is. The very reason why shipwrecked people in deserted islands are on the verge of starvation is because they can’t do everything at the same time. The more people you have, the higher the rate of SPECIALIZATION and DIVISION OF LABOR.
You must be jesting.
What in carnations are you talking about? Are you even considering what you’re saying? If it were true that adding laborers to the pool of labor makes NO difference if the labor is “unskilled”, tell that to all those entrepreneurs who cannot find enough labor to clean homes, take care of old people, mown lawns, etc. Even if unskilled, labor is PRODUCTIVE. If your concern is about this “quality” of labor, why not then advocate for mass sterilization of the unskilled and less intelligent? Why, they’re a burden and not an asset!
You also ignore the effect of Comparative Advantage. You ignore the effects of Division of Labor. You ignore Specialization. The more people you have, the more you can break down tasks to simper components thus INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY.
Not every child is. Not every dog is cuddly and tame. So fucking what?
John has decided that none of the classic rules of economics apply, because they conflict with his politics.
Rather than reconsider his politics, he has concluded that the entire dismal science needs to be tossed out and rewritten from scratch. With the basic premise being “Mexicans are bad.”
Not really. You’ve decided that none of the classic rules of economics (or even logic) applies because they interfere with your politics. Labor is affected by supply and demand just like everything else my dude.
Here’s the part that makes me laugh. I’ve never stated my opinion on immigration. You don’t know what my politics are. You just assume that because I’m stating basic rules of economics that conflict with the “IMMIGRANTS ARE GOING TO DESTROY THE COUNTRY” narrative, that I must want open borders.
So are you admitting that immigrants affect the labor supply? That adding millions of people to the labor market will depress wages ceteris parabis?
It can depress wages. That’s why minimum wage laws were created. Uppity blacks were immigrating north and taking good union jobs from good white people. So wise politicians who understood basic economics introduced a price floor for labor that was above what the unskilled blacks could command. The result was as intended – it kept those good jobs secure for good white people and made sure those uppity blacks stayed unemployed.
True story.
Sarcasm aside, the economy is not static. There are not a fixed number of jobs. Adding millions of people to the labor market can result in even more jobs, when you consider that these people are consumers as well. They’re going to buy stuff. They’re going to have new demands that will need to be accommodated. They’re going to produce stuff as well. Some will start businesses.
Immigration can be a good thing.
In economics, we usually take changes one at a time, holding all else constant. So, changing the labor supply by a few million people, who will mostly congregate at the lower end of jobs due to the IQ of the population we are discussing, it logically follows that they will in fact depress wages, yes?
This doesn’t mean immigration can never be a good thing. Something no one is arguing here.
Dude, I agreed with you. It has happened before. The solution then was to price the undesirables out of work. Now it seems that the solution is to close the border.
But it is really a problem? Don’t lower labor costs translate to lower prices for consumers?
Low end jobs aren’t supposed to be careers that allow you to buy a home and raise a family. For most they are a stepping stone. Lowering wages actually makes it easier to gain entry and get that first job. With that job comes experience that gives the person the ability to get a better job. Gotta start somewhere.
Low end jobs aren’t supposed to be careers that allow you to buy a home and raise a family. For most they are a stepping stone.
Yeah the Mexican illiterate in both Spanish and English who picks your fruit for 8 cents a bushel is going to move up in the company and become CEO one day.
Jesus fucking Christ you people are stupid. It would be uproariously funny if it wasn’t so goddamned sad. You are basically the embodiment of the phrase “there’s nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge”.
In economics, we usually take changes one at a time, holding all else constant. So, changing the labor supply by a few million people, who will mostly congregate at the lower end of jobs due to the IQ of the population we are discussing, it logically follows that they will in fact depress wages, yes?
Yes, but even more predictable is that those who can’t find a job will by default be reliant on welfare, likely through fraud who’s punishment consists of ‘try again later’, or black market labor that ironically competes with the already extant black market American labor who’s punishment is prison.
Ask any handyman, carpenter, or low-to-mid skilled laborer that does jobs off the book who isn’t an illegal immigrant what they think of illegal immigrants in their trade. You won’t like the answer. One of the big unspokens is that illegal immigrant labor is in direct competition with American labor for the black market, which is pretty much hand-waved away along with any other labor policy consideration.
Adding millions of people to the labor market can result in even more jobs, when you consider that these people are consumers as well.
Not when their consumption is driven by transfer payments. 1/3 of working age Americans don’t have jobs and are collecting the dole. Bringing in millions more uneducated pieces of shit to leech off the system is not a remedy. Your problem is that you’re nearly as stupid as the retarded Mexican and you both can’t visualize an economic model with more than 2 inputs or outputs. The examples provided in basic economic texts are not complete models. They’re dramatically simplified to help idiots like you understand basic concepts.
Here’s the part that makes me laugh. I’ve never stated my opinion on immigration.
Yeah it’s not like you’ve been posting here for 10 years regurgitating the Reason line about immigration or anything.
Re: John,
What would be an honest discussion look like, John, when you come here and pretty much inform everyone that you prefer to say the biggest economic whoppers since Marx and his merry band of Marxians.
You make me laugh.
If population growth didn’t improve the economy, then slowly dying societies would be living a bonanza the likes of which not even God has seen, which is of course NOT the case if one looks at France or Japan or any country that is turning itself into a giant nursing home.
You are a racist retard Mexican. You understand nothing about economics. You just don’t. Anyone who supports free markets and understand economics should be embarrassed by you. Seriously, just go post on a prog site where everyone else is just as retarded as you and you will be more accepted. Stop fucking wasting space here with your ignorance, racism, Hispanic tribalism and stupidity. It is long since stopped being entertaining and is now just pathetic.
John, he’s not worth it. Not much better than the Pantomime Hihn in fact. Just another weasel progtard, like Tony to AmSoc. He will never combed a point, no matter how concise your argument is or how sounded your facts.
You know, the claim of Japan’s demise is much exaggerated OM. Although population matters, it is not the end-all.
Re: Kivlor,
Ever heard of the Lost Decade?
I didn’t say it was the “end all”. Read my comments. Population matters because it increases YOUR chances for more TRADES. Trade IS the end-all, be-all of excess production (i.e. production above your satisfaction point). That is what you, John and many a Trumpista is ignoring or CHOOSING to ignore.
Immigrants offer a great value to an economy because they bring two good arms and a mind for work, compared to babies. If you were so concerned about population, you would rather advocate for mass sterilization and zero-growth policies because Them Childrunz Takum Er Jebz and to boot they don’t produce anything the first 16 years of their lives. Right?
If you were so concerned about population, you would rather advocate for mass sterilization and zero-growth policies because Them Childrunz Takum Er Jebz and to boot they don’t produce anything the first 16 years of their lives. Right?
Um… no. You are retarded. Jesus.
Japan is not falling apart because of its decreasing population. That doesn’t mean that their nation couldn’t do better if their people chose to have more kids on average. Besides, almost no one attributes the Lost Decade (or even the Lost Score) to population decline. It’s attributed to an economic bubble, which burst, combined with government policies aimed at preventing a second bubble, and the choice of Japanese companies to not borrow further, but pay down debt rapidly instead.
Your weird rant about children is nonsensical. Nowhere was there a coherent point, nor was any of it related to the topic at hand. But it does indicate the nasty authoritarian streak that runs in you.
What would be an honest discussion look like,
How about differentiating between legal and illegal immigration, just for a start?
Mexico has 125 million people and a GDP 4 times lower than Japan. Try to wrap your Mexican brain about that one and get back to us.
How economic growth is defined is not a settled issue.
The GDP formula that is usually cited includes government spending.
And government spending merely consists of forced transfer payments and that is no metric of economic prosperity.
Every dollar that government takes by force and spends on something prevents whoever previously had that wealth from doing whatever he or she would have done with it otherwise and the economic result of what would have been. That is the opportunity cost and there is precious little evidence that the value of whatever government does with the wealth it takes ever exceeds the value of what would have been created with that wealth if it had not done so.
Sure but that has nothing to do with the economics or wisdom of immigration.
You have to know how economic prosperity is actually measured before you can determine how any particular factor is going to influence it one way or another.
How you define prosperity is a value question. That being said, I think wealth is an objective term. And it is the sum total of every good and service you produce. So, I agree with you that government spending is not a creator of wealth. It is an expression of the wealth other people create. We have a big government because our private sector creates enough wealth for us to be able to afford one.
“And yet even states with large immigrant populations, such as California, New York, Florida, Arizona, and Texas, somehow manage to sustain vibrant democratic traditions. (The Enlightenment seems to be getting along OK, too.)”
California ? Really, I’m sure Robert A. Heinlein used California as an example of how a well run democracies is as rare as well run tyrannies, in his book Friday. It seems California has been doing everything to live up to the stupidly shown in the book. Which is one reason why Libertarians tend to support constitutional republic with strong limits on government or anarchy.
There are so many layers of fallacy there. since when is the single party prog dictatorship that is California a good example of democracy? Even if it were, that doesn’t mean it is that way because of immigrants. Maybe it is in spite of immigrants.
If hosting Central American immigrants is so conducive to democracy, why does Central America have such a horrible track record in having and maintaining democracies? Don’t the people in those places have something to do with that?
Speaking of fallacies….Central America included shithole countries because of the government’s there. You should know it is not so easy for people to change their government. Especially when most of them live near subsistence levels of income.
Who runs the governments there? Aliens? The governments are what they are because the societies are such that they produce such governments. God damn you people are fucking bullheaded and stupid.
Ok, then I don’t want to hear you complain about the US government ever again.
Our government like every other government sucks. But to the extent that it doesn’t suck as bad as the one in Honduras, it is because we have a society and culture that doesn’t suck as bad as the one there.
You people bitch and moan about how our government won’t stop spending because people want something for free. Okay, that is true. Our government spends because our society wants it to and the government is ultimately an expression of the society it rules. Now apply that logic to Central America and get back to me.
“and the government is ultimately an expression of the society it rules”
Even for dictatorships?
Yes. Those dictatorship don’t arise from nowhere. They are filled with people who support them and do the dirty work of making them function.
So when dictators oppress the people, they do so because the people want to be oppressed? The Soviet people WANTED gulags and KGB secret police?
This is such an absurdly reductionist view of government.
Yes in any government, democratic or not, there are always some people who support what the government does. But the existence of some people supporting tyranny does not mean that ALL people, or even a “general public will”, supports tyranny.
And I must say it is somewhat amusing to see you of all people adopting the Democrat Party’s slogan of “Government is just another word for the things that we do together”, except just applied to shithole countries.
Government is the product of your society. If your government sucks, it is because the people who live in the country allowed it to be that way.
What part of “people get the government they deserve” do you not understand. Moreover, pointing that fact out does not give the government any legitimacy or say it is a good thing. So what I am saying is in no way analogous to the slogan you are quoting, which implies that government is some good thing.
Try again, because your logic and arguments here are really stupid. When Fransisco is agreeing with you, chances are you have said something really thick headed.
“If your government sucks, it is because the people who live in the country allowed it to be that way.”
So in the former Soviet Union, the existence of gulags and the KGB was an expression of the people’s will, and not a tool used by a repressive regime for controlling the people. Got it. Because the people didn’t *need* controlling by the gulags! They would have signed up for it all on their own!
Do you not realize how absurd you sound?
Why did Russia have the USSR? That is a great question. Maybe the fact that Russia had a long history of despotic governments and society and culture that tolerated and supported them had something to do with that? The Communist Government in the USSR was actually quite popular through most of its history. The didn’t build all of those Gulags with alien labor. They didn’t staff those secret police forces with people from Mars. The USSR existed because a critical mass of people within Russia decided that totalitarian communism was the way to a better future. Only afterward when they had to answer for their crimes was it suddenly no one knew who supported communism. Kind of like no one in Germany was actually in a Nazi.
You morons act like governments exist outside of the societies that create them. Sorry dude, life isn’t that simple.
You are ridiculous, John. The existence of gulags was never on the ballot in the Soviet Union. The KGB was never on the ballot. For you to say that they were a product of the general public will is offensive and absurd.
“The didn’t build all of those Gulags with alien labor. They didn’t staff those secret police forces with people from Mars.”
No, the gulags were built with conscripted labor, and the secret police forces were staffed by a small minority of citizens, some of whom were true-believer Communists (but many were not), who were able to use terror to keep the citizens in line.
Taking your argument to its conclusion, what is your justification for the existence of Second Amendment rights for the purposes of resisting government tyranny? If the government decides to become (more) tyrannical, wouldn’t that be just an expression of what the people want? Wouldn’t it be wrong, in that case, for gun owners to try to resist that tyranny? They’d be resisting the general will of the public!
Actually, the two of you, John and chemjeff, are simultaneously making good points while talking past each other on the USSR.
Solzhenitsyn covered the topic as well as anybody.
Whether it was in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or in another writing, he made the point that if, only if, a group of men and women in an apartment building would decide to do something about those midnight knocks and had ambushed Beria’s boys, things might have been different.
Yes Mike he did. And the fact that those people didn’t stand up reflects very poorly on Russian society and makes Russian society share in the responsibility for the crimes of the USSR.
Wait, so because your typical Russian citizen didn’t risk death by standing up to the KGB during Soviet rule, that is equivalent to arguing that the KGB enjoyed the support of the general will of the people? Not risking death is equivalent to voting in favor??
Yeah, and if those immigrants from Central America come here, then they will corrupt our society and people will want our government to spend more. Oh wait.
You’re both right. Government is a product of a society, and this does not reflect well on American society.
Just saying that it’s not an ‘either or’, more like ‘we’re doomed regardless’.
Those who want wide open borders are just accelerating the process, which some people clearly think it a better scenario. Maybe they’re right, or maybe they’re wrong, but the rest of the world is decidedly illiberal and growing more so every year (at least in the aggregate, there are exceptions obviously).
Only the most abject of retard can’t see the problem with unlimited immigration in an expansive welfare state. Seriously, those people are retarded. Period. If this isn’t your opinion than obviously this does not apply to you, but they are out there. Old Mexican is one, for sure.
It seems anyplace that came from a Spanish colony is a shithole of some sort.
That includes Florida, so I might be onboard with this thesis.
Do you think there was some election where “dictatorship” and “non-dictatorship” was on the ballot, and the people chose “dictatorship”?
Well, if I believed that y’all believed what you say, then yeah. 2012 and 2016.
This is an excellent article on so many levels. Well written, full of facts, on the right side of economic truth and libertarian principles, and highly entertaining as well.
Bart is awesome, I’ve always liked his style as well.
It’s always weird to me when someone insists that illegals commit less crime than citizens. How on earth does that make bringing in more crime okay?
It also ignores that the rate of committing crimes is, by definition, 100%.
You know, the whole “illegals” thing and all.
If you exclude crimes, the rate of committing crimes can be made exceptionally low.
So let’s ban poor people from having kids, because some of them will surely turn out to be criminals.
Exterminating 30 million black babies since Roe v. Wade has coincided with a huge decrease in crime rates.
That pretty much sums up their logic here, “any immigrant is a good thing and an addition to society>” That stupidity of that statement speaks for itself. But that is what these people believe.
What’s the rape of thousands of women and kids in comparison to getting the option to buy falafels? Small price to pay, I’d say.
Can’t fault that logic. Sure, I don’t want my son to get raped. But I bet the food they make is really, really good so it’s a wash…
We should really thank them for enriching us with our culture. Our habits, traditions and ways are really no better than theirs. Besides that, we really don’t have a culture. But at least they do.
Eventually, your underage daughter will learn to enjoy being made into a Muzzie sex slave. And if that wasn’t the future you wanted for her, too bad. She has to be given to them, for diversity.
They’re the worst!
> Burpeedoo whizbang!
It’s almost like reality works differently than Reason’s ideology or something.
In other news, Trumps approval over 50%, which makes him officially “democracy.”
Now, why are all these sick authoritarians out there, trying to use the criminal justice system to take out their political opponents?
Sad.
It is just sad to see how quickly we in this country have gone from “All people yearn to be free”, to “Some people just don’t deserve freedom”.
All people don’t yearn to be free. If they did, the world wouldn’t be so unfree in so many places. You don’t read much or know much about history do you?
Because they choose where they are born and what political system they grow up in. Gotcha.
That has nothing to do with anything. People don’t necessarily long to be free. Most people don’t actually. Just because they want to come to the US doesn’t mean they long to be free. They may just want a job and to be just as unfree or more than they ever have been. importing people from other cultures is no guarantee of making your society free. Depending on the culture, it can make your society a lot less free.
So some people don’t deserve freedom. Got it.
That is the core concept behind prisons and churches, yes.
“Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.” – William Blake
Some people don’t want freedom. Again you really don’t know much do you?
So some people don’t deserve freedom. Got it.
Especially spics and towel-heads.
People who bring authoritarian attitudes do not deserve freedom.
People who bring authoritarian attitudes do not deserve freedom.
Does that include everyone who voted for Trump or Hillary?
‘Deserve’ and ‘want’ are not at all the same thing.
You really bought into the whole “the terrorists hate our freedom” bit from the George W. Bush crowd, didn’t you?
That has nothing to do with anything. Most people in history haven’t been too interested in freedom. Freedom is the exception to the human condition, not the rule. If anything, most people in history haven’t had the security to even worry about freedom. You have to be alive before you can worry about how free you are.
People long for lots of things. Freedom is one of those things but it is hardly the most common or even common at all.
Because libertarian principles are the *right principles* that means all people inherently desire to be libertarians. The ones who live in authoritarian, corrupt, and violent communities are products of circumstance. The magic air made their countries bad, and when they can breathe the pure libertarian air of America they’ll be just like us. That’s why we can’t exclude them.
If mankind cannot be trusted with liberty, then it suggests that the correct state of mankind is in bondage, being told by someone else what to do. So throw out this whole democracy nonsense, bring back kings!
It certainly appears to be the natural state of mankind. You and I may not like that fact, but it seems indisputable.
Agreed. Those who favor liberty for both themselves and others are in the minority while most prefer bondage. Just don’t make the bondage too explicit, since no one likes to believe they are in that category.
It’s why limits on the authority of our government was considered mandatory, and why even the forefathers appeared well aware of the fact that democratic societies are doomed to revolve back into authoritarianism even if only through the tyranny of the majority.
In fact, this is the explicit reason why America is not a democratic state.
Then it’s time to even give up even the pretense of liberty, then, right? Why even have a Constitution or natural rights theory or any of the rest? We are all destined to be serfs to a central regime which knows what is best for us. Why fight for liberty at all?
I agree with you, Escher.
But to the closed-border crowd it sure sounds like they aren’t big fans of liberty, because genuine liberty means accepting foreigners, and they don’t want that. So what is the virtue that they place higher than liberty? Is it just abject tribalism?
genuine liberty means accepting foreigners
Nice question begging.
“Genuine love means nonconsensual sex in the ass”
I’d argue that yes, most people “yearn to be free”. However few people “yearn for others of lesser social and economic standing to be free”. The conditions that limit and restrict freedom are seldom imposed from the ground-up.
yes, they are. You just have spent your life in a western society and don’t understand how free you actually are. Go to a non western society in the Middle East or Asia sometime and you will find out that not only are restrictions on freedom imposed from the ground up, the ones that are are often much worse than those that come from the top. There are societies that are horribly repressive and unfree. And they are that way because the people who live in them like it that way. I honestly can’t understand how people cannot understand that.
Like what? Are you now going to claim that cultural behavioral expectations corresponds to deprivations of freedom?
Like what? Go to Afghanistan sometime. Go to rural India. go to Saudi Arabia or Iraq. Go to Egypt. The average guy on the street in Cairo is totally fine with a society that imprisons women guilty of adultery and has the death penalty for homosexuality. They like a culture with very traditional values and strict mores.
You will think nothing of ranting and raving about the evil Fundies out in flyover country and how they are a threat to all that is right and good. do you think they are the only people in the world who are not interested a society with the level of freedom in the world? Do you not understand how tame they are compared to most of the people in the world?
Have you ever been anywhere? Seriously? I don’t mean going to Europe and seeing the Louvre. I mean going to places that are truly different than the US. If you have, how the fuck did you not notice how different the people were in these places? And if you have not, understand what a yokul you are.
I agree that people will often vote to take freedom away from OTHERS, and it’s not limited to foreign countries. But show me the gay guy living in a Muslim country who says “yeah I’m totally fine with having the death penalty imposed upon me”.
yeah I’m totally fine with having the death penalty imposed upon me”.
That guy is totally fine with imposing the death penalty on people who do things he finds objectionable. He wants a society where people are punished and prohibited from doing things that he thinks are sinful. He doesn’t want a free society. Not wanting to be free does not mean you are suicidal. And wanting people punished for doing things you don’t like doesn’t mean you really want to do them yourself and not be punished. Not everyone is a hypocrite. Lots of people really believe and practice the things they say. Since we live in a society and culture full of hypocrites it is sometimes easy to forget that a lot of people really do mean what they say.
Basically you’re describing Tony. Who wants to be free to indulge perversions, but wants t oppress and control anyone who is t like him or thinks different thoughts.
I imagine most of the places you have in mind are places where I’d literally be a criminal, so no thanks.
That said, you missed my point: wanting to be (personally) “free” is not the same as wanting everyone to be “free”. The guy that cheats on his wife probably still gets hurt and offended if he finds out his wife is also cheating on him.
So sure. Folks oppress each other plenty. Not arguing that. But they aren’t doing that because they don’t *personally* want to be free. They’re doing it because they don’t want *others* to be free. Big difference.
Exactly. Freedom for me but not for thee.
Given the opposition here to “nation-building”, this seems like really weak virtue-signalling. If everybody yearns to be free, then wouldn’t Bush have been one of the greatest men in history for trying to do that for Iraq and Afghanistan?
Or do you just want some people from those terrible places to be free?
That is a good point Damikec. When talking about the Middle East and Bush’s wars, the reasonites are all about how crazy and stupid Bush was to try and create Democracy where no one wanted it. But let those same people immigrate to the US and it is assumed that they love democracy and yearn for freedom, pot, robocars and food trucks.
It is just comical.
You are just assuming everyone is a hypocrite. And they are not. Lots of people mean what they say and are fine with their freedom being curtailed because it is being curtailed in ways that just prohibit them from doing things they don’t want to do in the first place.
Think of the drug warriors in this country. They hate drugs and would never use them. So they are fine with giving up their freedom to use drugs.
Is that better or worse then assuming everyone is a sheep?
I am not assuming everyone is sheep. I am assuming just the opposite. I am assuming that people have a will of their own and that there is no guarantee they want the same kind of world I do. And when they say they don’t, they generally mean it.
I don’t understand how people get the idea that everyone in the world would want to live in a free society if only they had the opportunity. No. Some would. But a lot would not. Most would want some degree of freedom, but the extent and nature of that vary wildly and is likely to be very different from what you and I would want.
Well, it’s just those non-Americans with their non-American ideas that don’t deserve freedom, the freedom to come over here by the thousands and take over our country with their fucked-up ideas that our American ideas can’t stand up to because American ideas are so weak and pathetic. It’s not as if some Mexican would ever come to America and be influenced by us to become a free-market capitalist, Mexican powers are such that one single Mexican can persuade a hundred Americans to become Communists.
Maybe Mexicans will be whatever they are and don’t give a shit about what you or I think? How about that idea? What makes you think the fact that someone decides to come to the US necessarily means they are interested in freedom? Is there something magical about the border that changes their mind? Are some of them interested? Sure. But I don’t see why all or even most of them would be.
*holds up a doll*
Point to where the immigrant touched you.
Most people are not interested in freedom. Why would immigrants be any different?
Maybe because they chose to come to a land knows as the free or something? That by choosing to leave their shithole and come here, maybe that shows that they are interested in freedom? I dunno. Just spit-balling here.
Immigrants are magical. They don’t have the same motivations as normal human beings. They are pure good and love and light.
Seriously, what kind of fucking polyanna do you have to be to actually unironically say something that fucking stupid? Are you literally 5?
As,long as they aren’t educated, or white.
*points at the constitution the doll is holding*
What makes you think the fact that someone decides to come to the US necessarily means they are interested in freedom?
Same reason I think that folks that come to football tryouts or chess club or game night are interested in football, chess or board games.
Since it’s a self-selecting process, the folks that show up are rarely representative of the population as a whole.
If I paid people to come to those chess nights, would you assume that they were interested in chess? I wouldn’t. Same thing here. There are lots of reasons to come to this country that have nothing to do with freedom. Living on the street in the US is better than living in many countries in the world. Most of the world sucks horribly. The fact that someone wants out of such a place and to come to a stable and mostly safe country like the US is no indication that they value freedom. They might just value safety or a free meal or a job.
So you’re just discounting economic freedom, freedom from violence, and so-on?
No. I am saying that not everyone understands the benefits of freedom or wants it. Yes, our country is nice because it is free. Half the people who grew up here don’t understand that. What makes you think people who didn’t will?
What makes you think people who didn’t will?
Well first, you’re confusing understanding with being interested. You can be interested in a place and what it represents without understanding why it is that way.
Second, folks can want and be interested in some of the “benefits of freedom” without being interested in or knowing about all of them. I’d argue that’s the norm, actually. You know, like how you like to trump the freedom to refuse service but don’t really care about my freedom to not go to jail? “interest” in “freedom” doesn’t mean you’re a fan of all freedoms equally, or even at all.
And again, the whole self-selection process does wonders to screen out folks.
As someone who has worked with many Mexicans, I can say that anyone who calls them lazy has never worked with them.
If Mexicans are so great as a group, why not move to Mexico? Then there are only Mexicans. What a great place that must be, right?
Yeah, that’s what I said.
6oure missing his point. Where you work probably attracts people with a good work ethic. Just like if you worked in a research laboratory you would probably say that your coworkers are very smart. It’s extremely anecdotal.
I wonder what your impression of these people would be if you were immersed in MS-13.
If you think about it, immigrants happen to be the LEAST lazy people you will ever meet, since they risk so much to uproot from the place the were accustomed to, to a new place. That takes guts. Not that it wasn’t easy for me but for many it’s almost life or death in many cases.
Well, the other perspective would be that they flee from fixing their own country toward prosperity buil by others.
Which is pretty fucking detestable and lazy. Not lazy would be cleaning up their home, not moving out and leaving it for some other poor fuck.
Well, the other perspective would be that they flee from fixing their own country toward prosperity buil by others.
“You didn’t build that!”
This time it’s true.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight…
That’s two chances to debate the point, and you’re 0-2.
Yes, someone who has never been here before built what was already there.
By the way, I appreciate that you understand my post is unassailable facually. You probably should have just avoided posting rather than making a fool of yourself.
Sure Sifrit. Or should I call you Obama?
Are you actually this stupid? Obama was talking about Americans, if he had been talking about Mexicans, it would literally be true.
Because Mexicans are inferior to those superior Americans!
By that same logic children don’t deserve to live in this country because they didn’t build that.
They live with their parents retard.
And eventually they go out into the world. A world that they did not build. They are nothing bug filthy leaches!
What makes you think they didn’t build it?
How fucking stupid are you?
Listen it’s obvious that you reacted poorly and said something stupid and unsupportable and now yo’re flailing.
They’ve been children their whole lives! Leaching off their parents and off the school system! They didn’t build a damn thing! All the prosperity that they enjoy was build by others! Jesus fucking Christ, have you ever met a child, or seen one turn into an adult? They’re fucking useless!
See? More flailing.
CHILDREN ARE JUST LITTLE ADULTS!!! THERE IS NOTHING DIFFERENT ABOUT THEM!!!
/drunk sarcasmic
CHILDREN ARE JUST LITTLE ADULTS!!! THERE IS NOTHING DIFFERENT ABOUT THEM!!!
That reminds me of an episode of WKRP. I feel old.
I was just thinking of that. Soemexpert Les interviews going on about how they’re smalle adults who are insane.
You ignore my point. What’s the difference between a child and an immigrant when it comes to their contribution to society and prosperity? If anything the child has been more of a drag because it has used services all its life, while the immigrant was raised somewhere else.
By your logic neither deserves to live here.
No, that’s your logic. My logic is, their parents ostensibly DID contribute, and children are an extension of that.
It’s no wonder you resort to low loevel trolling, you’re not smart enough to umderstand what you’re discussing.
How do you know their parents contributed? Their parents could be on welfare. What if the kid is an orphan?
And eventually they go out into the world. A world that they did not build. They are nothing bug filthy leaches!
Gotta love the radical individualism of libertarianism. We’re all atomized individuals, completely separated from those who came before us, and thus no different in our claim to our nation and heritage than a Chinaman in Hanoi in claiming our nation and heritage.
Keep it up. You argue against liberty day in and day out. Some day you will succeed in snuffing it out.
It’s called sarcasm. You know.. sarcasmic? Hello?
Re: Sifrit,
Isn’t that what workers do all the time when they switch jobs?
Idiot.
No, actually, most of us do a good job and then leave.
You just admitted you shit up the place before you go
“Idiot. ”
These aren’t letters, you don’t have to sign your post.
Yes.
What now.
You tell me.
Should we send all those Europeans back to their shitholes to clean them up? You seem to imply that deserting shitholes was okay for our ancestors but not okay for folks now.
Everone that ever came to America left a shithole for the prospect of building a better life. That’s why anyone leaves anywhere. People don’t move to make their lives worse. And when they arrive at their new destination, both then and now, they don’t get a better life handed to them, they have to earn it. They aren’t here for handouts, they’re here for the opportunity to succeed. And when they do, everyone benefits. That ain’t lazy, that’s industrious.
Wait, I thought our ancestors all left because of Colonialism and Imperialism. Which is it? It seems that everyone likes to vacillate between the two narratives as it suits their purpose.
European shitholes, after seeing how successful the American experiment was, proceeded to half-ass their way to a similar situation and have fucked it up literally ever since.
Not only that, but most of the ones I’ve met have pretty big families to support. So they bust their ass.
I’ve become acquainted with a local taxi service that is owned by a Somali immigrant who for the most part hires other Somalis. Some of the nicest people you could ever meet.
Of course John will say that I’m lying because Somalia is a shithole, which means that everyone from that country is culturally inferior and a drag on the economy.
Well, seems like he’d run afoul of laws with the refusal to hire non-Somalis…
Yeah. Because it’s bad that he provides opportunity for other immigrants to better themselves rather than going on welfare.
Bastard!
That whooshing sound you might have heard was the point going right above your head in terms of American labor law and it’s inherent anti-immigrant bias.
A few missing clits and a few murdered white people are a small price to pay for your good feelings.
As someone who has worked with many Mexicans who disappeared an hour after payday and had to have their work constantly re-done, I can say that anyone who pretends their shit doesn’t stink or that they’re better workers than anybody else is a fucking liar with an agenda.
By the way, hiring a Mexican to change your kid’s shitty diapers doesn’t count as “worked with”.
I actually mis-read the headline as: Trump’s Tribal Immigration Policies Hit a Wall of Feces.
I did a double-take and realized it was facts, not poop, that stood in Trump’s way.
It might be funnier with the original reading, however. A fecal wall across the border might actually work fairly well. Even if you’re desperate, would you really clamber over a slippery, puke-inducing barrier? All the while risking E. coli food poisoning to boot? And the costs would be so much lower! The materials could be obtained for free, apart from the cost of re-directing the flow of effluent from nearby sewage treatment facilities.
Funny how the immigration really brings the inner conservative xenophobe out of so many people. They turn into raving conservatard lunatics.
Similar to the same sex marriage nonsense. Except that that one brought out the inner lefttard out of people who were otherwise libertarians.
True.
I also think there are a lot of people who call themselves libertarian who are actually just conservatives who finally got tired of republicans talking about fiscal responsibility while doing the opposite. (And who could blame them for getting fed up with that?)
The real test is their degree of belief in statism. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool statist, you can’t honestly claim to be libertarian.
Just like being a whacked out anarchy capitalist doesn’t really. Are someone libertarian.
If by “conservative xenophobe” you mean “not regurgitating silly talking points and believing that immigrants are magical fairies” then sure.
An Argument Against Open Borders and Liberal Hubris
http://quillette.com/2017/08/2…..al-hubris/
One might also ask ‘how would you even know how many illegal immigrants start businesses when they’re inherently in the black market’, but you already know the answer; conflate legal and illegal immigration!
How would an illegal immigrant start a business? The entire claim is stupid.
I’m just pointing out the central fallacy in just about every cited study on ‘immigration’.
They measure legal immigrants, and then extrapolate to illegal immigrants since apparently they believe there are no meaningful differentiating features between the two.
You know, the kind of study an idiot might research.
Amusingly, CATO is among them last I saw along with the claim that domestic terrorism is more prevalent than foreign terrorism in the United States (different flaws, admittedly, but flawed none the less and it’s explicit in their research methods).
‘Libertarian moment’?
My other favorite CATO fallacy is the claim that since legal immigrants have low crime rates, opening the borders will not increase the crime rate. Maybe it is the case that immigrants are just better than native Americans and immigration will decrease the crime rate by replacing Americans with law abiding freedom loving immigrants. That seems to be CATO’s position. But just maybe, legal immigrants have such a low crime rate because our legal immigration system goes to great lengths to ensure criminals don’t get in and makes it very clear to immigrants that committing a crime means deportation. The possibility that being selective and the threat of deportation is why legal immigrants commit so few crimes never enters the people at CATO’s mind. Nope. Immigrants are just all wonderful.
I sometimes wonder if instead of being that dishonest they are instead actually that stupid and believe the shit they say. Them really really being that stupid is kind of terrifying.
Exactly.
Take a highly pre-selected group and then extrapolate it’s features out into all those people who were explicitly filtered out and pretend they were never excluded at all.
Again, the type of research an idiot might engage in.
It would be purely coincidence if their end-results were correct going by their methods, assuming they’re correct at all. Citing them is citing wishes.
It annoys me that they’re so disingenuous with their studies, because it makes them look like they’re hiding something or just immensely biased. If their end-goal is so great, it makes me wonder why they don’t control their studies a little more rigorously.
I’ll take ‘bias’ over ‘intentional’ until proven otherwise, but it doesn’t make them look good when they’re consistently skewed the same direction.
I sometimes wonder if instead of being that dishonest they are instead actually that stupid and believe the shit they say.
Their paymasters set the agenda. Whatever is good for the Kochs is good for America.
Once again, I’ll post the highlights of the UN Migration Report for 2017.. The last few pages are a table with the percent of the population in every country and region that is foreign born. This statistic allows you to infer how welcoming a country is towards immigrants. In the USA, 15.3% of the population is foreign born, and 10.5% of Europe’s population is foreign born. Compare that to 1.5% of Latin America and the Caribbean. Anyone who believes that opposition to bringing immigrants into one’s country is a form of racism has to come to terms with the statistics showing that Hispanic counties on our side of the Atlantic practice racist anti-immigrant policies. The march through Latin America will go through many Hispanic countries that lack significant immigrant populations to shame the USA, which has one of the largest foreign born populations in the world, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers.
I messed up the link. It is here.
Even if you accept “opposition to bringing immigrants into one’s country is a form of racism”, countries can’t (ethically) force folks to immigrate or seek asylum there. So you can’t jump from “these countries have low immigrant populations” to “because they’re racist”.
Then there would be no reason to leave where they are.
Daftar Akun Togel
If you think prosperity is based on immigration
Bandar Taruhan Togel
“The vast majority of research finds that immigrants do not increase local crime rates and that they are less likely to cause crime and less likely to be incarcerated than their native-born peers.”
I’ve seen this quote many times and while factual it’s non sequitur. Were not talking about immigrants, were talking about illegals. Show me the study about the crime rates of illegal immigrants.
I agree with most of your article, except for one point: a larger population pushes us faster against the coming disaster. A person in the US has a far larger environmental footprint than a person in Honduras, so when someone moves from Honduras to the US, it is bad for the future of the whole world.
Of course, we need to reduce the environmental footprint of people already in the US.
“But it hardly follows that controlling who crosses those boundaries is a necessary condition for democracy and self-determination.”
“Self” determination is implemented through voting. Let new people in, and that “self” changes.
Invasion is when a polity is involuntarily populated with foreigners who change the political nature of that polity.
CA elected Reagan and Nixon. That’s never happening again.
Yes we have been under siege for as long as I remember but the last 20 years the illegal aliens are everywhere and that is not my imagination.
I didn’t even have the stomach to read most of the comments… But my favorite quote from the article:
“A thousand new members of the Republican Party?”
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL Yeah, because 70+ percent of Hispanics DON’T vote left! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Seriously, the whole “Let’s bring in uneducated people from backwards shithole countries, and it’ll work out great!” type of immigration is retarded. The GDP will go up… But these people tend to work low wage, low productivity jobs. They’re net negative tax payers, which means the middle class 50-60K a year guy on up has to shoulder a LARGER portion of the tax burden to subsidize their shit, just like we do with native born poor.
Higher GDP is NOT what any normal person gives a shit about. Higher GDP PER CAPITA is what makes a wealthy and successful society. China has a far higher GDP than the UK, but who in their right mind would say that China is the better country to live in??? Nobody. We’re turning the US into a 2nd world country by importing a bunch of 3rd worlders who are dragging down the average standard of living. Look at the average income for Hispanic Americans compared to Whites and Asians… It’s garbage. I’m part beaner myself, but we don’t need millions more uneducated people who don’t appreciate the ideas America was founded on.
Mark my words, if we don’t get immigration under control this country is going to be a crumbling shit hole in the coming decades. Our major cities will look like Mexico City or New Delhi instead of the affluent first world cities they currently are. We need QUALITY not QUANTITY immigration.
nice sharing.
prediksi bola
i think this is agood information. situs taruhan togel
In a democratic nation, self-determination includes determining who is part of the nation.
daftar akun bola
idnplay poker
nice sharing.
bandar taruhan togel
prediksi togel
SQUARE = CIRCLE or something
“The government said it would issue one-year humanitarian visas to the most vulnerable, allow others to submit applications within the month to stay in Mexico, and request that the rest exit the country within 20 days.”
“But it asserted that the Mexican government makes its immigration decisions in a sovereign manner, and it is not responsible for regulating the legal entry of people to other countries.
It is not up to this government to make immigration decisions for the United States or any other nation,” the statement reads.”
IOW, when they said they “deported” them, all the meant was that they gave them a deadline for leaving Mexico, and didn’t care which border they left by.
Because capitalism and he free(?) market has been able to overcome the massive drain on the economy that “largest immigrant-based population” has been.
But it won’t be able to keep up under the relentless pressure of open borders.
Correlation is not causation.
Unregulated immigration is anarchy.
Name an nation on the earth that doesn’t have an immigration policy.
And how much higher would that “absolute median income” be if we didn’t have to support that “largest percentage of immigration-based population”?
Correlation is not causation.
Stop posting the same, lame argument.
Making it several times doesn’t make it any more of a line of bullshit than it was the first time.