"There is profound suffering at mass scale that we can help to remediate at relatively little cost to ourselves...."
The gentry progressive symbol manipulators who write such things of course pay little cost, as the West isn't importing Theorists or journalists in bulk but manual laborers who they only meet as low-wage nannies, gardeners, cooks etc. Gentry progressives in the age of globalism have privatized the gains and socialized the losses and have created massive social discord and dislocation that threatens their entire project.
Also, considering brain drain and the reality that most poor immigrants will be living hard lives here of constant labor, much of it spent on expensive yet rundown housing, maybe the better way to remediate their national suffering is exporting the norms, habits and systems that have helped the West create its wealth—rule of law and a reliable judiciary, a political class that represents its people and doesn't prey on them, not to mention deferred gratification and the social stability that follows this—instead of treating their people as our human capital.
And as for "moral impulses" and other claims to morality and its fruits, this is when I reach for my wallet and try to get out of the way of the gentry progressive and their desperate need for a hit of moral superiority. Moral narcissism is the great vice of our age and as we've seen in the past decade in everything from BLM to migrants to Trans and Palestinians, the goal is to BE SEEN as performing a noble deed toward a member of a marginalized group, to be the whited sepulcher in the front pew who is a Good Person on the Right Side of History™️—but once the buzz wears off, none of these same people are around to deal with any adverse consequences and have absolutely ZERO interest in finding out that their exalted morality might have led to downstream problems, such as a guy getting beheaded on a street in Belfast.
What we have here in the West is the Golden Goose of prosperity and when you've been blessed to inherit a Golden Goose your first responsibility is tending and nurturing it so it can be there for your future, your kids and communities, not to carve it up and pass out the best slices to distant strangers as a way to broadcast your pure and righteous soul. Not that I'm in any way opposed to generous immigration (my family are all Ellis Islanders) but I am opposed to people who refuse to state limiting principles and treat politics like religion and policy like Scripture.
Excellent argument. My attempt at a left-wing rebuttal in turn:
"maybe the better way to remediate their national suffering is exporting the norms, habits and systems that have helped the West create its wealth—rule of law and a reliable judiciary, a political class that represents its people and doesn't prey on them"
When the United States guts USAID and slashes other spending on life-saving aid for people in poor countries, does this not increase our moral culpability for their suffering?
Handing out "aid" is different than intentionally exporting and imposing a more functional culture. The former tends to be a bunch of middlemen taking their share as the "aid" passes down the line and ends up the currency of local strongmen and warlords, with relatively little of it easing any suffering. The latter is essentially modern missionary work - here, let's show you how to live better so your vulnerable aren't so miserable - which is out of fashion for many reasons. (I am not arguing for any of the above, just pointing out the distinction.)
When I think of USAID, I think of Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea". In this case, the USG cuts a large check to some distant sufferers but by the time it gets to them the largest hunks have been torn off by bureaucrats and kleptocrats, and what was supposed to be a banquet becomes a snack. Also, no one can possibly have any "moral culpability" for deeds they didn't commit and no one is "culpable" for the existence of human suffering and poverty—this is applying an unattainable moral standard (and also carries a heavy whiff of white saviorism).
USAID was a govt project and any democracy can elect a new govt who might no longer believe in or want to fund prior projects, then decide to pull the plug on them. This is simply the nature of democracy.
USAID was a Cold War program that of course had some successes and was good for the global image of America, but at the end of the day pouring billions into non- or poorly functioning states does nothing to bring them closer to self-sufficiency. The world is radically different since USAID's establishment in 1961, we now have a progressive billionaire class with all sorts of technical expertise and global influence. They and their political allies can create new and better projects, especially since they're the ones who seem to believe they have the moral responsibility to be global saviors.
This lovely, but the united kingdom has absolutely none of that.Any more. The online safety act is just more flexing of their totalitarian and surveillance policies and their idea of political correctness.As dogma as no different from the church.
Free speech does not exist.Even comedy cannot exist.
Power structures are a fragile narcissism. They only lust for more power.And to keep that power... and they did so pretending to care about minorities.
The cost isn't "to ourselves"... It is to the working class, who have also born the cost of neoliberalism and deindustrialization - the beneficiaries are the incoming outsiders and the elites who gain social esteem, cheap labour and free riches from escalating house prices.
Either they just plain hate us, or they hate themselves also but merely displace the self-flagellation onto the working class majority.
I've reached the point where I now pay more attention to U.K. news than American news because it seems they represent our future if we don't change course. Funny that the American leftists you reached out to hadn't even heard of this story. Also, the New York Times article covering it from the "backlash" point of view was utterly infuriating. I also notice that the New York Times is burying their reporting on the riots in Belfast. Someone behind the scenes wants that news suppressed from Americans, lest they get any "funny ideas."
It's amazing to me that even with social media and everyone having a computer in their hands, information can still be so siloed by ideology. Do you think the right has any comparable blindspots?
I think considering Tood Blanche to be an acceptable candidate for US Attorney General is a blind spot. He moved convicted sex criminal Ghislane Maxwell to a cushy prison. He tried to indict Congressional Representatives for speech.
That's such a great question because it forces a person to question where on the political spectrum they fall. In my case, I'm not even sure anymore. Based on spirited, Boghossian-style debates I've had with a very high net worth friend who is to the right of myself, I would probably say that a blind spot on the right would be the negative externalities of free market capitalism and extreme wealth inequality i.e. environmental degradation and political and financial cronyism. I don't think most people on the right fully recognize or understand that we are in a new Gilded Age that is even more extreme and destabilizing than the first Gilded Age.
My rebuttal would begin by rejecting your premise completely, and pointing out the everything that follows it is an appeal to emotion. With an unaccepted premise and the remainder of the text relying on a logical fallacy, the argument is essentially DOA. I would then invert your premise and claim that a fair immigration system is conservative. I would define “fair” as dispassionate, rule-following, and conscientious. I would define “conservative” in this context as serving a fiduciary purpose, filling an economic deficit, and protecting the interests, wellbeing and status of the native population. Then I would insert data that supports my premise as well as data that show that non-adherence to my premise leads to civil unrest, unstable economies, and strained infrastructure. And hopefully, that would be convincing.
S Slope: Would love to hear more from you. Please share your dispassionate, rule-following, conscientious & “conservative” argument with inserted data that supports it & shows the impact of non adherence.
I note that there have been multiple studies that indicate that the net impact of all US immigrants (not sure exactly how "immigrants" was defined) from 1980 to 2022 has been a small but net positive financial impact & that the number of US citizens killed by REFUGEES from 1980 to 2020 is nil. Unfortunately these stats are prior to the huge influx of people during the Biden era & I suspect that number from 2020 - 2026 are not nearly as favorable to the immigrants. Of course the above stats, as with all stats, likely show some bias in terms of definitions...
The Holocaust has warped the conversation around refugees and asylum. In that case, you had a nonviolent highly functional minority group being scapegoated by a brutal majority group.
Today’s conflicts aren’t like that. Today’s conflicts generally involve the implosion of all-around dysfunctional and violent societies. Thus, when you take in refugees from those conflicts, you are importing dysfunction and violence. This is especially true when you’re onboarding fighting aged men.
A compromise position that would accommodate the moral concerns of the left and the safety concerns of the right would be to restrict asylum to women and young children.
I've often thought about this. How much too of high crime among migrant groups is due to the fact that migrants are overwhelmingly young men? I'd be much more sympathetic to refugee policies that prioritized women and young children.
I'm not sure it's moral, though, to force the taxpaying workers of America to assume responsibility for the care and feeding of these women and young children. Without husbands and fathers these people would almost certainly require almost-universal welfare support for basic needs. Maybe we could have a voluntary system where people who are so moved by this suffering can accept refugee women and children into their households and provide for them directly, or fund housing/food/clothing/transportation/education/medical care for them out of a pool of donations from the compassionate folks of America with plenty of spare cash. Many Americans are struggling mightily to just get by and feed their own; just because this is a "wealthy country" doesn't mean that every one in this country is wealthy.
You lost me at “intelligent leftist.” These are people who think communism is good, drag shows benefit little kids, and boys can become girls by saying so. “Intelligent leftist” is a contradiction in terms. Pretty sure the last one was DP Moynihan.
I’m in England. I agree with the gist of your post, but I just want to correct the thing about the news coverage. This was on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story of every news programme within minutes. I read the Guardian, they covered it. The BBC covered it. They all covered the fact that he was an asylum seeker, and that he was from Sudan, and they praised the men who rescued the victim. Maybe it was different in the US, but they covered everything you might hope for over here. They even said “the police are expecting riots tonight.”
They haven't discussed yet what to do about violent immigrants from African countries, but I expect that is coming soon, too.
Follow the money. Subjective, political propaganda wearing the mantle of "news," makes more money. Watching one sided, ideological narratives; enrages alienated people and pulls them into the fold. They will gladly choose this over the older format of an hours worth of objective reporting.
I’d guess that the talk was 80% “We don’t like riots and we are not a racist country.” and 20% “we need to talk about immigration”. Everyone agreed that the heroes were heroes, and everyone talked about how the crazy Sudanese immigrant got into the country. But I think the riots made everything worse for everyone. They were awful and they took away any chance of a reasonable discussion about immigration.
The problem with your argument Peter/Mr Lefty is that it assumes that appropriate intervention would necessarily have prevented the behaviour, and therefore treats the existence of the violent behaviour itself as evidence that the intervention was inadequate. I reject this argument.
If only the leftists who champion these open border policies actually thought them through at all. What a difference it might be. I sat across from a migrant shelter in NYC during the Biden invasion. I watched hundreds of people be placed in a hotel with free healthcare, food, debit cards, legal assistance, and free entrance to the public schools (no documentation for vaccines or anything else required for their kids). They paid it back by turning my neighborhood into a shithole.
In which NYC neighborhood did you see this happen? I lived in the city for 20 years, mostly in Morningside Heights, but left before this migrant madness.
I agree with our prosperity comes responsibility to the poor. I would argue that mass importation is not the most helpful solution though. Certainly the proportions of immigrants to native population cannot be what it is in the UK without devistating issues. I also agree there are benefits to taking migrants but that those benefits are over shadowed if they are immigrants who do not want to conform to the native culture of their new country. I would also point out that in your (steelman) argument you said it is a low cost for us. This is not factually true. We are paying a very high dollar amount to deal with this issue. Our infrastructure, schools, jails, housing, medical systems are all being over run. This is all before we even address the cultural problem of having people who believe raping little children is acceptable in close proximity to your children.
I agree with all that you said. In addition, I am a little uncomfortable with the idea that we are a rich society. In one way that is of course true, but it is also true that (at least in the US) we are in deep debt.
The other thing that is NOT considered within this perspective is the actual architecture of the international system. We all know that most international law is little more than a handshake agreement in terms of it's enforcement capacity, but massive outflows of people from the destruction of WWII was THE reason that we have it in the first place. We should be leaning on this more from both sides as it is the best attempt we have to lay down a reasonable balance between the needs of individuals for safety when their home state can't provide it and other state's capacities to actually make a difference.
The understanding is that the only countries that are obliged to host fleeing foreign nationals from war-torn countries are the adjacent neighbours to that country, the seeker of asylum is expected to seek asylum in the nearest safe nation-state. The hosting terms are limited to the conflict and then it is expected that most of those refugees would return to their home country with the few that might not be able to be offered asylum in that country or other places after applying FROM the place of refuge. It fits neither an 'open borders' idiotic internationalism OR a 'shut the border' idiotic nationalism. It was a reasonable system on paper, and it got broken almost as soon as it started by the 'Palestinian Problem' and then by modern aviation, cheap transportation and the sheer number of post-colonial conflicts as empires broke down.
So, the UK is NOT obligated to take every person claiming asylum who turns up on their door, unless they are their immediate neighbours which are Ireland, France and arguably Spain, maybe you can stretch the friendship to The Canada. Asylum seekers who legitimately can't return to their country of origin are supposed to be distributed among other nations willing to accept them. Unsurprisingly, developed countries are preferable by Asylum seekers for obvious reasons. Australia caps this kind of intake, and it's very frustrating when it gets bypassed by (relatively) wealthier compatriots who can afford to travel and turn up at the door.
There also needs to be a coherent resettlement programs and resources for those refugees arriving and approved to stay. If you do neither the approval/screening process at both ends, and then dump these people in town and expect them to fend for themselves... this is what you get. It's a total betrayal of the whole agreement about seeking asylum for both the seekers and the hosts. The cost is borne by the people who have to try and figure out how to live with these new arrivals and the new arrivals themselves. There is nothing progressive or conservative about this and as far as I can tell it is less about ideology than a juvenile refusal of our civil servants, policy wonks and politicians to actually take responsibility for their decisions and the effects they have.
I would argue the following: Are we now the world's soup kitchen where the interests of our nation's citizens falls to the lowest rung in the ladder while we struggle and toil for our last dollar to feed our own under the guise of holding the moral high-ground? The cost of this egalitarian showmanship is too high of a price to pay via our judicial, financial, and medical resources amongst others. If you look in the periphery you will see many of our own in need of these very same resources who, or their ancestors alike, have most likely contributed to the treasury and deserve to be first in line.
1. The unique gifts that the United States offers are free to anyone in the world: Democracy. Capitalism. A free press. Freedom of religion. Respect for women. Etc etc. Any nation may provide these to its citizens and any group of citizens may demand these from their nation. No need to travel so far.
2. Are we not depriving the citizens of other nations of the imperative to enact change when we incentivize mass migration with open borders and free housing, health care, education, etc? Why fight for improvements on your home turf when you can just leave and go leech off the generosity of a wealthier country?
3. Can values be exported? Or do people have to actually be assimilated into higher functioning nations before they understand things like the rule of law, respect for women, how to positively contribute to your community, etc. Sure, wealthier countries can support what Trump refers to as "shithole countries" with wheelbarrowfulls of foreign aid, but how effective is that really in the long term? Does foreign aid disincentivize real change?
"Responsible policymakers should be investing more money to immigrants in the form of social and integration services like professional training, and in the form of social workers who are able to guide them through the process of assimilation."
The problem with this is that they don't believe this. Any of it.
My wife was a legal immigrant. She filed her paperwork, paid her fees, followed the rules, and waited. And the results? She lost her Green Card over a question. A simple question, and USCIS said she was done.
And when I bring it up with the supposedly pro-immigrant crowd? Mocking, derision, and a total lack of sympathy or support. My congresswoman, a Democrat, made things worse for my wife when we reached out for help. They don't really care, but would rather just project an image of caring and moral rectitude; but when you hold their feet to the fire, or even an uncomfortably warm foot bath (like on Martha's Vineyard)? They fold.
We KNOW the asylum system is abused and perhaps even broken. But, like with birthright citizenship in the modern era, we can't address the topic with honesty and critical thinking. Heck, I would even question your brief point about immigration bringing lower prices and great food. They certainly don't lower the rent, and very few of them are bringing high quality culinary skills.
To add: How much of the discourse on immigration is focused on understanding meaningful, serious aspects of the topic? And how much on baseless personal opinion and emotion? I can't even get people to understand the difference between administrative, civil, and criminal aspects of the immigration system.
I suppose the real question is: are governments doing what they were asked to do?
In the UK, we are governed by consent. Political parties put forward a mandate, and we, the public, vote for the local representatives of the party whose mandate most closely aligns with what we believe. In doing so, we give our consent for them to represent us in the House of Commons.
For the last five or six elections, the public has not been listened to and, it could be argued, has been lied to by a political class that increasingly sees the public as something to be managed rather than represented. This is a root problem, and much of what follows are the tangled and gnarled branches growing from it.
The moral argument for helping people is a subjective one, but it is an argument that many people willingly accept. Most people want to help those in genuine need. The problem arises when the definition of who qualifies for that help is gradually expanded beyond what the public originally understood and consented to.
Help is not an infinite resource. It depends upon finite money, finite housing, finite services, finite infrastructure, and finite public goodwill. As the definition expands and the number of people requiring help increases, the demand placed upon those resources also increases.
At some point, the capacity to help can become overwhelmed. When that happens, help risks becoming less effective for everyone involved. The people already dependent upon those services receive less support, the people arriving receive less support, and public confidence in the system begins to erode.
It is therefore not enough to simply argue for helping. One must also consider the limits within which help remains possible. Help ceases to be help when the demand for it exceeds the capacity to provide it effectively.
I think this really is the crux of the argument. It's unethical and undemocratic to provide aid to refugees when there's been massive domestic opposition to spending citizens' tax dollars in such a way. Plus, immigrants/refugees are never going to assimilate into a country that hates them; mass-immigration under such conditions is a recipe for a breakdown of trust among citizens and between citizens and their government.
There are two ethical questions that need to be debated openly.
First, can we meaningfully call a society democratic if there is no informed consent from the people on major issues that will shape the future of their country?
Second, is it ethical for the media and political class to discourage those questions from being asked in the first place?
A further consideration is whether public debate itself is being shaped by forces that operate beyond the traditional parameters of the nation state, including transnational institutions, global economic interests, and international networks of influence. If such actors play a significant role in setting the boundaries of acceptable discussion or policy, then that too should be open to public scrutiny and democratic accountability.
Without addressing these questions, the debate about immigration policy is largely redundant.
A functioning democracy depends on citizens being able to question, scrutinise, and withhold consent. Yet those who raise such questions are often dismissed as racists or fascists rather than engaged in debate.
That does not look like democratic discourse. It looks like an attempt to avoid it.
We're almost 40 trillion dollars in debt not because we have immigration but because we have politicians—both sides of the aisle—who are hostile to the very concept of fiscal discipline.
I read that Stephen Ogilvie has been put into a medically induced coma. His survival is still uncertain. I'm glad I no longer have Leftist friends to call and ask what they think. Do you think they know anything about the shootings of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the forced marriages of 9 year old girls to older men there, or the young Afghani males forced to dress as women and bellydance for degenerate older Islamist men's sexual gratification? What are they saying about the murder of Henry Nowak? Any chance they'll stop swallowing every word they read in the New York Times?
I'll bite!
"There is profound suffering at mass scale that we can help to remediate at relatively little cost to ourselves...."
The gentry progressive symbol manipulators who write such things of course pay little cost, as the West isn't importing Theorists or journalists in bulk but manual laborers who they only meet as low-wage nannies, gardeners, cooks etc. Gentry progressives in the age of globalism have privatized the gains and socialized the losses and have created massive social discord and dislocation that threatens their entire project.
Also, considering brain drain and the reality that most poor immigrants will be living hard lives here of constant labor, much of it spent on expensive yet rundown housing, maybe the better way to remediate their national suffering is exporting the norms, habits and systems that have helped the West create its wealth—rule of law and a reliable judiciary, a political class that represents its people and doesn't prey on them, not to mention deferred gratification and the social stability that follows this—instead of treating their people as our human capital.
And as for "moral impulses" and other claims to morality and its fruits, this is when I reach for my wallet and try to get out of the way of the gentry progressive and their desperate need for a hit of moral superiority. Moral narcissism is the great vice of our age and as we've seen in the past decade in everything from BLM to migrants to Trans and Palestinians, the goal is to BE SEEN as performing a noble deed toward a member of a marginalized group, to be the whited sepulcher in the front pew who is a Good Person on the Right Side of History™️—but once the buzz wears off, none of these same people are around to deal with any adverse consequences and have absolutely ZERO interest in finding out that their exalted morality might have led to downstream problems, such as a guy getting beheaded on a street in Belfast.
What we have here in the West is the Golden Goose of prosperity and when you've been blessed to inherit a Golden Goose your first responsibility is tending and nurturing it so it can be there for your future, your kids and communities, not to carve it up and pass out the best slices to distant strangers as a way to broadcast your pure and righteous soul. Not that I'm in any way opposed to generous immigration (my family are all Ellis Islanders) but I am opposed to people who refuse to state limiting principles and treat politics like religion and policy like Scripture.
Thanks!
Excellent argument. My attempt at a left-wing rebuttal in turn:
"maybe the better way to remediate their national suffering is exporting the norms, habits and systems that have helped the West create its wealth—rule of law and a reliable judiciary, a political class that represents its people and doesn't prey on them"
When the United States guts USAID and slashes other spending on life-saving aid for people in poor countries, does this not increase our moral culpability for their suffering?
Handing out "aid" is different than intentionally exporting and imposing a more functional culture. The former tends to be a bunch of middlemen taking their share as the "aid" passes down the line and ends up the currency of local strongmen and warlords, with relatively little of it easing any suffering. The latter is essentially modern missionary work - here, let's show you how to live better so your vulnerable aren't so miserable - which is out of fashion for many reasons. (I am not arguing for any of the above, just pointing out the distinction.)
I worked on several USAID projects. You quickly understand it's a finger in the dyke at best or more likely to score political points.
My answer to this:
When I think of USAID, I think of Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea". In this case, the USG cuts a large check to some distant sufferers but by the time it gets to them the largest hunks have been torn off by bureaucrats and kleptocrats, and what was supposed to be a banquet becomes a snack. Also, no one can possibly have any "moral culpability" for deeds they didn't commit and no one is "culpable" for the existence of human suffering and poverty—this is applying an unattainable moral standard (and also carries a heavy whiff of white saviorism).
USAID was a govt project and any democracy can elect a new govt who might no longer believe in or want to fund prior projects, then decide to pull the plug on them. This is simply the nature of democracy.
USAID was a Cold War program that of course had some successes and was good for the global image of America, but at the end of the day pouring billions into non- or poorly functioning states does nothing to bring them closer to self-sufficiency. The world is radically different since USAID's establishment in 1961, we now have a progressive billionaire class with all sorts of technical expertise and global influence. They and their political allies can create new and better projects, especially since they're the ones who seem to believe they have the moral responsibility to be global saviors.
Hope this makes sense!
This lovely, but the united kingdom has absolutely none of that.Any more. The online safety act is just more flexing of their totalitarian and surveillance policies and their idea of political correctness.As dogma as no different from the church.
Free speech does not exist.Even comedy cannot exist.
Power structures are a fragile narcissism. They only lust for more power.And to keep that power... and they did so pretending to care about minorities.
The goose and egg reference is accurate and relevant.
I live in California, where our beautiful Golden Goose is being sliced and diced daily.
But the FOOD!
ha!
lolol
The cost isn't "to ourselves"... It is to the working class, who have also born the cost of neoliberalism and deindustrialization - the beneficiaries are the incoming outsiders and the elites who gain social esteem, cheap labour and free riches from escalating house prices.
Either they just plain hate us, or they hate themselves also but merely displace the self-flagellation onto the working class majority.
What a wonderfully written comment!
Thanks, Ruben!
Excellent response.
I've reached the point where I now pay more attention to U.K. news than American news because it seems they represent our future if we don't change course. Funny that the American leftists you reached out to hadn't even heard of this story. Also, the New York Times article covering it from the "backlash" point of view was utterly infuriating. I also notice that the New York Times is burying their reporting on the riots in Belfast. Someone behind the scenes wants that news suppressed from Americans, lest they get any "funny ideas."
It's amazing to me that even with social media and everyone having a computer in their hands, information can still be so siloed by ideology. Do you think the right has any comparable blindspots?
I think considering Tood Blanche to be an acceptable candidate for US Attorney General is a blind spot. He moved convicted sex criminal Ghislane Maxwell to a cushy prison. He tried to indict Congressional Representatives for speech.
When I mention the rape gangs in the UK to leftists, they’ve never heard of that, either.
That's such a great question because it forces a person to question where on the political spectrum they fall. In my case, I'm not even sure anymore. Based on spirited, Boghossian-style debates I've had with a very high net worth friend who is to the right of myself, I would probably say that a blind spot on the right would be the negative externalities of free market capitalism and extreme wealth inequality i.e. environmental degradation and political and financial cronyism. I don't think most people on the right fully recognize or understand that we are in a new Gilded Age that is even more extreme and destabilizing than the first Gilded Age.
My rebuttal would begin by rejecting your premise completely, and pointing out the everything that follows it is an appeal to emotion. With an unaccepted premise and the remainder of the text relying on a logical fallacy, the argument is essentially DOA. I would then invert your premise and claim that a fair immigration system is conservative. I would define “fair” as dispassionate, rule-following, and conscientious. I would define “conservative” in this context as serving a fiduciary purpose, filling an economic deficit, and protecting the interests, wellbeing and status of the native population. Then I would insert data that supports my premise as well as data that show that non-adherence to my premise leads to civil unrest, unstable economies, and strained infrastructure. And hopefully, that would be convincing.
"Come on Spock...where is your heart?!" -Dr McCoy
S Slope: Would love to hear more from you. Please share your dispassionate, rule-following, conscientious & “conservative” argument with inserted data that supports it & shows the impact of non adherence.
I note that there have been multiple studies that indicate that the net impact of all US immigrants (not sure exactly how "immigrants" was defined) from 1980 to 2022 has been a small but net positive financial impact & that the number of US citizens killed by REFUGEES from 1980 to 2020 is nil. Unfortunately these stats are prior to the huge influx of people during the Biden era & I suspect that number from 2020 - 2026 are not nearly as favorable to the immigrants. Of course the above stats, as with all stats, likely show some bias in terms of definitions...
The Holocaust has warped the conversation around refugees and asylum. In that case, you had a nonviolent highly functional minority group being scapegoated by a brutal majority group.
Today’s conflicts aren’t like that. Today’s conflicts generally involve the implosion of all-around dysfunctional and violent societies. Thus, when you take in refugees from those conflicts, you are importing dysfunction and violence. This is especially true when you’re onboarding fighting aged men.
A compromise position that would accommodate the moral concerns of the left and the safety concerns of the right would be to restrict asylum to women and young children.
I've often thought about this. How much too of high crime among migrant groups is due to the fact that migrants are overwhelmingly young men? I'd be much more sympathetic to refugee policies that prioritized women and young children.
I'm not sure it's moral, though, to force the taxpaying workers of America to assume responsibility for the care and feeding of these women and young children. Without husbands and fathers these people would almost certainly require almost-universal welfare support for basic needs. Maybe we could have a voluntary system where people who are so moved by this suffering can accept refugee women and children into their households and provide for them directly, or fund housing/food/clothing/transportation/education/medical care for them out of a pool of donations from the compassionate folks of America with plenty of spare cash. Many Americans are struggling mightily to just get by and feed their own; just because this is a "wealthy country" doesn't mean that every one in this country is wealthy.
You lost me at “intelligent leftist.” These are people who think communism is good, drag shows benefit little kids, and boys can become girls by saying so. “Intelligent leftist” is a contradiction in terms. Pretty sure the last one was DP Moynihan.
Intelligent people include the insane
The same guy who figured out that proximity to Canada was the essential determinant of successful educational results in American states.
I’m in England. I agree with the gist of your post, but I just want to correct the thing about the news coverage. This was on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story of every news programme within minutes. I read the Guardian, they covered it. The BBC covered it. They all covered the fact that he was an asylum seeker, and that he was from Sudan, and they praised the men who rescued the victim. Maybe it was different in the US, but they covered everything you might hope for over here. They even said “the police are expecting riots tonight.”
They haven't discussed yet what to do about violent immigrants from African countries, but I expect that is coming soon, too.
I didn't look at UK sources. I'm glad it's at least being reported where it's happening. Do you think the honest reporting will have any effect?
Probably not but it should still be put out into the ether. Journalism has a responsibility to report such events regardless if it falls on deaf ears.
Follow the money. Subjective, political propaganda wearing the mantle of "news," makes more money. Watching one sided, ideological narratives; enrages alienated people and pulls them into the fold. They will gladly choose this over the older format of an hours worth of objective reporting.
I’d guess that the talk was 80% “We don’t like riots and we are not a racist country.” and 20% “we need to talk about immigration”. Everyone agreed that the heroes were heroes, and everyone talked about how the crazy Sudanese immigrant got into the country. But I think the riots made everything worse for everyone. They were awful and they took away any chance of a reasonable discussion about immigration.
Thank you for the info from ground zero. Very helpful. I hope the UK is poised pivot very soon! God Bless!
The problem with your argument Peter/Mr Lefty is that it assumes that appropriate intervention would necessarily have prevented the behaviour, and therefore treats the existence of the violent behaviour itself as evidence that the intervention was inadequate. I reject this argument.
If only the leftists who champion these open border policies actually thought them through at all. What a difference it might be. I sat across from a migrant shelter in NYC during the Biden invasion. I watched hundreds of people be placed in a hotel with free healthcare, food, debit cards, legal assistance, and free entrance to the public schools (no documentation for vaccines or anything else required for their kids). They paid it back by turning my neighborhood into a shithole.
In which NYC neighborhood did you see this happen? I lived in the city for 20 years, mostly in Morningside Heights, but left before this migrant madness.
Financial district in Manhattan.
I agree with our prosperity comes responsibility to the poor. I would argue that mass importation is not the most helpful solution though. Certainly the proportions of immigrants to native population cannot be what it is in the UK without devistating issues. I also agree there are benefits to taking migrants but that those benefits are over shadowed if they are immigrants who do not want to conform to the native culture of their new country. I would also point out that in your (steelman) argument you said it is a low cost for us. This is not factually true. We are paying a very high dollar amount to deal with this issue. Our infrastructure, schools, jails, housing, medical systems are all being over run. This is all before we even address the cultural problem of having people who believe raping little children is acceptable in close proximity to your children.
I agree with all that you said. In addition, I am a little uncomfortable with the idea that we are a rich society. In one way that is of course true, but it is also true that (at least in the US) we are in deep debt.
The other thing that is NOT considered within this perspective is the actual architecture of the international system. We all know that most international law is little more than a handshake agreement in terms of it's enforcement capacity, but massive outflows of people from the destruction of WWII was THE reason that we have it in the first place. We should be leaning on this more from both sides as it is the best attempt we have to lay down a reasonable balance between the needs of individuals for safety when their home state can't provide it and other state's capacities to actually make a difference.
The understanding is that the only countries that are obliged to host fleeing foreign nationals from war-torn countries are the adjacent neighbours to that country, the seeker of asylum is expected to seek asylum in the nearest safe nation-state. The hosting terms are limited to the conflict and then it is expected that most of those refugees would return to their home country with the few that might not be able to be offered asylum in that country or other places after applying FROM the place of refuge. It fits neither an 'open borders' idiotic internationalism OR a 'shut the border' idiotic nationalism. It was a reasonable system on paper, and it got broken almost as soon as it started by the 'Palestinian Problem' and then by modern aviation, cheap transportation and the sheer number of post-colonial conflicts as empires broke down.
So, the UK is NOT obligated to take every person claiming asylum who turns up on their door, unless they are their immediate neighbours which are Ireland, France and arguably Spain, maybe you can stretch the friendship to The Canada. Asylum seekers who legitimately can't return to their country of origin are supposed to be distributed among other nations willing to accept them. Unsurprisingly, developed countries are preferable by Asylum seekers for obvious reasons. Australia caps this kind of intake, and it's very frustrating when it gets bypassed by (relatively) wealthier compatriots who can afford to travel and turn up at the door.
There also needs to be a coherent resettlement programs and resources for those refugees arriving and approved to stay. If you do neither the approval/screening process at both ends, and then dump these people in town and expect them to fend for themselves... this is what you get. It's a total betrayal of the whole agreement about seeking asylum for both the seekers and the hosts. The cost is borne by the people who have to try and figure out how to live with these new arrivals and the new arrivals themselves. There is nothing progressive or conservative about this and as far as I can tell it is less about ideology than a juvenile refusal of our civil servants, policy wonks and politicians to actually take responsibility for their decisions and the effects they have.
I would argue the following: Are we now the world's soup kitchen where the interests of our nation's citizens falls to the lowest rung in the ladder while we struggle and toil for our last dollar to feed our own under the guise of holding the moral high-ground? The cost of this egalitarian showmanship is too high of a price to pay via our judicial, financial, and medical resources amongst others. If you look in the periphery you will see many of our own in need of these very same resources who, or their ancestors alike, have most likely contributed to the treasury and deserve to be first in line.
1. The unique gifts that the United States offers are free to anyone in the world: Democracy. Capitalism. A free press. Freedom of religion. Respect for women. Etc etc. Any nation may provide these to its citizens and any group of citizens may demand these from their nation. No need to travel so far.
2. Are we not depriving the citizens of other nations of the imperative to enact change when we incentivize mass migration with open borders and free housing, health care, education, etc? Why fight for improvements on your home turf when you can just leave and go leech off the generosity of a wealthier country?
3. Can values be exported? Or do people have to actually be assimilated into higher functioning nations before they understand things like the rule of law, respect for women, how to positively contribute to your community, etc. Sure, wealthier countries can support what Trump refers to as "shithole countries" with wheelbarrowfulls of foreign aid, but how effective is that really in the long term? Does foreign aid disincentivize real change?
excellent - thank you
"Responsible policymakers should be investing more money to immigrants in the form of social and integration services like professional training, and in the form of social workers who are able to guide them through the process of assimilation."
The problem with this is that they don't believe this. Any of it.
My wife was a legal immigrant. She filed her paperwork, paid her fees, followed the rules, and waited. And the results? She lost her Green Card over a question. A simple question, and USCIS said she was done.
And when I bring it up with the supposedly pro-immigrant crowd? Mocking, derision, and a total lack of sympathy or support. My congresswoman, a Democrat, made things worse for my wife when we reached out for help. They don't really care, but would rather just project an image of caring and moral rectitude; but when you hold their feet to the fire, or even an uncomfortably warm foot bath (like on Martha's Vineyard)? They fold.
We KNOW the asylum system is abused and perhaps even broken. But, like with birthright citizenship in the modern era, we can't address the topic with honesty and critical thinking. Heck, I would even question your brief point about immigration bringing lower prices and great food. They certainly don't lower the rent, and very few of them are bringing high quality culinary skills.
To add: How much of the discourse on immigration is focused on understanding meaningful, serious aspects of the topic? And how much on baseless personal opinion and emotion? I can't even get people to understand the difference between administrative, civil, and criminal aspects of the immigration system.
100%. The strictest of scrutiny for immigrants doing it the legal way and carte blanche for those who do it illegally.
I suppose the real question is: are governments doing what they were asked to do?
In the UK, we are governed by consent. Political parties put forward a mandate, and we, the public, vote for the local representatives of the party whose mandate most closely aligns with what we believe. In doing so, we give our consent for them to represent us in the House of Commons.
For the last five or six elections, the public has not been listened to and, it could be argued, has been lied to by a political class that increasingly sees the public as something to be managed rather than represented. This is a root problem, and much of what follows are the tangled and gnarled branches growing from it.
The moral argument for helping people is a subjective one, but it is an argument that many people willingly accept. Most people want to help those in genuine need. The problem arises when the definition of who qualifies for that help is gradually expanded beyond what the public originally understood and consented to.
Help is not an infinite resource. It depends upon finite money, finite housing, finite services, finite infrastructure, and finite public goodwill. As the definition expands and the number of people requiring help increases, the demand placed upon those resources also increases.
At some point, the capacity to help can become overwhelmed. When that happens, help risks becoming less effective for everyone involved. The people already dependent upon those services receive less support, the people arriving receive less support, and public confidence in the system begins to erode.
It is therefore not enough to simply argue for helping. One must also consider the limits within which help remains possible. Help ceases to be help when the demand for it exceeds the capacity to provide it effectively.
This is what we see here.
I think this really is the crux of the argument. It's unethical and undemocratic to provide aid to refugees when there's been massive domestic opposition to spending citizens' tax dollars in such a way. Plus, immigrants/refugees are never going to assimilate into a country that hates them; mass-immigration under such conditions is a recipe for a breakdown of trust among citizens and between citizens and their government.
There are two ethical questions that need to be debated openly.
First, can we meaningfully call a society democratic if there is no informed consent from the people on major issues that will shape the future of their country?
Second, is it ethical for the media and political class to discourage those questions from being asked in the first place?
A further consideration is whether public debate itself is being shaped by forces that operate beyond the traditional parameters of the nation state, including transnational institutions, global economic interests, and international networks of influence. If such actors play a significant role in setting the boundaries of acceptable discussion or policy, then that too should be open to public scrutiny and democratic accountability.
Without addressing these questions, the debate about immigration policy is largely redundant.
A functioning democracy depends on citizens being able to question, scrutinise, and withhold consent. Yet those who raise such questions are often dismissed as racists or fascists rather than engaged in debate.
That does not look like democratic discourse. It looks like an attempt to avoid it.
Spot on
Little cost to ourselves? With 40 trillion in debt? That thinking is how we got here and why nothing can stop bankruptcy and national suicide
We're almost 40 trillion dollars in debt not because we have immigration but because we have politicians—both sides of the aisle—who are hostile to the very concept of fiscal discipline.
roger that Peter - and I hear you opine frequently on this topic in your conversations with your guests
I read that Stephen Ogilvie has been put into a medically induced coma. His survival is still uncertain. I'm glad I no longer have Leftist friends to call and ask what they think. Do you think they know anything about the shootings of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the forced marriages of 9 year old girls to older men there, or the young Afghani males forced to dress as women and bellydance for degenerate older Islamist men's sexual gratification? What are they saying about the murder of Henry Nowak? Any chance they'll stop swallowing every word they read in the New York Times?