And no I do not favor open borders even though I do favor a big increase in immigration into the United States, both high- and low-skilled. The simplest argument against open borders is the political one. Try to apply the idea to Cyprus, Taiwan, Israel, Switzerland, and Iceland and see how far you get. Big countries will manage the flow better than the small ones but suddenly the burden of proof is shifted to a new question: can we find any countries big enough (or undesirable enough) where truly open immigration might actually work?
In my view the open borders advocates are doing the pro-immigration cause a disservice. The notion of fully open borders scares people, it should scare people, and it rubs against their risk-averse tendencies the wrong way. I am glad the United States had open borders when it did, but today there is too much global mobility and the institutions and infrastructure and social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring. Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs. (The clever will note that this problem is smaller if all wealthy countries move to free immigration at the same time, but of course that is unlikely.)
He concludes that there should be a book like this, or two, for every major political issue of import.
“I do favor a big increase in immigration…”
So what is the ideal population of the US, 500 million, 1 billion? Because that’s where more immigration will end up. And then the historical US will no longer exist. We will be just another Nigeria, or India, or Mexico.
I favor zero immigration, imprisonment of all illegals until deportation, and transfer of blacks to Africa.
The open-borders idiots believe in magic dirt; the immigrants will become American by contact with it.
Reality? They also shut down the assimilation machinery of our culture, via “diversity”. Balkanization is what we have now, versus “Americanization”. That’s not going to end well, and the useful idiots like Caplan and Weinersmith don’t comprehend that they’re being used as catspaws in the scheme for destroying the phenomenon that was America.
I used to enjoy their work, liberal as it is. No more–They’re off my reading list, and there is no way in hell I will ever purchase another book by these total f**king idiots.
One of the key things you need to be able to do, in our modern world, is recognize when you’re being cozened. Most Americans do not realize how much of the “conventional wisdom” has been created and put out there by creatures who are actually inimical to their best interests, and the happy-dappy idiots buy into the most ludicrous ideas and positions.
Ilhan Omar is a perfect example–Idiots voted for her against their own self-interest, ‘cos “diversity”. Dumbasses. The people running the United States at this point are too ‘effing stupid to live, and they’re going to drag the rest of us down with them. We have possibly the worst set of delusional “elites” in the history of the human species. It’s hard to come up with historical precedent, although the Chinese who shut down Zheng Ho probably come close.
Bob/Kirk… well said.
My observation is most open borders proponents lock their doors and do not live near borders or illegal immigrants.
Open-borders advocates are like termites; they operate in complete obliviousness to the reality of what they are doing to the commons, living as they do in a haze of idealized self-virtue. Few of them work in fields where the wages are depressed below the poverty level by unskilled competition from the illegals, and they happily glom on to all the benefits they get from buying cheap labor to build their houses, mow their lawns, and watch their kids. They’re parasites, pure and simple–They could not afford their lavish lifestyles if they had to do the work themselves, or pay their own countrymen a decent competitive wage to do it.
Thing that pisses me off is that when they manage to crash the whole system, just like the Roman aristos who drove all the yeoman farmers off their land to build their vast slave-operated latifundia, they’re gonna be standing there blaming everyone but themselves for the resultant misery and poverty. For evidence, see rural California.
Assholes. Self-involved, selfish assholes living out their little fantasies of idealized virtue while hollowing out the flesh and blood of their native country, so that they can exploit the misery of poverty-stricken foreigners for cheap labor, and oh-by-the-way, create for themselves a client class beholden to them–Which ain’t going to happen. The invaders are not going to enshrine the open-borders types into positions of power because they enabled all this, instead, they are going to quite rightly dismiss them as traitors, and put their own people in charge when they reach the majorities they need to be effective.
Same shit the Roman aristos did, with regards to the various tribes like the Goths. Same results will ensue, and you’ll see California and the other invades states hacked off the body politic because of it, same as the Romans lost the provinces settled by the Goths.
You want a template for what’s going on, right now? Look to the fall of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. Europe? Same shit, different ethnicity. US? Same shit, different ethnicity.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do? They have to watch everyone else repeat it around them, all the while telling people it ain’t gonna work…
“I am glad the United States had open borders when it did”
I am not sure the USA ever had open borders. Even those Ellis Island folks had to wait for five days, stand in line, fill out the paperwork, pass a physical, prove you have a sponsor, walk up two flights of stairs. And numbers were turned away.
The numbers who were ultimately turned away (some had to stay for quarantine or further examination) were a pretty small % of the total, BUT:
–there was great demand for unskilled labor
–there was almost nothing in the way of a publicly-funded welfare system
…and, most importantly: America had not lost its civilizational self-confidence and new immigrants were not expected to hate and resent their new country.
See my related post Two Views of Immigration:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/49641.html
How dare you! I had to unsubscribe from SMBC because of this book.
I am forced to assume that Science here means something other than ascertaining truths about the natural world by hypothesis, observation and experiment, and Ethics assumes axioms I do not share.
Curious.