The reason why people are opposed to immigration is not mainly prejudice and racism, but how it affects them personally.
This is one of the strongest effects I found when researching immigration and multiculturalism.
The reason why many actors, lawyers and professionals are fine with immigration is because it won't threaten their jobs. But when Indians came in H1B visas, American IT workers spoke up and the NY Times wrote an article about it.
If immigrants were highly skilled engineers, the high school educated white man wouldn't oppose them. More likely, the opposition would come from those with college degrees.
This is partially right. Many pro-immigration liberals don't fully internalize crime and disorder externalities from low-skilled migration.
But the economic self-interest story doesn't hold up as neatly as you'd think: college-educated Americans compete most directly with skilled immigrants yet support skilled immigration most strongly (https://www.popularbydesign.org/p/why-skilled-migration-is-popular).
When we are able to discuss homosexuality without being censored, the debate will change again. Homosexuality has historically been allowed and even approved in many times and places for long periods, such as Renaissance Florence, but ultimately the negative consequences of such tolerance will catch up.
It's only by preventing reality, history and logic from being talked about that the LGBTQ movement can have temporary momentum.
The more I think about this post and others you've written, the more disturbed I get. Because if we really probe, some of the most basic assumptions that underlie the entire immigration debate are in fact highly questionable morally.
You often point out that immigration is a complex set of policies with complex effects on the receiving country. But the base frame is that only the receiving country matters to this debate. The effect on immigrants themselves is just not considered as important.
You've written about how your own life is totally different because you immigrated. And this is true of nearly all immigrants. Almost no one ends up worse off because they migrated. And the impact is overwhelming, life-changing, transformative, and the effect lasts generations, even centuries.
The tradeoffs the receiving country has to weigh are minor in comparison. Utilitarian logic applied to humanity as a whole makes the moral case for very high levels of immigration - as many as the labor market can absorb. We don't even know what the upper limit truly is, only that it may be orders of magnitude higher than the _political_ limit. Israel took in levels of immigration in the early 1990s that would be unthinkable anywhere else - and by and large, it succeeded.
But because that's not the way democratic states operate, all this is lost. We just take it for granted that rich people are effectively allowed to make decisions on where poor people live, and see nothing wrong in this.
And that raises another thought that is even more disturbing:
What if the analogy is not gay rights but civil rights? These weren't won by persuasion as much as by force. Nonviolent force, but still force - sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, lawsuits. The cost of withholding civil rights became greater than the cost of granting them. Even then, to this day, force is used - southern states remain under federal supervision under the VRA.
In which case, isn't illegal immigration actually comparable to civil disobedience? Not to say that illegal immigrants themselves are thinking on these lines - they mostly just want higher pay than they could get at home. But the effect is the same. The cost of enforcing the laws as written is actually higher than the cost of just letting it slide. The US can't expel its undocumented population. Even the current attempt to do so has run into many issues which you've written about.
Men of good faith could once disagree cordially among each other on whether women should be allowed to vote, but the only real reason this was a debate was because men got to decide that question.
The reason why people are opposed to immigration is not mainly prejudice and racism, but how it affects them personally.
This is one of the strongest effects I found when researching immigration and multiculturalism.
The reason why many actors, lawyers and professionals are fine with immigration is because it won't threaten their jobs. But when Indians came in H1B visas, American IT workers spoke up and the NY Times wrote an article about it.
If immigrants were highly skilled engineers, the high school educated white man wouldn't oppose them. More likely, the opposition would come from those with college degrees.
This is partially right. Many pro-immigration liberals don't fully internalize crime and disorder externalities from low-skilled migration.
But the economic self-interest story doesn't hold up as neatly as you'd think: college-educated Americans compete most directly with skilled immigrants yet support skilled immigration most strongly (https://www.popularbydesign.org/p/why-skilled-migration-is-popular).
When we are able to discuss homosexuality without being censored, the debate will change again. Homosexuality has historically been allowed and even approved in many times and places for long periods, such as Renaissance Florence, but ultimately the negative consequences of such tolerance will catch up.
It's only by preventing reality, history and logic from being talked about that the LGBTQ movement can have temporary momentum.
I have wrote a little piece about democratic will and I personally think it might be of value here.
https://defiantrationale.substack.com/p/what-is-will?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5utlhq
The more I think about this post and others you've written, the more disturbed I get. Because if we really probe, some of the most basic assumptions that underlie the entire immigration debate are in fact highly questionable morally.
You often point out that immigration is a complex set of policies with complex effects on the receiving country. But the base frame is that only the receiving country matters to this debate. The effect on immigrants themselves is just not considered as important.
You've written about how your own life is totally different because you immigrated. And this is true of nearly all immigrants. Almost no one ends up worse off because they migrated. And the impact is overwhelming, life-changing, transformative, and the effect lasts generations, even centuries.
The tradeoffs the receiving country has to weigh are minor in comparison. Utilitarian logic applied to humanity as a whole makes the moral case for very high levels of immigration - as many as the labor market can absorb. We don't even know what the upper limit truly is, only that it may be orders of magnitude higher than the _political_ limit. Israel took in levels of immigration in the early 1990s that would be unthinkable anywhere else - and by and large, it succeeded.
But because that's not the way democratic states operate, all this is lost. We just take it for granted that rich people are effectively allowed to make decisions on where poor people live, and see nothing wrong in this.
And that raises another thought that is even more disturbing:
What if the analogy is not gay rights but civil rights? These weren't won by persuasion as much as by force. Nonviolent force, but still force - sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, lawsuits. The cost of withholding civil rights became greater than the cost of granting them. Even then, to this day, force is used - southern states remain under federal supervision under the VRA.
In which case, isn't illegal immigration actually comparable to civil disobedience? Not to say that illegal immigrants themselves are thinking on these lines - they mostly just want higher pay than they could get at home. But the effect is the same. The cost of enforcing the laws as written is actually higher than the cost of just letting it slide. The US can't expel its undocumented population. Even the current attempt to do so has run into many issues which you've written about.
Men of good faith could once disagree cordially among each other on whether women should be allowed to vote, but the only real reason this was a debate was because men got to decide that question.
That's an OK position to have as long as you're aware you're in minority now :)