> Immigrants could do everything right and conservatives would still hate them for taking jobs
There's a problem that remains when you take away all other problems, but it's not jobs, it's culture. People are attached to the culture they live in, and they don't want to see it displaced or overly altered.
You can look at places where recent immigrants outperform the "native" population in every way, like Hawaii (counting all non-Polynesians as immigrants for this purpose), and they have materially improved the lives of the native people considerably. You'll still find a lot of resentment of that, and some of that is quite legitimate.
The culture changes without immigration, you're not cool anymore old man. This reminds me of my country, growing up it was virtually all catholic, nowadays I was surprised to see that something like 40% are some flavor of protestant, courtesy of US missionaries. Always sad to see something like this happen. And of all things to take from the US, why the weird religious stuff?
>The culture changes without immigration, you're not cool anymore old man.
Yes, but like most things, there's a threshold beyond which the rate of change becomes harmful and alienating, and mass immigration tends to push the rate beyond that threshold.
Surely it is significant that the money was collected, and now after presumably it’s all shut down - there is no widespread, where is my daycare? Where will I find childcare now?
Well, it wouldn’t be a fraud if the daycares have been functioning normally all this time and continue to do so versus being empty shells or mailing addresses. I guess your contention is that it did not happen at all. I don’t even think Tim Walz is claiming that, but I haven’t followed recent developments.
I'm mostly ignoring the Somali aspect and I'm more fascinated that Minnesota seems to have a significant amount of fraud that's kind of broadly tolerated. Like, yes, there was the Feeding Our Future prosecution, so is the threshold somewhere in the 8-9 figures before they care? What other states have similar issues of widespread but broadly-tolerated welfare fraud?
To throat clear a bit, I'm quite sure, for example, West Virginia has significant amount of various forms of fraud, and that is also bad.
>So when a white women in Minnesota wanted to set up a fraud operation and hire people, she was gonna hire Somalis, the same way a German would hire Germans
Well, uh, no, I don't think that's the case at all. It could still be coincidental but your analogy is way off.
Minnesota is less than 2% Somali; Germany is 73% German. Hiring specifically in Minneapolis, or specific neighborhoods like Columbia Heights, your point is a little stronger but still nowhere close to the same ratio.
>Do you dispute nick Shirley's dishonesty/low intelligence?
I mean if you really want my opinion on journalists, you know what forum we're in, right?
The fraud in Minnesota is part of the political system and is specific to the Somali community. The Somalis are organized, insular, and loyal to their ethnic group. They are allowed to commit fraud because they reward and punish politicians by directing votes and political donations. You can see this in the leaked audio between Somali fraudsters and the Minnesota AG, where they are open about looking out for the Somali community and rewarding politicians who play ball. A random non-Somali fraudster will not benefit from the same political protection.
West Virginia pays its taxes (its citizens have a higher tax rate than we do). I never mind sending federal funds to West Virginia. Scofflaws like South Carolina are a different story.
And I've heard of the corruption in West Virginia. It's minor. (As in hundreds of dollars, when a good bribe to a local politician is around $2000 -- where I'm at we're still in Appalachia, so this isn't cali money talking).
I'm originally from West Virginia and I was thinking of stuff like questionable disability declarations, of otherwise able-bodied people finding the right doc to sign off on 100%.
Supposedly it's a widespread thing in the military these days too.
Disability's a problem pretty much round the country by this point. Welfare is stigmatized more than disability, so people get disability when they possibly can.
I don't know the statistics about immigration in Europe broadly, but I certainly know enough to know that immigration is not monolithic across the continent. (This is also true for America, but since in Europe we can break countries down more narrowly, it is useful to do so).
Immigration in the UK does not match "the American conservative narrative on immigration" at all. Immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial and basically good, and commit crimes at much lower rates. They often outperform the native-born on standardized testing (as a general rule).
Okay, I know you mentioned that one can cherry-pick from European countries, but I just want to add this on behalf of the UK, because I think we may be getting the American backflow from the European backflow! :)
That is an amazing view of immigration to the UK which accurately reflects the immigration of generations of Indians and of African elites, and neatly elides the entire last 15 years.
I think Scott was suggesting that one _not_ do exactly that.
Net migration to the UK has ballooned (this is good). I agree with that.
The expected economic contribution of the marginal immigrant to the UK is positive, quite clearly. So I disagree with that. I mean it depends how you rank marginal, obviously there will be some that will have a negative expected economic contribution so if you list by expected economic contribution then yes negative, but this is true everywhere because basically everywhere needs to overhaul their immigration system (the US too).
Well let's be a bit careful with our economic analysis here.
The cost of living crisis is basically a ridiculous farce driven by the fact that far too few british people are skilled and working good jobs, and they expect a higher standard of living without putting in the work to achieve it.
The housing crisis is pretty true, but the counterpoint to the housing crisis is rising house prices, which is good for homeowners. Now, I agree that the housing crisis is an issue, and we need to build more houses, but it is not a simple "positive" or "negative" to the economy as a whole.
Housing crises are almost always artificial and supply-induced, not demand. Building more housing is not actually a hard problem, we're very good at it. We just refuse to.
Seems to me like the problem then is the part where we don't build houses.
Imagine if there wasn't immigration and Britain miraculously had a high fertility. Would you tell people "stop having children" because there's not enough houses for them?
Visit a hospital. Wait until you or one of your relatives needs care, either in their own home or in a care home. The presence of immigrants prepared to do what we Brits choose not to do, is a huge benefit in real terms, whatever the money says.
This is entirely the product of policy though. The BMA have a hard limit on how many doctors can be trained and the Boris government made it so that native doctors don't have any priority on training spaces. Likewise we have extremely high rates of economic inactivity. No wonder the hospitals are full of (often not very good due to lesser quality training) doctors from the developing world when we actively prevent British citizens from becoming doctors and nurses!
I understand that one of the key limits on training places is that there are simply not enough senior people to train new starters as they are too busy treating people to train others. This is in part a consequence of the pressures on the NHS - reducing waiting lists is good short term but removes training capacity in the NHS thus creating a long term problem, which is the limit on training.
Fundamentally the NHS has been operating above capacity for so long that the processes needed to keep it going broke.
I don't know about the UK, but in Germany, the health care sector runs on immigrant labor, and that's specifically true for the non-doctor roles. No one is stopping Germans from becoming nurses and the like. There are simply not enough who want to do it, so we need immigrants to fill these roles.
Of course, you can argue that, if working conditions were better, we wouldn't have to rely on people from poorer countries, but I don't think that the general population is willing to pay what it takes to make that happen.
The demographics of NHS staff are identical to the demographics of the UK as a whole, the idea that the health service (or elderly care) is disproportionate reliant on immigrant labour is a false one.
Those sectors are certainly reliant on immigrant labour to suppress wages, but immigrants don't make up more than their expected share of heath staff.
This is not true, if you don't estimate by skin color only, it is really common to fly in docs from Eastern Europe for 36-hour shifts, clearly the NHS is massively understaffed.
Also, the vast majority of British immigrants do not work in the NHS. Even if we assume that the NHS is reliant on immigrant labour (which as you point out isn't true, but let's pretend for argument's sake), we could still cut immigration by a good 90% and still keep the NHS fully staffed.
Interestingly I visited a hospital in Australia recently and found that the majority of nurses were either British or Irish immigrants. A lot of them talked about how much better things are in Australia than at home, both in terms of the pay and conditions and in terms of how well the overall medical system works.
So it's not that British people aren't willing to be nurses, it's just that the NHS is unwilling to pay British people to be nurses.
The "vast majority" of Doctors who were struck off or suspended were trained overseas per GMC. The UK must reduce immigration as a public health measure.
Does that article offer some evidence of migrants having negative contributions that I'm missing? he just seems to be generically saying they're bad without any details.
This is why arguing about foreign countries is dangerous - they have just as much nuance and important context as the US, but we are much less likely to know about them and consider them in our arguments.
It's easy to become a 'man of one study' when talking about a culture you're not immersed in and have just read one study about.
The economic contribution metric is often a joke because it focuses on essentially tax on income. In a welfare system, it's normal that there's going to be a lower tier of tax payers who are net receivers whereas the richer side are net contributors. This is what the system is *designed to do*: redistribution from the rich to the poor. The implication that because someone is a net negative on the public balance (namely, receives more in healthcare and other benefits than they pay in taxes) means they're overall a burden on the economy is absurd, because it doesn't count all the economic activity those people enable (both as workers and consumers), activity which is *also* taxed, but does not figure directly as part of their income. And the lower your income, the higher a % of your total real contributions to the economy that activity likely is.
Crazy as it sounds, UK economists thought of that already. But no matter how hard you squeeze, there's just not enough juice in non-EEA immigration to the UK (which is most of it). We even tried adding back non-cash credits for the education costs we didn't have to provide. Just can't get those numbers over the line.
I don't quite understand this comment. To me it parses like vulgar Keynesian "broken window fallacy" stuff. Yes, there are weird times when an economy can be harmed by a slump in consumption, but we still want productivity and net takers are still a burden. Even when doing Keynesian demand-side interventions, there are more and less wasteful ways to do them. Going to the store while living on the dole does not make you a net contributor to the economy. Having too many such people is how you become 2015 Greece.
Of course that is all obvious, so I suspect that I am missing what you tried to say.
What would an economy with no net takers look like? How do you even achieve that? Does the state just not get taxes at all? Do they take them and spend them on... what? I assume nothing that ever directly benefits any one individual?
Again, the whole point of a welfare system is redistribution and sort of countering some of the starker inequality creating economic forces. So yes, it goes without saying that part of it is essentially "the richer half pays healthcare/pensions/whatever to the poorer half". You need the two sides to be balanced and that's done via deciding on the precise level of welfare as well as the tax burden. But generally speaking it's normal that some people will be net takers. This is not some horrible dysfunction of the system. It happens because those people have low income, something we know happens in a market economy and can happen even for very vital jobs (street cleaner, mailman, even teacher or nurse), but the principle of a welfare state is that they should still be able to have a dignified life.
Could you just find ways to have the market solve that by paying them higher salaries? Maybe, I don't know - historical examples aren't very encouraging. But even if, you would risk needing to push things to an extreme for that to happen (e.g. roads keep getting filthier until enough people finally decide it's necessary to be willing to pay road cleaners more). Welfare is the compromise between trying to keep the society capitalist and simply letting most workers get double fucked by both doing hard, dangerous, necessary jobs and still not even managing to gain enough to live on. Because ultimately salaries aren't determined just by societal necessity of a job, they're determined by bargaining power factors which mean those people often aren't in a good position to capture much of the value they produce and that leads to them appearing as "net takers" in the books, not that they are actually useless.
Generally speaking, if you could just make all the "net takers" by this definition vanish overnight, you wouldn't get a rich and prosperous society now free from economic parasitism. You would get instantaneous collapse into barbarism. That says something about how meaningful the concept is in actually reflecting the real usefulness of people to society.
From the late 1980s until 2013, group-based child sexual exploitation affected an estimated 1,400 girls, commonly from care home backgrounds, in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. Between 1997 and 2013, girls were abused by grooming gangs of predominantly Pakistani men. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history"
Yes, I am aware. It is a big scandal and a problem. But in the grand scheme of such things it is clearly not determinative on whether immigration is overall positive or negative. Should be dealt with though, for sure. But, though I am reticent to say it, it has become slightly overblown in political discourse in the UK/about the UK (but of course for the victims it remains horrific and has to be dealt with promptly and swiftly).
In the grand scheme of such things, "Just in this one instance, immigrants have systematically raped hundreds of children for decades" sounds like a pretty heavy weight on the 'negative' scale. How many excellent ethnic restaurants does it take to balance this out in your book?
I mean just in the grand scheme of child sexual abuse it makes up like 2.5% of all cases (hard to estimate such things because the Casey Report wasn't able to find great numbers, but let's assume it is 5x underreported compared to baseline).
I am not saying it's not horrific, I'm just saying there are other factors here, and if immigrants are also incredibly entrepreneurial then increasing the UK's GDP will increase people's socioeconomic status, which is probably one of the most predictive factors for whether children will suffer abuse. So immigrants still net out positive.
In a world where people are more and more atomized and people of good socio-economic status have so few children, it seems far from clear that ”growing the economy” just automatically equals children in society doing well.
And if they are not as incredibly entrepreneurial as you keep claiming without any reference to data, then they are a clear net negative. Where is your break-even point? Where is the threshold at which you can confidently say that this is somehow worth it?
Have you seen UK's GDP growth rates in the past decade? The least we can say is that explosion of immigration in this case *did not* lead to this sorts of benefits. This is in fact the greatest natural experiment we had to disprove the 'trillion dollars on the sidewalk' argument for open borders.
Well, yes, we also did Brexit which had a negative impact. I mean it's not a great natural experiment, since you'd need a control. Maybe Ireland, but I'd guess their immigration stats look a bit different.
One of the common themes of the grooming gangs is that the perpetrators' co-ethnics in the police and local government helped cover up their crimes, so it's not "just" children being raped, it's the integrity of the state and the rule of law being compromised by ethnic mafias.
“Easier to exploit” is quite the dysphemism for “reducing the absolutely ballooning amount of money we are spending on healthcare, mostly for old pensioners (who are broadly themselves net takers from the welfare state)”
Because, as a policy decision intended to "starve the beast" so that it can be replaced with systems that make cashflows easier for private investors to extract, we have decided not to offer our medical staff rates that are copetitive by Western standards, so they are all going to the US where they get paid more while working fewer hours; but this agenda is at odds with people still wanting to not get sick and die, so there is pressure to acquire medical staff willing to work the hours we want for the pay we offer from somewhere so the system can limp along for a little while longer despite the factions attempting to kill it.
Or to be less U.S.-centric (at the cost of some quick slapdash research), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syma_Khalid was the daughter of working-class Pakistani immigrants in the similar-population town of Wolverhampton over the same time period, and is currently running https://www.hecbiosim.ac.uk.
I think the thing is that basically it was swept under the rug (bad), and not addressed properly when it happened. And now, no matter how many inquiries one does, the evidence is simply not there to find the perpetrators, and the networks have basically stopped existing due to other crackdowns that have already happened. So it will be hard to find justice, but people really really want justice here (which makes sense, but it will be extremely hard to get).
How is it overblown? It is becoming increasingly evident that the numbers of British children raped is in the 6 to even 7 figure range. The Casey report explicitly stated that the media and government were trying to cover it up and deliberately deflecting from its severity. If this had occurred during a civil war it would be taught in ethics textbooks about crimes against humanity.
The population of Rotherham is about 100k. If the number of British children raped by the Rotherham gangs were in six figures then that would mean that every inhabitant of Rotherham was raped by them.
Perhaps they somehow managed to arrange for hundreds of thousands of people not living in Rotherham to pass through Rotherham's care homes so that they could molest them. If the number of British children raped by the Rotherham gangs were in seven figures then that would mean that more than 1% of _the whole UK population_ are among their victims.
Just by way of reminder, the usual estimate is "at least 1400". (That was the figure found by the Jay enquiry; the subsequent Casey enquiry's report, which you cite, says "we fully endorse" Jay's findings. Jay and Casey both stress that the actual number may be higher. But they would not write the way they do if they thought it was _three orders of magnitude_ higher. I don't think they would write the way they do if they thought it was _one_ order of magnitude higher.)
Wherever you are getting your numbers from is not even _trying_ to make them have any correspondence with reality. They are deliberately deceiving you and I think you should stop trusting them.
(For the avoidance of doubt: yes, 1400 children is 1400 too many. "At least 1400" children is at least 1400 too many. And it does indeed look as if local government in Rotherham attempted to cover it up, which is appalling. All of that is true. None of that justifies inflating the figures by three orders of magnitude.)
We probably have different moral systems, but I cannot fathom how any positives from immigration outweigh hundreds of raped children. Ideally you would just have an immigration system that does a better job of filtering out child rapists and a police system less likely to cover it up, but as it exists now, I can’t imagine arguing it to be a net benefit.
Hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you’re looking at numbers and other people are looking at raped children.
The stance is: literally nothing is worth this.
I was at the ‘ literally nothing is worth this ‘ when Sweden starting having hand grenade battles for Europe and ‘ my roofer friend can’t find a job because the Haitians are getting paid 12$ an hour ‘ for America - so I’m sure you understand how I feel.
The same way we still allow private cars even though lots of children get run over each year. Banning the whole concept is not the right solution to the problem.
Does this logic apply to the Catholic Church as well? They covered up notorious sex abuse for decades, often with help from police, and probably at a similar scale to the grooming gangs. What should America do about its catholic problem? Is catholic culture compatible with American values?
(Basically you can find horrific scandals involving any group, and it’s usually a bad idea to use those scandals as the sole criterion for policy, because as other people have pointed out there are actually other things that matter)
"If you think this wave of immigrant rape-torturers is bad, then get a load of how molest-y the Catholics our forefathers tried to keep out of the country are!" is probably not the most watertight pro-immigration argument I've ever seen.
Unless the reader himself is catholic and too "ethnocentric" to even consider whether his own group could ever be a net-negative anywhere.
Boy I guess I haven’t been exposed to the “we shouldn’t have let Catholics into the country” side of the internet. But my hot take is: the many Catholics we let into the country have been a net good for america, and are now held up by most people as assimilated exemplars of American values. If we deported them because of the sexual abuse scandals, it would be a net loss for everyone. If you don’t buy that premise, Okee doke.
To me it just seems weird to talk about "migration" as either a net positive or net negative. It seems obvious that immigrants are not all the same and their cultural compatibility with the native population is not going to be the same, either. Would it be completely out of bounds to make distinctions like "these immigrants have been great, these kind merely good, and these other ones not so good?"
Yes, but one has to engage on a systems-level. I think basically everyone agrees we should change the system somehow, but it's really nontrivial to do that, and as it stands the three reputable positions are basically "more immigration" "same/similar immigration" or "less immigration."
It is nice to speculate about how we can cherry-pick only the best entrepreneurs who are also going to acculturate quickly and do well in school, and be high human capital etc etc etc. But ultimately that level of granularity ought to be reserved for economics papers. The political question is basically a trichotomy (unfortunately, but this is the truth)
The only countries with good data - Denmark and Holland - show clearly migrants from non-Western countries have massive costs and migrants from Western countries have net benefits. That might be a good start to a sane migration policy.
Well, according to my dialog with James below, it *is* out of bounds: "immigrants from virtually every nation are a net benefit."
(See, James, this is why I was asking about your response to John Smith: in your reply below, it *seems as if* you grant that some groups of immigrants are not good—just as it *seemed* [to me, anyway] as if you granted J.S.'s contention about the statistics *in re* immigrants from the Global South—but it is not actually what you think!)
It was a scandal for two reasons: mass child rape, and the authorities knowing about it but doing nothing for ideological reasons.
Now we're looking at a reasonable chance of Farage becoming PM, while Starmer is dealing with the consequences of a different child rape scandal. It's all very depressing.
>But, though I am reticent to say it, it has become slightly overblown in political discourse in the UK/about the UK (but of course for the victims it remains horrific and has to be dealt with promptly and swiftly).
What do you think is the correct level of salience for the systematic, ethnically-based rape of tens of thousands of schoolgirls over several decades with the tacit and sometimes active support of state authorities?
Pretty low given the hundreds of thousands innocent people that have been imprisoned and raped and not just sometimes, but fully and actively supported, by the state authorities doesn't even warrant a blink in the UK political narrative.
There are several towns with official numbers of victims of grooming gangs like that in the several hundred to 1,400 range. London has no official figure. I took these figures, adjusted to the total UK Pakistani population, assumed continuity, and used 80% unreported. This gave me a figure of several tens of thousands. I don't know why any mainstream source I've seen hasn't speculated on this
"Was" is an unlikely term for the situation. Cousin marriage naturally creates extreme kinship groups who have little regard for outgroups and can very easily coordinate among closely related family members. People who are not protected by their own kinship group rely on the police, who appear to be influenced by the local political power of the perpetrating groups
The Labour government voted against a national inquiry in 2025, indicating that the psychological and political influences that prevented a serious police response are very much in effect
This was covered up by the British state, which also covered up the Savile case, the Kincora boys home, had Prince Andrew (and Lord Mountbatten before him) in the royal family, etc.
Rather than a problem caused by immigration, I think this kind of scandal is caused by British elites ranging from "actively molesting children" to "prepared to look the other way at institutionalized child rape".
I can't think of a counterpart to Rotherham in Pakistan itself.
Because in Pakistan, you ~never meet a woman walking alone, without male relatives who will try to kill you if you try to speak to her. Going from there to Britain must be an experience similar to that of hungry sailors discovering an island full of tasty, flightless birds with no fear of humans.
We will note that when Pakistani men encounter a defended little girl, they call the police like every other adult ought to, in order to ... remove the knife-wielding child, and ... well, you know how this happens.
If we instituted justice like Pakistan, they'd learn to chop their own dicks real quick.
>I can't think of a counterpart to Rotherham in Pakistan itself.
In Pakistan itself, they keep their womenfolk inside, because everybody knows that any unaccompanied women walking abroad would be considered fair game for rape.
"The ethnic background of defendants prosecuted for child sexual abuse offences was recorded in 69% (6,356) of cases in 2023 (Ministry of Justice, 2024a). Among these individuals, nine-tenths were White (5,731); across all other ethnicities, there was a much lower proportion than in the general population of England and Wales (see Table 4). This is likely to be related to the under-identification of child sexual abuse in minority ethnic communities.
There was a near-identical pattern of ethnic backgrounds, where this information was recorded, among defendants convicted in 2023."
- Child Abuse in 2023/24 : Trends in Official Data, Center of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse
While, admittedly it is hard to reconcile the great Grooming Gang scandals, with these data - which year after year - fail to show any Ethnic Pattern to Child Sex Abuse cases. However, one clue can be found :
"only in 3.7% cases of child sexual abuse, there were more than one offenders working together."
I don't live in the UK, but I don't think your claims are accurate.
The UK's prison service freely admits that "people from minority ethnic groups are over-represented within the prison population" and that "In the prison population, around 27% identified as being from a minority ethnic group in 2025, compared with 18% in the general population." (https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04334/SN04334.pdf, pg 21) Granted that many of these people may be British nationals.
If you adjust for age, migrants are underrepresented in prison populations.
"Indian", "Chinese", "mixed white and Asian" make up a large proportion of GCSE results, and again, if you adjust for socioeconomic status, the margins become even larger.
Also I think Black British outperform at GCSE. Perhaps different at A-level. Basically they're broadly comparable to native-born (but vastly more entrepreneurial).
In the study comparing A-level results, the period 2021/22 included 28,535 students, of which 19,923 were "white British". Of the remaining 8,612 students, the ethnicity of 6,709 was known. Of these, 955 outperformed the "white British" cohort, with the remaining 5,754 (or 86%) underperforming.
Equivalent figures for 2022/23:
• Total cohort: 28,023
• of which white British: 19,117
• of which not white British and ethnicity known: 7,029
• of which outperformed white British: 2,415
• of which underperformed white British: 66%
So, on average, 76% of A-level students who are not white Britons will receive worse marks than white Britons.
I think glossing this as "They often outperform the native-born on standardized testing" is profoundly misleading. Three times out of four, they do not.
A-level seems like a worse measure to me for reasons that we could get into, but basically I think other weird factors start influencing, and it's not very standardized so comparisons become hard and weird.
Given you think they are underrepresented - are you open to the idea that different cultures produce different levels of crime?
Why do you think that migrants are less criminal? Are they richer than British Nationals on the whole? Are they poorer but being poorer makes people less likely to commit crimes? Are less sex crimes committed by Muslim migrants because Islam is especially tolerant and respectful of female rights? Or does it all correlate with entrepreneurial, presumably because deciding to go to the UK was entrepreneurial. I guess now I'm really interested in how well entrepreneurial parents correlates with genetic traits like intelligence to outperform at school.
Well, actually even if they were slightly more criminal, I would still probably take them. My reasoning here is similar to Lee Kuan Yew's reasoning when he introduced an education system:
"The decisive factor for high performance was a pair of well-educated parents. [...] 1960 and 1970 data analyses [showed] most of our top students who won scholarships for universities abroad had parents who were not well-educated: storekeepers, hawkers, taxi drivers, and laborers. I compared them to the 1980 and 1990 data that revealed over 50 percent of the best 100 scholarship winners had at least one parent who was a professional or self-employed. The conclusion was obvious, that the parents of these scholarship winners of the 1960s and 1970s would have made it to university had they been born a generation later when education was universal." (A quote from From Third World to First)
I think the UK and places accepting immigrants more broadly are arbitraging a little bit of underperformance today (though in the UK's case we are still getting overperformance today), for massive overperformance in future generations, essentially. I also think this explains a lot of America's success.
Yes, sure those inmigrants with 80 average IQ are gonna be amazing doctors and engineers that will be incredibly helpful for the natives, especially in the age of AI!
Unsure what AI has to do with this? I think the average IQ of immigrants to the UK is higher than 80 (we don't have stats on this, but I would be pretty surprised if it wasn't).
Also IQ (a la Stanford-Binet) seems like a poor measure if coming from countries with much worse educational systems. I expect their children to overperform them.
Lee Kuan Yew also said that ethnically homogenous countries are easier to run and that many of his policies were directly aimed at ameliorating the problems of diversity. He would not be in favour of mass immigration.
That looked wrong, but turns out to be true for foreign nationals ("migrants" isn't a category anyone's using in prison stats, and the UK has a policy of not compiling immigration status statistics for crime)...
...because the UK's homegrown and naturalised Black Caribbean and Pakistani populations bring up the home team advantage.
Having said that, it looks from eyeballing it like that foreign nationals are underrepresented as serving prisoners on long sentences due to being deported.
>"people from minority ethnic groups are over-represented within the prison population"
Of course, there are lots of potential explanations for that.
Just to make the ad absurdum explicit, lots of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. Is this evidence they were uniquely criminal and dangerous?
One of the explanations is "they commit more crimes." Perhaps we can think of a way to determine if this is so; e.g., in the U.S., there's the victimization surveys.
The link provided in the parent post about conviction rates seems to suggest that "they commit more crimes" probably ought be the default assumption, I'd think—we would expect to see disproportion there, otherwise. Of course, one can always come up with alternative explanations, but at a certain point we should maybe admit that we're reaching.¹
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¹(*I'll* never do so, naturally, but *others* should–)
Jesus Christ dude, I'm so glad you've been (repeatedly!) banned from the Motte.
Yes, the UK (that nation which turned a blind eye to Pakistani grooming gangs for decades so as not to "inflame community tensions", and in which the prime minister is routinely dubbed "two- tier Keir") is going door to door rounding up racial minorities to toss them in prison and throw away the key. Sure. That must be the explanation for their overrepresentation in the prison system.
If the example of the grooming gangs is any indication, these statistics probably understate the scale of the differential in criminality: there are thousands of white Britons in prison who shouldn't be (because they were convicted for "hate speech" or some similar act of thoughtcrime) and probably thousands of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who ought to be in prison but aren't.
The grooming gangs are not a good example. It's more complex than it's been made out, and to do with classism issues, and intra-community problems (not just pakistani grooming gangs going after white girls, as it is often portrayed, it's vastly more mixed than that when you read the actual Casey report).
There are also definitely not thousands of white britons who have been convicted of hate speech. Source? Usually in these cases people are arrested but it is not followed up on (still bad, but not thousands).
From page 61: "Ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators. Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data were much higher in police data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Their data shows there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity in these police force areas."
Sounds suspiciously like "recording the ethnicity of these perpetrators would inflame community tensions, so we decided not to bother".
From page 71: "Ethnicity in the VKPP report was only recorded for 35% of victims, with nearly two-thirds unknown. Despite that, the report shows that for victims of CSAE with self-identified ethnicity that, in 2023:
• 87% of identified victims were recorded as White or White British"
>There are also definitely not thousands of white britons who have been convicted of hate speech. Source?
I'm a bit confused as to why you asked for a source when you've already decided I'm wrong, but nevertheless.
"[In 2014] 1,209 people were found guilty of offences under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003... Of those convicted, 155 were jailed – compared with just seven a decade before. The average custodial sentence was 2.2 months."
According to the Times, 1,399 people were convicted under this act in 2023.
That's two data points. Let's assume the rate of convictions is constant, and of those convicted, the proportion who serve jail time is constant. The average of the 2014 convictions and 2023 convictions is 1,304. Of those convicted in 2014, 155 served jail time, or 12.8%. The bill was passed in 2003. If 1,304 are convicted under it every year, that means 28,688 convictions in total, of which 3,672 served jail time.
And this is only assuming a totally flat rate of arrests, convictions and prison sentences: the real figure could well be higher.
See also this page (https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003/Section_127) which cites data from the Ministry of Justice indicating that 8,992 people were convicted under this act in the period 2003-2014, and that the conviction ratio crept up from 67% in 2003 to 78% by 2010. That's an average of 817 convictions a year. If we assume that figure remained flat for the period 2015-2025, there have been a total of 17,162 people convicted under this act. If 12.8% of those served jail time, that's 2,196.
I've provided you with two credible back-of-the-envelope estimates of how many people have served jail time under Section 127 of the Communications Act, both of which were in excess of 2,000 i.e. "thousands".
And bear in mind – this is just ONE piece of legislation under which can face imprisonment for saying nasty things. Lucy Connolly, for example, was convicted under a completely different act, section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986.
Grateful you took the time to cite sources here, so I'll respond, but this may take a while, and I probably won't reply if you decide to reply to this.
> Sounds suspiciously like "recording the ethnicity of these perpetrators would inflame community tensions, so we decided not to bother".
No it doesn't. The data just wasn't collected. The Casey Report goes into detail about this at length. Here are some quotes:
"Reviews, recommendations and strategies on child sexual exploitation raise the same issues repeatedly: system failures in information sharing, the need for more training, understanding of risk factors of victims, and the importance of collecting better data and information on perpetrators, including on ethnicity." page 6
"The ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation is not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level." page 8
In Greater Manchester, they managed to collect pretty good data on ethnicity, and this data can be found on page 81. The conclusions are 54% Asian, 3% Black, 35% White, 8% Other. This is the region for which the best data were collected. But of course, as the Casey Report states *multiple times*, there is insufficient data to draw conclusions (no, not even conclusions about a coverup on ethnicity, they were just really bad at collecting this data systematically).
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It's a similar story for the victims, you cite 87% were white, but there is insufficient evidence to draw this conclusion. Casey again says this explicitly:
"This audit does not believe it is accurate to make this statement given the low levels of ethnicity recorded, even with the note of caution that has been included." page 71
Though it is worth noting that the distributions given are basically the distribution of ethnicity among the UK population in 2011, maybe slightly biased towards more Asian victims than White victims. But I won't speculate further because the honest truth is that there is not enough data.
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I said there were not thousands who were convicted of hate speech. You have just cited the statistic for how many people were convicted under the malicious communications act. I really do not want to be the defender of the government here, because I think the malicious communications act is terrible, and the UK needs more free speech than it currently has. However, your implication was that they were convicted for thought crimes, or speaking out against immigrants, when this actually makes up a vanishingly small percentage of the convictions, and most of it is for rape threats/death threats as is spoken about in the articles you link.
Lucy Connolly's conviction is honestly an edge case. During a time of riots against immigrant and muslim communities, she posted in a group chat saying:
"Mass deportation now, set fire to all fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care [...] if that makes me a racist, so be it"
I just want you to suppose the counterfactual, that there were muslim-led riots against white britons, and that in an islamist group chat, someone posted:
"Mass Sharia now, set fire to all the fucking apartments full of the whites for all I care [...] if that makes me a terrorist, so be it"
I think probably we should not convict that person. But honestly it's a difficult call. It comes close to incitement in my opinion. Obviously the context in which it was happening matters too.
Which unfounded narratives of mine are incorrect? Are you claiming that British police *didn't* turn a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oxford for decades? Are you claiming that British police *don't* arrest and convict thousands of people for speech crimes every year?
Here's the alternative hypothesis for the grooming gangs: it's not that the police turned a blind eye because of the race of the perpetrators. It's that no one gave a shit about the girls involved. I can tell you bluntly that if the police encountered a thirteen year old who had a lot of sexual encounters with adult men, their reaction was not "this is a traumatised and vulnerable young girl who is being sexually exploited and is under the age of consent". It was "lol slag". I think this is very evident from the multiple enquiries that have since taken place if you read them without cherry picking for a preexisting agenda.
No, but Japanese internment was a specific wartime military measure (that many people thought was misguided and motivated by racial animus against the Japanese in the US rather than actual wartime security concerns), not conviction and imprisonment under the ordinary civilian criminal justice system. After the war ended and the internment camps were dismantled, it was no longer the case that Japanese in America were over-represented in prisons.
In a natural experiment where two random civilians ofJapanese descent had the chance to aid a downed pilot from the Pearl Harbor attack, they went full send in a violent kidnapping that resulted in multiple fatalities.
Like imagine that a member of the 9/11 terror cell seeks help in NYC, runs into a random Saudi emigre, and that emigre ends up harboring the terrorist and getting into a shootout with NYPD over it.
I think that would cause most people to see Saudi foreign naturals in a somewhat different light.
"Certain nationalities – including Albanians, Iranians, and Afghans – are among the most common non-UK nationalities in the prison population but have relatively small populations living in the UK. They are therefore highly likely to be overrepresented in prisons, even if it is difficult to calculate precisely how much."
So they basically excluded them from the charts based on arbitrary population size criterion.
The way they present the data it's impossible to see whether migrants from certain countries are overrepresented in more serious crime types. When you look at "Sexual crimes" in aggregate you group Australians and Pakistanis and when you look at Pakistanis in aggregate you also see both "Sexual crimes" and "Summary motoring". Murders are not shown at all, presumably because there are too few of them.
Also it's weird that migrants' incarceration rate for "Miscellaneous crime" is so high - I wonder what hides there.
The statistics broadly show that EU and other Western immigrants have been a net asset to the UK and immigrants from the Global South for a range of different reasons have been a net negative. Conflating these two very different immigration flows might show a marginal positive effect overall but it’s hiding a significant difference between them. Of course obsessing about melanin content and aryan skull shape is just making the exact opposite mistake. This is a problem with the quality of the human capital being brought in, not their race or country of origin.
Depends on where in the global south, but immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China are broadly quite good (the UK just has a very different immigration profile than Germany or France).
Also immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean have also broadly been very positive.
Even just discussing Pakistan are we talking about educated middle-class Muhajirs such as the London or New York mayors or ill-educated Mirapuri peasant communities who form the criminal base for northern grooming gangs and the support base for ISIS?
IIRC, it isn't true for Bangladesh or Pakistan, either. That fellow's awful fond of giant, sweeping, unsupported assertions (...he said, adding his own–)!
I think it is true, that I am making sweeping assertions, but that they are true.
I am saying that the impact of their immigrating here has been broadly positive. That is *not* a claim about their educational attainment (I have made such claims, but they were more precise, and I made claims based on GCSE that FionnM then pushed back on, citing A-level statistics, there are many ways to judge these sorts of claims).
But the claim I made above was a claim about their *impact* on UK society, economy, democracy, etc. There have been good and bad effects, to be sure, I am not shying away from that. But since everyone in the thread seems happy to point out the bad without much nuance, I will have to be the one pointing out the good, and I am trying my *best* to retain some nuance.
I think you can do this "break it down by ethnicity" game, and I will join in and I will defend basically the vast majority of ethnicities that have immigrated to the UK, since I think overall the vast majority of them have been broadly good on the UK's potential for long-run economic growth (as is virtually all immigration, always). There are some edge cases where this is not true, but by-and-large, you basically want more people in your country.
It's hard for me to support this beyond directing you to read, like, Bryan Caplan, or something? I mean it's just honestly hard for immigration to be a negative for your country.
This is kind of a difficult comment-thread to navigate because it kind of all blurs into one omni-anti-immigration claim eventually for me. There are like 10 people giving random different anti-immigration takes, and I am trying to argue against all of them at once. This may elide some nuance. It is not helpful when I make a claim that is about "the impact of immigration on the UK," and someone responds with "No, look at educational attainment, hehe." My response is quite simply: that is not the claim I made!
Note that my link was not just about education but also crime, social housing and mental health. That's the UK government's own summary of how Black Caribbeans are doing.
"I think you can do this "break it down by ethnicity" game, and I will join in"
Join in? You brought up the Caribbean, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
"you basically want more people in your country."
Like India? Weird how they're so keen to leave then.
Yeah, it can be very difficult when people pile on—I was most just trying to be humorous with that trailing comment ("I'm accusing this guy of doing exactly what I just did!", heh).
Out of curiosity, though, if you have time: the (great-great-)grandparent comment said "immigrants to the U.K. from the Global South have been a net negative"; you responding by saying something to the effect of "sure, but it depends on where exactly from the Global South", with migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China (does that one count as "Globally Southern", actually?–), the Caribbean, and Africa all being claimed as beneficial on net.
Even if we grant that all of that is true—that, e.g., Bangladeshi immigrants to the U.K. are economic powerhouses & less criminal than the native white population (which I don't think *is* in fact true; but if we stipulate that it is)—well, then, it seems as if you actually *totally disagree* with John Smith's assertion regarding the statistics about emigrants from the Global South: there's not much south (in terms of "major U.K.-immigrating populations") *left* after subtracting all of the above! Maybe, like... Afghans, and that's it—every other group is fine?
It's not true that immigrants to the UK commit crimes at a "much" lower rate than British citizens. The evidence from analysing the prison population suggests that overall there is not a big difference between these two groups. But it also shows big differences between immigrant country of origin. People from ustralia, India, most of Western Europe are very low. Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, for example, are very high. I've not checked for similar patterns on things like average income, but I'd bet you'd get a similar picture. The India versus Bangladesh and Pakistan differences are well known, for example.
Would it be sensible for the UK immigration system to discriminate, at least to some degree, on grounds of potential immigrant nationality? I'd say so. Is this racist? I guess that depends on definitions, but it would favour Indians over others from the Sub-Continent, for instance, so it definitely would not be about skin colour.
>Immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial
Of the eight million people who received universal credit in June 2025, 16% are neither British nor Irish nationals, and 1.5% are refugees. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx5pw8pwg5o)
I don't know how you square "extremely entrepreneurial" with "claim public benefits at a rate proportional to their share of population". Surely "extremely entrepreneurial" implies that they would be significantly less likely to claim public benefits relative to their share of population?
This is mostly focused on massively performing startups, but more broadly just look at London. Massive overrepresentation of stores that are run by immigrants. I guess that's anecdotal so you can take it or leave it, but it seems pretty clear to me.
not really. just ethnicity-level. there's discussion of it in the thread with FionnM. Basically it is "higher" in some sense, but not if you adjust for age and sex etc.
This is fascinating to read because lately for some reason Substack's algorithm has been showing me hysterical sounding posts by UK nativists that claim immigration has been a disaster for the UK. I assumed they were making it up or exaggerating just because nativists are wrong more often than not, but it was interesting to hear someone calmly state the exact opposite.
It is a similar situation to the US, most such opinions are from people living in communities with vanishingly few immigrants, and the people (like me!) who live in communities with a lot of immigrants (I think I am in one of the largest-immigrant constituencies in the country, certainly top 10) are basically broadly quite bullish.
The UK's economy is in significantly worse shape than the US's, those immigrant-free communities tend to be poorer, and "it's immigration's fault" is the go-to explanation. The narrative may be wrong, but it's certainly competitive.
The NHS recently developed a policy on cousin marriage that doesn't even meet 6th-century standards of science.
I suspect you are wildly overrating any economic and cultural value, likely due to a default "immigration good" moral foundation, or the very closely related "anything that even looks vaguely like it could have racist connotations is bad, regardless of reality" moral foundation.
First cousins marrying is basically harmless; the chance of genetic defects is doubled compared to non-consanguineous coupling, but twice fuck-all is still fuck-all.
The USA has a taboo on it as a result of the overzealous eugenics movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (which was strongest in the USA, at least until the Nazis came along). It's been legal in the non-US West for ages.
r=0.125 is fine. r=0.25 (double first cousins, uncle-niece, and half-siblings) is really pushing it, as the risk increases far more than linearly, and siblings (r=0.5) is about as dangerous as "one of the parents has Huntington's". Then again... we don't ban Huntington's sufferers from procreation, do we? I'd suggest you go after them before you even think about banning cousin marriage.
Well, okay, guess I picked too easy a case (one which I'm personally less than sure about).
How about mandatory abortions for Down's? That's as bad, and if identified that's a 100% chance as compared to a couple of percent - in many cases even the risk a priori for Down's is in the double digit percent. Are you beginning to see the dystopia that this kind of liberty:eugenics exchange rate would build if applied consistently?
(Note that there's no ongoing harm to future generations from consanguinity-related defects; the offspring of someone inbred with fresh blood - even someone inbred in a different family - aren't inbred at all. So I'm not sneaking anything in that way.)
Going from 2-3% to 5-6% is hardly fuckall, imo, especially when you're talking about a culture where it's not some quirky one-off; long-term cumulative effects are going to be higher.
>It's been legal in the non-US West for ages.
Legal is not the same as wise or good. The Roman standard and Pope Gregory's policy was better, and even if the church got a little extreme with it later, that probably played a significant role in breaking clannishness and creating much to the culture we actually like.
Huntington's is quite rare and also not a choice. Clannishness is a choice.
A single instance of first cousins marrying is biologically low-risk, though not harmless. If a couple wants to do it and is aware of the risks, I don't see a strong case for banning it.
A broad tradition of first- and second-cousin marriage is likely to be socially disastrous, at least if your society depends on Western levels of peace and prosperity, because it tends to produce an extremely clannish society with low social trust outside of the clan, and none of the things we expect from Western civilization are going to occur in that environment.
We should probably try to discourage that, though by the least-draconian means that would still be effective. Talking about the genetics is a red herring.
That's a gross oversimplification. There are multiple cultures that don't regularly practice cousin marriage; we can certainly incorporate all of those in the course of public education. And the cultures which do practice cousin marriage can be accommodated by either not teaching to that part or by explaining the adverse consequences as appropriate.
Also, though a single instance of otherwise unrelated first cousins marrying is biologically low-risk, if there's no taboo around it pretty soon there'll be first cousins marrying who have more great-grandparents in common then if they were just first cousins.
Why? Last I checked TFR is falling and two gay cousin husbands aren't making babies, nor are brother husbands which also leads to I'm curious why they didn't remove the incest marriage ban.
As an American, there are two narratives I hear about UK immigration that make me question your assessment.
1) The migrant rape gang scandal. If the UK is systematically turning a blind eye to migrant crime - even very serious crimes like rape - out of racial sensitivity, then how can we trust their crime statistics?
2) How does this square with the intense censorship of anti-migrant sentiment in the UK? If immigration were really such a benefit, then why would it be necessary to criminalize anti-immigration speech?
Have you considered these, or do you believe they are a misrepresentation of the facts?
I've spoken about it at length elsewhere in the thread.
1) This is overblown. (The UK is dealing with this. The scandal you have heard so much about is 15 years old, and has since been cracked down on, the issue is that it is hard to get justice because a blind-eye was turned to it when it originally happened, so we now have investigation after investigation, but ultimately we are unlikely to turn up anything definitive, because it just happened too long ago. This is obviously a tragedy, but not a major issue currently). It also was not _that_ massive as issues with child sexual abuse go. It probably made up at most 2.5% of such issues.
2) This is also overblown. (But less so, because in the UK such abridgement of freedom of speech is much more accepted, and this is terrible. But it is usually not to silence dissenting voices on immigration. It has been used vastly more against e.g. pro-palestine protestors in recent years.)
I believe they are both a misrepresentation of the facts. There are kernels of truth in both of them, but they are often framed poorly.
It is interesting how commentators have provided evidence that mass child rape happened in >80 towns and cities from the 1950s to the present day and was repeatedly ignored or downplayed by authorities and thousands of people have been arrested for speech violations and yes you insouciantly claim everything is fine just fine and the victims and advocates are hallucinating or exaggerating. It seems people are talking past eachother or lacking common definitions.
I am certainly not claiming the victims are exaggerating about what happened to them. I feel I have said repeatedly it is tragic and horrible.
I am saying that it is occupying an outsized role in UK political discourse given what actually happened, and that unfortunately we can do inquiry after inquiry, and we likely will, and some people will be brought to justice, but many unfortunately will not.
Also I don't think anyone has claimed it continues significantly to the present-day? Maybe I am wrong here? It seems like the worst of it happened around 1997-2013.
The government is different, the political pressures are different. In 2013 it hit the news that this had happened, and there started to be prosecutions. Safeguarding guidance was changed. The Jay inquiry came out. People became more alert to it. I mean 2013 was kind of the big year for this stuff.
It looks to like the change is primarily that you're no longer going to hear about something like this when it happens, with gag orders and hate crime prosecutions for anyone trying to tell people.
"Immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial and basically good, and commit crimes at much lower rates."
I'm not sure you can make that claim. Ethnic minorities (e.g. first, second or third generation immigrants) are overrepresented in the prison population. Partly this is due to the age-makeup of immigrant groups, but not entirely. The crime is mainly driven, as in America, with extremely high crime rates among Subsaharan Africans.
Some groups (e.g. Pakistanis) have average crime rates overall but are overrepresented in sex crimes, as we see with the rape gangs.
Some previously high-performing immigrant groups have also been diluted by the Boriswave. Nigerians and Indians used to have above-average wages, but the Tories imported so many low-skilled people from those countries that Indian and Nigerian wages are now below average.
Asylum-seekers and other illegal immigrants are also disproportionately criminal. We're seeing an epidemic of Afghan sex crimes against teenage girls work its way through the system as we speak. If I remember correctly, Afghans are something like 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than native men.
While there are certainly elements of the UK immigration regime that bring in high-performing immigrants (e.g. the NHS importing doctors), those elements are outweighed by mechanisms that bring in more dysfunctional immigrants (the asylum system, chain migration through Muslim cousin-marriage, care-worker visas).
Also controlling for age is the Everest-fallacy. If our immigrants were mainly aged, Australian women no doubt there would be less immigrant-associated crime. But they are not. You can't just control away their age and gender as if this also controls away their victims' experiences of being mugged or raped.
I wish there was consistent data across countries to allow comparison, but I suspect at the root of a lot of differences is that the developing world has a huge number of smart, capable people who speak English as a first or second language, a smaller but still substantial number fluent in French or Spanish, and almost zero for other European languages. This will shape where such highly skilled immigrants want to emigrate and gives the Anglophone world an advantage.
There's a pretty big grooming gang running the US composed almost exclusively of native borns. We just call them Epstein's friends on this side of the pond.
Seems like that is probably pretty overblown too, to be honest. But that’s a separate conversation, and I am much less sure of that, since there haven’t been any serious, official inquiries or anything really.
But somehow the UK has the worst examples, meaning Rotherham. In the EU crimes happen on a smaller scale, randomly, not thousands of victims in a very organized way.
Immigrants in the UK commit "crimes" at much lower rates, naturally. I mean, that's exactly why they refuse to talk about the race of the person who commits crimes, innit? Because they all whitey over there? Because britbongs go around stabbing their neighbors?
I think both sides just use Europe (or any foreign nation) as a place where they can more safely be a 'man of one study.'
You just have to find one statistic or translated article or etc. that says what you want to believe, and be confident that it will be much harder to debunk it because your interlocutors won't speak the language or know where to look for contradictory evidence.
They do, but my impression is that the US is seen more critically across the political spectrum in Europe, whereas American liberals and right-wingers very divided on Europe
Most Europeans I've met are convinced that you can routinely hear gunshots on American cities and that school shootings happen everywhere all the time. Meanwhile I haven't heard a single gunshot (outside of a gun range) in my 6 years of living in Seattle.
To be fair, most Americans think that this is true of red states, and yet for the 9 years I lived in Texas, I only once saw a gun in Texas, and the most common place I saw guns while live in Texas was at Charles de Gaulle airport where the French gendarmes just casually walk around with what look to me like automatic rifles strapped to their chest.
When I was staying in Queens in New York I feel like I did hear gunshots but I may have been psy-opping myself and also agree on the general claim that guns are not a massive issue in the US (though to a European mind, you can understand, they are a significantly bigger issue than here).
Going from being a 0.0001% issue to a 0.001% issue is technically a "order of magnitude" increase in severity and yet both are trivial enough to completely ignore in practice :-)
>We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations
There are constant small (few hundred people) demonstrations by various lefty groups on a great variety of topics that happen abroad. I visited Brussels two weeks back and when we got to the European Parliament there was a small pro-Kurdish demonstration right there. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have of course been a fixture for the recent years. However, these even happen when it's not a literal war being talked about; for instance, there have been solidarity demonstrations for Polish pro-choice activists, for example.
The BLM marches should be seen in the same context; small lefty groups that are continuously thinking about foreign causes to support decided that right now, in this instance, *this* is the foreign cause to support, and that was that. Of course there were also tie-ins to local causes; I remember the Finnish BLM marches being connected to some local event that escapes me at the moment.
Americans seem to find this far stranger than it actually is, since Americans are so unused to thinking about America as "someone else's foreign country" in this way, ie. something that a non-American could see as comparable as a potential cause for solidarity to various smaller, more obscure regions.
Also, American conservative narratives of European immigration are complicated by the fact that Americans seem to assume there are more immigrants in Europe there actually is (or at least more non-Western immigrants; it often seems to escape people that a large portion of immigrants in whatever European country tend to be other Europeans moving around, often temporarily due to studies etc. due to EU's free internal movement).
Often this is compounded by personal anecdotes like "I went to this country's capital and visited the most touristy sport there is there and it was FULL OF NON-EUROPEANS!" (American conservatives often sneer at Europe as a museum continent, but such anecdotes make me think it's people like this that, most of all, want it to be a museum, ie. a place where they can experience the Old World without any perceived-to-be-incongruent brown people to ruin their museum experience.)
>such anecdotes make me think it's people like this that, most of all, want it to be a museum
When one visits Paris, they want to see the Musee d'Orsay and eat good cheese, not be harassed by con artists and trash hawkers. We've already got NYC and DC for dealing with that.
When one visits DC and NY, they want to see museums and go to shows, not be harassed by con artists and trash hawkers. We've already got London, Paris and Rome for dealing with that.
If you wanted to eat good cheese, France is pretty much the last place you'd go. You'd get better results going to England, Holland, Spain, Greece... Serbia...
>it's people like this that, most of all, want it to be a museum
It's not like the Old World goes out of its way to contradict this in its tourism marketing. At most it may allude to perfectly integrated model minorities, which certainly haven't converted large parts of cities into wretched slums.
If you go to London and walk through a neighborhood to find that all the signs are in a foreign language, the women dress in full burqa, the houses of worship are for a foreign religion, and nobody there is a native, then the obvious conclusion is that London is in the process of being colonized by foreigners. It seems silly to argue about the current foreign-born proportion of the population when you can look at the rate of change, look at the impact it has already had, and then extrapolate about the obvious consequences if that rate remains stable.
The other obvious conclusion would be that you are in an ethnic enclave. I visited London two years ago and my hotel was a block or two away from a Turkish neighborhood, which was much as you describe, but the parts of the city that were not specifically ethnic neighborhoods (i.e., most of the city) seemed pretty British. So the enclave conclusion seems much more accurate to me than the colonization one.
Not every foreign group is the same. Chinese people (and other east asians) are one of the least problematic groups to integrate into western society. (Very low crime rates, cultural emphasis on education, minimal religious/ideological tension, fairly high willingness to assimilate.) So the existence of Chinatowns is less threatening in general.
The Chinatowns that do exist seem to be mostly historical, not significantly expanding (to my knowledge), unproblematic, and with younger generations well integrated.
However, a mass of new Chinese immigrants rapidly expanding into non-historical Chinatowns would still be a concern. The fact that there are many older residents in existing Chinatowns who still struggle to communicate in English is a bad thing and demonstrates how long and difficult the process of integration actually is.
True, but I still think the broader point stands that narratives born in one context can influence politics in another where it doesn't apply.
Like for instance, Sweden not too long ago had an attack at a university, where 11 people were killed. This is basically unheard of here, and was seemingly just some crazy 35yo (white) guy losing it. The govt response was to put in new restrictions on access to semi-automatic hunting weapons. I strongly doubt this would have happened if not for the case vaguely matching the shape of the american "School Shooting -> Ban ARs" narrative, when here it was realistically a one-off.
The biggest ones that I can remember here were the massive support for Poland in the mid 80s and then the protesting of South Africa not too long after that
Also, the IRA hunger strike. This is all completely biased though because I live in New York City.
This is a great point and one that took me a while to understand as an American living in Europe. The two contexts differ dramatically and it’s dangerous to import your framework for thinking about race or immigration from one to the other.
Another example of Americans reacting to European news was the discourse around „lockdowns“ during COVID. At least where all of my family and friends lived, there was no such thing as a true „lockdown“. Some states closed stores for a very short period and many enforced mask mandates. Many private businesses and local governments tried to follow guidance restricting certain activities. But the true „lockdowns“ that Europe and Asia experienced - months of people not being allowed to leave their homes except under limited circumstances - just did not happen. Nobody I knew in the US was unable to go to a store or visit relatives or whatever anytime they wanted. But they were seeing constant news about people being confined to their homes in Spain and talked about this as if it was something they were all experiencing.
Unfortunately the decline of national media and rise of social media means America and Europe increasingly occupy the same discursive space despite being politically quite different. I could cite many examples of Europeans becoming negatively polarized by things they see in America.
I was told not to visit relatives. I don't think there was any enforcement, but I definitely would have felt like I was breaking the rules if I'd done so.
Knowing you are breaking the rules is quite different to thinking its fairly likely you will be caught and have to explain yourself. Seeing police patrol your streets for the first time in your life and knowing they are only patrolling to catch you. Having to carry old ID with a family address to prevent cops turning you around on the road if you want to see your parents and knowing they can pull you over just for being on it. Hurrying your kid as they tie their lace at the park because the police are just behind you shouting at anyone they perceive as stationary "SUNBATHING ISN'T EXERCISE".
That's the UK.
My impression is in say Spain, fairly likely to be caught turned into very likely and full roadblocks and checkpoints replaced the probabilistic, "we pulled you over for a safety stop."
The UK and Europe go more totalitarian under perceived pressure.
As an aside, I personally view the NY times fiasco which took your thoughts offline over a chunk of that period was a massive stroke of luck for me. As much as I'd have appreciated your rational and fair approach to describing the world as you see it. I wouldn't have wanted to take the downside risk that too much sympathy was given to lockdown policies. My emotions were running very high at what I saw (and see) as tragic mistakes. It would have been a shame, for me alone, to have run any risk that I didn't want to read the blog anymore. Aside from opinion spite being a mistake - this article is a useful reminder that experiences and perceptions do differ hugely on things over the Atlantic.
The situation within Europe was very different. I was living in Germany and there was literally never a situation where police was patrolling the streets or checking cars and people. People were at all times allowed to go outside, wherever they wanted to as individuals or small groups.
I think Germany might have been the most liberal place in all of Europe during the "Covid lockdowns". Our then chancellor openly said on TV that while she respects the virologists calls for lockdowns, she as a politician has to make a political decision - and that includes epidemiology, as well as other factors. I guess you could find the scene on youtube if you looked hard enough.
There were a few isolated incidents, were people were fined heavily, e.g. for having a marriage in their garden with close to triple digit guests during the worst outbreaks. I'm not going to defend the fines here, but as I said, such occurrences were rare and localised to states which are known for having more authoritarian bureaucracy and police (and snitching neighbours).
I was shocked to hear that even in France, there were times were people were officially only allowed to go outside around their "block", for exercise and groceries. I would have expected more french reactions - you know, chaos and backlash.
In Hessen, we also had one or two instances of "curfews", but in reality nothing happened. Streets were full of cars and people, police was completely ignoring the situation, and literally no-one cared or was impeded or fined. It turned out to be an evening like any other.
I specifically remember one on a good weather day, so it seemed even more busy than usual for the time of year. We were driving home from small daytime rave after curfew, car packed with 5 people, police next to us at traffic lights, and that was it. "Nothing ever happens".
This is wildly, unrecognisably, different to my first-hand experience of the panic here in the UK, any of the stories I heard from friends, or the impression I got from the media here.
Police changing their patterns of patrol - is that wild and unrecognisable as an impression? I can imagine for many people given the small sample set of observations when confined to your home, particularly if you didn't live in a city that no difference would be directly observed. But you did see any news stories mentioning this to the degree that my impression is wildly unrecognisable? I struggle to imagine that.,
My description of needing something indicating I lived at a different address to be able to travel there is wildly unrecognisable to you. Did you ever plan a journey like that? You missed all the stories about police turning people around trying to travel to second homes in the country? You missed the stories and government edicts forbidding that kind of travel? Or you thought it wasn't in any way enforced? You assumed the police don't pull people over on empty roads to the degree that my description was wildly unrecognisable?
With regards to how police treated people in parks - perhaps that was specific to London, perhaps you didn't go to any parks. But you missed all the stories talking about the zealousness of policing. The walkers fined for carrying cups of coffee on their walk because that made it a social meet-up. People watched a lot more news during the lockdown because they were stuck at home. If you didn't consume any news how can you even have an impression strong enough to make mine "wildly, unrecognisably, different"?
It's funny how people's opinion on the validity of a policy shapes their memory or reporting or that policy's details even when we aren't discussing the ratio of costs and benefits.
But isn't that just the panopticon? Installing a policeman in your own head, where none actually exists to stop you (most likely)?
I very much believe that the panopticon is a huge problem that's shredding our society and mental health in this digital age. But I don't think you can use that to translate 'advisories' as 'lockdowns' and imply authoritarian overreach (or w/e the point is). It's a separate problem that we all feel anxious about doing legal things that are generally frowned upon.
I don't think so, people really did go to prison for breaking lockdown rules, got arrested, etc. I did three days in jail myself for not wearing a mask to an outdoor farmers market (in America). I.e. your "most likely" isn't never.
I wasn't charged, I got to sit in jail for seventy-one hours and fifty-nine minutes to the second because that is the release window without charging in my state. The cops had great fun with it too.
I do know people though that were actually charged for violating the mask statue and got a criminal conviction from it though "time served" plus out the bail fee, a fine, and a year of supervised probation.
That's really strange. In the US, the police cannot arrest you without probable cause - if it happened to you, this would be a trivial 4th amendment based civil lawsuit. What was the alleged crime at the time of your arrest?
CDC's authoritarian overreach in cancelling all rents for years is a true thing. Not perhaps a "lockdown" issue, but a Very Real Issue nonetheless, with longer term ramifications.
So you think (like most people) there are laws you really have to follow, and others that aren't so important and it's tacitly accepted if you bend or break them. What puts the COVID stuff in one category vs the other?
I didn't say I always followed them. But to answer your question, if most other people are following them and taking them seriously, and there's a possibility of real harm if they're broken, and other people are sacrificing their own convenience in order to prevent me from getting the harm, then I feel pretty strong pressure to reciprocate rather than defect.
I should have assumed California was different. At least where I know people, there were no such rules. Obviously many people were told by authorities or friends that they shouldn't be visiting relatives and many people chose not to, but it was still largely mediated through individual feelings of guilt. My relatives mostly couldn't be bothered and had a massive 60th wedding anniversary in late Spring of 2020, but still talk about the "lockdowns."
With many companies actually shut down, including hotels and restaurants, but also including "nonessentials" like balloon operators, furniture stores, etc... we had a pretty sharp lockdown under Trump. For a few months, like February through Aprilish. Then red states started bucking, and Georgia opened up, in about May, and everyone thought Georgia was gonna die.
That’s still very different from being told that you would be arrested if you spent more than an hour outdoors or ventured more than 5 km from your house! The Bay Area “shelter in place” orders made it very clear from the beginning that you could always do as much “exercise” as you like outdoors.
Yeah, that was because they did the stupid thing of closing the beaches. They shouldn't have done that. But even with the stupid policies they actually implemented, there were no restrictions on going for a stroll on sidewalks or going for a bike ride in the street. Unlike in many other countries.
I lived in the United States during that period. Specifically, the state of California. For approximately six months, I was not allowed to leave my home except under limited circumstances. I was allowed to visit grocery stores, which were operated in a very regimented manner to minimize any sort of human contact. I was not allowed to visit relatives, at all, during that period. I was not allowed to walk alone in the local nature preserve. I was not allowed to "or whatever".
Now you know. Please don't ever say again that you don't know.
That is absolutely not true. If you read the orders, they always said you could go outdoors to exercise as much as you like. If you wanted to go for a walk or a bike ride, the law would congratulate you.
It was only going *in* some place that was ever banned (though to be fair, it was a *lot* of places you were banned to go into). You were never banned from going *out*.
It was bad that they closed beaches and some parks. I agree with that.
But again, that was a ban on going *to* those places. If you just went for a stroll on the sidewalk or bike rides on the streets, that was completely in line with the orders.
Right, but there was a broad mass of public spaces that were always permissible to go to anywhere in the United States, even if there were places that were banned for entry that shouldn't have been. This is a very big contrast with the situation in many European countries, when there were periods where it was stated that people could only leave their home for an hour a day, or that people couldn't travel more than 5 km from their home, and even at later points in the pandemic there were often curfews where people weren't allowed to be outside the house after certain hours.
A ban that lists 100 types of place that you're not allowed to go in might *feel* like a rule that says you can't go out, but as long as streets and sidewalks weren't on that list, it was still quite different.
Yes, I was allowed to go out of my house to exercise. Which basically meant walking around the block, because e.g. the local park and wilderness preserve were locked. I don't think I ever stated otherwise.
I was not allowed to visit friends, or relatives, or anyone else, as "Jude" stated all Americans could do. I was not allowed to "whatever". About the only human contact I was allowed was to occasionally pass a cartload of groceries to a clerk on the far side of two masks, a sheet of plexiglass, and six feet.
If you're going to tell me I can't complain about that very substantial infringement on my civil liberties because I was allowed to *walk around the block*, then I'm not sure what else to say except hell no, I am absolutely going to complain.
I'm not saying you're not allowed to complain. Just that you should complain about the *actual* restrictions you had, not some imagined version that is actually what other people in other parts of the world had.
People are mostly complaining about the actual things that happened to them, as far as I can tell, unless you are objecting to the use of the word "lockdown."
The post I was replying to was not. It made the false claim that "I was not allowed to leave my home except under limited circumstances". In California you were always allowed to leave your home under any circumstances. It's true that there were too many places you weren't allowed to go, but the complaint that was expressed was about the kind of restriction that people in China and the UK and France sometimes had, not about restrictions that the person (who said they were in California) ever had.
I lived in California during that time too, and none of that was true. I visited relatives, relatives visited me, I walked around on the trails near my suburban home. No one threatened to arrest me.
Sorry, with all due respect, I think you are significantly exaggerating the experiences on the ground in California. I was in mountain view, and had friends in SF and in LA. I would give it to you if you said 2 months, but 6? You don't strike me as the kind to strictly follow the speed limit and never jaywalk.
First, my ability to visit my friends and family is constrained by more than my own personal willingness to break the law.
Second, lots of gay men were able to have sex with each before Lawrence v. Texas, even in Red States like Texas. Very few of them were arrested, and fewer still charged. Those laws are now broadly considered abhorrent in our community, and this should be no different.
Re one: again, "You don't strike me as the kind to strictly follow the speed limit and never jaywalk."
Re two: sorry, just on face this is silly. 'Encoding homophobic prejudice into law' is not the same as 'state government trying to deal with a once-in-a-lifetime crisis using temporary measures'.
Based on everything you've said so far, and the clearly emotional way you are writing, I think you were traumatized, and I'm sorry for that. But your personal emotional state is clouding your judgement. You have several people *in this comment thread* who lived in the same places as you who had vastly different experiences. *YOU* may have constrained yourself in a way that no one else did. I'm sorry that you felt the need to do that.
> But the true „lockdowns“ that Europe and Asia experienced - months of people not being allowed to leave their homes except under limited circumstances - just did not happen. Nobody I knew in the US was unable to go to a store or visit relatives or whatever anytime they wanted.
I guess it is a big mistake when people use words like "lockdowns" without specifying what exactly they mean, so it can turn out that everyone was talking about something different.
Actually, I am not even sure what to think about your comment. Are "going to a store" and "visiting relatives" not possible examples of "limited circumstances"? If you are allowed to leave your home only for a few selected reasons, which include going to your job, going to a store, visiting your relatives, and walking in nature in groups not exceeding five people, is that a "true lockdown" or not?
Stay at home orders were definitely a thing, although not actually enforced as you describe. Most people still followed them, though, and almost everyone in my community and social circle did, which created a very oppressive atmosphere. Even if you wanted to ignore it and go out, there would have been nobody to do so with. Social pressure can be an effective means of enforcing rules, which means it's a problem if social pressure is applied to enforce a bad rule.
CA, NY and many other states issued executive orders codifying rules very similar to europe.
Not only were they unenforced they didnt take basic steps to make enforcement possible, say by setting checkpoints on roads.
So the legal lockdown becomes subjective. A certain rule following sort may insist they were not allowed to leave. A different sort would say cmon what lockdown.
However, we live in an advanced capitalist society and there are only so many times we can enjoy riding a bike around the block. To enjoy being out and about in an urban environment we need businesses and amenities to be open, and many weren't, so we were locked down in practice in ways that go beyond legal enforcement.
I lived in nyc at the time and my kids spent 2020 and 2021 summers in japan. Their border was closed but their businesses were not and so they were less locked down in japan than in nyc. Cant say anything about europe.
I meant rules similar to what ppl cite as the worst examples. As others on this thread point out, the order stated ppl in CA are not allowed to go outside except for narrowly defined purposes. So on paper, bad like Spain.
I was under lockdown in the US. AOC sent uniformed military to the store to buy her groceries. Lockdowns meant "everyone closed everything" and you couldn't even go to the hotels that didn't close for the f-*(* civil war!
No, we didn't quarantine NYC. But we lost months of restaurants, and lost more after that from "questionable virtue signalling" (where people would visit someone else's local, instead of their own).
American conservatives and liberals could both respond, "Europe today is a warning of what may come to us tomorrow. Therefore we must—" (continuation varying according to who is speaking).
Keep in mind that one reason migrants to Germany are more likely to be on welfare and less likely to work is that they often literally banned from working (and I suspect Germany has less developed informal institutions for migrants to work under the table than the US has.)
Barring young men from productive work would probably also increase their crime rate.
I do not have any data but have the impression that there was much less of a problem with Ukrainians in 2022 than with Syrians (...or whatever) in 2015. Is this wrong? Or was there actually a learning and the procedures for claiming asylum were updated?
The Ukrainians were allowed to work from the start. But it was a political decision regarding Ukrainian refugees, not a general update of the procedures.
This doesn't add anything to the discussion, but let me also say that I loathe the "of course bored young men are going to do crime" argument, especially in the German context where you don't have to do it because welfare is enough to not let you go hungry, or homeless.
Ok cool, bored young men without purpose but with enough welfare who do crime are bad people. Agreed. Then what? The fact remains that they will, in higher proportions than young men who are in work and have a purpose. If we care about reducing crime, yoir individual-moral-responsibility feelings just get in the way.
Not really, that's a Protestant (culturally) trope. At best, rich Protestants made poor entertainment illegal to punish their "underserved" lives of leasure ala Bastit's bridges.
The data from any source you look at will show you young men have the highest propensity for committing crimes. This is likely due to biology (poor impulse control), but we know culture plays its role as well. It’s why long prison sentences don’t make a lot of sense for public safety reasons. Men who committed crimes when they were young and went to prison will literally age out of crime.
The rules exist to disincentivise economic migrants from falsely claiming asylum. Otherwise anyone who overstays a student or work visa would immediately claim asylum and the system would be overwhelmed.
One more sensible solution would be to pay them welfare rates to plant trees or pick up rubbish or even just to dig holes and fill them in again, which would keep them busy without them competing for private sector jobs.
I imagine the scheme would cost more to run than it would give you back in productive labour. Anyone with an inclination to ‘make themselves useful’ can still volunteer from day one, or apply to start working after a hundred days on any of the jobs on the priority list.
>Barring young men from productive work would probably also increase their crime rate
Very true from my personal experience both as a citizen of host country and as an immigrant.
Russia has imported significant numbers of Central Asians (mostly Uzbek or Tajik) as a cheap labor since 2000s. Many stay, have children, etc. Not certain if this diaspora is more law-abiding than native populace, but at least it isn't seen as a general threat by anyone except literal neonazis. A niche of "scary foreign thugs in our cities" is occupied mostly by Caucasus peoples, as in folks from Caucasus mountains (not pointing any fingers on any particular formerly separatist republics), who are technically citizens of RF. There is some ethnic tension, but it's pretty weakly related to emigration.
As a Russian in Serbia, I'm part of probably one of the most law-abiding diasporas ever. Over three years I haven't even once heard of a local Russian committing anything more than a drunk fight or maybe a little tax fraud. And that's a nationality that went from <1% to ~10% of population in some cities (eg Novi Sad) basically overnight. Not claiming any moral superiority, it's just due to the fact that most of us have come already having a jobs, either remote or in relocated tech companies. The same should probably be true for at least a subset of Ukrainians in EU, but I don't have much experience with them.
Russia also does a lot to celebrate being a mutt-country like America. There's less "inherent friction" in a country that doesn't see "you look funny" as an inherent problem. (Today's humor is to look at Lukashenko's sons. Very different looks).
Interesting that Russians in Serbia are so law-abiding. Russians in Israel (yes, different ethnicity probably), were quite the gang-problem for a while.
Of all policies, allowing someone to enter your country and then *not* allowing them to work seems the most obviously self-destructive. There is no reason for such a category to exist.
Aside from student visas, tourist visas, etc. of course. The US has, or at least had, a version of this, the idea being that refugees legitimately fleeing for their lives can still immigrate but people who just want to move here for economic opportunity will be discouraged. I won't argue that it's a good or effective policy but I think that was the intent behind it.
> Third, as some countries, namely Germany, Estonia, Malta and Slovenia, do not distinguish between third-country nationals and EU immigrants, we have decided to drop these countries from the analysis as well
In addition,
> We opt for the country of birth criteria and define as an immigrant any person who lives temporarily or permanently in a country where he or she was not born.
I wonder how much this warps the numbers, as Europe let in a large amount of immigrants to do manual labor (e.g. Gastarbeiter, many of whom are still alive), many of whom decades later naturalized. Anecdotally, these groups are still underrepresented in white collar and over-represented in blue collar jobs.
I suspect the numbers may start to look differently if one adjusts for type of employment one holds (or last held), as it's understandable that someone who worked in a factory for decades would need to rely more welfare to take care of family or for complications of old age.
This is pretty much just a lie, the time it takes to get a work permit is measured in weeks, while time in unemployment or welfare tends to be measured in years.
What is an issue is the high dependence in the German labour market on formal qualifications, even for trades and so on.
I thought the unstated assumption was that the right wing argument was about preventing a disaster before it happens. People who talk about the white replacement theory are not talking about right now necessarily except in terms of anecdotes that they claim are an early sign of what's to come. It's about what happens in the future if trends persist, that's where the disagreement lies.
That's why those predictions of England or Germany being only X % white by 2060 are so divisive. One side predicts the collapse of Western civilization, the other predicts a prosperous multicultural Western civilization.
A lot of far right groups in Europe argue that immigration is already a disaster. They favor not only closing the doors to new immigrants, but expelling the ones that are already there (and, disturbingly, their children).
That's a rather weak argument, though, surely. Italians and Irish were considered different, undesirable races 120 years ago, and nativists warned that we needed to hold them out to avert disaster. That prediction looks wrong in hindsight.
I don't think you're right, anyway. I think most nativists believe that current immigrants to the US are violent, lazy, or both
>nativists warned that we needed to hold them out to avert disaster. That prediction looks wrong in hindsight.
Because they actually assimilated over time, instead of staying enclaved or getting worse.
There's been enough immigration long enough that we can be reasonably confident certain populations *don't* assimilate- 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants in the UK and France are often more likely to be radicalized than the 1st, who actually wanted to be there.
I should have been clear, to avoid the error the original post is about -- I'm talking about America. I don't think there is compelling evidence that 2nd and 3rd generation American immigrants have failed to assimilate and/or are especially criminal or dependent on welfare.
I'm not sure what you mean. You're saying those places contain a lot of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants that failed to assimilate? Or are you saying that they have native-born cultural enclaves that aren't assimilated into the US? If the latter, that doesn't seem terribly relevant to the immigration question.
The former though honestly the latter is relevant too as it's indicative of ghettoization and how those cultures refuse to adapt, the where is irrelevant to that as it's a cultural flaw.
> Or are you saying that they have native-born cultural enclaves that aren't assimilated into the US? If the latter, that doesn't seem terribly relevant to the immigration question.
You realize that those "unassimilated" native-born cultural enclaves reflect the fact that immigrants to the region never assimilated?
Anyway it definitely puts some kind of floor on how much assimilation you can expect. Assimilation can happen fully within a generation, or it might take forever.
Jews in Europe are another example, as a minority population that existed within another population for over a thousand years and did not assimilate, despite (sporadic and inconsistent) pressure to do so.
I don't think one can claim with confidence that certain populations *don't* assimilate, when there's also the competing hypothesis that we have in recent years deprecated assimilation and let the machinery of assimilation go to rot.
If the United States imported half a million poor uneducated monolingual Italians today, I am not at all confident that they would assimilate in the way their cultural ancestors did a century ago.
This is like when Republican shoot out (GOVERNING BODIES) kneecaps, then say "Look at GOVERNING BODY limping along, it doesn't work, we need to privatise!".
The right half of the political spectrum in the US is fully committed to saying as loud as it can get away with "Assimilation is impossible. Only heritage americans are real americans", and then turning around and complaining that communities don't assimilate.
No shit they don't assimilate, the president told them they cant!
It's worth noting that Europe has been less welcoming to immigrants wanting to assimilate.
Even second, third generation immigrants that don't look like the native population or don't have a name that looks like one, do tend to be seen as an immigrant even if they've been born and raised there.
As a first gen immigrant in Germany, I'll never be fully accepted as "German" in the way that one might throughout their lifetime become "American", no matter how hard I try to assimilate. This was a fact I accepted before I decided to take an offer that involved moving here.
I am of course trying to assimilate to an achievable point, but assimilation is definitely a two way street.
I am not claiming that Italians and Irish were not considered white! Cremieux's post seems pretty narrowly about whether the term "white" legally included Italians, Irish, etc. I accept his argument that it did.
Rather, I'm claiming they were considered a different and undesirable race than native-born Americans.
I am fairly confident that people in the 19th and early 20th century did not conceive of "white" as a single monolithic race, and it would have seemed strange then to conceive of Irish, Greeks, Russians, Italians, and Armenians as all a part of a single ethnic or racial group.
The books I have read that discuss American nativism and the racial politics of this period generally assume the existence of broad hostile sentiment to various European immigrant groups and/or fears that their failure to assimilate would have disastrous consequences for the country. A few contemporary quotations I was able to verify after they were brought to my attention by AI:
1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, noted suffragist, in an 1869 letter, decrying the fact that uneducated, undesirable men would have suffrage while women did not. Her list of undesirables is "Hans, Yung Tung, Patrick, and Sambo." To me, this is evidently German, East Asian, Irish, and Black people. [https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/march-2016]
2. The New York Times on the subject of the victims of the 1891 New Orleans lynching: "These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation." [https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1891/03/16/103299119.html?pageNumber=4]
3. A historical particle on the Library of Congress website suggests that in the late 19th century "racialist theories circulated in the press, advancing pseudo scientific theories that alleged that 'Mediterranean' types were inherently inferior to people of northern European heritage." [https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/under-attack/]
4. Grant M. Hudson, US Representative from Michigan, evidently in 1924: "Now, what do we find in all our large cities? Entire sections containing a population incapable of understanding our institutions, with no comprehension of our national ideals, and for the most part incapable of speaking the English language." [https://www.uua.org/files/documents/washingtonoffice/immigration/studyguides/handout2.4.pdf]
5. Benjamin Franklin, 1753 (!) letter to Peter Collinson: "I am perfectly of your mind, that measures of great Temper are necessary with the Germans... . Few of their children in the Country learn English; they import many Books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English ... . In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other Colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not [in My Opinion] be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious." [https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0173]
It’s interesting that in the period referenced, when there was more Italian and Irish immigration, whatever else - America was simultaneously enjoying a conservation movement to set aside public land for wildlife and for aesthetic reasons, and also a City Beautiful movement was getting started.
Now we can’t have those things because we are told they are no longer a priority and never will be again because we have a new priority which is letting people in and those people don’t care about those things nor should they.
Just a pretty significant difference. I wonder why the mindset changed, but also I wonder if it is not somehow more complementary of the attitudes of past people?
From where have you heard this sentiment? As far as I know, progressive ideology in this country does not explicitly reject conservationism and environmentalism in the name of higher immigration. I don't think I've ever heard anyone put it that way.
Why have the major national environmental groups been captured by the omnicause? (This you would know if you worked for them.) Why did the Sierra Club become impotent on its original mission? Why do people like Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen endorse selling off public land? Why is "we're not crowded" the crowing reply to all objections, as though we didn't at one time used to be concerned about: sprawl, biodiversity, water use, energy use? How did population go from being a buzzword, and a neutral one at that - to verboten? Why is there so much trash everywhere and yet litter campaigns are a quaint thing of the past? Even on Dumb Reddit, there is once in awhile someone who's not gotten the memo, who complains about trash, and the moronic response is some combination of: why don't you pick it *all* up yourself, and - talk about First World problems! Ditto decaying buildings and unkempt civic spaces: disorder is an aesthetic preference merely, it reflects badly on you to have mentioned it.
Why is the environment about 1-2% of philanthropy when the population has grown by more than 65% in my lifetime? Does it surprise you to know that dog and cat rescues and humane societies make up part of that total?
Why on a forum like this, do people talk about AI constantly, and never about declining species populations, as people of your education once would have, had internet forums existed then? Why did that subject die?
Why do people now think that *talking* about climate change *is* the conservation movement?
And why do they think the left, which once genuinely led on environmentalism, even if it was conservatives who paid for it - would care about that if it could not frame it as "poor people's lives disrupted" - only?
I agree that the American environmentalist movement peaked some time in the 20th century, and is less prominent now. If those issues are of primary importance to you, I can see why this would be distressing. On the other hand, I think a lot of the movement's ideas and results are still with us and not going anywhere.
I appreciate the not-weird exchange on ACX. (Why am I even here lol? A long-ago delightful book review of Malcolm Muggeridge.)
I think it is probably difficult for younger people to understand how big a deal, and mainstream, the environmental movement once was. It was always a choice on menus of “issues of concern” say on surveys. No longer. I search for it in vain, take surveys just to see if it is there.
It is natural for issues to be like fads, perhaps, and wane. But what’s happened is so much more than that.
There are smart young professionals, in conservation. But the volunteers, the meetings … all gray heads alas.
>Why on a forum like this, do people talk about AI constantly, and never about declining species populations, as people of your education once would have, had internet forums existed then?
You've picked about the one cause where this argument falls flat.
See, what we're mostly worried about is rogue AI rendering everything down for resources, as instrumental convergence predicts. "Everything" includes all the animals and plants, too. Failure to stop AI means essentially all environmental conservation efforts end in total failure; there is no point in them if you do not stop AI as well. Hell, it's unlikely the *planet* would still be there after a victorious Skynet was finished with it; it'd probably strip-mine it until there was nothing left, although it's hard to be sure.
Meanwhile all the stuff that happens between now and the supposed then, is of no interest. In a way, it’s admirable that y’all are able to drum up s much interest in something that … doesn’t actually interest you much.
> Why on a forum like this, do people talk about AI constantly
That is driven by Scott. It's a pet issue of his, and it's his forum.
> Why have the major national environmental groups been captured by the omnicause? (This you would know if you worked for them.) Why did the Sierra Club become impotent on its original mission?
Note that there's nothing special about environmental groups. The ACLU was persuaded to reverse its position on civil liberties. At some point maybe they'll change the name.
The commentary I've seen on the ACLU blamed the following process:
1. Donald Trump is elected;
2. A bunch of people panic and donate to the ACLU;
3. But they don't support the ACLU's beliefs;
4. So the ACLU changes what it's doing to avoid alienating all the new guys.
5. Ultimately, the ACLU hires new staff who believe in the new mission, and the old mission is forgotten.
> Why do people like Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen endorse selling off public land?
It must be a mere “pet” despite the thousands of words on it, by him or by commenters, because the real world current impacts - admittedly, enabled by dumb local pols: “Why are we letting this happen to our community, to our prime farmland, to our forest (*yes, we got an actual call about this*)?” Local pol: “That’s for us not to know or understand and you not to find out about” - are massive, and irrelevant to the blog.
The people who want to not let people in also want to destroy the NPS and clear cut/drill/develop all the public land they can, though.
I've been fighting with local representatives about it for years now, the R's keep trying to destroy as much coastal chaparral as they can get away with; there's only any left in my region 'cause the state government is blue.
No doubt about it, the libertarian wing - which is increasingly *the* wing - of the GOP definitely benefits and co-opts this rhetoric from the left. Overall, I think it is particularly funny that they claim we need to "build more houses" (which is gonne be sprawl) when the people we are building the houses for - are immigrants, full stop.
Of course the GOP has always been happy to co-opt the left and open the border. It is only recently that a few pretend otherwise. Trump was a one-off, who reflected the will of the people and demonstrated the fiction that is democracy.
And it used to be Democrats who advocated - at times - for those things, joined by Republicans quite often. But it's not their bailiwick anymore either. I can count on two hands the people in my state fighting new dams. The Dems have not weighed in on that sort of thing in years.
Just getting Mike Lee off the Energy and Natural Resource Committee would open the door for normal people to get things done, though they won't have the help of either party.
The existence of the Italian mafia doesn't count as a disaster to you? In hindsight, to you, the nativists were wrong to count the many murders and other crimes the Italian mafia would go on to commit as having any moral weight?
Surely what you mean is that, although the disaster the nativists predicted absolutely did happen (and we made some cool movies about it) and it was really bad, and the damage is ongoing -- that, in your judgement, according to your values, the contributions made by Italian-Americans to US society outweigh the (factually accurate) harms that the nativists feared.
Nope, I don't think the existence of the Italian Mafia would count as a national disaster. I am happy to be proven wrong, but my prior, not disconfirmed by a little cursory research, is that in the grand scheme of things the mob was a relatively minor part of American history, and a very small fraction of Italian immigrants were involved in it. I think the Volstead Act probably does more to explain the rise of organized crime in the 20th century than immigration demographics.
Is your view that absent Italian immigrants, the US wouldn't have organized crime today?
Yes, you of course have to take the good with the bad and pass judgment on the whole lot. Otherwise, the presence of every ethnic or racial group of significance is a disaster because they all contain a fair number of scoundrels.
If we agree that a prospective group of immigrants will do some crimes, but on the whole will make the world a better place, then it hardly seems fair to call their presence a disaster. The question is whether, in a counterfactual world where fewer Italians had immigrated, the nation would be better off. I do not think there is very good evidence for the affirmative answer to that question. If, say, Italian immigrants were on average less criminal than native born Americans, the fact that some Italians are criminals would not be a reason to exclude the entire group.
Are we talking about the same mafia? The one that extorted money from every construction project in New York City for fifty years? The tax fraud, pension theft, wholesale cargo robbery, prostitution, drug smuggling, murder? For a small number of scoundrels, they caused a lot of trouble.
I think we agree that it's a value judgment. Like, for instance, if you value eating a really good sandwich at +1 and getting criminally extorted as -100, then overall, Italian immigration was a great deal for you. There are _so_ many more Italian sandwiches than Italian crimes, way more than 100 to 1. But if you value a sandwich at +1 and getting criminally extorted at -300,000, then it's not such a good deal. (My very rough estimate is 250,000 mafia crimes per sandwich. Seriously, look it up, the mafia victimized a LOT of people from the 30s through the 80s.)
I think, ultimately, I would probably make the same judgment as you, and prefer mass Italian immigration over not. I just don't think it's trivial, I think you have to admit the people who were against it at the time had a point.
I agree the Mafia is not trivial, but it isn't a nationwide social catastrophe that fulfilled the worst fears of 19the century nativists either.
My point is that few people today would look back on the immigration policy of the late 19th and early 20th century in this country and say that the admission of too many immigrants was a disaster, or US history has gone poorly as a result. This should serve as at least some evidence against the notion that today's immigrants will ruin the country in the future.
That seems to approach the problem from the wrong direction. Would people looking forward from the late 18th century say the admission of too many immigrants was a disaster? Why would we judge the policy by whether the immigrants were happy with it?
Not from our perspective. It's evidence that, from the perspective of the future, the immigrants of the 2020s won't ruin the future. The thesis "people judge their own period by their own period's standards and like it" doesn't tell us how we, now, would judge the future, if we could see it. But you're right, we can learn from history: from the perspective of the 1900s, the US is far, far more catastrophically destroyed than they could have possibly feared or imagined. Not materially, of course, but socially.
You've got to understand, not even the most insane radicals of 1900s America could even conceptualize the moral norms of 2020s America. It's an exercise in creative writing just to try to express the change.
Imagine if the Nazi party won all 3 branches of the US government and re-enslaved all the Black people. And legalized pedophilia, and took away women's right to vote, and make them wear these ugly red and white outfits. And we won't say what happens to the Jews, but it's not good.
That's not extreme enough, because you can imagine it. The changes that actually took place since 1900 were unimaginable to people in 1900. Try to find even one thinker before 1950 who predicted the number of legal abortions that would take place in the 80s and 90s. Even one thinker before 1950 who predicted full homosexual legality.
If the analogy holds (1900 is to 2020 as 2020 is to the future) then imagine the worst, most evil things that the people of future America could possibly do, according to your moral standards. Now multiply it by 100. That barely scratches the surface of what future Americans will consider normal. And they'll see you as malicious and evil for not supporting it, the way most 2020 Americans see the Victorians.
So I mostly agree with you about immigration; the nativists were wrong, the Italians and Irish have been, on balance, worth it. And the material abundance we enjoy in 2020 is amazing. But I think it's undeniable that anybody in 1900 looking at 2020 would say that American history has gone extremely poorly.
What you are missing is his point often lost on New Yorkers, that other places exist in the USA, I know I know, unfathomable. And in all those other imaginary places like Boston or Helena organized crime also existed with all the same problems but no mafia nor Eyetalians, i.e. New Yorkers were going to get victimized regardless.
(wrote more than I meant to, sorry, you don't have to read all this nonsense)
I've heard this theory before; all crime is fated, inevitable. It's caused by socio-economic forces, not individual agency. If there wasn't an Italian there to pull the trigger, socio-economic forces would have supplied an Irishman, or, lacking Irishmen, a Pole. Or even a native citizen. But everywhere the dark god Socio-Economic Forces spreads his dread influence, the crime will happen, and we mortals are merely his pawns. There would have been exactly as much murder in New York without Italians; there would have been exactly as much fraud in Minnesota without Somalis. It's Hegelian. The individual is nothing to the working-out of the convolutions of the world-spirit in history.
The problem with this theory is that it has to posit strange gaps in Socio-Economic Forces' power -- for instance, at the magic holy portals of Ellis Island, all traces of Sicily's Socio-Economic Forces are entirely purged, leaving the immigrant wholly subject to American Socio-Economic Forces. Nothing left over from Sicily can be permitted to explain crime, not even the otherwise all-powerful Socio-Economic Forces; that would be nativist. Discriminatory. It might lead you to prefer immigrants from a homeland with kinder, gentler Socio-Economic Forces over those from places with dark, cruel Socio-Economic Forces. No, foreign Socio-Economic Forces have no power on these shores; the Lethe wand of Ellis Island erases all trace of former lives, habits, assumptions, morality, leaving behind pure untouched Americans.
Anyway, I live in Rhode Island. This is the territory of the Patriarca family; the power of the New York bosses stops at the Connecticut River. Or, it used to, anyway.
The specific Sicilian practice of Omerta insulated the mafia from prosecution under existing US law until the 1970s RICO act. Omerta works like this: made men don't talk to the authorities; only Italians can be made men; made men don't do the dirtiest crimes themselves, they use non-Italian buffers. The made man never signs the checks or contracts, never owns the bank accounts himself, always has a perfect alibi during the massacre. So it didn't matter how many thieves, pimps, loansharks and murderers the police caught -- the core 100 or so made men could never be charged with any crime.
Omerta was a strategic innovation that the Jewish and Irish street gangs prior to the rise of the mafia didn't use. Omerta didn't have to exist in the United States, it was an accidental consequence of Italian immigration.
So no, all organized crime does not have the same problems. A lot of people died because the magic Ellis Island portals failed to erase the Omerta strategy from the minds of Sicilian immigrants.
This is dunderheaded. Clean out the cobwebs. There was mob everywhere, except maybe the good ol' south. The Eytalions won over the Jewish mob, the Irish mob, and every other mob by being more violent.
>Italians and Irish were considered different, undesirable races 120 years ago, and nativists warned that we needed to hold them out to avert disaster. That prediction looks wrong in hindsight.
It looks wrong because we've spent all our lives living in a world shaped by the consequences of their immigration, so we don't really notice them. But Italian and Irish immigration did bring major problems with corruption and organised crime (Tammany Hall, the Mafia), and Italian- and Irish-Americans were important parts of the New Deal coalition that resulted in America becoming substantially more centralised and statist than it previously had been. Somebody in, say, 1890 who liked the US as it then was and predicted that immigration would reshape the country in a way he regarded as negative would have been quite correct.
Agreed -- if you're willing to bite the bullet and say the immigration of the late 19th and early 20th century was bad for America, then my argument has no sway over you.
American immigration restrictionists point to the crime issue because most of them aren't brave/stupid enough to talk about the thing that really bothers them about mass immigration, which is the transformation of society into something they find foreign and bad via the arrival and eventual influence of people with alien cultures and mores. Also some basic racism for a lot of them.
I often wonder why haven't tried making the anti-immigration argument to wealthy and influential liberals, who are disproportionately likely to be hardcore NIMBY's, using "preserving neighborhood character" style terms and framing.
>I often wonder why haven't tried making the anti-immigration argument to wealthy and influential liberals, who are disproportionately likely to be hardcore NIMBY's, using "preserving neighborhood character" style terms and framing.
Anti-immigration types tend to despise those people.
"NIMBYs could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be NIMBYs anywhere." The fresh air felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE NIMBYs" he thought.
>the transformation of society into something they find foreign and bad via the arrival and eventual influence of people with alien cultures and mores. Also some basic racism for a lot of them.
Because a lot of conservatives are still bothered by being called racist, as you go on to do, and if they say "I like my ~~doctor~~ culture and want to keep it," they know they'll be called racist. This stigma doesn't work as well as it used to, and I don't think anyone's going to like what comes next.
Appealing to crime is ostensibly more objective and playing into a vaguely technocratic role, but it fails since liberals would also rather have more crime than look like they're even remotely racist (in disparate impact and "community wellbeing" terms).
I think the majority of immigration restrictionists are not racist, by any useful definition of the term, but there are no question some sizable factions among them who are at least partially motivated by simple racism. And I agree about why they don't make the cultural argument straight up, because it makes it too easy for the dominant cultural actors to paint them as racist and thereby deligimitize their project to normies.
By that note, the crime argument does actually work fairly well, when viewed in the context of how do we get normies onside. The Laken Riley Act is a pretty powerful example of that.
In the sense that “alien cultures and mores” include disdain for law and order, disdain for freedom and self-government, disdain for individual freedom of conscience on religious questions, a tribe-based dog-eat-dog culture of corruption, and a sense that they are citizens of, let us say, Somalia first and the United States second, you are damned right I consider it bad.
I am sure, for example, that there are a lot of, let us say, Somali who come here with the same desire for freedom, self-government, and desire to be Americans that marked my own ancestors (which, I hasten to add, came over *quite* a while after the Pilgrims). My barber is a hard-working Persian who is delighted to be an American citizen despite having relatives still in Iran. My career was spent in tech, and I have the utmost respect for my various immigrant colleagues of all races over the years. Nothing I said above was meant to deny the existence of exceptions, nor even to assert that the exceptions are rare.
But, as I've probably said here before, the culture and mores of the U.S. are children of the Enlightenment, which was born in northern Europe, and more precisely children of the flavor formulated in England and Scotland. (Think Mill and Smith rather than Rousseau.) The farther a potential immigrant was raised from that crucible of Enlightenment values, the less likely he is to successfully assimilate when he gets here. When our immigration policy was focused on people that probably were brought up with Enlightenment values in their water, along with a small seasoning of people from outside that area, assimilation tended to work pretty well over time.
In the middle of the last century, though, the Zeitgeist changed. Citizens stopped making it clear that immigrants would be better off if they treated assimilation as a goal, and in fact began to feel embarrassed about even suggesting it. The 1965 "reform" stopped giving preference to people with a shared political and ethical background, and we congratulated ourselves on not being bigots.
The result, a half century later, is appalling formulations like the Smithsonian's poster about "whiteness and white culture in the United States", which suggested that many of the foundational things that made America great, like self-reliance, autonomy, the scientific method, hard work, promptness, responsibility, and planning for the future, are "white" and should accordingly be questioned and even abhorred.
When I grew up I never thought of myself as "white" especially, though I am probably about as white as anybody. When the vibe began to appear in recent years that I should admit to being white, and also that I should be ashamed of it, I remarked to my wife that this was not going to end well -- they would regret ever suggesting to whites that we were an ethnic group. Nothing has given me any reason to doubt that initial assessment.
I was under the impression that a very large percentage of migrants arriving in the U.S. are "seeking asylum" (not just Afghanis, Chinese, and Venezuelans) in the sense that they claim persecution from organized crime or poor economic opportunity or whatever at home. Is that wrong?
You can always claim persecution etc on the basis of a made-up story. Whatever country you come from, there's probably *somebody* their being oppressed and you can claim to be one of those. Venezuela, there were a lot of people being oppressed.
And for a while you can claim asylum with the reasonable expectation that you'd be told "fine, wait over there, don't do any crimes, don't take anyone's job, we'll get around to investigating your claim about persecution", but that nobody would really check to make sure you were "waiting over there" etc and that you could indefinitely postpone the "let's hash out this persecution story" part.
I am fairly certain that a number of people who were primarily interested in the economic opportunities of the United States of America, found it expedient to follow the "sob story, asylum claim, wader off and get a job, hope nobody notices" plan, and that it worked fairly well for them. At least until 2025.
Numbers matter, at least to nerds like us, and it's hard to get good numbers on how much of a problem this is. But most politics is done by normies who don't generally think about numbers.
I wasn't trying to answer the "large percentage of migrants" question from the original poster. I was just trying to clarify that in most countries (I understand also America) you can't claim asylum on the basis of escaping from poverty.
True. However, poverty is not grounds for asylum under our laws. Part of the complication of the Biden-era migration crisis was the administration's commitment to due process for asylum claims, often allowing claimants to remain in the US while waiting for a court hearing. This incentivized people who were fundamentally economic migrants to claim asylum, knowing it could be years before their claim was examined in court.
A lot of this is just that the same labels cover different realities. Asylum seeker in Germany and asylum seeker in the US aren’t the same population, because the way people end up in that bucket is different. But the anecdotes travel as a whole script....villains, implied setup, all of it, and the script outperforms the actual facts.
I don't know the numbers on this, but my read is that asylum claim is (was?) the preferred loophole to get your foot in the door. Many people *claim* asylum and are not granted it, but by that point they're already in the country and just dodge the courts. Perhaps the stats that Scott is referencing people who were actually granted asylum.
Yeah, that sounds plausible. You’ve got at least three different groups mixed together - - people who file, people who are granted, and people who file and then disappear into the backlog.
You need to be within the country to apply for asylum. If you're okay with dodging the courts, you can also just overstay your tourist visa and avoid the entire legal hassle.
That is why German embassies will NOT give a tourist-visa to Syrians (and a looooooong list of other countries) - not even to medical doctors. "Dodging the courts" may be a thing in the US, but here you are much better off to *embrace* 'the entire legal hassle': you do not pay the fees, anyway.
I would like sources on your claim that they don't give tourist visas to a long list of countries.
Syrians who seek asylum still need to come here one way or the other though, and if they get smuggled across borders or come with a schengen visa from another country, they can still overstay instead of seeking asylum.
That said seeking asylum in Germany probably has more tangible benefits than the US. My right to work was checked every time I started a job here and from what I heard asylum seekers can be granted right to work (requiring approval on each position, which is a reportedly a bureaucratic headache that discourages many low skill employers), and there's various other benefits around housing, pocket money and healthcare.
I closely cooperated with the German embassy in Riyadh, KSA (2010-2015). And it does not depend on where the embassy is, but from where the applicant comes from. Any country with a considerable number of citizens seeking asylum in Germany will get on the 'blacklist' (ie, it has to be a long list), the country being poor mattering less. (One embassy-guy told me once (1992?), they never had trouble with Nepalesi.)
If one fulfills the requirements for work-visa/student-visa/spouse.... or is obviously really rich: different story, of course. So, Dr. Mohammed still got a solo tourist Schengen-Visa from the Italian embassy (and with this, he visited me in Germany) - and he had offers to smuggle him (with his family) to the EU, too. In the end he ended up with a work-visa to the UK and works there as medic.
See it from the position of the staff at the German embassy: if you give a tourist-visa to anyone who then later claims asylum in Germany: you will be reprimanded - and your account checked, if it happens more often. I would have refused Dr. M's application, too, though I would have hated the dumb system that forced me to.
But sure, get the numbers/ratios of applications and refusals - though people obviously learn quickly and not even try to get the German visa, thus the numbers underplay how restrictive the embassy really is.
Embassies love to give visa, where they are not to make a decision of their own: as in giving your foreign spouse a "family-reunion-visa" if you have a kid together (who is German, naturally) - but giving a spouse visa is already a headache (could be a fake marriage).
If you compare immigrants to Americans overall, immigrants can look especially low because the U.S.-born average includes groups with much higher incarceration rates. If you compare immigrants only to U.S.-born whites, the gap usually shrinks. But it still generally goes the same direction: immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born whites.
What about illegal immigrants? I'm under the impression that conservatives are mostly anti-illegal immigration, and only a niche minority are more broadly against immigration in general, so I find it confusing that these types of discussions always conflate legal and illegal immigrants into just "immigrants" when the populations are clearly very distinct.
Agreed. 'Immigrant' gets used as a catch-all (illegal, legal, asylum, overstays) and the debate changes depending on which one you mean. Which I think is basically Scott’s point: Europe’s asylum story gets treated as if it’s the US story.
I read somewhere that the difference also goes away if you account for the fact that an average native has been present for longer than an average immigrant. (I don’t remember where it was or how likely they are to cheat — if they’re computing per-year chance of incarceration but giving natives credit for ages 0 through 12, I’m not that impressed. But I have the feeling it was somebody more reputable than that.)
Yeah, that’s a real issue. If you compare “ever incarcerated” for people who’ve lived here their whole lives to people who arrived 5–10 years ago, the second group has had less time for anything to show up. The remedy depends on how it’s done. The weak version is giving natives a bunch of “risk time” from childhood. I think a better version looks at adult years, or compares people at the same ages.
My impression is that once you do that, the gap usually gets smaller (but doesn’t disappear.) If you happen to remember where you saw it, I’d like to look at what they actually did.
Now coming from Europe I don't have a good feeling for what mainstream American conservatives would say. I also do not know the actual numbers here, but I noticed that you used statistics for all native-born Americans. I can imagine that the New Right, overrepresented in online discourse, would start using race-based arguments and compare immigrants to native groups with worse crime statistics. If you know what I mean.
This is different from Europe where the native population is homogenous.
Several European countries have a sizable native gypsy minority. E.g in Bulgaria, they are believed to make up about one tenth of the general population and about half of the prison population, which is more extreme than the situation with blacks in the US.
Bingo, there is a lot of "European" conversations on here where Europe means the EU + UK. Conspicuous they ignore your point about Gypsies or let's say immigration numbers in other parts of Europe like Moldova, Turkey, Belarus, Cyprus, Malta, FYROM, etc.
I know that, I simply don't a good short hand for Western Europe + UK + Scandinavia + Germany hence why I didn't say "non-EU nations" and instead listed a few as examples. Non former-Warsaw Pact doesn't capture it, OSCE comes close but most people don't know what OCSE is anymore and I feel OSCE has vastly expanded as well. European NATO nations comes close as well but it also captures Turkey while not capturing Austria and Switzerland which also have the same Islamification issues.
"We" all "know" what Europe means in American just like Americans know what America means unlike a Mr. Bunny who seems to think America means every nation in the two continents. But this is a case where I think the former is extremely unfair as Austria is definitely culturally European as is both Transnistria and Russia and as much so as France is whereas Bolivia and the Illinois, not so much.
On your last part I have no idea, never really thought about it. I think my brain has always made the dividing line between Western and Central Europe the WW1/2 western demarcation i.e. the German border, not the French one, and I'm betting most American would agree, i.e. if you asked Tyrone Jackson if Amsterdam was in Western or Central Europe I'm betting she would say Western plus vertical lines are easier to visualize than North-Western diagonal ones, people like their boxes lol.
The problem with “Western Europe” as you mention is Central Europe exists as a commonly used term too but that includes places like Hungary and Liechtenstein which most Americans nor Frenchmen I'd suggest don't think about or mean when they are talking about “Europe”. And if Germany is in Western Europe then it's not really in Central Europe.
It's a hard one because modern Europe has become like porn, “you know it when you see it”. We all know what “Europe” is but the edge cases on that usage is hard and will probably differ by a couple countries person to person context to context.
BUT what it's not, which is how many EU and their American supporters use it, is a euphemism for the EU as the UK is the most glaring example plus nobody is going to seriously claim Monaco or the Vatican aren't European.
The numbers also don't really compare directly; I tend to suspect that American blacks are more criminal in an absolute sense than Bulgarian gypsies, but their share of the prison population gets driven down by most American groups being more criminal than would be expected in Bulgaria. I would also bet that American whites are more criminal than Bulgarian whites. But the share-of-prisoners metric says nothing about this.
Those Sinti/Roma numbers look a bit worse than they are (and they are bad), as gypsies who do well and assimilate in Bulgaria/Romania etc. often stop to self-identify as anything 'gypsy' on forms/in surveys etc.
That is exactly what they do, but this reply doesn't get them far in the discourse because all the same statistics are true for white, native-born Americans, who also commit crimes at a higher rate than immigrants - both legal and illegal. Also, within each racial category, the native-born citizens commit more crimes than the non-native counterparts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104727971730279X
even this doesn't capture the full nuance. A right-winger might bring up:
1) nonwhites being marked as "white" in police reports (a bunch of viral cases of an obviously not white guy's mugshot next to RACE: WHITE).
2) sanctuary laws that prevent reporting to the feds of illegals who commit crimes (this was a sticking point in minnesota IIRC -- there is still disagreement about exactly how much they reported to the federal government/ICE)
3) nonwhite immigrants living in self-policed ethnic enclaves with corrupt police that prosecute crime in a biased way, letting off violators of their own tribe.
4) a lot of crime happens within, a community. e.g. black crime is a huge thing in America, but most of it is black-on-black crime. It is likely that if a crime happens to an illegal immigrant, probably by another illegal immigrant, they will be less likely to report it (esp. if they are worried that if they call the police they will get caught and deported).
We're still calling Arabs white, right? I mean, that's still a thing? I don't think they fit other categories terribly well (except for the Yemeni, which do fit black).
Good question. I think the most likely explanation is that some welfare programs specifically ban immigrants, so even though immigrants are dispositionally more likely to use welfare (and therefore be on at least one program), they can't use as many programs (and therefore collect less)
It also depends on what a particular report counts as welfare. In some European studies a huge expense is the welfare benefitting the migrant's dependents which other studies don't even count.
The statistics are all over the board and are going to vary heavily by region and data set- migrants in NYC between 2020-2025 probably received *way* more than the average, depending how you calculate all the benefits. How does public schooling count? Et cetera.
immigrant households have children who are recipients of very cheap forms of welfare, such as discounts on eating cardboard from a school cafeteria. Immigrant households rarely contain anyone eligible for the more expensive kinds of welfare, which are for old people.
Looks like it mostly comes down to social security plus medicare. The CATO study is all welfare and entitlements. CIS includes SSI, but not the main social security program. That could be defensible as the beneficiaries paid for it. But its certainly going to skew the numbers.
Some other points CIS finds that although immigrants use the school lunch program more, its not the only driver. Medicaid looks to be the biggest expensive program they over consume.
In cash welfare programs they count EITC. Views on whether thats proper welfare will differ. Excluding that, cash welfare use doesnt differ much.
Comparing to the violent crime rate of native-born Americans is weird, since that is an average of very disparate rates. For example the homicide rate of black Americans is 8 times that of white Americans. I suspect that the crime rate of migrants is higher than that of white Americans but less than the very-high rate among blacks.
I think this is a valid point. An ethnic group that commits violently crime marginally less frequently than black Americans (but still many multiples of the rate for white Americans) doesn't sound like a net positive.
Liberia was a disaster, but if US blacks think that the US is oppressing them and that lacking money and land is the root of their problems, then they're more than welcome to be educated by experience. In some other country, far far away.
Sure, I mean I don't know that much about the black american experience, being a white british person. It seems broadly like most of them are proud to be americans.
Probably around 50% of white americans would also express hypothetical interest in moving to another country, and I would assume a higher proportion of white americans actually _do_. I don't think this is necessarily because they hate the US and think its evil.
If I was considering whether to allow migration from a specific country, and studies found that immigrants from that country committed violent crime at a rate vastly higher than the white majority but slightly lower than black Americans, I would not be in favour of doing so.
Just because you're stuck with a Demographic A who commit violent crime at very high rates, doesn't mean you're morally obligated to accept immigrants from every other demographic that commits violent crime at an even marginally lower rate than Demographic A.
Is that meant to be sarcastic? I don't think most people here would even be particularly against that (as long as you include the better parts of Europe as well).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, if immigrants commit crime at lower rates than average native-born, that seems like the definition of an improvement on the margin re: crime rates? Isn't this the point of contention?
I guess it would depend on how mixed the neighbourhoods are and how much crime varies by neighbourhood, but given reasonable assumptions this seems true.
But that's not what we're talking about. If immigrants are less criminal than natives, and black people are only an eighth of the overall population, immigrants are much less than slightly less criminal than black people.
But they are still much more criminal than the majority of the non black population, because the black population weighs so heavily on crime. There huge gap hidden in 'average'.
That seems wrong. The premise of the original comment in this thread is that while immigrants have lower criminality than the general native-born population, it's higher than the non-black majority.
If black criminality is 8, and blacks are 1/8th of the population, while the remainder has a criminality of 1 then overall average criminality is 1.875. So immigrants would be between 1 and 1.875. Much closer to the non-black majority than the black minority.
And as pointed out by others, if you think that crime is mostly a black problem, you should be in favor of diluting the black population with less criminal people. This would weakly imply both pro-natalism and support for immigration.
mathematically this doesn't work. there are still way more whites than blacks in america, so the average crime rate is closer to that of whites than blacks, and if an immigrant is on par / better than that they are much better than american blacks and close to whites, not other way round
Depends to some extent upon how disproportionate the black crime rate is (and how many of the immigrants are also white, if we're trying to pin down racial effects). Consider a model wherein 15% of the native population commits 50% of the crime; then the limit beyond which immigrants would not increase crime-rate still has them committing crimes at twice the rate of the remaining 85% (and at one-third the rate of the aforesaid 15%). Whether that counts as "close to" the former depends upon how one interprets "close", I suppose; *closer* to the 85% than to the 15%, certainly... but not particularly *close, per se,* to either, if you ask me.
Not sure how to think about this. Suppose that American natives were ethnically homogenous. We could always separate them into two groups, high-crime-committers and low-crime-committers, and show that immigrants committed more crime than the low-crime-committers (but still less than the average). But this would be tautological and boring. Why does it become interesting when the groups start being color-coded?
I think most of what we're trying to do here is say "If America let in lots of immigrants, should the average citizen expect higher or lower crime than today?" Since some crime now is committed by black people, and they would be diluted as share of the population, I think using the full national statistics is an okay approximation.
The non-approximate version would require thinking hard about cross-victimization rates. That is, I could tell a story where immigration makes the average white American experience less crime (because immigrant criminals mostly prey on other immigrants, and some native criminals also prey on immigrants in ways that make them prey on natives less). Or I could tell a story where immigration makes the average white American experience more crime (because immigrant criminals prey on natives, and native criminals don't switch to preying on immigrants). I'm not sure how this would pan out, and it probably depends a lot on details of effective segregation in each region.
>Why does it become interesting when the groups start being color-coded?<
For a large variety of reasons, if you ask me:
* Compare white Americans to non-white Americans—or non-white immigrants; it seems as if color is a highly salient proxy for various traits of interest. Such a strong & easily-evident proxy is pretty useful; we might, for example, also compare immigrants via racial groupings thereof: we now have—esp. combined with the evidence of our own population—an easy way to determine what sort of immigrants we ought to let in.
* (Possibly we ought especially compare, where & if possible, relatively-less-selected populations; e.g., lottery immigrants vs. immigrants who made it here on some sort of merit: this might provide some information on the mean we might expect regression toward.)
* It isn't just about "color"—as I know you know! Beyond genetics that go deeper than skin-, there's a cultural question; one could make an argument that we ought to import only the more compatible cultures, and/or only the relatively less toxic cultures. (I think even some on the left are coming around to the idea that some cultures are better than others—I would hope, anyway—if not in some universal moral sense of "better", at least in a very easily definable "better for human flourishing as the modern West views it".)
* The dialogue is *already* "color-coded"—we aren't starting from square one and choosing a way to divide up populations; it has already been chosen for us, on both the Left & Right (albeit with different directions of sympathy, so to speak).
* The "cross-victimization" thing is not at all a wash, I think you'd find, for white Americans. This certainly isn't the pattern we find in Europe, nor with our native black population; I'd be pretty surprised if disproportionate cross-racial victimization rates went the *other* direction when the immigrants are Haitians or Somalis or what-have-you. East Asians, sure, maybe. ("Some native criminals also prey on immigrants in ways that make them prey on natives less" seems, *prima facie,* implausible as any sort of major factor, as well—and that would have to be the main mechanism which washes out the known-to-be-so "immigrant criminals also prey upon natives... and certain 'color-salient' groups prey upon *everyone else* disproportionately" element.)
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[Note: I myself have a known propensity to prey upon the "Edit" button disproportionately, so the arguments in this comment—such as they are—will probably continue to slowly improve over the next day... but these are at least the responses that immediately jump to mind; may or may not be too convincing, but I'll try to put my intuitions into gooder words as I can.]
All those things are true, but they seem rather tangential to the point Scott is bringing up. Presumably, when people bring up immigrant crime, it's because they're afraid immigrants will make the country a more violent place on average. But if immigrants have lower crime rates than natives, they'll bring the crime rate down, even if all the native criminals are the same race. Between whites, blacks, and immigrants, the only people who would experience an increase in crime in the average case are the immigrants themselves. If the immigrants are moving to white areas, then it would be whites to experience this increase in crime, but as far as I know, they're more likely to move to black areas on account of being poor.
My comment above is a response to "why is looking at race more interesting than looking at other ways of dividing people up?"; I don't think it's tangential to the larger question either, though: if non-white immigrants are more likely to be criminal than whites, I'd rather we not let the former in *regardless of their criminality relative to black Americans*—just as, if I were to desire to dilute a flask of acid, and I had a choice of "pour in water" or "pour in solution of NaOH", I'd rather do the latter:¹ even if the water is better than nothing, the choice isn't *between* "water or nothing".
(...and if the goal is "as pure & concentrated a solution of NaOH as possible", water *isn't* better than nothing... but that's a different argument, to some extent; I'll just say that criminality is not the only concern: I live right on the southern border of Texas, and good God has social order deteriorated in the past decade or two—everything's run down, everything must be locked up tight, every social service is overwhelmed, every event must be heavily policed or canceled; we can't have nice things, because we import people who aren't conducive to having nice things. Only one demographic is a net benefit to the nation, financially speaking, and that seems to go also for the social fabric.²
(I suppose the question is, in the end, whether one wishes their nation to resemble Mississippi, or Pakistan, or Liberia—or Vermont.)
>If the immigrants are moving to white areas, then it would be whites to experience this increase in crime, but as far as I know, they're more likely to move to black areas on account of being poor.<
Unfortunately, one cannot completely isolate one demographic from another. If you're very wealthy, perhaps you can live in a gated neighborhood & deal only with fellow richie-riches—but that's not the modal white experience.
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¹(...even though, ideally, we'd be adding acid to water rather than vice versa. literally, I mean, not in the metaphor—I guess, what, in the metaphor that'd be advocating for a... deportation program, or something?–)
²(I don't mean that the Mexicans are a big problem; hell, I love 'em—almost all of my coworkers, the majority of my buddies, a plurality of my partners, and a quarter of my parents have been Mexican, heh... it's the massive influx of folks from farther south, and—weirdly—a sudden increase in Africans.)
> why is looking at race more interesting than looking at other ways of dividing people up?
But looking at race doesn't change the overall picture that immigrants aren't dragging up the crime rate of the country. I agree that in general, looking at race is interesting because it correlates with a bunch of other things. I just don't see how the specific objection of native crime differentials has any bearing on the immigration question if you've established that immigrants are less criminal than the national average. I think that's what Scott was trying to communicate when he asked why is looking at race interesting here.
> if I were to desire to dilute a flask of acid, and I had a choice of "pour in water" or "pour in solution of NaOH", I'd rather do the latter:¹ even if the water is better than nothing, the choice isn't between "water or nothing"
What if you had so little caustic soda that even after using it all, the water would still serve to dilute the acid further? I would say that's the situation we face with regards to immigration and crime. If you were to ban all immigrant groups who commit more crime than whites, even if they commit less crime than the national average, I don't think you'd then receive enough immigrants to drag the crime rate below the native white average. So admitting immigrants who are more criminal than whites but less criminal than the average would still serve to reduce the crime rate.
> and if the goal is "as pure & concentrated a solution of NaOH as possible", water isn't better than nothing... but that's a different argument, to some extent
Yes, there are other objections to immigration (which I would say are mostly wrong as well), but I specifically wanted to respond to the one about crime.
I think it's relatively obvious that the reason it becomes interesting when the groups are color-coded is because you can use that coding as a metric to gain the positive effects and minimize the negative without expensive background testing. It even works better than the nearly-as-simple country test most conservatives use, it just comes at the cost of making you the worst villain of the current time and a general pariah, which only serves to make it become even more interesting
It's not helpful in this context, where the commenter is separating Americans by color and crime rate, but trying to use it for policy on immigrants which they are not separating by crime rate or color.
If they were proposing deporting black Americans, that would be terrible, but the policy is based on the metric. Likewise, if they were banning immigrants by some visible quality that statistically correlated with higher crime rates than the native citizens, the policy is based on the metric. But what they were actually proposing is just a logical fallacy. Their policy only make the average crime rate higher.
I didn't see a policy prescription, I only saw where the commenter suggested that the comparison of "native-born Americans" is higher due to a specific population and where Scott suggested it wasn't interesting. I also am not making a policy prescription, I am just saying (if you'll pardon me showing my age) "Big if true". You can say that it is true that there is a causal relationship between race/ethnicity/culture and crime, or you can say that it is false (mitigating factors, incorrect data, correlation vs. causation, etc.), but you can't say that it isn't interesting
It really isn't interesting for the question of immigration and crime. If the crime rate of immigrants is less than that of natives, the average rate of crime will go down if you let them in, even if all the native criminals are the same color.
Now if deporting blacks were a serious policy option in this country, then this would be a valid objection because taking in immigrants could be a crime increase over the counterfactual as the only natives that are gonna stay in the country are the non-black ones and they have lower crime rates than the immigrants. But because this is not a serious policy option, this objection is not relevant.
It's not interesting in that it suggests deporting black Americans (though, I suppose it would), it's interesting in that it would suggest that you could generally massively increase the upside of immigration while decreasing the downside if you just allowed or disallowed immigration based on race. The color chart the police officer uses in the Simpson's would be incredibly cheap and, if the data were true, more effective than the current bureaucratic immigration system. (Note: I am not genuinely advocating this, just saying that it would have very interesting implications if it were true)
So, um, can we use the general Carribean "Haitians are low status" to decide that no more Haitians? Or is using that part of Global Culture somehow bad? Is it weird that other countries are anti-immigration? Is that a bad part of their culture?
I don't think the "lower average crime rate" is how people really assess this question.
People compare the hypothetical immigrant to themselves, not the average.
I do think it's an interesting and open question what the correct algorithm here is. Like increasing pop at all could increase victimization rate by increasing encounter frequency.
I should take actions that reduce my personal expected victimization rate. If we take a hypothetical of letting in 1 billion UNIFORM people who slightly shift the average for the better, I would expect my own victimization rate to increase since I'll have more trouble filtering my average encounter to be only with people who were better than average, as i already have. If they are non uniform (obviously) now it depends on the variation. I doubt incoming groups individually vary as much as the American population, hence it could be logical to reject a group with a lower rate maybe?
I think the high Black rate is an outlier that needs specific policy prescription. We should not be looking to allow migrants who have higher crime rates than native whites - why should we?
This just seems arbitrary. Why whites? Why not native Chinese Americans? Or even better, just pick a number. 1%.
But then you get into a thornier question: you have an individual in front of you, not a population. How do you determine that individual's "crime rate"? You might say something like 'look at their skin color', but that's ridiculously low signal. You could be smarter and say 'look at their ethnic background' and maybe that's better, but then you need to be ok with letting in large numbers of people with low criminal backgrounds (Indian folks, Chinese folks, whatever). Or you could do the smartest thing and look at socioeconomic status. But now you're definitely not optimizing for a 'white' country, which is what I think secretly everyone who talks about these things in these terms wants anyway
Whites are more representative of the US than any other racial group simply because they still make up 58%. Latinos are 20% and Blacks are 13%. My main point was to take out Blacks out because they are an outlier because of the history of slavery and oppression in various forms that they suffered continuously till at least the passage of civil rights act in 1960s.
I don't see why we should allow racial groups that have higher incarceration rates even when they fear being deported than native born whites. We simply don't have enough information about individual migrants to treat them as individuals, so we have to approximate based on group characteristics. The point is if we don't want the next generation of these migrants making our society more violent, we should not let the migrants in in the first place. Turns out native born Latinos have higher incarceration rate than native born Americans.
My point is not to advocate for more Chinese and Indian illegal immigration - I think we should have ZERO illegal immigration. My post was to challenge Scott's contention that almost all illegal immigrant groups in the US have lower incarceration rates compared with US born natives.
And my main point was that you don't have to look at race at all. If you were actually interested in criminality, you would use socioeconomic status as your individual marker. Instead you arbitrarily insist on using race, and then create an arbitrary carve out where American doesn't mean American, and then use a different arbitrary carve out for why, if we are focusing on race, we should not just use the rate of the lowest criminality racial group. There is *no* reason to use 'white americans' as the measuring stick, unless you have a vested interest in 'white americans' being the default. But that makes me think you care way more about race than about the crime.
Respectfully, you're wrong. You have to be obtuse to an extent I cannot imagine to explain the difference between criminality amongst African American and American Whites to "socio economic status." That theory is discredited and dead for some time now.
I think the reason why this is interesting is that you would get a more apples to apples comparison with Europe. I *believe* when you separate out education in America by race, you end up finding out that America has one of the best education rates in the world. In theory, if you separate out white America on crime you'd get something like a European country on crime and then ask "if you view white America as Europe, is the counterfactual impact of immigration similar to what Europeans are experiencing, or is America really just built different?". I think this is an interesting question beyond just trying to gerrymander high crime and low crime groups.
Obviously this would require a lot more analysis on where immigrants end up etc. etc. etc. but I think even a low granularity analysis of this would be informative. Or just doing the analysis where you compare American immigrants to European natives would be simple enough.
I did not think of that but i agree this would be insightful. My main point was two fold: 1) whites have defined the US for a long time, and they still do even if their population has dropped to 58% - they're still the largest group and the next bigger group is Latinos at 20% - a huge drop-off. 2) Blacks are an outlier because of the history slavery and oppression in various forms that they suffered continuously till at least the passage if civil rights act in 1960s - and it is so much higher than any other group by a huge margin. We just need to treat this as a special case and implement policies to specifically address it.
Another confounding factor is the lumping together of legal and illegal immigrants into just "immigrants" despite them being very distinct populations with I suspect a vast gap in crime rates (ignoring crossing the border illegally itself).
Aren't the majority of illegal immigrants people who came in on completely legal work visas and then failed to renew them? I think the actual border hoppers who get literally smuggled into the country are a minority.
I thought so too but I think this is a pre-Obama model; at least during Biden's admin I think the typical case was a border hopper who gets immediately caught, claims asylum as a refugee from violence or something similar, and is then released into the US where they disappear
And the majority (around 75%) of immigrants are legal, so my point is that conflating legal and illegal immigrants by saying immigrants in general commit less crime than the native population is obfuscating.
You can break down the illegal population down further into subgroups of over stayers vs. border hoppers, but I'm not sure what the point would be.
This is what I thought. The overall crime rate in the US is useful for thinking about some issues and not others. I have lived in areas with, for all practical purposes, zero property or violent crime all of my life. I have never been afraid to go out at night, I have never been the victim of any crime, I know almost no one who has been. I'm not talking about gated communities either, these are normal suburbs in normal mid-sized cities all over the US. Almost everyone I know owns guns, some of them many many guns, and I have never known anyone who's been shot on purpose or accident. The crime in these areas was things like occasional vandalism from kids, drug possession, DUIs, etc. I'm sure there were financial crimes, domestic disputes, things like that. And while these show up in the stats, and these laws should be enforced because these crimes of course create serious problems of their own, they have very little impact on the overall sense of safety and order in these communities in most cases.
I think this is what a lot of the big brained analysis from the big city types misses. There are actually still huge areas with ~0 "scary" crime. And when that number goes from zero to "the national average" it feels very very bad for the people who live there and they want it to stop. And no amount of talk about national crime stats or long term impact on GDP or labor productivity makes any of that feel better.
For me the question this raises isn't so much why are European immigrants so criminal, it's why in the world is the American born population so likely to be criminal? In like the second richest country in the world, why aren't immigrants, from a poor corrupt country struggling to survive in a new place, more likely to be criminal than the natives? Why do you have the highest prison population in the world by a mile? What is going on?
This is not me trying to be America Bad, I'm genuinely curious about this. Poverty is highly correlated with crime and violence. Is there simply so much poverty in the US that traumatized immigrants from literal Mexico doesn't make a dent?
That only works when you compare the US and Europe and ignore the rest of the world. Actually a high murder rate has much more to do with the abundance of gangs. Brazil and South Africa have extremely restrictive gun laws and high murder rates because they are full of gangs. El Salvador was full of gangs and had an incredibly high murder rate. They cracked down on gangs, not guns, and now the murder rate is very low.
I've heard the same - that it's not so much some inborn personality flaw, but more likely hard-to-change cultural mores. I'm not an American and have no clue, but I've seen sociologists suggest that the main culprit is the "honour culture" in poor black communities. Which probably correlates with gangs. And honour culture pops up easily in very different societies, regardless of ethnicity, usually when the police are weak or nonexistent. The US black honour culture is supposed to be at least decades old, maybe from the pre-war-on-drugs period, when the police didn't bother with poorer neighborhoods that much (if such a period existed)?
Gangs are generally "unable to go to the courts" so there's a real "economic" thing going on, and the honor culture is only somewhat wrapped in that.
If someone doesn't pay up, what you gonna do? Well, you knee cap them. See if they pay then. If not, you kill them. This is what happens when your gun is your enforcement strategy, and it's rather independent of honor culture.
That makes sense, yes. Well, I suppose, as a gang man, one needs to keep one's honour by showing that one's not messed with, and just kills whoever doesn't pay or doesn't take him seriously.
Around half of American homicides involve a firearm, so most developed countries (and some undeveloped ones) have a lower *total* homicide rate than our *gun* homicide rate.
No, that literally is most of the answer. IQ is mostly genetic, as is a good chunk of personality, and it's literally the first factor that pops out of a principle component analysis when the analyser is allowed to do wrongthink.
Except that doesn't explain why native British blacks are so much less criminal than American blacks. And why British blacks have roughly double the crime rate of British whites while American blacks have 8x the crime rate of American whites.
The 8-10x multiplier is for homicide (and I think burglaries), the overall black/white difference in US crime more generally is more modest.
But yeah, in any case British blacks were more selected from the jamaican/west-indian upper-class, as I understand it. British-Nigerians do relatively well in the school system as well, though how much of this is due to the distorting effects of diversity initiatives is hard to say.
Selection bias, goddamnit! American blacks ain't the sharpest, because they were sent over as the "oh, who don't we want to deal with no more" from the Black Slavers on the African Continent.
"new immigrant" blacks in America used to be a quite well thought of immigrant group, because that had the same selection we did with everyone else.
IQ is not "mostly genetic", there was an entire thread here about how the current consensus is that it's around 40-60% genetic based on the most current studies. Of course I have other views, but that's the average opinion of experts.
70-80% genetic in twin studies, which are highly unreliable. The Wilson paper is widely criticised and genomic studies and meta analyses of twin studies have much lower estimates.
40-60%* which is 50% average which is not mostly. Even 60% is a weak "mostly" and cannot fully explain the behaviour in question. Even 70-80% would not fully explain it.
around 70-75% of black babies are born to single mothers. couple that with the fact a disproportionate share of young black males are in prison or have done time and you end up with kids who just have no family infrastructure or role models to grow up to be law abiding. this was different 40-50 years ago btw.
I haven't seen twin studies specifically looking at the effects of single-parent households, but I do recall at least one researcher commenting that these effects largely disappear after controlling for the mother's IQ (and the great majority of these absent fathers weren't great role models to begin with.)
Especially not when white Americans are also much more homicidal than Europeans. Is gun culture perhaps stronger among black Americans? Anything else about black American culture that might explain?
White americans have about 2x the homicide rate of white europeans, although that varies substantially by country, and yeah, gun culture might be part of that, but it's not that hard to point out white districts or even entire countries with sky-high rates of gun ownership and minimal violent crime. (Canada and Switzerland, for example.)
Yeah, "% black" is a *much* stronger predictor of murder-rate than "% gun-ownership"; IIRC, the latter is actually pretty weak once racial factors & suicides have been sifted out. Actually, I think Scott did a post upon this a long time ago & came to essentially the same conclusion.
Or at least not the "beat randos on the street" kind of criminal. I'd assume importing a lot of people with a good skill at tax evasion won't please IRS very much, but it won't make streets more dangerous.
"Selects for" is the entire point. I think very few people have a problem with selective immigration and a whole lot of people have a problem with whoever crosses the border and says "assylum" immigration.
My claim is that existing asylum seekers (ie the people who showed up as low-crime in the asylum seeker statistics I mentioned above) are selected for this. I think there are a few reasons for this:
- In practice, US asylum seekers are disproportionately rich people fleeing Communist regimes.
- The US actually makes it pretty hard to claim asylum.
- It takes more agency and competence to escape a failed state than to stay in it.
- It takes agency and competence to navigate the US immigration system.
- The US actually makes it pretty hard to claim asylum.
The Democratic innovation was to simply overload the whole system to functionally ignore the law by inviting and giving free release and a court date 10 years down the line to the hundreds of thousands saying the magic word. More or less everyone arguing in good faith knows that most asylum seekers, especially those coming during the Biden years, are economic migrants not legitimate asylum seekers, because one required factor in true asylum is "first safe country", which for almost all of them is not the US - they passed through others (especially Mexico) first.
- It takes agency and competence to navigate the US immigration system.
Again, this was more true prior to the Obama / Biden era influx. Most of these folks are not "navigating" the system in any meaningful sense. They're simply overloading it and then being ignored for years at a time.
> one required factor in true asylum is "first safe country"
Can you share your source for this? This appears in neither UN convention on refugees to my knowledge. EU has Dublin Regulation for this reason, but notably US is not in the EU.
It's a general principle of asylum claims. The general principle is implemented in a couple ways in the US regulatory regime. Most directly there is the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Rule which creates a rebuttable presumption of asylum ineligibility for those who cross the southwest border without first applying for (and being denied) asylum in a country they traveled through. Also under 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(2)(A)(vi), an applicant is barred from asylum if they were "firmly resettled" in another country prior to arriving in the U.S.. There are also Safe Third Country Agreements where the third country will agree to take asylees. I think Canada is the only active one currently, there used to be more.
> The US actually makes it pretty hard to claim asylum.
I disagree with this point on a technicality, but a critically important one here. The US makes it hard to be granted asylum, but extremely easy to claim asylum and remain in the country. This is why Trump's remain in Mexico policy was a great idea and Biden made a huge mistake removing it.
> It takes more agency and competence to escape a failed state than to stay in it.
Agreed
> It takes agency and competence to navigate the US immigration system.
Agreed, but this is the selective immigration system which I am not arguing against.
A significant fraction of the American born population is descended from immigrants, and many from places with much, much higher crime rates than the United States of America. And some from places that used to have much higher crime rates but became nice and peaceful about the time most of the malcontents had migrated to the US and elsewhere. America at its best has been pretty good at assimilating immigrants and turning them into normal Americans complete with European-level crime rates, but America has not always been on its best behavior in this regard.
In particular, one large group of involuntary immigrants was actively discouraged from assimilation until fairly recently in historic terms, and wound up with a rather different culture that's now pretty baked in.
My personal guess is that America disproportionaly drew in risk takers as its immigrants (e.g. the Gold Rush and the 49-ers). Especially as its reputation grew as a place for entrepreneurs, who are a rather interesting group of people, psychologically speaking. (I don't have the reference on me, but I remember reading an interesting book about the inception of casino loyalty / customer loyalty programs in Las Vegas. The old hands at the pioneering casino, Caesar's Palace if I remember correctly, expected that it would show bankers, financiers, and stockbrokers as their best customers, the people they should tailor their programs around. Turns out instead that it was coin operated laundry owners, or something like that. Shopkeepers. Carwash owners. Little old Chinese grandmas, who owned a single Chinese takeout place. Small business owners, self-made.
The bankers, financiers, and stockbrokers, meanwhile, turned out to be risk adverse people. People who chose steady, safe paychecks in respectable careers. People with enough self-discipline to complete higher education, and therefore had enough self-discipline to recognize that they should only gamble with other people's money. Never their own. A nation formed of such people, is very different from a nation formed from the 1849 equivalent of the crypto-bro.)
I think one factor is that there's less of a social safety net, so you end up with entire communities that are largely in poverty, have dysfunctional values and norms, etc. etc.
Crime in rich or middle-class areas is typically quite low; working-class areas vary but are also often fine. From what I hear, the worst areas, on the other hand, are war zones.
Immigrants from Mexico are the "good ones" in general, or at least they have been for a while (good folks defined as "work hard, don't cause much trouble" -- they may be as a general rule pro-genocide, but that's a different pollgame). not so sure now that we've been arming spanish speakers in the Ukraine (whee, mercs).
If you follow this logic a bit further, it's evident that America's run of "good immigration" can't go on forever. The US has disproportionately attracted good immigrants from other parts of the world (likely helping the US and hurting the poor countries which they come from).
Europe has attracted "bad immigration." But if we acknowledge this, it's inevitable that the returns from good immigration will diminish if the numbers get large enough. In large enough (and uncontrolled enough) numbers, all immigration will eventually look like European immigration.
Europe attracted bad immigration at one specific time, the Syrian refugee crisis. That crisis is now long over but its aftereffects will likely linger for decades.
Whether Europe is still attracting bad or good immigration is difficult to answer because that huge run of bad immigration is polluting both the data and all public discourse surrounding it.
Obviously Syrians and other North Africans who came in all at once with no positive self-selection and very often no documentation are a completely different group from migrant workers from Nepal or the Philippines coming in smaller groups on work visas.
Europe has attracted bad immigration since long before that. Low IQ immigrants don't have good outcomes in subsequent generations even if they come on a work visa. This is also true for Hispanics in the US, but African-Americans make them look good by comparison.
>Europe has attracted bad immigration since long before that
Do you have data on this? European immigration is overwhelmingly internal and was a net positive over most of the cold war era.
>Low IQ immigrants don't have good outcomes in subsequent generations even if they come on a work visa
Immigrants on work visas are far less likely to stay long-term and start a family than asylum seekers are. Obviously some still do but it's a much smaller fraction. Most come in, work for 10-20 years for wages that would be insanely high in their home countries, then go back and live like kings compared to their neighbors.
And according to the 2024 IIT tests Nepal and the Philippines average 97 while India averages 99. Germany averages 100 so it's really not that big a deal, especially when you account for all the positive self-selection you have with people willing to learn another language and work in another country.
But as I've said in the previous comment properly measuring the impacts is as of right now almost impossible.
"European immigration is overwhelmingly internal and was a net positive over most of the cold war era. "
As opposed to "Europe has attracted bad immigration"? I don't see those as conflicting claims. For example, North Africans in France and Pakistanis in the UK have been coming since like the 1960s, Syrian refugee crisis is far from the only problem.
I don't know what the IIT tests are, but to be clear I'm not talking about software engineers or whatever.
>I don't know what the IIT tests are, but to be clear I'm not talking about software engineers or whatever.
International IQ Test, a standardised test taken by people all over the world and a much better representation of national IQ averages than previous attempts.
>For example, North Africans in France and Pakistanis in the UK have been coming since like the 1960s, Syrian refugee crisis is far from the only problem.
In much smaller numbers than the refugee crisis and definitely not large enough numbers to change the overall effects of immigration from net positive to net negative(like the refugee crisis did).
"In much smaller numbers than the refugee crisis and definitely not large enough numbers to change the overall effects of immigration from net positive to net negative(like the refugee crisis did). "
But the claim was about "Europe attracting bad immigration", not about bad immigration being outweighed by good internal migration within Europe.
And I'm not even sure the net benefit of internal migration within Europe is all that much more than zero, given that one country's gain may be another's loss to a large extent.
I could see that IQ test being representative of the kind of person who moves to the west on a work visa, but as for national averages in many countries half the people don't have internet access, and it's not a random half.
The "International IQ Test" is an online, self-administered quiz designed to provide a quick, free estimate of cognitive ability. It is not a standardized or proctored exam, and results are for entertainment or personal curiosity rather than official psychological assessment.
Are you referring to some sort of on-line test? These are startlingly unrepresentative and quite unreliable. Published IQ studies and school achievement tests clearly imply relatively low IQ/g in India, Nepal and the Philippines.
An article* from 2020 says "15 out of 32 gang leaders who are now on the focus list of the Stockholm police in Operation Rimfrost are born outside Sweden, and the others arrived as children – and among those, 14 out of 17 immigrated more than 20 years ago." I.e. much of the bad immigration that is behind Sweden's gang-crime problems happened in the last millennium, not in 2015.
Is it really instructive to compare to the “native” population? Like, in pre-Bukele El Salvador, would it be sensible to allow immigrants from literally anywhere because their murder rate was lower than the natives? In reality, it seems super obvious to me that you should prioritize groups that don’t commit many crimes outright, whether you’re in America, Germany, or El Salvador.
In the case of Germany, that has to do with humanitarian reasons: After WW2 and the Holocaust, right to seek refugee in case of war was deeply ingrained into our laws. And in that context, sorting by "usefulness" seems contra-humanitarian
> Like, in pre-Bukele El Salvador, would it be sensible to allow immigrants from literally anywhere because their murder rate was lower than the natives?
I'm pretty sure we would consider that to be colonization at that point... I'm sure the natives wouldn't be happy, but it would still be a net postive for the world.
> "The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals. As our news sources love to remind us, this is untrue in the American context. The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen."
(1) Comparing general immigrant statistics with Americans in general (which already have hugely inflated crime/welfare stats thanks to the country's black/hispanic fraction), is pretty misleading. Compare immigrant stats with white Americans and the benefits are a lot more dubious. Why would white voters want this?
(2) Compare the tax/welfare/crime statistics of 2nd/3rd-generation hispanics (the most common immigrant group) with white Americans. It's obvious that the continuous expansion of this group is totally unsustainable without massive increases in taxation or massive cuts to the welfare state. It only looks good in the first generation because of relatively limited welfare access, age structure and regression-to-the-mean not kicking in.
(3) None of this speaks to the larger political hazards of immigration, where both high and low-skill migrant groups wind up in coalitions that push toward resentment-drive marxist politics at the expense of whites (and less selective migration policies.) For example: https://youtu.be/C069vPPUnmE?t=642
I think you're right, and I'll say there's another analogy American conservatives make. They not only apply European lessons to America, but generalize from the black experience to immigrants.
Black Americans do have high crime rates and more welfare use, and vote overwhelmingly for the left. When the country started filling up with Hispanics, conservatives thought of them as "black lite." But although this is true to a (very) limited extent, they're much closer to white norms than black norms on most of the measures people care about, and are not forming some kind of permanent separatist underclass that threatens the long run future of the country.
Liberals didn't help by putting all non-whites under the "people of color" umbrella, crowing about the browning of America, and feeding into conservative paranoia.
The perpetual expansion of the US hispanic population is still totally unsustainable without either massive cuts to welfare spending and/or massive increases in taxation, to say nothing of the general risks of introducing Latin-American-style politics (i.e, marked by erratic oscillations between nutjob socialism on the left and authoritarian caudillos on the right.) I would say that AOC isn't quite as toxic as Ibram Kendi, Ilhan Omar or Zohran Mamdani, but it's not a million miles of difference.
I will, a little, since some of them voted for him and others are reacting to the problems created by immigrants. But yeah, arguably the US is entering LatAM basket-case territory already.
I would expect those numbers to converge over time as the demographics and culture become more similar, either through growth in LatAM countries or recession in the US (or both.) Are you proposing some mechanism for economic development that is independent of both genes and culture?
Costa Rica did catch up by a factor of two from about 2010-2020, before that the US had 10x their GDP per capita and now it’s more like 4-5x. According to AI, they established a free trade agreement during that time (CAFTA-DR) and built up med tech manufacturing and engineering as an industry.
"are not forming some kind of permanent separatist underclass that threatens the long run future of the country."
I would normally agree, but the triumphalist rhetoric from Latinos after the recent Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show is making me scratch my chin a little bit.
There are lots of based/trad hispanics out there, and they don't vote for the Democrats by quite the same margins that black or jewish-Americans do, especially in states where the immigration situation was most obviously out of control and harming communities near the border. But the net effect of hispanic migration is still to shift the Overton Window leftward. (Much as is and was the case with the Irish, I have to say.)
Really? Perhaps it has changed with the new Pope, but where I grew up in a rural city with a 40% hispanic population, my white schoolteachers and classmates seemed significantly farther left than my hispanic ones.
It is broadly uncontroversial (here, anyway) to note that left-wing identity politics alienates white voters who would otherwise be more inclined to vote Democratic, but the flip side is also true: the GOP could pull in a lot of votes from conservative minority voters if they themselves were not seen (largely correctly) as the anti-minorities party.
If you're calling for the abandonment of identity politics of any stripe, I would remind you it is impossible to have colour-blind standards of merit that don't wind up excluding the vast, vast majority of candidates from low-IQ racial groups. Low-IQ groups do not tolerate this, certainly without explanation, and any forthcoming explanation from the high-IQ groups will be seen as another form of "identity politics". It's inescapable.
The ultimate unsustainability of the current tax vs. welfare setup (and some of the risk of marxist politics) in the US is largely downstream of biological factors particular to specific ethnic backgrounds. (It's also unsustainable because of ageing and collapsing TFR, but this can theoretically be remedied by cultural/economic incentives- genetics cannot.) None of this will be altered how much or how little the GOP panders to minority groups (and even asking for cultural assimilation is now considered a form of 'racism'.) What does the winner get by importing ten million Somalis, exactly?
Being 'anti-minority' is the only morally defensible position when most potential "minority" groups on earth are not constitutionally capable of running an industrial civilisation and will use democratic enfranchisement to punish you for building one. If there is a solution to either the biological or political dimensions of this problem, then I am going to demand it be discovered and implemented BEFORE importing more of them. Not after.
>> But the net effect of hispanic migration is still to shift the Overton Window leftward.
> where I grew up in a rural city with a 40% hispanic population, my white schoolteachers and classmates seemed significantly farther left than my hispanic ones.
For this question, thinking of policies as being "right" or "left" is going to lead you to wrong conclusions. The effect of hispanic migration is to shift everything toward hispanic preferences. Their vote is currently, net of everything, Democratic. But party positions aren't fixed; they constantly change in response to voters. As you get more and more hispanics, both parties will adopt policies to appeal to them.
Some obvious examples of the kind of change you'd expect:
Tax-and-spend: great idea, do more of it.
Women in the workplace: dumb idea, do less of it.
Prayer in school: great idea; do a lot more of it.
That's because complaining about immigration is both more socially acceptable and more seemingly-solvable than complaining about black Americans. Black crime doesn't really go anywhere in policy terms; it's high but not high enough to justify overt Jim Crowe-type discrimination to anyone sane and fair-minded (bearing in mind the bulk of black Americans aren't criminals), and while there might be some hypothetically effective social interventions to deal with a lot of the disfunction they have no-one in the real world knows how to do these effectively for people whose dysfunction means they aren't interested in being helped. You can say something about profiling more, but everyone already does that anyway and then lies about it, so it becomes "do what we're doing anyway, but be ruder to people."
You can have a fairly fun time reading both conservatism and liberalism as responses to, "We have a massive unsolvable problem that's gutting all our cities and no solution" by opting for cope-y fake solutions, namely "Deport the Mexicans" and "Fight racism."
I would say, speaking as a European who's spent time in America, your Mexicans and Mexican-adjacents are obviously 95+% fine and just need filtering for a handful of criminals (plus whatever fix you need to your education system to make the kids turn out like their parents). They're much more like the UK's Indians than their Pakistanis.
Something around 50% of US blacks have expressed a hypothetical interest in moving to another country, and technically it would be financially rational to pay them half a million dollars to relocate. I don't think this problem is as unsolvable as people think.
Paying 40 million people to leave the country and go *somewhere* is not a sane solution. The difficulty isn't even the 20 trillion dollars, it's that there's no country on Earth that could absorb 40 million people other than, possibly, the US.
If you're ignoring common sense, the Overton window etc., creating an independent Blackistan in Georgia, South Carolina Alabama and Mississippi (possibly with adjustments to include New Orleans, Memphis and the Florida panhandle) and doing Indian partition-style population transfers is more viable. It's still a completely mental non-starter.
> "The difficulty isn't even the 20 trillion dollars, it's that there's no country on Earth that could absorb 40 million people other than, possibly, the US"
I don't know if 20 million (50% of) US blacks would all take the offer simultaneously, but there are literally a billion people living in sub-saharan Africa right now, so there'd be plenty of potential destinations where they could get set up and would absorb the numbers trivially. Or heck, maybe parts of Latin America or SE Asia would take migrants with half a million USD of spending money. It's not like they all have to go one place.
Sure, the Overton Window is an obstacle, I'm just pointing out there's no technical reason why other americans have to be carrying this ball and chain forever. If US blacks really think the country is oppressing them, they're more than welcome to try their luck elsewhere with a bunch of seed capital, and see what happens.
Money doesn't magically make infrastructure, goods, and services appear. If millions of foreigners with a ton of money in their pocket appear overnight, it would just collapse the local economy with hyperinflation.
You could put the money in trust funds and release it relatively slowly over 10-20 years or so, but I honestly don't think half the US black population is large enough to collapse Africa's economy.
And how is that the US's problem? If the black population find themselves stranded in a collapsing Africa, the US does not need to let them back in. Forfeiture of citizenship would be a part of the deal.
If you told me that there was an immigrant group of Catholic small-business owners who drive big trucks and spend their weekends grilling meat, drinking beer and watching futbo- er football, I would say they certainly must be Republicans.
The fact that hispanics still largely vote Democrat seems a clear repudiation of Republican views on race.
There was a massive swing toward Trump among Latino voters in the past three elections. According to CNN exit polls, he went from 28% in 2016 to 44% in 2024. He won Hispanic men in 2024 by 10 percentage points.
(Trump also went from 8% of the black vote in 2016 to 13% in 2024.)
I have to admit that when I read "In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate," I immediately subvocalised "so, still lower than the murder rate in the US?"
Turns out that's not quite right, but pretty close: According to UNODC (https://data.unodc.org/datareport/hom-victim), Germany's intentional homicide rate was 0.91 per 100k inhabitants in 2023, and the US's intentional homicide rate was 5.76 in 2023. So the US baseline intentional homicide rate was ~6.33 times higher than the German one.
Which is to say, even if you expected asylum-seekers to be equally violent in both countries, it would show up much less strikingly in the US statistics.
Nearly half of that difference is due to US blacks alone, without even factoring in other non-white groups of a mostly-immigrant background. White americans do still have about 2x the homicide rate of white europeans, last I checked, and you could plausibly blame that on gun culture or whatever, but none of this turns into a positive argument in favour of more asylum-seekers.
I needed a while to untangle your comment since it's such a non-sequitur to me, but I think I understand the source of confusion, so, to clarify: I live in Germany, and I don't actually have any opinion on immigration either here or there, I just noticed, with amusement, that the statistic is not nearly as comparable (not in the sense of "same" but literally in the sense of "comparable") as the article suggests.
If you don't mind, I don't have very much interest in discussing US politics, so I'm not going to engage much more with this comment, but it's not personal, I just try to curate my interactions on the internet somewhat consciously. Wishing you all the best. :)
I'm not disagreeing with you from a technical PoV, it's just that I think the US demographics most likely to object to immigration are unfairly framed as being "worse than immigrants", and a lot of this relies on selective reporting.
I think I understand his point. When interpreting this claim: "In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate" -- you have to keep in mind that the German native rate has far fewer Blacks in it than the US native rate does. It could be that the ratio of "US asylum-seeker murder rate" to "US white murder rate" is much more similar to the ratio of "German asylum-seeker murder rate" to "German native murder rate" because Blacks commit such a disproportionate share of murders and are a much smaller share of the native German population than they are of the native US population. Probably the US's white murder rate is still higher than Germany's because of gun culture, etc., but not to the same degree as the US's total native murder rate, which is skewed by a relatively larger Black population.
But when it comes to immigration, what you should be comparing to is the total murder rate for all groups, since the question you actually want to answer is: Will allowing one more Somali refugee raise or lower your chance of being murdered?
If the US crime rate is high because of some specific subgroups, then letting in more people with an overall lower crime rate would decrease mean crime, meaning that everyone is slightly safer. Meanwhile in Germany that same group of refugees would increase mean crime rates.
An immigration restrictionist might reply that nobody experiences the national mean murder rate. What matters for your chances of being murdered is the local murder rate around you. So, in your framing, if somebody doesn't live near many Black people, then yes, an influx of Somalis may well raise their local murder rate above what it was; even if that same influx in a more Black-populated area would lower the local murder rate there, and even if it lowers the national mean.
In practice, since refugees are generally poorer, they tend to end up living in high-crime areas where they probably do lower the local rate. In fact they kind of provide a service to the rest of us by absorbing the high-crime externalities and acting as a buffer.
But an ethical restrictionist (or just one with basic solidarity for his own people which most restrictionist claim to have) should care more about the mean rate of the country, that is an effect which slightly raise crime in one city but lowers it everywhere else is good, even if you happen to live in the unlucky city.
Also I think I remember Richard Hannania writing somewhere that middle eastern migrants have provided exactly the service you predict they would, by running small businesses in poor neighborhoods
Something that's highly underrated is that US immigration critics would be largely unconcerned with legal high skill immigration. The 10 million illegal immigrants Biden let in may well commit crime relative to legal skilled immigrants at a similar ratio as the high crime groups in Europe do relative to natives
If you're a white ethnocentrist, literally no statistic about non-whites being great could ever make you want to allow them in. So any statistics based on that premise are pointless.
That's sort of why people don't bother talking to bigots, you can use logic to fix someone's decision strategy, but not to fix their utility function.
If talking, statistics and logic is hopeless against ethnocentrism and bigotry then it sure is a good thing we don't have any ethnocentric or bigoted immigrant groups coming into our countries.
> If you're a white ethnocentrist, literally no statistic about non-whites being great could ever make you want to allow them in. So any statistics based on that premise are pointless.
What about "99% percent of XXX immigrants want to adopt white names and culture, want their children to only marry white people and raise their grandchildren as white"?
I mean I guess that depends what flavor of white ethnocentrist you are, I'd expect most of them to not care about that but it's not like hang out in their forums and know their policies well.
You are correct because the one drop rule. Obama is never going to be white no matter how much he acts it even if he's genetically more white than black (at best), equal parts (at worst,). This isn't a case of German moving to France. Not really just a white thing either, Japanese don't consider Blasians Japanese either nor do Spaniards consider mestizos Spanish.
A really interesting natural experiment here is what does Israel look like with the mass Beta Israeli influx a hundred years hence and do they integrate and vanish or ghettoize?
I think that depends on the source of the ethnocentrism. If someone's belief structure is simply: "white = good" as an axiom with no other reasoning other than pure racism, then obviously no statistics would change their mind.
However, if someone's belief structure is something like "ABC are good, XYZ are bad, white people have way more ABC and way less XYZ than everyone else, therefore white people are good" then statistics could matter. Because if you convince them that other races are equal or better at ABC and equal or lesser at XYZ then they'd accept those races. Because they don't truly care about race, they care about ABC and XYZ.
Now, I suspect most racists are some combination of the two. They ultimately care about things like crime and pro-social behaviors, and in combination with anecdotes, statistics, and biased reasoning, come to the conclusion that their own race is inherently better and other races are incapable of behaving themselves. But given strong enough evidence (usually in the form of personal experience, not official statistics) some of them could be convinced otherwise.
Comparing immigrant crime rate to "US natives" rather than to "whites" (which is what right wingers mean when they say US natives) is why this discrepancy seems confusing to you. US natives crime rates are skewed upwards by the black minority and the existing Hispanic population, both of which are also "problems" from a US right wingers POV. A Hispanic/Somali immigrant in a black neighbourhood lowers the crime rate, but in a white neighbourhood (which is what right wingers care about) they raise the crime rate.
One of the challenges I have with rationalists is their apparent trust in academic studies and willingness to generalize therefrom.
Example: immigrants commit fewer crimes.
I am well aware of an iconic study being used to support that point (Texas 2019). I am also aware that most cite it not as saying what I would say it did. I would say it says: we inferred the rate of incarcerations in 2018 in Texas for legal and illegal immigrants when guessing the number of illegals present to be lower than the incarceration rate of citizens. Unlike my interpretation, I would say the general interpretation (and citation?) of the statistic is to say "Illegals commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens." (Though recognize Scott is not saying that, here.)
The problem is I see are issues hanging off all sides of a study like that. Incarceration does not equal committing crime. Many commit crimes and are never arrested. Texas 2018 does not equal the nation today. The number of illegals in such a study seems likely to be highly unknown.
The gap between what the study said and immigrants commit fewer crimes is just stark.
What's my guess as to the actual situation? I don't know, but I know I'm not going to use that paper as a strong prior for my guess.
I'm not sure what the relative rate of crime would be.
I suspect illegal immigrants commit far more crimes per capita than citizens, and legal immigrants probably commit similar or fewer than citizens.
We know that an illegal immigrant has to have at least one more crime on their tally sheet than a citizen - they're here illegally. They also skew demographically into high crime demo pools (young, male, poor, etc.). Further, as an illegal, it's effectively impossible to be a typical resident without committing other crimes (e.g., how to legally work). Those seem really strong priors to leave me thinking illegals are likely skew high crime.
For the portion of immigrants that are legal, I'm not particularly interested (the topic of the moment is really illegal, not legal), but I'd guess they skew low-crime in part due to the fact that they could have chosen an illegal route but didn't, so they're probably disproportionately rule-followers - if nothing else. The demographic skews I'm not so sure about (are they young? are they male? are they poor?). Don't know. And, more to my point, I'm not sure I care.
The notion that we can hold as bedrock the fact that "immigrants commit fewer crimes" becomes an insufficiently examined prior for a mountain of subsequent logic. And I recognize that Scott here is interrogating that prior slightly with additional study citations. But the skew of such studies is also going to have the same sorts of problems as the Texas study - so more studies along the same ilk don't actually buttress the original proposition if they suffer from a systemic error. If you really want that as a trustworthy prior for a mountain of highly important conclusions, don't you have to relinquish trust in the face value interpretation of the study and assess a lot of foundational issues they have with generalizability?
>We know that an illegal immigrant has to have at least one more crime on their tally sheet than a citizen - they're here illegally.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is all off-the-top-of-my-head. Someone with more knowledge should correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem with this is that I don't think illegal entry is technically a crime. This cuts all sorts of ways into the debate; I think that's why you can send illegals out of the country without a trial. There was some controversy during the Obama administration of the government playing catch and release, where they would send the border-crossers back without processing them, because crossing back in once you've been kicked out once is a crime, and without noting who had been caught once you can't prove they had re-entered. While it's not a crime, it is a breach of the law, but it allows people that want to skirt the difference to do so.
And you're right about the other violations: not just the violation of the laws with regards to working, but taxes and things like drivers licenses and insurance all amount to cases where it's hard (but not impossible) to live here illegally without doing something that is a crime.
>For the portion of immigrants that are legal, I'm not particularly interested (the topic of the moment is really illegal, not legal).
There is the debate about H1B visas and similar work problems that is still relevant. While someone who loses their job because their employer found an immigrant that will work cheaper may blame the (legal) immigrant, this is really an employer problem (and the government to the extent it lets employers flout the laws).
Legal immigration is at least as large a problem as illegal immigration, it's just that the extent of tolerance for illegal migrants is particularly galling.
Thx. Also no lawyer, but a couple of AI agents suggest to me illegals are committing a crime by crossing here illegally, and are _also_ guilty of a civil fraction that triggers the unique legal process options to ICE.
>The problem with this is that I don't think illegal entry is technically a crime. This cuts all sorts of ways into the debate; I think that's why you can send illegals out of the country without a trial.
It is a crime, it's just a crime with a big set of loopholes: magic word asylum doctrine, non-enforcement leniency, etc.
The idea of paroling is that they'll eventually come back for the trial, but enforcement is piss-poor and how do you even alert someone with no address or communication ability that they need to come back?
>We know that an illegal immigrant has to have at least one more crime on their tally sheet than a citizen - they're here illegally.
We don't know that. As a number of critics have been at pains to point out for a while, people commit various minor crimes more or less non-stop because US legal codes are a nightmare. +1 for an illegal border crossing might adjust our estimates upward (though many, of course, didn't cross the border illegally; they entered via an asylum claim or overstayed a visa), but the added risks associated with encountering law enforcement might push them downward. If we're going to ignore the evidence we have, it becomes a game of rationalizing your priors.
Of course, when people talk about crimes, they generally mean Serious Crimes. The problem is that what you think is a Serious Crime is a highly political question. There are some central examples that aren't very controversial, e.g. the vast majority of people will agree that murder and rape qualify (and are in fact The Most Serious Crimes), but when you get to the edges it starts getting fuzzy. For example, I personally think we should be waaaaay harder on moving violations. I'm pretty clearly in the minority there, as it is normal for people to break the speed limit, roll through stop signs, etc... and rigorous enforcement of these laws would lead to rioting. In the specific context of immigration, nativists believe that illegal border crossing is an extremely serious infraction - to the point of supporting abridgement of due process in some cases - while anti-nativists think it is barely a crime at all.
A lot of official statistics are flawed and you can probably improve things by dip sampling and analysing surnames. Which is hard to do and not much of an option for an ordinary observer.
As some other commenters have mentioned, all this is being used as foreshadowing for America, I liken it all to your post about the "Vibecession", but with immigrants.
The conservatives and other groups in America and Europe are strictly forward looking. "This is America in the future" and "This will happen if we don't stop them", "Our country will look like London or Stockholm if we let this go on" and so on.
Whereas the only counter-argument is past-looking. Statistics. You can't convince groups who only look ahead to look behind them. The statistics either A. prove their argument or B. aren't telling the whole story because it's not yet the future.
My colleagues and I are working in the Netherlands, alongside various Europeans (Dutch, Hungarians, Polish, Turks, Brits, etc. ) we get to see a lot of the discourse on immigrants from their own countries as well as the impact of the bombardment of constant US news. Our cafeteria has a muted CNN feed on in the background for goodness sake.
I suspect that thanks to the constant "loud" American discussions about immigration, it has definitely encouraged the European equivalent. (I say loud as in it dominates English-language news and internet).
Whereas a few years ago, immigration talk was much more hush-hush, I am personally seeing a louder Dutch population complaining about the same things but with North Africans and Middle Easterners. When I first moved here, I never heard people making off-the-cuff remarks about Muslims or North Africans, but slowly, I overhear a bit more in taxis, waiting lines, cafes.
I've also heard louder talk amongst Canadians' social media complaining about the state of Canada due to all the brown people. More Swedes complaining about crime in Sweden from all the Muslims. More French complaining about violence in southern France from all the black people. In turn, the Americans use it as prophetic warnings.
A few anecdotal experiences over the last few years:
1. I remember an article during the height of BLM about a black woman who immigrated to Poland (maybe a student?), and was complaining about the Polish word for black people, murzyn... which literally means black person, and which has no slavery connection amongst Poles, and ignoring the fact that slavery of Eastern Europeans by Ottomans was a thing in the early modern era. I think a protest followed with a rather sad showing. Never heard anything of it again after that, but your post reminded me of it.
2. I am noticing a vocal Swedish media sphere with English posts and op-eds from women increasingly fearful of crime in Sweden due to all the African/Arabic immigrants. These posts in turn get picked up by communities elsewhere in Europe worried about the same happening to them. I also see these articles get picked up by American conservatives, for the reasons you mentioned.
3. I also never used to hear about Brits complaining about immigrants not integrating until Trump's re-election, and the latest fuel to that fire was an article last week in The Guardian by Sangeeta Pillai telling people to stop saying "thank you". That really riled readers up, largely British conservatives as well as Americans stating that integration is clearly failing if immigrants are complaining about the culture of the country they moved to and it's a good reason to halt it all.
4. I can't speak for French protests but I live in an area of the Netherlands that gets a lot of protests in general. Prior to the war in Gaza, most marches were political party rallies and the occasional farmer subsidy protest. Since the war, they have been dominated by pro-Palestinian groups, and their frequency has gotten to the point where my parents ask on the phone if the noise in the background of my Skype call is another Gaza protest. I've noticed the numbers dwindle over time, but the groups are definitely dominated by university students and retired people. (Maybe since everyone who has a job isn't spending their weekends with a megaphone and flag outside a closed politicians office). I do find myself wondering how much taxpayer money goes to the police that have to spend their afternoon keeping an eye on them each month.
Somewhat related, my Facebook (yuck, I know) feed definitely focuses more on the violent riots caused by these Gaza protests in other cities in the Netherlands. The clips show a lot of brown people smashing windows and cars and petty crime. And the responses are naturally anti-immigrant and wanting them all sent back. Voting results are a mess out here so I can't really get numbers, but the "vibe" has definitely gotten louder and more far-right.
5. One thing I noticed amongst all this social media posting and water cooler talk - is that despite the huge inflow of Ukrainian refugees and immigrants, very little has been complaining about them. It's almost entirely African / Arabic / Muslim immigrants. And of course Gypsies but even that has gotten quieter.
>One thing I noticed amongst all this social media posting and water cooler talk - is that despite the huge inflow of Ukrainian refugees and immigrants, very little has been complaining about them. It's almost entirely African / Arabic / Muslim immigrants.
There's a right-wing meme that goes something like "If the refugees were all white blonde women then liberal women would be forming SS death squads". Well, by far the biggest refugee wave of the recent years in Europe - over twice the size of the one in 2015 - have been the Ukrainians, who have, indeed, been mostly women (often blonde), at least if we're just speaking just about the adults.
And yet, liberal woman SS death squads haven't been formed. When this has been occasionally pointed out, the most the right-wingers have mustered is pointing to some poll in Poland (the biggest recipient of the women) showing the local women griping about it to some degree, but even there the women haven't actually gone as far as starting to vote for the local anti-immigration and pro-Russian parties, let alone forming death squads.
"In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate."
How do you get that number? The linked article says 2% of people livng in Germany in 2017 were asylum seekers (which seems low, those are the numbers of asylum seekers 2015-2017 alone) and that "10.4% of murder suspects ... were asylum-seekers and refugees in 2017".
That looks like 5x to me, even if we ignore that the latter number includes other refugees.
Germany had 890.000 asylum applicants in 2015, 745.545 in 2016 and 222.683 in 2017, for a sum of 1.85 million.
I was going off of "according to Germany's Interior Ministry, 27 illegal migrants either committed or attempted to commit murder or manslaughter in 2017. The 447 figure used by AfD actually refers to all asylum seekers and refugees, most of whom are in Germany legally. Overall this group was 15% of the total 2,971 suspects linked to these crimes in Germany last year". But it looks like your statistic is more specific for murder, so I'll edit it in.
The AfD tends to be a bad source on immigration related stuff, because on this topic they are as biased as you can be.
(They tend to be generally not the most truth oriented party, and fake news/ "alternative" media are part of their media strategy/ or at least of the strategy of their inner right wing. I believe it would be fair to categorize them as a populist party with (overproportional) dishonest discourse in their toolkit.)
One big example is coverage of the British monarchy in the American press. I can't think of a less relevant issue that gets regular coverage, and this has been going on for many decades.
As an American conservative with a lot of questions about the methodology involved in the cited studies, this line from the NPR article stands out as giving away some of the progressive misdirection in the current debate:
"The study also suggests that there's a real fear of getting in trouble and being deported within immigrant communities. Far from engaging in criminal activities, immigrants mostly don't want to rock the boat."
Isn't the whole point of the debate in America that certain Democrat-run localities are refusing to hand over illegal immigrants with ICE detention orders that have been arrested (causing ICE to have to go in and apprehend them directly)? If the threat of being deported is keeping illegal immigrants from committing crimes, why would you remove the threat of deportation?
I don't think NPR is necessarily lying. I think immigrants don't necessarily know the ins and outs of American politics; they may fear ICE even if the local government is on their side. The problem is the people in the debate either don't know the ins and outs of American politics or they are deceiving people. There's a massive gap between "we should not fear illegal immigrants because they are law abiding because they fear deportation" and "we should not deport illegal immigrants no matter what crimes they commit".
As far as the studies go, just from a quick and dirty perusal of the cited studies, apparently the only state that keeps track of illegal immigration status for arrests is Texas, which is a state with a reputation for law and order and more importantly hands over illegal immigrants to ICE, which deters illegal immigrants in the state from committing crimes, making Texas a statistical outlier. Seeing this makes me seriously question anyone that talks about the rates of illegal immigrants and crime (and immigrants in general and crime), and also question why we don't require states and localities to gather this information.
>Isn't the whole point of the debate in America that certain Democrat-run localities are refusing to hand over illegal immigrants with ICE detention orders that have been arrested (causing ICE to have to go in and apprehend them directly)? If the threat of being deported is keeping illegal immigrants from committing crimes, why would you remove the threat of deportation?
The whole point is that ICE *used* to primarily target immigrants accused of crimes, but is now abducting people off the side of the street largely at random based on skin tone, including citizens, because of huge quotas they're required to meet to get paid.
If you target people whether or not they've committed a crime, that also gets rid of the incentive not to commit crimes.
This proves my point about the massive gap between the arguments and the actual policies. "Don't hand over any illegal immigrant for deportation no matter what they did" (which is Minnesota's policy) is electorally indefensible to the median American voter, so the progressives have to pretend they approved of when ICE was only deporting criminals and place the blame on ICE, even though the order of causality works the other way. The ICE surge results from sanctuary policies, not the other way around.
It's not hard to get away with it; the media has let Democrat politicians play to both sides; Obama could pretend that he was enforcing the law to the credulous median voters while winking at the progressive left about not enforcing the law in sanctuary jurisdictions.
Yes, more interactions means more mistakes by ICE, though I find more mistakes by the media (or 'mistakes' / deliberate blood libel) in reporting what actually happened. But remember the current head of ICE was head of ICE during the Obama administration where he could do enough of his job to let Obama appease the median voter; he didn't suddenly become a bad guy. ICE's policies are no different, the difference is the number of illegals, the commitment of the Administration to actually enforcing the law, the organization and commitment of the far left to fighting law enforcement, and the openness of Democratic politicians to support the far left.
>"Don't hand over any illegal immigrant for deportation no matter what they did" (which is Minnesota's policy)
This is simply not true.
The DHS is presenting a lot of complete fabrications about Minnesota which is in keeping with the Trump administration transparent method of operation.
In plain words they simply lie to justify an insane authoritarian spectacle. The cruelty is the very point.
"Minnesota Department of Corrections Addresses False Claims by the Department of Homeland Security"
"The Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) is releasing new evidence demonstrating that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to publish false Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “arrest” claims in press releases and on their website by mischaracterizing routine custody transfers from Minnesota state prisons. DHS’s “Worst of the Worst” (WOW) website, allows users to search by state and city for “criminal illegal aliens that have been removed from their state.”
DOC quickly identified 68 cases in which individuals were lawfully transferred from Minnesota Department of Corrections custody directly to ICE, only for DHS officials to falsely claim these same"
Minnesota’s policy is to hand over all illegal immigrants after they serve their sentence, and indeed many of the “worst of the worst” that the trump admin brags about catching were simply handed over to them by Minnesota DOC. The city and county jail system in Minneapolis specifically is more complicated and closer to “they do not cooperate” but many people in city and county jails are awaiting trial or bail and are not eligible for deportation.
I appreciate some pushback on the numbers. We're at the point where I can admit that both sides have incentive to shade the truth (and probably are to some degree). It may also be Minneapolis specifically rather than Minnesota where the issue lies, and I may have been too hasty by saying Minnesota. However, there's obviously something wrong, since the high-profile incidents from Minneapolis that have made the news have involved protesters stopping ICE from taking into custody illegal immigrant criminals with extensive records that it didn't take ICE too much trouble to find, not "random street abductions".
You admit Minneapolis is complicated, but why would someone awaiting trial or bail not be eligible for deportation... and which is it? If ICE is accidentally requesting someone awaiting trial for a felony, it's one thing, but why would you grant bail to someone with a pending deportation order? What are the levels of the crimes involved? I'd love the numbers, but I'd settle for even some examples to look at.
The encouragement by government officials of people to fight law enforcement is also a new change in 'policy' (and dates back to BLM, rather than ICE). I remember when it was the fear that it would be right-wing idiots killing cops (the ATF) rather than left-wing ones. I mean, during COVID you had anonymous masked law enforcement officers going after people using the beaches. I can agree with criticism of some level of the 'protect the cops at all costs' mentality that contributes to some of the police violence, but that pales in comparison to the effect of the 'cops are racist pigs! fight the power!' rhetoric from the far left; if anything, they've given law enforcement a very good reason to want to be anonymous when dealing with anarchist terrorists.
And that raises another point; part of the reason this issue is so hard is that the raw numbers are hard to come by. One of the reasons I'm more given to trust the right on this is that the right was more accurate when it came to numbers when it came to 'amount of police violence' vs 'amount of crime' during BLM. We saw the 'defund the police' rhetoric and where it led to: more crime. Now we've seen Trump's law and order push (including against illegal immigration) and we've seen the reduction in crime, which even the mainstream left has had to acknowledge. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it does raise at least a significant argument for it.
At the same time, the far left has been pushing for fighting law enforcement since at least BLM; pretending that this current drive to fight ICE is something due to the nature of ICE and not just a continuation of BLM is silly. Likewise, the complaints about progressive cities failing to hold onto repeat violent offenders (and then finally doing something when they cross the line by doing something heinous enough to make the news and thus cause median voters to pay attention and consider voting Republican) is also not new; there's no reason to think they'd be any less lenient when the criminals in the revolving door are illegal immigrants.
In the past, you'd have the Democratic-administration federal government charge right wing idiots with federal civil rights charges when the local government failed to convict them, because that was what the federal government had the power to do. The Democrats established that the Federal government was supreme when it came to enforcing immigration law. Why would you not expect that the Trump administration would follow precedent and use federal law when it was the appropriate mechanism when local government failed?
>pretending that this current drive to fight ICE is something due to the nature of ICE and not just a continuation of BLM is silly.
It's not ICE enforcement, it's the thuggish methods.
It was all prefaced by this goonish promise:
"FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!"
And that is exactly how ICE came across, knocking out window in cars, grabbing the driver and letting the in-gear car roll into traffic.
Knocking on doors in peaceful residential neighborhoods and asking "Where do the Asians live?"
Off duty police who look Hispanic have been stopped and asked for papers.
Trigger happy, unprofessional ICE agents killing people for bush league civil disobedience. Afterwards adding as an authoritarian grace note "Fucking bitch". Good's last words were, "I'm not mad at you dude."
Ask the health care professionals in the Twin Cities if they are pretending anything.
Ah, the wonders of a pay wall. And it's not like the health care professionals didn't suddenly decide that the BLM protests were a reason to suddenly change all the advice they had given during the COVID lockdowns, so you know they're not politically unbiased.
Yes, I've admitted law enforcement hasn't covered itself in glory. I'm sure it's possible that the ICE agents did something wrong (and certain that I can find some agents doing something wrong somewhere). Although seeing a drama-laden emotional headline rather than an actual by the facts story causes me to suspect that there is more to this particular story than what the headline suggests, such as another side.
I'm sure I can go through and find some sob story, say about people that got killed by some illegal immigrant who should have been deported. I don't want to play that sort of game. What I want is numbers. And here some are:
"Federal authorities are aware of but not currently detaining 13,099 illegal immigrants living in the US who have been convicted of homicide and 1,845 who are accused of it, according to the data set."
[I admit, I assume the NY Post to be biased towards removing illegal immigrants. However, these numbers come from the 2024 administration, so no Trump bias here.]
I'll add that the victim with both sides of his skull broken came to the US legally - not sure if a visa expired or anything, but definitely not the worst of the worst - and has a registered roofing business in Saint Paul.
No way. What they are currently doing in Minneapolis (and have been doing in other cities) is not similar to anything that happened under Obama. There was also that memo that told ICE agents they didn't need warrants.
> the commitment of the Administration to actually enforcing the law
Is this a joke? The current Admin's respect for law could be shoved up a gnat's butt, and it would rattle around like a BB in a cereal box.
"The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen...Still, taken as a vague high-level claim, the news sources are right and the conservative narrative is wrong."
The average legal immigrants and/or illegal immigrant? And given the narrow scope and studies of these topics, I have trouble agreeing that the narrative is simply "wrong." Trucking has been transformed by immigration, and is now full of violations of law and social norms that do not always rise to the level of "crime" in record keeping. Roads are less safe, but how can that be reflected in studies that rely upon questionable data. But that likely does not matter, because most oikophoibic researchers have made up their minds before they even write a single word.
It's hard to tell with illegal immigrants because most of these studies use incarceration rates as a proxy for crime rates, but many illegal immigrants get deported instead of incarcerated. The statistics I gave were for legal immigrants. The statistics for illegal immigrants are facially lower, but subject to the bias above.
If the true fact is "immigrants commit fewer crimes, but more trucking accidents", I think getting people to understand that would be an improvement over the false "immigrants commit more crimes".
I think there is just too much gray area and complexity in saying something is true or false when it comes to crime and immigration, legal or illegal. Do immigrants report all crime in their communities? Are driving without insurance or using a stolen ID to work considered crimes? (And does being a victim of those things feel like a crime has been committed?) How about running non-authorized food truck? Is an entire trucking business built on fraud a crime? Of course, illegals committed a crime by entering the country illegally.
I am biased because of the way my legal-immigrant wife lost her Green Card over USCIS nonsense, but the discourse around immigration is just too biased by pre-conceived, absolute beliefs. If immigration was all sunshine and smiles it would not be the touchy subject it is around the world and has been throughout history.
It's worth noting that pretty much everything you mention in your first paragraph has to do with with illegal immigrants, so mixing "legal or illegal" is nonsensical. The examples you give are also interesting, as they're likely caused by when someone cannot do things "the correct way" due to their immigration status. I have not heard of any legal immigrant here getting a fake DL, as while a real one is costly, the cost of going from "allowed to remain legally here" to "getting deported" is much higher. This is not the case for illegal immigrants, and one of the main arguments people have in favor of regularizing status.
> If immigration was all sunshine and smiles it would not be the touchy subject it is around the world and has been throughout history.
You are right about this, but not every outrage is proportional to the actual size of the issue. In the modern day, immigrants make for a convenient scapegoat, sitting along the likes of trans people.
Well when the policy under discussion is “to what extent should we worry about illegal immigration” and our main proxy for that is crime rates, it’s circular reasoning to take into account the fact that illegal immigration is a crime. Saying that, technically, 100% of illegal immigrants are criminals does not help people reason about the kinds of criminality they actually care about.
At a minimum, there illegal immigrants who entered the country at an age when they weren't old enough to have the mens rea to commit a crime, and therefore can't fairly be called "criminals"
Mens rea isn't required for crime, it's just the default. Illegal immigration is a strict liability crime like, in most jurisdictions, speeding. Their state of mind is irrelevant. We have jailed eight year olds for possession of drugs.
But whether we should allow more or less legal immigration is not remotely the argument right now, the main contention is around whether illegal immigrants should be forcibly removed.
About half of US illegal immigrants are visa overstays, which I believe is by definition an infraction but not a crime. Plus, as Herb^2 notes, the ones who were brought as young children and whose parents may or may not have committed a crime in the process.
My understanding is that there is no crime to "be in the US illegally." It's a civil violation, and the government can remove you from the country, but not a crime.
> If a law was passed upgrading it from a "civil violation" to a "crime" then would this change anyone's opinion on anything?
No, but it might have meaningful consequences for enforcing those laws. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the fact that it's a civil rather than criminal violation means the process can be faster and skip over some of the due process that criminal defendants get.
On paper sure but in practice you get vastly more good faith due process in civil matters as there isn't the irrational violent criminal fear attached "if you free them".
>This may be true, but I propose a simpler explanation
Just a small nitpick: while I find your explanation very plausible, I would consider it roughly the same complexity as the previous one, so your argument seems unnecessarily possibly wrong here.
>There are still some ways of asking the question where you find immigrants >collecting fewer benefits than natives (for example, because immigrants are young, >natives are old, and pensions are a benefit).
This is not some sort of liberal trick, but what you want to keep track of if you want to ask: does it make sense to allow more immigrants so as to sustain our pension system? (I think by now even the Spanish right has looked at the numbers and quietly accepted that Spain would be unsustainable without immigration; they seem to have decided the best way out is to be condescending to Latin Americans and keep everybody else out. Or something.)
> But there are also more options for >asking the question in ways where yes, >immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. >The European link between >immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the >conservatives are allowed >to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries.
Well, if you are going to break down by age group and other demographic categories, you might consider doing so consistently. Even in Germany, the contrast is much less striking if you consider young male migrants to young male natives. (The great majority of asylum seekers in Germany are young men.)
Then, as someone else already pointed out, there's the utter brilliance of German asylum policy: don't allow refugees to work, and pay them an allowance instead (claimed by AfD to be princely, but actually very modest; the AfD must be counting high administrative costs pocketed by (German) administrators, or, well, go ask them). This is a legacy of the time of zero immigration policy. Not sure what sense it made even then - maybe it rhymed or something.
PS. In a welfare state, immigrants will be disproportionately on welfare because (or if) they are disproportionately poor. Of course, that's relevant for the "virtue" angle, not for balancing finances, but for the latter, again, there's no point in separating by age.
> Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs.
I think the main reason boils down to the point that Europe is more left-leaning and has been for longer, and a lot of US progressives more or less explicitly have the goal of "make USA more like Europe" and so conservatives are very interested when the European system hits problems.
Like the current topic of welfare - progressives have been wanting a European-style welfare system in the US forever - conservatives have argued "sure, you can massively increase welfare in the short term, but in the long term it's not sustainable" so news like "Britain is cannibalizing the younger generation to support welfare payments to the older generation" is very interesting to conservatives.
---
That doesn't really explain this phenomenon, where US commenters are mistaking European problems for American ones... but honestly, I think that just boils down to the current internet zeitgeist which will believe anything as long as it's bad. A European will (rightfully) complain and an American will read it uncritically because it supports their general "everything sucks nowadays" viewpoint and not realize that the original commenter's situation doesn't apply to them.
I've never heard a Leftist explain WHY illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born. After all, if crime is caused by "poor educational opportunity" and "generational poverty," you'd expect illegals to commit far more crime. They might think they don't need to, since low illegal alien crime is simply a fact, but when you combine that with their history of lying about the very real high crime rate among blacks, voters simply don't believe their claims about illegals. Even now, after the ICE killings, voters trust Republicans more on immigration:
Conservatives could easily explain low illegal immigrant crime: illegals who commit crimes risk deportation to terrible countries. Harsher punishments provide more deterrence, this is conservative crime theory 101. But they'd rather lie, it serves them well enough electorally, though the constant lying turns off the elite human capital a few of them would like to attract.
My post didn't distinguish between legal vs. illegal immigrants, because we have poor statistics on illegal immigrants (we mostly measure crime through incarceration rate, and illegal immigrants often get deported rather than incarcerated).
Still, I think we can be pretty sure your proposed explanation isn't the full story, because legal immigrants have lower crime rates than natives, so an easy explanation for if illegal immigrants did would be that they have the same immigrant-specific factors. My guess is that it takes agency and competence to immigrate to the US, and those are helpful in getting real jobs, which in turn prevent crime. My guess is that for illegal immigrants, the explanation is a combination of the overall-immigrant agency+competence effect, plus what you say about deportation fears.
I don't think I've ever actually heard a liberal say that illegal immigrant crime isn't caused at all by deportation fear.
>the constant lying turns off the elite human capital a few of them would like to attract
Constant lying doesn't seem to hurt progressives in this regard. I'd say that conservatives' problem is that they offer either explicitly religion-based ideology, or outright anti-intellectualism, and neither option is attractive to elite aspirants these days.
I wonder if part of this disconnect is that "serious" conservatives from suburban/urban areas will never experience the toxicity of rural culture. But they do routinely experience the worst of progressive culture.
Progressive rhetoric does get frustrating for me but it will never compare to the toxicity of rural culture.
I'd argue that people like JD Vance are elite aspirants, with the distinction that they are trying to create a new elite to replace the old one. There's no reason the elite caste of a country couldn't be heavily religious.
>There's no reason the elite caste of a country couldn't be heavily religious.
There are plenty. Religious dogmas are mostly obvious nonsense that educated people can't take seriously nowadays. This isn't a problem for unambitious theocracies like Afghanistan, however if you want to maintain and develop a post-industrial society, clear social license to ditch obsolete nonsense is essential. Of course, ambitious opportunists like Vance have no trouble ignoring inconvenient parts, and also denying doing it. Such blatant hypocrisy isn't sustainable in the long term, but that isn't their main concern.
My understanding is that in most jurisdictions, it was not customary to inquire of someone you’ve arrested for the 10th time, only to let go again, their immigration status. This was so in my blue city in a red state at least.
Though in truth, it would really be just as interesting or illustrative to track when their parents came here.
The weirdest part to me is that the US managed to elect someone who "solves" this even though it's a much lesser issue overall, while in the EU they just continue to vote for the same people who caused it, despite there actually being a substantial problem.
Also, on the issue itself, I increasingly dislike the word "immigrant" altogether. Generally speaking, if you really dig into the statistics, there are three points that really matter: 1. Where did the people you're talking about originally come from? 2. How selective (by status/education/whatever) was the process of getting them here? 3. How much have they culturally adapted?
For extreme examples of what I'm talking about, highly selected first worlders who are willing to adapt are basically amazing for any country they are staying in no matter whether they are recent immigrants or have been there for some generations, with very few exceptions. At the other end, unselected or even arguably negatively selected third worlders who ghettoized are awful for any country, no matter as recent immigrants or as natives with generations of time. You can invert each example by playing around with the other options, of course; Highly selected third worlders willing to culturally adapt will outperform negatively selected first worlders unwilling to adapt at some point, and plenty of examples can be found.
This is critical for the US vs EU comparison in respect to immigration. The large recent hispanic immigration into the US is high-crime compared to native whites, but it's low-crime compared to native blacks, and it ends up being mostly a wash. On the other hand, especially north europe had absolutely tiny and irrelevant native high-crime groups, so the difference to unselected middle eastern and especially north african immigration was extremely shocking and large. Once you understand this, it all fits together easily and each side can be understood.
> The weirdest part to me is that the US managed to elect someone who "solves" this even though it's a much lesser issue overall, while in the EU they just continue to vote for the same people who caused it, despite there actually being a substantial problem.
This is not true. "The EU" votes for people who "solve" this left and right. Well right, mostly. Unfortunately the "solution" does not work. Europes move to the right has not made it a better place to live.
No, not really. Denmark did successfully move to the right, solved the problem, and they are better off for it. But they are the exception.
Germany, which I'm by far most familiar with, voted for the CDU, which is nominally a right wing party, but also the party that made the disastrous decisions in 2015 under Merkel that lead to large parts of the current problems. If you look at what actually happens on the ground as opposed to rhetoric, they govern center left - which is mostly unavoidable, since they can exclusively coalition with left-wing parties nowadays thanks to the Brandmauer. Letting millions of people into the welfare system with minimal checks is not solved by deporting a few thousand. Likewise, reducing current immigration levels solves nothing, either, it merely means the problems get worse at a slightly slower pace. Instead, they go crazy on credit to finance it all for a few extra years with no fixes in sight.
Somali culture really is a lot farther from American culture than Irish or Italian culture was. Their issues back home with tribalism seem quite severe.
I don't think our ability to survive ethnic enclave fraud in the past is a guarantee of our ability to do so in the present. I would suggest that every fraud instance is a separate roll of the dice, in the sense of whether it triggers a broader-scale norm breakdown.
To be clear, I feel the same way about Trump's corruption. A lot of the Somalis are pointing at Trump and saying "how can you blame us when the president is so corrupt?" I'm concerned that we are on the verge of a phase shift, where attempts to cheat the system start outrunning our ability to catch the cheaters, and our country collapses in a whirlwind of whataboutism.
I spent some time in the Somali subreddit when the fraud story broke, having conversations, trying to be constructive, and basically concluded that assimilating them was hopeless. They aren't having tough conversations about how the fraud might've occurred; they are telling each other that they need to band together ever tighter as Somalis, and dismissing criticism of their community using standard progressive rhetoric ("white supremacy" etc.) Kari Stark's note about her conversations with Somalis in Minnesota resonates with me: https://substack.com/@karistark/note/c-193872399
Wokeness isn't helping either. I'll bet it's easy to justify defrauding the government when you're taught a caricatured version of US history which zooms in on all the bad bits and exaggerates to make us look like a supervillain:
The funny thing about open borders is that in a sense, it's a profoundly patriotic idea. Open borders ideology claims that as soon as someone steps onto American soil, they'll be transformed into a valuable worker, law-abiding citizen, and civic stalwart, due to the magic of American culture and institutions. Oddly enough, the same progressives who push for open borders also tend to insist that the US is a fundamentally flawed and deeply racist society. In addition to the obvious internal contradiction (is it really ethical for the US to allow brown immigrants if we're going to give them generational trauma from our microaggressions?), it seems to me that such progressive rhetoric undermines the "Reaganite" mechanisms of assimilation which might somehow cause the sort of magical benefits they hope for.
I'm not comfortable with deporting law-abiding US citizens. But I would treat this Somali incident as a lesson in what US immigration policy should NOT look like. I certainly would block any further Somali immigration or naturalization until we are sure that we've determined the full scope of Somali fraud all across the country.
I should wait until my friend actually writes their post, but I don't think this is true. When you think of Italian culture being good and easy-to-assimilate, you're probably thinking of, like, Italians in Florence having the Renaissance or something The Italians who immigrated to the US were 1800s Sicilian peasant villagers. 1800 Sicilian peasant villages were pretty dreadful - for example, they had a literacy rate (in their native language) lower than Somalis have today, no indoor plumbing, and a life expectancy of 30 (including infant mortality) or ~50 (excluding it).
> We're not talking about the kind of Italians who did the Renaissance here.
You kind of are, actually -- Renaissance Italy (which I assume is what you mean by "semi-modern"), particularly the Tuscany-Romagna area, was a fantastically violent and unstable place. It was the time-and-place of Cesare Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli, after all (though the latter was much less of a monster than his reputation suggests). Basically every figure of note from the Italian Renaissance lived through multiple regime changes and was involved in deadly brawls, assassinations, conspiracies, battles, sieges, and purges. Endemic tribal violence, for better or worse, is not at all incompatible with great art and literature. Even today, Tuscan cities (and sometimes, *rioni* within the same city) are proudly inimical to each other, though now it is *almost* entirely a joke. Interestingly, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna are the most consistently left-wing regions in modern Italy.
"Better a death in the family than a Pisan at the doorstep" -- popular proverb from Livorno, a city 20 km away from Pisa
The Italian mafia caused trouble in the US for perhaps 100 years. And it seems plausible to me that the 1920s immigration shutdown played an important role in eventually assimilating Italians. So the Italians hardly seem like compelling support for your position. Offhand, I would guess that the Italians were only truly assimilated when Giuliani (an Italian public prosecutor) successfully wielded RICO laws to take down the mob in the 1980s. This looks more like a contingent event than the outcome of an inevitable process. Somali assimilation could be similarly touch-and-go. Without a Giuliani-type figure in the Somali community, you could see an endless tug-of-war between "ethnocentric" assertion of group identity, and "xenophobic" demands to assimilate. I was hoping to somehow help foster a Giuliani-type figure by chatting with Somalis on their subreddit, and eventually gave up. Hence my pessimism.
I think your claims about underdevelopment are somewhat beside the point. I am more concerned about nepotism, which also applies to some high-development immigrants like H1B fraud. My mental model is that corruption-fighting efforts are sort of like error correction mechanisms on a noisy communication channel. Error correcting codes are built to handle a certain level of noise in the channel, using check bits and other techniques. But if the noise level gets too high, the check bits themselves become corrupted, and it's impossible to recover the signal. Similarly, I think American society can handle a certain level of corruption through our existing corruption-fighting mechanisms. But I'm concerned that there's some threshold beyond which the corruption-fighting mechanisms become corrupt themselves, and clean institutions are effectively unrecoverable. We don't know where this threshold is. It may fluctuate over time. I feel pretty confident that progressive rhetoric is lowering the "point of no return" threshold, by creating the permission structure and rhetorical defenses for immigrant groups to subvert the system. That's what happened with Rotherham in the UK. Many Brits seem to think that the UK is overall close to a point of no return, and will be going the way of Brazil or South Africa. American culture is similar enough to British culture that we can guess we are not super far from the breaking point. It already seems plausible to me that US news organizations are engaging in Rotherham behavior through bogus "debunkings" of Somali fraud (e.g. negotiating with the daycare owners the time at which the news organization will show up, making it easy for fraudsters to ensure that the daycare is full of kids at that time).
How about you send my comments to your friend so they can fortify their argument against my critiques.
I think Italians were pretty thoroughly assimilated before 1980.
I also think if a good enough prosecutor can end the problem, this is a whitepill compared to "they are temperamentally and genetically incapable of assimilating".
I agree 100 years of poor assimilation is pretty bad, and this is part of what pushes me towards a position of "open borders for easy-to-assimilate immigrants, take a limited number of hard-to-assimilate immigrants at a time and wait for them to assimilate before adding more".
There was also WW1 and WW2, which used huge levels of social pressure to force German and Italian immigrants to assimilate, and the subsequent 1950's post-war pressure where ethnic kids were discouraged (or in some cases barred) from using their old languages etc. I doubt you are either hoping for or planning on that type of shared experience or social pressure.
Yeah that's the grim thing about "assimilation", I actually suspect that social pressure from the host society can sometimes be a fairly important ingredient. Panglossian open borders advocates might want to keep that in mind. Maybe the reason previous groups assimilated is, in part, because they were on the receiving end of a certain amount of racial discrimination of the sort that's considered unacceptable in polite society.
There's also the actual wartime shared physical experience of being drafted, enduring privation, traveling to combat, rationing, trauma, etc. that helped forge the Greatest Generation's social solidarity. But I don't think anyone is proposing or hoping for another war requiring total mobilization and killing millions! But if that's key for assimilation, then what's left of the argument that it will "just happen"?
Sure, so if your notion of "thorough assimilation" permits large-scale organized crime (Italian Mafia), we aren't using "thorough assimilation" the same way. You can talk all you want about "thorough assimilation"--I just don't want more organized crime! That's more important to me than whether we have achieved some sort of arbitrary "assimilation" metric according to however you are using the word.
It's tricky, because I do sympathize with the position that having conversations about the relative merits of various ethnicities is not a polite thing to do in multi-ethnic society. A lot of people shy away from those conversations because they don't want to alienate friends and colleagues, which is extremely understandable! But immigration policy, in a democracy, *requires* that we have those conversations. Maybe the best solution is to require immigrants to carry quite a bit of "immigrant criminality insurance" (which pays out if the immigrant or their descendant commits a crime or engages in other notable antisocial behavior), and allow insurers to set insurance rates based on what would ordinarily be considered protected characteristics like age, gender, genetic testing, appearance, national origin, etc. so racism no longer needs to be a load-bearing part of our democratic conversation (it can just be a thing that happens quietly in insurance offices).
Immigration restriction is one of the best ways to fight racism, because it makes racism less necessary (from the perspective of people who believe immigrants won't assimilate, they no longer need to go online explaining why it's necessary to restrict immigration from country X by using characteristics of current immigrants as evidence)
>I also think if a good enough prosecutor can end the problem, this is a whitepill compared to "they are temperamentally and genetically incapable of assimilating".
I mean, if it took 100 years and a lucky break to assimilate a population that is very European visually and genetically, imagine how much time and luck it would take to assimilate a population which is *wildly* distinct in terms of genes, culture, and appearance, especially when our society is so divided on the basis of ethnic/cultural issues...
>take a limited number of hard-to-assimilate immigrants at a time and wait for them to assimilate before adding more
Why not aim for ~0? It seems much safer to undershoot than overshoot. From an effective altruist point of view, it would be better to spend those assimilation resources on research into effective development aid. Immigration is not a scaleable solution to global poverty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE (This video is old and some numbers are outdated but I think the fundamental point stands)
> I also think if a good enough prosecutor can end the problem, this is a whitepill compared to "they are temperamentally and genetically incapable of assimilating".
I think this point is actually under-appreciated with many of the issues that allegedly make immigration bad.
Crime? Our crime policies are bad. Improve them, arrest criminals whether immigrant or not, deport the immigrant ones after their sentence (or instead of, for minor crimes) if you want. Clearance rates in the US are atrocious; improving them would be a win-win.
Welfare? Immigrants are generally excluded from these programs anyway, but sure, have a less-generous welfare state and work on reducing welfare fraud. It's not like the people who oppose immigration generally want a large welfare state anyway.
These policies would just be positive-sum even before you account for the benefits of immigration; holding up policy failures as excuses for even worse policy failures is quite lazy.
Wow, is that where you were headed with this essay? I missed that entirely! That strikes me as an atypically conservative position for you, though I do welcome you to the club.
When does this actually ever occur?: "fire whichever state officials allowed it to happen." I expect we can all agree the bureaucratic firing should occur, but it never really seems to. See public officials and the economic collapse of 2008, see public officials and their Covid lies, see Minnesota fraud. I personally would favor a few public hangings to concentrate the rest of the lot. Seems unlikely to actually happen.
It’s a good question, because it’s not clear which state officials are responsible for allowing fraud to happen. Some of these laws don’t have effective enforcement mechanisms baked-in to them. If someone submits a payment request for services that didn’t happen, who is responsible for ensuring that money isn’t paid out?
Is the fault with the legislators who passed the faulty bill? Is the fault with the office staff who approved the payments? They’re in an office building all day. They have no idea which payment requests are fraudulent and which ones are legit.
Presumably in an ideal system there are published standards for a childcare facility and random inspections to ensure compliance. Is the alleged fraud a consequence of a gap in this process or something more sinister ?
My understanding is that there were regular safety inspections, but that these inspectors were not responsible for verifying attendance or financial records.
> The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations...
That's true, however many European countries have a Black population % higher than some American states (New Hampshire, Vermont...). Official statistics must be taken with care because: 1) in some countries like France, using the concept of race about humans is a legal offense, so official statistics on this matter are forbidden - there are no official numbers, only more or less indirect research studies; 2) the situation for Black people is comparable to that of Latino people in the US - many don't have papers and escape statistics. A parliamentary report estimates 400k to 900k illegal migrants in France (a significant portion being Black people). So it's hard to tell, but France probably counts 2-4 million Black people, more than 3-5% of the population, with high concentration in Paris and some suburbs. No surprise that BLM has an echo. However, racism is by no means as extreme as it is in the USA.
You're right. I meant not as strong as anti-Black racism can be in some US states or conservative areas.
In France, there is a general tendency toward xenophobia, just like everywhere (instinct?). But strong anti-Black racism is mostly limited to private right-wing circles and certain individuals who largely conceal it in public. Racism here is less about skin color or genetics, it's more focused on immigration and fears of "replacement."
What strikes me about the US is that genuine anti-Black racists don't hide much. Even the US President appears to be overtly anti-Black racist. I mean, when MAGA people joke about the Obamas or other black people, it's not because they are fresh immigrants. It's deep racism, and they don't even try to hide it.
I have no problem characterising Trump as an overtly anti-immigration politician. But on the topic of his supposed hatred of black people, I've always felt a bit underwhelmed by all the evidence marshalled to support it (as has the author of the blog you're commenting on, incidentally: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/). Why, exactly, do you think Trump is an *overtly* anti-black racist?
Thank you for the link. I'm not sure whether Scott would still be as nuanced in 2026 as he was in 2016 when challenging Democratic or mediatic orthodoxy. Hard to say. He did write something of a mea culpa in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
I'll admit that my view of Trump shifted to "this guy is overtly racist" with the recent Obama affair. However, I believe there was already evidence of deep-seated and not-so-hidden racism:
Housing discrimination (1970s)
Segregation in casinos (1980s-90s)
Comments about "inherent laziness" that he acknowledged in 1997
The Central Park Five
But perhaps I'm wrong. My argument wasn't specifically against Trump to begin with. To me, he's symptomatic of the remnants of the segregation era, which isn't that far in the past, and the deep imprint it left on American society. Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between The World And Me" really marked me. I maintain that, while racism also exists, the situation for Black people is quite different in France/Europe—and that was Scott's original point anyway. My initial comment was more intended as a nuance about the fact that Black people may be more numerous in France than one may think on the other side of Atlantic (that would probably be also true to some extent for Italy, Belgium, UK, maybe Germany).
France, sure, bit of an outlier for their own colonial reasons. Though, ah, I would question the suggestion that they don't have extreme issues with racism.
The wokest of the woke in Ireland sometimes cite the shooting of George Nkencho as an example of the Irish police service's supposed institutional racism. I believe he was literally the first (and, to date, last) black person killed by the police in the history of the state, and that was after they spent literal hours attempting to neutralise him with less-lethal methods like tasers and pepper spray.
The idea that BLM has any relevance to Irish society is a transparent farce and always has been.
Recent immigrants will have previously lived under persecution in a country where the govt is against them. The ones who make it out will have learnt to stay under the radar.
>Why should these numbers be so different in the US vs. Germany?
We could consider the reason given in the linked article: asylum seekers include 3x the proportion of young males as the general population, and young males commit almost all murders (and are the large majority of victims).
I bring this up not (just) to be snarky, but to point out another big factor here: It's easier to ignore nuance in a foreign country.
It's a very common experience here in the US for one side to make a broad and bold claim about something, and then for the other side to carefully sift through the data and methodology and caveats and point out that this isn't actually true, or is at least debatable and complicated, or has different causes and implications than they were implying. Scott's doing a lot of that in this post.
But when you are dealing with a foreign country, it's equally easy to make the big, bold claim, but much more difficult to do the nuanced fact-checking. You don't speak the language, you don't know what sources to use, you don't know enough about the government and culture to have intuitions about where to look.
It's much, much harder to come to a nuanced understanding, and to sort the lying narratives from the empirical facts. So liars will always get an advantage by arguing about something happening in a foreign country, rather than their own.
As a French guy, I can confirm that immigrants are disproportionately represented in crimes (especially petty crimes). So much so that it's statistically safe to bet that, if your bike was stolen, it was by immigrants. Indeed, in every single resolved case I personally know of, the culrprit was of arab/gipsy ascent.
French Catholics were puzzled by Pope Francis's take on immigration policies and thought he was a leftist. It's only after reading Hanania's pieces on immigration that I understood Pope Francis's ideas were rational in the american context. Much less so in the european one.
Still, I have to say that I'm writing this comment while in a car driven by a Moroccan who doesn't speak French. So I guess statistics don't show the exact picture. Also, having travelled to Morocco, I can day that the country is much safer than France, at least in the big cities. So I don't buy the "arabs are inherently inferior" narrative.
I believe that the left ideology has a point in that the way immigrants are welcome to France encourages them to become criminal. The combination of (generally justified though counterproductive) racist bias, impossibility to work when you're an illegal, possibility to benefit from welfare even when you're an illegal, and absolute lack of sanctions for petty crimes is absolutely perfect for turning decent people into scumbags.
To illustrate the "absolute lack of sanction", my brother was beaten to near death by a group of immigrants and had to spend 3 weeks in intensive care, with brain internal bleedings, broken orbital floor and nice stuff like that. The guys just wanted to take his debit card to buy Tacos. He had roughly 50% chances of survival when he arrived at the Hospital.
His agressors were caught (CCTV in the Tacos shop), which in itself is quite rare. 4 out of 5 were african. They were sentenced to nothing. Like absolutely nothing. Just a "rappel à la loi".
So modern medicine saves us from another murder stat.
Anecdote: My sister interned in France with a lawyer in the criminal justice system. She said all the defendants were black and spoke limited French. This was in 1990.
I feel really bad for your brother. If it were up to me those criminals (regardless of color) would get 20 years in prison, maybe more. Death penalty if he had died.
That's insane that the perps are known and caught on camera but received no consequences, how are the people tolerating this state of affairs? Is there no legal or political recourse?
Very strange framing. It wasn't a burglary, but direct action. The jury agreed and acquitted. That's not the law to blame, but the consciences of the jurors.
Meaning it was earnest political activism, which the jury recognised. You bringing this up as an example of justice not served is misleading, as it was the jury deciding to acquit, just as they have been able to do for the last 1000 years.
>French Catholics were puzzled by Pope Francis's take on immigration policies and thought he was a leftist. It's only after reading Hanania's pieces on immigration that I understood Pope Francis's ideas were rational in the american context. Much less so in the european one.
Which is, IMHO, a good argument for Popes making fewer public pronouncements. There are very few "Governments need to do X" statements that apply to all the parts of the world with significant Catholic populations.
Bingo. I was visiting Normandy around twenty years ago and my rental got broke into. Mind you for Americans, Normandy is rural France and white as snow. Being from Bosnia at the time I assumed it was just local teenagers because France doesn't really have a high Gypsy population. When the cops showed up they were like “100% Algerians did it”. It wasn't even a question or a maybe lol.
This is bizarre. Were the aggressors adults? "Vol avec violences en réunion" is a felony; I do not think it is legally possible for it to be punished with a "rappel à la loi".
They weren't! That's one of the reasons they had nothing. Another one is that there is no space left in prisons.
Fun thing, to add to this conversations: I hitchhiked yesterday from Pau to Lyon, and was picked up by a nice man who has been friends with a bounty killer in Marseilles.
I'm not absolutely sure how reliable this second-party account is, but he gave me some reasons to believe that his (ex-, as he told me)friend indeed was a bounty killer, from age 13 to 15. (1)
I'd say there's roughly a 30-50% chance it's true.
My driver told me that his (ex-)friend was a very helpful and benevolent guy on most accounts (he gave me personal anecdotes about his friend's altruism), and that he deeply regretted his deeds.
Just another (somewhat unreliable) datapoint on human complexity.
(1) Said reasons were:
1. My driver didn't make a fuss about it. He gave me a general impression of being trustworthy. He seemed mentally healthy.
2. His friend confessed to being a drug dealer before confessing to being a killer.
3. The confession happened when a cousin of this guy (who, if I understand correctly, was his client), asked everyone present to never tell a word about his confession.
Wait, what do you say was one of the reasons they got nothing?
Prison overcrowding may be one of the reasons why penalties of less than two years are routinely suspended - but this sounds like a felony that would have got a lot more than two years.
I think the reason the American right makes fun of europe is because they see europe as the embodiment of the policies the American left would implement if it could. Europe is seen as the out-group.
True, but its kind of counterproductive for the "New Right" internationally, as this behaviour by the American rightists will cause a higher proportion of (Western) Europeans to side with the left, since the right in Europe is now seen as being "American Bootlickers", and the American right as the enemy, and of course, at least in Western Europe, the average person cardinally believes that the US is inferior both politically and socially to Western Europe.
I don't think the American right cares. They are American first and while they probably think it would be good to have a Europe that is in their mould, it is not a priority, and besides it's fun for them to make fun of Europe.
Maybe. But in the eyes of most voters in Western Europe, this makes right-wing Americans the enemy, and thus means that MAGA will face even more opposition than if they wouldn't be as anti-European and thus are less likely to achieve their international goals (though I guess one possible strategy for MAGA could be to antagonise the Eastern EU states against the Western EU states, but the pro-Russian attitude of MAGA makes this strategy less likely to be fruitful).
I don't think MAGA is pro-Russian as much as they are anti USA interventionism in a lost war. Some of them also understand the western propaganda and that the cause of the war is not as simple as Putin is an mad imperialist that invaded Ukraine unprovoked.
Another thing you see on the American right is steps towards limiting EU censorship and shining light on undemocratic EU compaigns that supress right wing EU parties to keep the current ones in power. So while the political machine on the american right may be alienating the EU left, it is also supporting the EU right, and increasing the chances that these groups come to power.
You don't seem to understand what I'm saying. From a Western European perspective, MAGA is just repugnant for the vast majority of people. Even right-wing populist parties parties like the RN in France or Reform in the UK are having to distance themselves from MAGA, because to most people in Western Europe they are the personification of the ignorant, uncultured and boorish American. So no, by supporting the EU right, MAGA is causing them to become less popular in most countries, and the EU that MAGAs hate so much to become more popular inside the EU, thus making it much less likely that right-wing populists can become more powerful in the EU.
From a MAGA perspective, Western Europe has always seen America (or at least the good parts thereof) as repugnant, gullible, and easily exploitable. They've given up on changing the "repugnant" part and are trying to make it clear that the gullibility and exploitation are over. To MAGA, America and Europe have been enemies for a long time, but much of America has been too foolish to see that.
MAGA's perception is, of course, not entirely in line with reality. But neither is Western Europe's.
" He answers that their ideology centers around the idea of Western civilization, which is kind of him: a more paranoid analyst might make a similar argument around white identitarianism."
Crazy. Western Civilization comes from Jews, Greeks, and Italians. Yes, they're white, as are the Arabs, Persians, and Hindus, but why would Norwegians like me identify with them?
Maybe US crime statistics are misleading: the crimes are committed by blacks and Latinos, which are technically “native” Americans. But it doesn’t undermine the white identitarian thesis that these “low IQ” groups are dangerous or burdensome.
Like twelve comments here are variants of "blacks commit a lot of crime therefore groups which commit a lot less then them should not be allowed to immigrate to the United States."
You could be more charitable and read some of them along the lines of "having Crimes Georg as part of your population is not a good argument in favor of immigration."
It's a response to using an average which is weighted so heavily by the small minority of blacks that it's pretty useless. The median and modal American commits far less crime than the average would lead you to believe, so saying "Immigrants commit slightly less than average crime" is severely misleading, being that slightly less than average is still way above median and mode.
It seems the lesson to be learned here is that the right is looking at the wrong problem if they're looking for effective ways to improve the country's demographics.
It's looking at the 'problem' it can 'solve' (at least to some extent, if not finally). It has stumbled on the wonderful fact that it is possible to
- assign a value of zero to someone
- demonize someone
- act as if someone were essentially homo sacer
if that someone is a non-citizen (or, perhaps, a citizen born elsewhere). Its (half-confessed) target of choice would be someone else, but someone with a hammer may just choose to hit nails within reach.
i have zero statistical proof, but am very skeptical about whether illegal immigrant and asylum seeking criminals are getting caught and their crimes documented at the same rate as those of regular citizens. a) these are people already living somewhat underground and pros at dodging the authorities even under normal circumstances b) a lot of the victims are likely to be part of the same demographic groups and they are going to go to the police to report crimes significantly less and c) even if the crime gets reported police might not focus on these cases involving marginal/transient society members quite as much, so lower solve rate. Most murders probably do go into the statistics, but everything else i doubt we are capturing at same rates.
This resonates with me from conversations I’be had online with European about immigration:
- Europeans sometimes frame their thinking about black Americans as if they are immigrants, because most black people in their own countries are immigrants, not internalizing that most black Americans have American-born ancestry from at least 1700s, longer than the average white American.
- Europeans assume that their concerns about assimilation of Muslims in Europe applies to America, not recognizing that Muslims are a minuscule proportion of American immigrants, who are mostly Christian.
> Europeans assume that their concerns about assimilation of Muslims in Europe applies to America, not recognizing that Muslims are a minuscule proportion of American immigrants, who are mostly Christian.
Europeans don’t think like that at all. We know too much about America.
Scott is saying the opposite, that American conservatives and restrictionists bring up the European experience, somewhat cynically.
Open Borders guys try to avoid mentioning European crime and welfare statistics of migrants. The only countries for which we do have long term granual data (Denmark & Sweden?) show non western non Asian migrants to be a huge cost to the state.
Caplan pretends this doesn't exist.
Hanania does say on occasion "I don't know about European migrants", to his credit. But I felt he's trying to mention this less than what honesty would proscribe. But am I too demanding of him?
Caplan, as a libertarian, would probably be happy to see the European welfare system collapse anyway. it’s that that makes immigration costly.
Libertarians in general see humans as eating, excreting, consuming and producing machines. Culture is irrelevant. More utils needed, as reflected in increased GDP, if not increased GDP per capita or wages.
I think the phrase "native-born Americans" is also doing a lot of work. If you consider the perspective of the modal conservative (by which I mean both right of center and politically engaged), they are in a peer group / community / neighborhood with a rather lower crime rate than the average of everyone with American citizenship. If one identifies not only as "citizen of the USA" but nationally as an "unhyphenated American", then the relevant baseline for comparison is not the crime rate of native-borns.
As an illustrative thought experiment: in the future, if the German population is comprised of 50% people whom we today would call German with a normal German crime rate, 30% immigrant groups with very high crimes rates, plus 20% other immigrant groups with normal/low crime. Arguing in favor of continued influx of groups with higher crime rates than Germans on the basis that they are lower than aggregate "native-born Germans" would rightly be seen as making the problem worse. Many conservatives see the present of the USA and the extrapolated future of Europe as a similar phenomenon. I think that view is still somewhat of a stretch, but also that your refutation of it is overstated.
> In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate. This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about this issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of “asylum seekers” as a group.
Not an expert, I just read the bbc report you linked, but I think this is overstated and considering it's a controversial topic I would have appreciated a bit of a deeper description. As far as I can see reading the report the biggest factor here is socio-economic factors, especially that young men between 14-30 commit 50% of the violent crime while making up 9% of the population. For asylum seekers the rate is 27% so 3x that. The number mentioned in the article is 2% of the population vs 8.5% of the suspects that's a factor of ~4. So adjusting we would expect the 50% of young men to commit 1.5 times the crime + the 50% else to commit another 50% for a total of 200%. There might be another adjustment for the immigrants being poor and at times not allowed to do jobs. There might still be an argument for e.g. then preferably letting in only female asylum seekers or more educated or wealthy ones.
Opposing immigration on the basis of welfare spending and criminality is actually the old right. The new right opposes immigration because of racial replacement. Whites have already lost their majority status in America, but Europe is still mostly white. So you may be correct conservatives arguing on the basis of crime rates and welfare usage will have a harder time making their case, but I don't think the new right has this problem.
My bet is he's using the census data which of course fairly inflates whites as obvious non-whites get rolled up with them such Jews, Indians, Arabs, Sicilians, Spanish Moriscos, Gypsies, most Slavs, etc.
There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants, but most of the energy is directed to illegals, and I consider it a misrepresentation when people -even you, who I respect - don't make that distinction. I adopted two sons from Romania, who married women from two further countries. I have resettled refugees and still support a Sudanese church. Legals tend to be anti-illegal, and consider that Nice People who conflate the two have the net effect of making them look worse.
Crime and benefit statistics about "immigrants" are a motte-and-bailey. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital and can tell you that illegal immigrants are often not charged or charges dropped because the county doesn't want to pick up the tab at the House of Correction, as that is an entry point to penetrating the entire system. They hope they give up and go to another locale.
Hypothesising that conservatives hold their views because of some emotional comfort while not considering that possibility for liberals still seems to be the default.
There's definitely a lot of people in the current day american right that pushes to abolish the H1B visa and kick out anyone who has it. That's an anti-legal-immigrant stance, for example.
Revoking visas of students who are politically involved here is a definite anti-legal-immigrant stance taken by the government, see e.g. Rumeysa Ozturk.
ICE also appears to take too much time focusing on skin color rather than legal status.
"Definitely?" Whenever I see words like obviously, unquestionably, etc I have found them to be ill-supported, but people want to cut off being challenged by using a overplayed, even bullying tone. Thus also here. Your statements are exaggerated. I have not had good success discussing things with people who are 30% correct but claim to be 100%
I don't think your post is much better than mine. You make some statements with a tone of certainty without backing them up with sources:
"There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants", "Legals tend to be anti-illegal", etc
---
Let's mend that on my part: "Anecdotally, I've seen a large number of people within the American right, particularly on reddit and twitter, having an anti-H1B stance." This is not always about an anti-immigrant belief, but moreso one of protectionism, often of oneself or those around them. Anecdotally, I've seen a large share of anti-offshoring stances within the same set of people. Practically, "protectionism" or "purely anti-immigrant stance" matters little outside of a philosophical discussion, when these people are in favor of ending or severely limiting legal immigration.
Here's a recent larger example that comes to mind:
I'm not making any claims of this being a majority position, but I stand by my point that there are a lot of people who are anti legal skilled immigration. Your definition of "a lot" may not fit mine, but it's clearly a big enough crowd that it got the US government to act to restrict the programs.
Well done sir. You asserted your strongest points and retreated a bit from your overstatement and added a great deal of supporting data. You have overproduced in answering my objection.
There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants, but most of the energy is directed to illegals, and I consider it a misrepresentation when people -even you, who I respect - don't make that distinction. I adopted two sons from Romania, who married women from two further countries. I have resettled refugees and still support a Sudanese church. Legals tend to be anti-illegal, and consider that Nice People who conflate the two have the net effect of making them look worse.
Crime and benefit statistics about "immigrants" are a motte-and-bailey. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital and can tell you that illegal immigrants are often not charged or charges dropped because the county doesn't want to pick up the tab at the House of Correction, as that is an entry point to penetrating the entire system. They hope they give up and go to another locale.
Hypothesising that conservatives hold their views because of some emotional comfort while not considering that possibility for liberals still seems to be the default.
"Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs."
I don't see why that interest would be remarkable. Europe is part of Western and developed society and has been our ally in a number of areas. If everyone there turns into a rhinoceros, it's (1) sad, (2) concerning, and (3) possibly a warning of where current trends will lead us, given more time (and now pressure from all the rhinoceri running Europe.)
I don't have strong feelings about immigration either here or there, but I am concerned about creeping regulatory despotism, lack of free speech and diversity of thought, and crime-friendly policies, to the extend they're true, for the above three reasons. I'm curious if stories about safety in Germany or France announcing that it's no longer safe to walk the Seine at night are correct, and about British elite efforts to stop Britons from speaking their minds.
Maybe those stories are all overblown, and I'm taking them with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure why it's remarkable that I'm interested and potentially concerned.
Re European backflow: Americans don’t seem willing to identify themselves as “upper class.” Maybe because the US imagination reserves “upper class” for an aristocratic system we’ve never had? (Inherited titles, fixed hierarchy.) Even entrenched elites see themselves as middle class people benefiting from earned success. To do otherwise would feel un-American.
Canada has 9% more men than women in the 20-29 age group - about 10 years ago it was 2%. According to one study I read, each percent in the 16 - 25 age group causes 3.6% more crime.
- Edlund, Li, Yi & Zhang’s paper “Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China"
This would imply that we may have a 30% increase in crime from the gender ratio alone, and violent crime has increased by 30% from the 2015 low. Australia has a similar less extreme change to a 4% male gender imbalance in the age group so this may be an experience shared by Europe and the US as well.
In this source violent crime is up 30%, human trafficking has increased by 395% and extortion by 429%. Human trafficking seems like a very obvious and awful effect of the now 400,000 more working age men than women in Canada.
Recently the major Canadian city of Surrey has requested the federal government declare an emergency to deal with extortion, with several extortion warning shootings in the first month of the year. Apparently those caught and charged can claim asylum, which a police video sternly described as "not a long term solution".
Scott has forgotten about the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when Castro briefly opened the door for anyone wanting to leave. Castro used the opportunity to generously seed the flow of real asylum seekers with psychotics, murderers, hardcore criminals, drug dealers, and intelligence agents. The crime wave triggered by the Boatlift lasted for years, and permanently shifted the cultural landscape. It has been described as the third most damaging attack on the United States after Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The success of this operation was noted all across the world by people who wish us ill.
Maduro released god knows how many thousands of gangsters and psychotics and pointed them northward, where they were welcomed by border guards instructed not to notice their very obvious gang tatts. Maduro flatly refused to accept deportees before partially relenting.
The reality is, many if not most of the unvetted, i.e. illegal, migrants disappear into the vast coast-to-coast immigrant underground, where they are basically invisible to the rest of us, and to the keepers of stats. The Cartels took huge advantage of the Biden Migration, first by charging each of them many thousands of dollars for the right to cross the border, then by hiring new arrivals by the thousands through postings on FaceBook and networking events wherever migrants gathered in numbers. I think it's safe to say that whatever these people are doing, it isn't in our nation's best interests. Longer term, the Mexican government has for years been pursuing a policy of quiet reconquest, La Reconquista they call it. Through a network of 50-something consulates (China has 5) they school migrants on how to maintain their culture, resist assimilation, and act (and vote) in the best interest of the Homeland. Just for grins, which political party do you think they overwhelmingly vote for?
It's working, too. There is an immigrant area the size of a zip code not 5 minutes from my house. It is 99 point something Hispanic. It used to be pretty much all Mexican, but in the last few years lots of Guatemalans and Hondurans and Salvadorans have arrived. These groups hate each other and fight constantly. It doesn't make the official stats, though, because everyone practices a form of Omerta, and obeys the rule of "snitches get stitches." These various groups signal their tribal identity with enormous flags, a common decorator item. Old Glory is notably not among them. The signs in front of the three public schools, where messages and reminders are posted, are uniformly all in Spanish. If a white person tarries a little too long, rough-looking men will appear to question him. They do not do so nicely. I had a customer who lived in the neighborhood, an older white guy in a wheelchair. He was desperate to leave because his life was basically a living hell. He was constantly harassed, and the instant he left his house for whatever someone would break in and take whatever scraps were left. Police do nothing.
This is in no way shape or form an improvement over what was there before. This is also a microcosm of what likely awaits us in the future if we stay the present course.
It's not just Mexico pushing mass migration with a purpose. Multiple adversaries are intentionally using mass migration as a weapon to weaken the United States through demographic change. China, which hankers to replace us as the preeminent power, has a state-sponsored program wherein heavily pregnant women are paid to fly to Guam or California to give birth. This practice gave us the marvelous term "birth tourism." They tarry just long enough to gather up their newborn's citizenship paperwork. Thereafter the child lives life entirely overseas, yet retains the right to vote at age 18, a right they will absolutely exercise. A million of these are known, so far. Which party do you think they will vote for when the time comes?
Crime is only part of the picture. Immigrants are being forced into the system far faster than they can be absorbed. Entire communities are being changed almost literally overnight. Increasingly, migrants are being encouraged NOT to assimilate, not just by foreign actors with agendas, but by well-meaning but naive Americans. This is terribly destabilizing. The sense of being part of a shared enterprise is what keeps this society going. Lose that and you've lost your nationhood. We are well on the way to becoming a society of mutually antagonistic, perpetually squabbling factions, jostling for dominance, motivated by clan loyalty. Places like that tend to turn into hellscapes.
We are being played for chumps by people who abuse our good and generous nature. For all his many, many flaws, Trump understands this and is pushing back.
This is all covered in "The Invisible Coup," by Peter Schweizer, legendary investigative journalist. It's a book with something for everyone. If you love America and want it to thrive, it will alarm the hell out of you. If you hate America and want it to die, you'll cheer.
Wait, China doesn't recognize dual citizenship and requires holders of foreign citizenships to renounce them in order to acquire Chinese citizenship, so how does the birth tourism program work? Would the babies grow up in China as American citizens?
You are correct in that China does not officially allow dual citizenship. But as with lots of things it does not officially allow, it looks the other way when it's convenient. Birth tourism is a HUGE deal in China. It's all over social media and dozens if not hundreds of companies offer full packages for those wanting to do it. This ought to be front page news here, yet somehow is not. Why? I have my suspicions.
If a Chinese couple have a child while visiting the United States - not by "birth tourism" but e.g. premature birth a day before they were planning to fly home for the Big Day, that child is a US citizen under US law, and indeed would have to go through a great deal of effort to ever not be a US citizen under US law.
Does the Chinese government say of this child, "you are Not Chinese and you don't even have a visa for China, so you are an unperson unless and until you manage to formally renounce your US citizenship (and bring us the reciepts"?
Or does it just treat the kid as a Chinese citizen the way it treats pretty much every other child born to two Chinese-citizen parents as a Chinese citizen?
Because I'm pretty sure it's the second one, which means the parents have a child who is a Chinese citizen under Chinese law and can live the best possible life in China, but who is also an American citizen under American law who has the option of moving to the United States on demand. Sometimes that will even be advantageous to the CCP; mostly it's just not so much of a problem as to be worth extraordinary effort to suppress.
It's actually a good question what would happen in this case, I imagine bringing a baby with only a US birth certificate would raise some questions at the border, and I'm not sure I'd assume they'd automatically get Chinese citizenship. They probably would be considered a foreign national and some process would have to be followed to get them a Chinese birth certificate, during which they might be required to renounce any foreign citizenship?
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_nationality_law) says that unless one of the Chinese parents is a foreign national or permanent resident, the child is a Chinese citizen at birth. And as a Jus Sanguinis state, it shouldn't matter to China which jurisdiction issued the birth certificate, so long as it properly identifies two parents who the Chinese government knows are its citizens.
In addition to differences between the nature of immigrants, I personally feel that there's an immense difference between the descendent of a white settler who arrived on the continent 75-200 years ago standing on a border and saying "stop" to a Latin American whose ancestry is largely that of people who came to the Americas during the Ice Age vs some German or Englishman whose ancestors may well have lived there ever since they migrated there from Africa (yeah yeah by way of Anatolia and Mesopotamia but you know what I mean) saying the same thing to people's whose ancestors may well have never lived north of 40° N.
Unrelatedly, I think another significant Europe->America transition is right-wing antisemitism. Not to say we were free of it in the past, but I don't think it was a coincidence that it exploded right after American rightists gained the ability to log on and talk to European rightists
> stop" to a Latin American whose ancestry is largely that of people who came to the Americas during the Ice Age
Latin Americans have significant European ancestry. On average 50-60%. It varies a lot though. Also by being south of the Rio grande they aren’t native to what is now the US.
Despite that I take the point a bit. Europe is full of ancient peoples. Who happen to be white.
Yeah people always wanna quibble with one part or another when I make this argument and I think reasonable people can do so on the particulars, erfectly possible to rationally dispute my feelings about mestizio immigrants... but even if you think settler-descendent whites have every right to exclude, its hard to see how anyone could dispute that Euro whites have *more* of a right to exclude
At some level I would say that the national government doesn't have the right to control borders, just like the national government doesn't have the right to collect taxes, because national governments don't have the right to exist.
But I acknowledge that this is a very impractical level, that nations and governments are a necessary evil to prevent worse forms of authority from arising, and that if we're going to have nations then we need taxes and all the rest (although they don't need to be nearly as high as they are).
But the idea that someone could say governments have the right to collect taxes but they don't have the right to protect their borders seems incoherent.
> because national governments don't have the right to exist.
it’s true that nation states are a recent invention, something that may not last.
What are you hoping for though? Empires are the most common form of government in history, many quite long lasting and stable. City states pop up every so often, and the odd republic, but they either don’t last or be one empires themselves.
I don’t think anarchists, libertarians or general leftist internationalists mean that, though. Hard to know.
The real oddity, historically speaking, is the idea that borders should be fixed, or sovereignty should be equ and rulers should be chosen by voters rather than force or habit.
Completely agree. This is why I feel that "nativism" in the US is not something that is standing on solid ground, at least when compared to nativism in Europe, but instead is (for the most part) driven by white supremacy (or at least racial animosity towards "brown people" etc.).
The Americans have blacks, and blacks in the US commit crimes at a much higher rate than other ethnic groups.
So the overall American crime rate is deceptively high, and makes the immigrant ratio deceptively low.
But immigrants don't generally end up in areas where there's lots of blacks. So people in the US who aren't black look around themselves and see who's committing crimes. And it's disproportionally immigrants as long as they're not in black areas.
The entire case for immigrants using less welfare from your linked source is from old age entitlements, which is not what anybody thinks of when they say "welfare." Without that it is about the same. Also, I think you should edit your claim because the study cited dollar amount received, not likelihood to use like your statement here implies:
> The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen.
Furthermore I would argue that this entire line of analysis is irrelevant. The problem is not how likely they are to claim welfare, but rather that they claim any welfare at all. With the exception of immigrants who are now citizens, they should not be eligible for any type of welfare. If a citizen of another country needs financial support from the government that is no our job. Their visas should be revoked and the only aid offered should be a one way ticket back to their home country.
The other key statistical trick Scott uses and/or falls for is to ignore households headed by immigrants (particularly illegal immigrants) versus the immigrants themselves. Anchor children open the floodgates for welfare to households that are headed by, and were generated by, the act of immigration (usually illegal).
That's a great point. Our birthright citizenship insanity means the children of illegals are citizens. Europe doesn't have this, so the costs of their kids are correctly calculated as cost of immigrants while this is removed from the US numbers.
Because they do get them if they naturalize, those work quarters still count towards their social security eligibility if they do. And Medicare likewise is an investment in the future.
Now if you want to change law so they can opt out but in doing so they get a hard ban on naturalizing ever and I mean ever non-revokable, I'd be ok with that.
Btw this isn't strange either. I worked in Germany and paid German taxes, I'm pretty positive Germany isn't going to pay my American self an pension when I retire. Also America still took social security and Medicare out of my German wages.
I'm curious if anybody knows what became of most of those "translators and guides" we took in because they'd sided with us. We hear "translator" in America and think some kind of harmless bookish nerd, but as I understand it these folks worked as security forces or some other variety of henchman for local warlords. I imagined the military, CIA, or blackwater type entities might hoover up a handful of them, but the rest were hardly suitable for ordinary jobs, they'd lack the credentials required for most jobs in the US, and that kind of person isn't going to be a waiter or a janitor or a meat packer. I'd imagine them reacting like Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas, I'm supposed to take the bus to some job like a schmuck?
The most obvious landing spots for Afghan translators/guides therefore seemed to be either as private security for hire, or organized crime. They would make good toughs, perhaps even useful business partners if they were a bit smarter than usual for a goon, they had extensive experience with weapons and narcotics smuggling and transactions of similar character, and may even have a few useful contacts for such an enterprise. Given the typically ethno-centric nature of narcotics trafficking in the US, I'm not sure which existing group would've wanted them, but that aside it makes more sense than any other option. If they aren't popping up in crime statistics, perhaps they're just better at crime than the locals or have more personal discipline and so they aren't getting caught, or are using some CIA contact to get them out of jams.
I live in a refugee resettlement city and my wife teaches adult English classes (aka, English as a second language), so I've personally known many of the translators who came here from Afghanistan. They're mostly quiet dweebish guys who are eager for any sort of job and who work hard to keep those jobs and support their families. That's why they became translators. Often quite young (mid 20s) and eager to build new lives. The more entrepeneurial ones have started businesses.
The day after Trump's election in 2016 we were visiting a translator and his wife who had moved here about a month earlier. I asked him how he felt about moving here, given the election. His response was (approximately) "I am so happy - I can walk around outside and not worry about people shooting me". He worked as a janitor, finished community college and now has a job as an office worker. His wife also got a degree, and is working in an office. n of 1, but not atypical of my experience.
The refugees I've met from Syria have included more of the types that you describe. Many were respected teachers, doctors or lawyers and some of these find it hard to eg drive a bus. I think it's simply that they are older and have had a decade of being in respected positions in their community. I've known a few that ended up too depressed to keep a job, or simply angry, but once they see their kids integrating they mellow out a bit.
I see, I was not expecting the translators we got out of there to be that young, the descriptions I'd heard during the withdrawal in 2021 made them seem like established interlocutors with the warlords, people who had clout and privileges and knew how to handle themselves in a fight out of necessity. This is why, it was suggested, they could not pass certain vetting procedures.
I find the story of people who had respected positions having to take some menial job to be very tragic. In their shoes, I would definitely be trying to start a business, and would do about anything to avoid taking a bus driver or janitorial position, surely you would feel enormous shame.
Count me as someone who was initially skeptical of fearmongering but is now worried about immigration in Europe. The flip started when my gay German friends started talking favorably about the German far-right AfD. Their concerns with immigration were not economic, but rather centered on social justice and safety. I guess Afghans don't like gay people. Who knew? The fact that you can import hate and reopen old social divisions -- that you can hurt native minority populations via migration -- was not something I had fairly weighed or really considered. So now "defending Western civilization" and "protecting LGBTQ rights" are politically coupled in my friends' minds and the far-right is their champion. Wild world!
I think the more sophisticated conservative viewpoint is not that most asylum seekers are "parasites" (although a decent percentage of Somalians may fit that bill; I don't know), but that they're simply a net fiscal drain on state and local government services. Most of them are in low skill jobs, qualify for every social program under the sun, and depending on what region of the globe they happen to come from, may have pre-industrial fertility levels, so American taxpayers are on the hook for providing first world education and medical care to 4+ kids, also.
Spain is one country that should really benefit from immigration. Eight of the ten top source countries, the exceptions being #2 Morocco and #10 Algeria, are in Latin America: meaning the immigrants share the language, are more or less culturally similar, and are capable of assimilation.
Spanish here. The country has changed a lot in the last decade or two, the main minority we used to have were the Gypsies, now it's Moroccans and Latinos in general, with a fair number of Chinese, Pakistani, Romanians and assorted East-Europeans. When you go into a shop it's just as likely you're greeted by a Latina. In a way I think it's true we're relatively lucky, because Latinos know the language and adapt to the culture pretty well. They can easily be friendlier than the locals. We just kind of hope their kids and grandkids adapt well enough not to import South-American style of politics. Moroccans OTOH just mostly keep to themselves.
The popular sentiment so far is mostly pretty good, despite loud voices here and there from the far right. I live in a small town, and a lot of people help with various integration initiatives and programs. I've talked to a number of recent immigrants, and many of them appreciate the welcome and are keen to get up to speed, find work and even participate in local life - although I'm sure there's a selection effect there.
The main problem is insecurity. If too many young people get disaffected or can't find decent ways to make a living and turn to petty crime, entire communities can get blamed quite quickly.
Light rail and trains have always struck me as a European idea that makes little sense in the US. Why? The population centers in Europe have been stablished for centuries, and while Americans are moving less today, we still move more than the average Euro.
I might overrate this being from the rust belt, but most of the friends I knew in SF 10 years ago have moved on to hotter job markets. Bus lines and trains are a fraction of the cost and are easily re-routed when a town turns into Akron (rubber), Gary(steel), Rochester (Kodak), or Titusville (lubricants).
Still my well-educated peers yearn for trains. This despite driving when other options are available. But the grass is always greener on the other side (I usually take a train, but I secretly hope BART collapses).
That's a good one. HSR especially, which needs a number of dense, walkable cities in a line to work, really only makes sense in one part of America (the NE Accelya corridor). Commuter/light rail/subways make sense in more areas (anywhere where you have a central jobs hub and dense housing) but it's still only a handful of cities. Grade-separated trains are legitimately nicer to ride than busses, though - not dealing with traffic is the #1 perk of good public transportation.
HSR probably makes sense in a few other places, like the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio corridor, maybe Austin- Houston as well. These are big cities in the ~300km sweet range where it's a stupidly short flight or an annoyingly long drive.
HSR trains are the trains that make the least amount of sense, in general, so should be built last, after a regional network have already been built. Otherwise you just need cars at both ends anyway.
The United States has gotten really good at stupidly short flights. We've also gotten really good at using our railroad network to move slow freight. And long drives are annoying while they're going on but really convenient in that you have a car at your (probably not walkable) destination.
That leaves a pretty narrow niche for HSR. Acela Corridor, yes. LA to San Francisco might work if we could build it, but we can't. The major Texas metros are probably the best bet for a new HSR system if you insist on HSR, but even there I don't think it's a very good bet because those metros are very not walkable (or subwayable, and only marginally bussable).
People don't move nearly as much when they can commute, that's a huge rail proponent talking point.
(I've recently heard of a case study from our local equivalent of the rust belt. Jastrzębie-Zdrój, rapidly depopulating despite being one of the last places in Poland to still largely retain its mining industry. Contrast its neighboring towns like Żory and Rybnik, whose population remains more or less stable. The difference? Jastrzębie infamously lacks passenger rail. Many of its former citizens didn't move far - they moved to familiar nearby places like Rybnik or Żory, from which they can (relatively) easily and reliably commute to several other, larger urban centres. Job market suddenly becomes much hotter when it's orders of magniture larger, even when the whole surrounding region is deindustrializing.)
The left wing discourse around austerity is an example of this. Many European governments did engage in austerity during the Great Recession and American leftists adopted anti-austerity talking points from the European (probably mostly Corbynite UK) left and tried to apply it to US politics. But it was quite obviously absurd when American leftists were complaining about austerity during the Obama and especially Biden admins.
I live in a very hot area. As such, I am a frequent consumer of air conditioning. If I lived in Alaska, I probably wouldn't own an AC unit. That makes sense to most people. So why is it so hard for people to understand that immigration can be good or bad for an area DEPENDING ON INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS? Why can't people just say something like "I support immigration to Country X, but oppose it to Countries Y and Z," or "Immigration seems to be benefitting Country X, but I believe the harms outweigh the benefits in Country Z."
My own crackpot theory: immigration is good between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and bad everywhere else. The New World has the ability to assimilate. We all love to talk about the American melting pot, but Latin America gets ignored in this discussion. The former president of Peru was a guy named Fujimori. The J-Pop singer Carlos Toshiki was born in Brazil. Argentina's practically an Italian colony. There's a city called Tovar in Venezuela that still speaks German to this day. Gringos don't understand that the melting pot extends to the whole of the Americas.
There are some problems with current policy. Refugees CANNOT be taken in as whole tribes like the Somalis in Minnesota. It's a disaster as they prioritize tribe above all else. Fundamentally, we need to split the Somali tribes geographically to prevent them from organizing into a bloc. Refugees should be as widely dispersed as possible to minimize clannishness. Refugee procedure in general needs to change. If they aren't willing or able to adapt, it isn't cruel to send them back.
But thank you, Scott, for addressing an important issue. I just wanted to add my two cents about Latin American immigration.
As Scott alludes to at the start - European attitudes to immigration are also driven by American stats. As are statistics on the contribution of immigrants to the economy and pensions, which are also different.
European liberals and socialist are mostly US Democrats despite the odd claim that both parties in the US are right wing compared to Europe.
if left wing means socialist and not progressive then there are few left wing parties in Europe, where some exist on the fringes they are anti immigrant, and anti EU
Anti-immigration, not anti-immigrant. Basically the whole problem I (we, the left?) have with right-wingers is mistaking the issues of immigration as policy (bad) and immigrants as people (good by default until proven otherwise, they're your fellow humans).
Okay, it's not even that immigration is necessarily bad. It's bad in competitive exploitative capitalist labor market. If there's a [immigration good] example, it should be my native Poland, admitting millions of Ukrainians in the span of a decade to a largely positive effect. But only because it coincided with rapid increase in minimum wage and worker protections, which shielded the locals from most of its negative effects. Most, not all, we'd still need a crackdown on increasing housing costs, but our politicians sadly love their passive landlord incomes and property developers' funding way too much, although that too is slowly cracking under popular pressure.
I was recently made aware that tougher immigration regimes might have some unintended effects on migration patterns. My generic mental image of an economic migrant is a young ambitious man willing to leave his life behind and start from zero in a hope of better economic opportunities, in a place where he has no family and friends, with an unfamiliar culture and language, and often with an unpleasant weather. For those who do not manage to succeed there is strong incentive to go back home, but if the migration process was difficult and costly there is also a strong incentive not to go back once you're in, so they stay and may even do crime out of desperation. Similarly, people who might be willing to cross for seasonal work and cross back once the work dries up are now incentivized to not go back once they've made the journey.
But the point of the tougher immigration process is to select for people who _are_ likely to succeed.
For instance if you admit a Brahmin with a degree from IIT Hyderabad then you can feel reasonably comfortable that he won't wind up as a street-dwelling shoplifter; if he can't get a job at Cisco then he'll at least wind up managing a 7/11. A dirt-poor Honduran with questionable literacy even in his own language? I'd be less confident.
One of the things that often gets overlooked in discussions about immigrants in Europe and crime is who it targets. Those immigrants to Europe hate Jews specifically, and commit violent crimes against us disproportionately. It was Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher. The American Right remembers the first and forgets the second. The American Left would rather forget the first than remember the second. It's alienating.
The phenomenon still exists in America (Dearborn, Denver), as does violence by native-born Americans (Tree of Life, Washington DC) but hating Jews is just such a lower priority for South American migrants than Middle Eastern.
I’ve come across an anti-immigration explanation for pensioner welfare in Europe, which nicely links both topics of this post. I don’t necessarily agree it fully explains support for transfers from the young to the old but maybe there’s something to it. It goes like this: To the native population, high transfers to pensioners are beneficial because they’re going to their parents. Indirectly they will benefit: either their parents are better able to support them, or they will inherit. Immigrants, on the other hand, don’t benefit because their parents are living in another country. Thus natives, who form a large majority of the electorate, establish a welfare system that hurts immigrants and benefits themselves.
That’s clearly not true for permanent immigrants although it would be true for say non immigrant or temporary visas. Like the H1B in the US. I paid pensions taxes on that and won’t get a dime in return in pension. Should I? No.
Europe should, if there is an economic argument for immigration do a lot more of this.
I read once where one healthcare worker in the UK from abroad is usually connected to like 13 relatives coming in due to chain migration.
I used to work the voting polls and it was commonplace for younger immigrants to bring in their elderly parents to vote, who had no English whatsoever. The younger person could sign an affidavit and vote for them. Or the young person would verbally convey to the pollworker, that they could aid the elders and that their vote was for the Democrat. This was more troublesome in primary elections, which none of them tended to understand. I remember thinking, if I moved to a country where I did not know the language, let alone the first thing about their candidates, I think I would lie low and not try to vote there. But we all have differing levels of chutzpah I suppose.
"The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals." This is, to put it uncomfortably bluntly, nonsense. The conservative narrative on immigration and crime is that immigrants are sometimes parasites and criminals of which we already have an ample supply, so perhaps it would be good idea to try to keep those parasites and criminals out of the country.
One place where I think the conservative immigration discourse clearly is imported from Europe is when the discussions of "demographic change" and all that sometimes veers into worrying that the US will be taken over by Sharia law.
If you are worried about "demographic change" in the US, then the obvious thing is Hispanic people, but sometimes conservatives start talking about Muslims in the US even though it doesn't fit in our situation ... rhetoric is imported from Europe.
Stats aren’t very useful with crime nowadays I think we can all agree on that. Arrests, no; charges still less; convictions not at all. A map showing where 911 calls are concentrated might be most useful.
Or maybe it’s just that the reason for America’s relative success with immigration is selection, not because it’s magically “better at assimilating” and if we widen the sieve (as many want) our immigration results will be more like Europe’s.
I was first made aware of political backflow due to the English case, where we have culturally made fun of the French (depicting them as cowards), despite France being the US's first ally, and generally being good to us since then.
In practice there is a distinction between "committing a crime" and "being convicted of a crime". Nonetheless, I think a large part of the issue with immigration, legal and otherwise, is cultural / ethnic friction, and in particular religious friction. There is a limit to the rate at which a society can assimilate foreign culture, and there are some cultural elements -- jihadism, antisemitism, and misogyny, for example, that many of our citizens reject. We have enough homegrown religious fanatics and criminals already and could stand to be more selective in our admissions.
I think the populist rhetoric of the right (especially Trump) in the US is to express their shared distaste for illegal immigrants by saying they are “criminals and parasites.” To me, it comes across as a low brow argument for a low brow audience. One step up from the toddler accusation of them being “a bunch of poo-poo heads.”
The populist rhetoric of the left is that anyone opposing immigration is a racist. IOW “a poo-poo head.”
The more intellectual arguments from the center and right are that illegal immigrants depress wages for lower skilled workers, are a fiscal drag on healthcare spending in states subsidizing them (Calif and others), weaken the culture of liberalism, vote for leftist candidates and solutions to problems, create an external threat, lower the country’s human capital, and get unfair affirmative action preferences for jobs and universities. If the (Biden era) high levels of illegal immigration continue or escalate, then the America that the right values is at risk — according to this view.
Some of the intellectuals on the center and right argue that if handled properly, immigrants can add value for America. They argue for well-screened guest workers and legal immigration of (for example) English speakers in higher skilled professions. They may also call for limitations on welfare, job requirements, and higher tax rates.
Others on the center/right just argue against all immigration for the earlier reasons.
On the intellectual left and libertarian are the arguments that increased immigration is good because immigrants are people too and they will benefit personally by being here, that governments should not have the power to obstruct freedom of movement, that immigrants contribute to the economy, that they can offset fertility declines, and that they will vote for leftist policies and candidates.
The vast majority of Americans — regardless of political persuasion — reject the idea of open borders. Some are racist, some believe the right’s (crime/parasite) rhetoric, some agree with some or all of the more intellectual arguments against immigration.
I believe a majority support reasonable levels of legal immigration, though they probably disagree on the details.
I think your description is broadly correct, I would like to add that one factor that I think also exists on the left/libertarian(?) axis is that historically it is hard to regulate immigration without horrible violations in how you treat people (use the word human rights, if you like it).
I don't know enough about the history of migrations vis a vis contemporary movements to say whether that's factually true, but in my eyes it is a big factor in embracing the reality of migration anyways
> No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
I feel like these things need some substantiation/clarification. I am aware of the Rotherham scandal. I haven't seen a substantiated claim of a "no-go zone" in Europe (I know Angela Merkel at one point suggested there were some but did not identify them; also given the context I'm not sure if she was implying areas dominated by lawless immigrants or by neo-Nazis which is apparently something people claim happens in Germany). But I have ALSO seen claims that no-go zones exist in, like, Dearborn, MI or places in Minnesota. Same for claims that places are subjected to Sharia law.
Something I'm surprised I didn't see you mention is that the frame of reference for the US and Europe is so different. Buoyed by high gun ownership, income inequality, and a few key hotspots of gang violence, the violent crime rate in the US is MUCH higher than in Europe. For example, the wikipedia page on "intentional homicide rate" shows the US is 6x higher than Germany!
Thus, when you say "Assylum seekers don't commit crimes at a higher rate than average in the US but commit crimes 5-8x higher in Germany," you have to normalize by the base crime rate. If I very very messily divide by 6 per the state above, then... woah, immigrants are the same!
From this, the discussion shifts to a much more interesting point. If immigrants are essentially the same in both places, BUT the US as a whole is just a more violent place while Europe has a much more peaceful society, should European countries be more restrictive on immigration to preserve their culture? That is a much more nuanced (and interesting) question that I don't know. It's the same argument I've seen posed by those who defend notoriously stringent Japanese immigration policies, because Japan has one of the least violent countries in the world (homicide rate 4x lower than even Germany!)
When US conservatives paint immigrants as criminal and depraved despite this being objectively false, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist. This is just the most normal sort of racist fantasy, it has been since like the 17th century*, and you really don't need a complicated theory like "conservatives perceive an association of immigrants with criminality in Europe which, if you focus on certain statistics for certain countries, has some basis in fact, and then get confused and apply it to the United States by accident, even though it doesn't apply here at all."
The more interesting connection to European racism, I think, is the ideology of white nationalism, the spirit-of-the-volk stuff you'll hear from the likes of JD Vance, which is closer to the language of the European far right than to American home-grown racist ideologies.
*E.g., from the American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1798: Negroes were said "to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience." Then there's The Birth of a Nation, the Central Park Five, ad infinitum...
Why can't one be pro-immigration but subject to these caveats:
1. Immigration must be lawful. Whatever laws and regulations the U.S. has should be enforced. If they are too restrictive, or not restrictive enough, that must be dealt with by changing the laws through the political process, not by ignoring them.
2. Immigrants should be screened, at least for criminal records. Who is allowed to come to this country should not be based on whether or not they can manage to get to the border.
3. It is not racist to believe that assimilation is good and immigration surges that produce ethnic enclaves can have downsides.
I think the much simpler explanation is that American media is dominant and they export their culture war issues all over the world. Even outside of Europe, in Africa and Argentina and Japan and Korea, you will find the exact same talking points and media coverage.
“Remigration” is another meme that the American right has taken from Europe that makes no sense in the American context. Weird to see DHS account constantly post that on X.
I guess from what I can tell charitably without using loaded terms “remigration” means there is a class of people in a country who may legally be citizens but for all other criteria are not members of the polity and they have to be deported.
In EU plausibly you could define such a group (not that I condone it) as they have a shared thousand year history. In America, defining any such group would be a mess, no one would agree regarding the definition, and it would just lead to insane politics.
If the question needs to be asked seriously then everyone is fair game, are Italians and other white ethnics like Poles, Balkans fair or do they need to be “remigrated back”. Maybe a far right white identitarian would say yes they are fine, then what about Jews? What about Chinese and Japanese who came in the 1900s. Of course, what about Hispanics who have been here since even earlier and then finally what about the blacks, many of whom have been here since 1619. Maybe if we go by time and say people before 1950 are fine, then we have the weird situation that Elon needs to be remigrated back, along with Peter Thiel.
From the comment quoted in your post: "...the average pension in France is now higher than the average salary"
This is not quite true. The average pension is higher than the average salary of all working-age adults, which includes many people who are not employed (students, stay-at-home parents, the unemployed, etc). Their $0 annual salaries bring down the average quite a bit. If you only include workers, their average salaries are still higher than pensioners.
Additionally, I think it would not be all that crazy for the average pension to be higher than the average salary. It's common to aim for the pension to be around 80% of the salary at the end of one's career, and it's common for one's salary to grow substantially during one's career. To me, it just seems like a strange comparison.
> It's common to aim for the pension to be around 80% of the salary at the end of one's career
That is an insane and clearly unaffordable standard. How could that possibly be paid for?
I don't believe old age pensions should exist, but to the extent that they must then it's reasonable for them to be some small pittance to ensure the meagre survival of anyone too foolish to have saved for their own retirement.
I don't know how it works in France, but in Sweden, people pay about 23% of their salary into the pensions system, which, if you plug those numbers into a FIRE calculator, gives 30-something years until retirement, so it doesn't seem unrealistic to me.
Immigrants are low crime in that America has a high crime native population called blacks, that push up the numbers. But if you are a white american that lives in a place without many blacks, immigrants will push up the local crime rate. This isn't a hard thing to understand, unless you are... actually I'd be lying if I pretended to believe you were not pretending not to understand it.
Oh and immigrant children regress upward in their crime rates so even this technical lawful evil truth, becomes absurd. But of course by then they are American citizens... and liberals have won another round.
The reason why European immigration discourse is taboo among american liberals, and embraced by american conservatives, is because it's just one step removed from the same awful fate which American liberals are happily imposing on their countrymen against their consent. It just takes a little bit longer, and by the time American Liberals pull it off the imposition carries a passport so it's all fine by then.
US has a relatively small and compact group of non-immigrant population that is off-the-charts in many international comparisons. For example, whether you look at victimisation or arrest rate for murders, US Black population has the rate in low-20s per 100k/year. This is higher than almost any country on Earth, and at the level of very violent places like Colombia and Mexico. This has a substantial impact on average American homicide rates, but little impact on the median neighbourhood experience. So an immigrant population may be offending at a below US-wide average level, and yet be at stark contrast for a median neighbourhood. In Europe, such disparities do not exist, or did not exist until very recently. So comparisons of immigrant crime rates and national crime rates may be misleading.
Yes, I'd love for the US to become more curious towards the circumstances of the not-US.
But I think US v EU comparisons are inherently tricky, sometimes you're comparing a country with a continent and sometimes you're comparing two federal states with varying levels of centralization.
Like your offhanded "European populists might have a point", that'd be a US v a continent comparison. Most political discussion is not on EU level and different countries have different populists (and different parties those populists respond to).
I disagree that "the American conservative narrative on immigration is mostly true in Europe, mostly false in America." An argument US conservatives make is that the existence of our welfare state, both in Europe and the US, attracts the poorest from dysfunctional societies/countries. The difference between the US and Europe is the degree of impact, but generally the above stated principle applies.
Regarding incarceration rate, it might be beneficial to look at US native born white incarceration rate rather than US native born; the really high black rate should be treated as an outlier that we need to address specifically with tailored policies. Native white rate is 747, and the illegal immigrant incarcerated rate is no longer a fraction of 747, and is in fact comparable, and at times, higher. Example: Dominican Republic - 954, Cuba - 987, Vietnam - 836, Honduras - 1307. Rates for El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia are under 747, but well over 650. So, even when these groups have the fear of being deported they still commit crimes at or over the white natives. It is really hard to make the case they are an overall asset to the US. The only argument that works is a humanitarian one - we ought to let them in because we have the resources to support them.
Because Europe has a much larger and generous welfare state accessible to all, immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. The US welfare state is a lot more limited and restricted. but it cannot be denied illegal immigrants do get some welfare benefits such as medicaid in some states. Conservatives, when comparing US illegal immigration to that Europe, worry that the much worse situation is Europe is in the US' future too unless policies are implemented to reverse the trends. Had it not been for Trump winning in 2016, we would be closer to Europe today on illegal immigration.
As a person who writes a lot about immigration to Europe, I have many issues with this post.
"In Europe, the situation is more complicated. There are still some ways of asking the question where you find immigrants collecting fewer benefits than natives (for example, because immigrants are young, natives are old, and pensions are a benefit)."
No. The situation is not complicated. It is one of the least complicated situations. My country, Denmark, gathers and analyzes data of a higher quality than any other country in the world and publishes a report with how many benefits immigrants receive and their overall fiscal impact. And Muslim/African immigrants are exceedingly costly. This has also been shown in detail in Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, and more. There are no "ways of asking the question" where immigrants collect fewer benefits. And it's not a small disparity, they collect vastly more benefits.
"The European link between immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the conservatives are allowed to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries."
This comment about cherry-picking is ridiculous. Every Western European country that keeps good statistics about it finds that Muslim/African immigrants commit way more crime.
Denmark is an outlier in terms of honest interaction between government and population. We saw this with covid (As a Danish transplant to the US I could read the 500 page critical report they generated less than one year into covid that stated the data they based their interventions on and addressed the major critiques that had been leveled at the government, in order to conduct real time course corrections). I caught a clip from the BBC where a stunned journalist asks a politician why they publish statistics such as the ones you mention. "Because otherwise people would not trust us any more" was his reply. An outlier indeed.
My brother and father are/were in a union where the older guys got great pensions (not better per hour but its a salary). They actually bankrupted one local with their pension increases and mismanagement of funds (meant to support the unsupportable pensions), then got bailed out by another so the younger guys get much weaker pension along with other penalties. Some years my mom, as a widow, actually makes more in pension money than my brother if he takes a significant vacation or just has a gap between sent to a new job site. Not sure that scales but it's what I always think of when something like this is raised.
As you mention, clannish, lineage based cultures are a concern. As pointed out by J. Henrich, it was the eradication of lineage based relationships over a long period of time in Europe that helped shape the Western individualistic mind, upon which all Western institutions build. So any deep seated attitude of clan first, old culture first, new country second or third, might stick around for a long time, as enabled by ghettofication. That is indeed the friction area in Europe right now. For smaller countries like Denmark, which rely on trust in the system, assimilation is not optional, as erosion of trust can be triggered by smaller scaled phenomena. So Denmark has taken control over its borders.
What is similar in critiques of both US and European contexts, is the notion that borders and immigration should be controlled where they are not, and guided by the interests of the country where they are. Even if most of the people entering illegally here will be good productive law abiding folk, it leaves the question as to who has actual control over who enters and who doesn’t -and what their priorities are. Mexican cartels have their own agendas, and they have had outsize impact in this country, affecting certain communities much more than others, of course. And in a country unable to process the flux of immigrants, a de facto lower caste of workers is created, which certain industries and communities rely upon and facilitate, but which again impact other communities or populations in negative ways.
There is a difference in Europe between countries where uncomfortable topics can be discussed honestly and openly and therefore productively in the political realm, like apparently Denmark, and where they cannot, like apparently England and Germany, if you go by FIRE’s generally grounded assessments. Where they cannot, resentment of not having ones "lived" concerns listened to foments, and seek other outlets.
I think the US exemplifies a country where they cannot, sadly, so another similarity with certain European countries.
The immigration benefits statistic is extremely misleading because it judges it individually instead of per household. If immigrants have a child in the US, benefits claimed on behalf of that child will count as benefits consumed by a native-born citizen instead of benefits consumed by an immigrant, but for the purpose of the conservative hobbyhorse ('will admitting these people increase benefits usage on net'), should be treated morally as benefits consumed by immigrants. Many studies do this by accident, and the Cato study explicitly notes that it does this on purpose.
This is good to know, but the alternative (counting US-born children of immigrants as evidence of immigrants receiving benefit) seems to muddy the waters even more.
We’d be left with disproportionately hard-working, law-abiding people raising children who get counted as a drain on the social safety net
But they literally are a drain on the social safety net, to the extent their households claim resources from the social safety net. The existence of said households drawing benefits is directly caused by their immigration.
But given that these are children of hard-working, law-abiding parents, we expect them to be a net benefit to public resources in the long term. By the same token, we don't discourage native-born parents from having children because they will cost the state money at first. Nativists are fine with some people having many children in public schools, but not others.
I am not saying there's an objectively correct way to go about these calculations, I am just saying that either definition of "benefits received" will confuse people if not contextualized properly.
If you're trying to answer the question "Are immigrants a net financial drain on society in the long term?", it would not make sense to count their children, since they are long term beneficial.
If you are looking at short term outcomes, you need different data.
Either way, a conclusion such as "Immigration waves put a strain on social nets in the short term, but are enormously beneficial in the long term. Therefore we need to prevent massive spikes, but allow much of it overall" can only be reached by looking at data in multiple ways.
It's not just schooling. Such households are more likely to use full-on welfare programs including Medicaid and SNAP. And the schooling is not plug-and-play with these students. They overwhelm schools and increase costs due to language barriers, low SES, and again greater welfare program utilization (e.g. school lunch type things). Then most of the selection advantages - to the extent they exist - get drowned out in the second and third generations. For example second generation immigrant children have increased measured criminality in comparison to their parents (although this is very hard to measure because the methodology for their parents tends to be flawed anyway and understate the stat). There's already a fairly high bar to being a net positive taxpayer and their SES doesn't increase super fast in a generation. One estimate I saw showed net negative through 30 years of projections.
Absent actual numbers, the fact that they have increased criminality compared to their above-average law-abiding parents looks like regression to the mean, so exactly what you would expect.
Personally, I suspect it's largely a reporting artifact and they are probably about the same adjusted for SES. But as Scott noted, it's terribly difficult to get any decent data that adjusts for reporting and other factors, especially for illegal immigrants, so I can't definitely prove my suspicion there.
"I think this plays into the conservatives’ hands... they can paint intellectuals as mealy-mouthed and unwilling to acknowledge reality. I think the more honest and politically practical course would be to acknowledge when these stories ... are true."
This is not Scott's main point, and I'm also outing myself as a starry-eyed idealist in this respect (and it is reassuring at my age to discover that I have some idealism to own), but here goes: I find almost nothing so demoralizing as the realization that those with whose causes I am broadly aligned are willing to dissimulate and avoid "uncomfortable" facts. No matter whose "hands it plays into" just now, in the long run I wish so much that people on every side of every debate would simply face the awkward truth rather than plying the momentarily-convenient optics. I truly believe that a great deal (not all) of our social and political misery is downstream from just one thing: our domestic internalization of the friend/enemy distinction. One is justified in dealing less than straightforwardly with ones enemy -- trying to appear stronger than one is, playing down defeats, feinting to the north when one will strike in the south, whatever. Once one turns this strategy inwards, one will inevitably reinvent the enemy inside ones own borders. Of course, the "necessity" of this approach (supposedly) was itself downstream from the enemy already "infiltrating" -- the classic example is the Red Scare; and there really is such a thing as treason; but I maintain still that once one has torn up standards of honesty with ones fellow-citizens and replaced them all with tactics and spin, one is well on the way to losing a society worth defending, splitting it into mutually-suspicious camps (for who can trust "the other side" when one knows deep down that one would not oneself have the integrity to be forthright about whatever belies ones own Official Story?), and certainly of weakening any chance of success in that defense when the time comes. Which of course might have been the aim of "infiltrators" (if any) to begin with.
I think it's worth pointing out that there are reasons the US does better with immigration and while I generally lean left I think it's something the pro-European part of the left doesn't sufficiently appreciate.
Ironically, I tend to think exactly what makes European policies feel appealing to many liberal Americans are features that are tuned to work well in a more culturally (and to some extent ethnically) homogeneous societies and make assimilation hard.
There are real benefits to generous welfare systems and laws which make it hard to fire people like in the EU. But when firing people is hard you not only don't take chances on people but the risk to hiring the wrong sort of person is very high. Combine that with a generous social safety net and you create the perfect conditions to create an underclass who feels they won't be rewarded by joining the above board economy. For all the American way of doing finance and banking feels very cold and data driven (unlike say the UK system which seems to depend substantially on relationships) that system is much more oriented to help immigrants create their own businesses. Also, the US approach to law, rights and free speech generally -- very much about hard rights not soft judgements (no vague anti-religious insult rules) -- is better designed for a system that must accommodate different cultures.
But probably the biggest issue is culture. The very things that elite liberals dislike most about American culture -- it's mass market 'low-brow' appeal of McDonald's and pop stars -- make it easy to culturally assimilate. The things in France that make french culture seem refined and high-brow are also the barriers to entry by immigrants.
> The things in France that make french culture seem refined and high-brow are also
> the barriers to entry by immigrants.
Is it really? There's an entire mass-market genre of magazines and publications that would be difficult to imagine in the US. (I suppose the closest thing would have been Scientific American in the 70s-80s, i.e., back when it was still good.) In my old neighborhood, the shopkeeper would read Philosophie magazine, and I'm pretty sure he was of North African background. Pop culture can present its own barriers to entry .
(... and piggies just happen to be more prominent in the 'low' traditional cuisine of some regions of France than in haute cuisine or la table bourgeoise, but whatever - I think that's a coincidence. Or rather, it was economics at play, not rubbing-it-in as in 16th-century Spain.)
>The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits
When you see a claim about immigration from the Cato Institute, the big question is whether they are lying or just trying to mislead you. In this case, I think they just mislead you. The source does not actually claim they are "less likely to claim welfare benefits." It compares total spending and lumps in programs old-age programs that people pay into their whole lives like Medicare and Social Security as welfare.
I have a simpler explanation. America simply has more politics. Yes, every nation has a government. But America has more elected offices than Europe and spends far more on elections and has far longer cycles and has more subsidiarity (meaning there's more relevant stories at different levels). Further, those politics are more impactful on other countries than other countries are on the US.
Do you know how long a UK election lasts? One to two months. Do you know how much they cost? A bit less than £100 million. How much news does that produce compared to an American multiyear multibillion monstrosity? And the UK doesn't really have (relevant) local governments the way the US has states. You sometimes see American professional campaigners go to Europe because they have experience in a much more intense environment and the latest technology and so are often better trained.
Plus the US has more media and it's better funded than most European counterparts. And it's got contradictions and fights and an ecosystem that feeds on itself and is highly optimized for attention.
The contradictions and fights are pretty much universal.
I have an even simpler explanation: sheer cultural power.
I'm not European, but I'm much more knowledgeable about current U.S. politics then my own local politics. In my case that's mostly from hanging in DSL, which is rare in its specificity, but many or most people give disproportionate attention to something from the U.S., whether news, music, games, or movies. Politics just seeps in.
A simple factoid you may find funny: in Poland, we call large part of the Left "Kserolewica" (xero from Xerox, so it's "photocopy Left") exactly because of them blindly following every trend from the US, without paying attention whether this actually fits Polish realities.
It finds that migrants are about as criminal as comparable Germans in the area they live in and that an influx of migrants has no measurable effect on the crime rate.
"Immigrants have higher crime because they concentrate in high crime areas" seems tautological to me. Perhaps the areas have higher crime rates because that's where the immigrants are, or perhaps people who are prone to crime are drawn to high crime areas.
GPT tells me that non-citizen conviction rates are 3-4x that for German citizens.
“Perhaps the areas have higher crime rates because that's where the immigrants are”
If that was the case you’d see a rise in crime rate with an influx of immigrants. This is precisely what was checked in the study and it couldn’t find any evidence to support that.
“perhaps people who are prone to crime are drawn to high crime areas”
Reason why they were living in those areas were also analysed in the study. They were not living there voluntarily, but rather because they were forced to.
“GPT tells me that non-citizen conviction rates are 3-4x that for German citizens.”
There’s no reliable data for that in German crime statistics with non-citizens meaning asylum seekers. General crime statistics only consider non-citizens in general which includes tourists, etc. And only include total numbers. Calculating a crime rate for foreigners by relating that number to people living in an area gives completely wrong numbers.
This is also true in neighbouring countries like Austria where Germans are “overrepresented” in the crime statistics relative to their population in Austria if you try to calculate crime rates like this for the same reason.
"Foreign nationals were convicted for sexual offences a rate 71% higher than that of the British population, 69% for drug-related crime, 25% for theft, and at 39% for all crime types."
> No-go zones, [...], rape statistics, sharia law [...] are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants >are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
a) "No-go zones" are really an American fiction about Europe, which then may be getting reused and applied to the US. Are there rough neighborhoods in large cities? Sure. Are they safer than rough neighborhoods in US cities? If you mean you are much less likely to be shot, sure. I live in a suburb immediately adjacent to Paris (the sort that would be called part of the city in any US city other than Boston, SF, and some other places I haven't been to where people also have a strict definition of 'the city'). Do plenty of neighbors have family in North Africa? Sure. Do most people vote Communist in municipal elections? Sure. Do people come on the ring road from the business district to go to the projects to buy drugs? That's what I've read. Have I ever been bothered? Not once.
Ah wait, one exception, after a fashion. Did I call the police when some folks gathered outside my window at night to drink and play loud music for the tenth time in spite of my having talked to them as many times (and strategically watered my plants over their heads, or so they say)? Sure. Did the police come? Sure. Have I had any problems since then? I haven't.
Would I live in the US in a district where people are rumored to go buy drugs? Are you crazy? Well, possibly not: you might be one of those far-sighted people who bought in the Mission twenty years ago. Still: are you crazy?
(This is obviously a rhetorical "you", so people who actually bought in the Mission shouldn't feel insulted.)
b) France has stronger separation-of-church/mosque/temple/coven-and-state laws than the US does. They do get applied to veils.
c) Rape statistics are not part of the US experience?
Why I, an American, bring up European immigration is that what's happening there *can't* ever happen here if the principle upstream is to treat non-Western immigration with great suspicion. This reasoning is more explicit in Japanese anti-immigration discourse; you never see people suggesting that it's silly for Japanese people to get all worked up about something that's barely even happening in Japan.
>the most common countries of origin for seekers are Afghanistan, China, and Venezuela. Afghans are incarcerated at 1/10th the US average rate1, Chinese at 1/20th, and Venezuelans at 1/4th.
This misrepresents the issue. These figures are taken from asylum grants, which generally take several years to process. Asylum applications went from an average of 10-20k per year before 2020 to over 500k per year after. The recent influx is primarily from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The issue with crime isn't with the crime that illegals themselves commit, it's the crime committed by the communities that they establish. I'm sure illegals are unusually law abiding because they're afraid of being deported. In general, Hispanics are incarcerated at a rate 2-3x above the national average.
In the UK, foreign nationals were convicted of nearly one-quarter of all sexual assaults and rapes despite making up only 9% of the population. For every 10,000 people, the conviction rate among British people for drug-dealing is just 16.6 compared to a rate of 2,537 for people from Albania, 452 for Vietnam, 270 for Somalia, 260 for Congo, 208 for Gambia, and 175 for Afghanistan. Not sending their best.
Lots of comments here, but I'd just like to insist that Europe is far from a monolith. Back at the height of the US BLM craze I heard that it became a big thing in the UK. As far as I could tell, here in Spain it just didn't make an echo - probably because we have relatively few Blacks, and those tend to be African, not African-American.
OTOH, activists will activate, and you regularly see posters or small demonstrations in support for Palestine or some cause of the day. You don't see much noise about Ukraine anymore, probably because people figured that demonstrating against Putin in Spain isn't going to move anyone's needle, but I'd say grassroots support is still strong.
So yeah, issues and ideas do cross over, but I think the local context still matters a lot.
>The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals.
I don't think that's accurate: the narrative is that illegal immigrants are often parasites and criminals. When Trump famously said "They're not sending their best...They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists" he was talking about illegal immigrants, not legal ones. And he's said plenty of nice things about legal immigrants, as do most Republicans. It's a bit similar to the "You're Still Crying Wolf" thing, if you look at what Trump and Republican politicians actually say it's pretty clear that they support legal immigration and believe the illegal immigrants are a bunch of parasites and criminals, as you put it.
I've noticed that the Left uses a rhetorical critique where they always use the word "immigrants" and never distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants when critiquing the Right. If Trump says that we need to secure the border to keep out drug dealers and terrorists, the Left responds by saying "Trump believes immigrants are drug dealers and terrorists." But clearly there is a difference between someone who has jumped through all the legal hoops to enter the US and someone who paid a Coyote to smuggle them across the border.
“I don't think that's accurate: the narrative is that illegal immigrants are often parasites and criminals. “
Which doesn’t make much sense since they’re almost all coming to work and can’t receive benefits. And we know immigrant crimes rates aren’t particularly high…..
Really glad Scott wrote this. I've been making the same argument for a while: immigration and other broad issues are not literal things that have effects across contexts--policies do. Showing that Danish crime chart says nothing about how well America integrates migrants, and citing US fiscal data doesn't tell you much about Swedish asylum policy. Both sides treat "the West" as monolithic, and that's exactly the problem (alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/immigration-is-not-a-thing-that-has)
I feel like the "actually they're less likely to commit crimes than the native population" thing is just playing games with statistics.
Here is the standard I would suggest: the crime rate for immigrants in the US or any other rich country ought to be zero.
The US is in the fortunate position that demand to move to it is large; it can afford to be choosy about what immigrants it admits. If it admits anyone who turns out to be a criminal, then that is an unforced error, and an investigation should occur into exactly how this happened.
The US could fill its immigration quotas while only admitting people who are _much_ better than the average native-born citizen. The US could be setting up booths at job fairs at Oxford and ETH Zurich and the University of Tokyo, offering green cards and a relocation bonus to top grads. But it's far harder for a brilliant Swiss scientist to get into the US than for an El Salvadoran gangster, because the brilliant Swiss scientist needs to go through a long O-1 visa application process and the Salvadoran gangster can just catch a bus to Juarez and sneak across the border.
It's, in practice, far harder for a brilliant El Salvadoran scientist than for a brilliant Swiss scientist, and easiest of all for a Swiss money-launderer working ultimately in the same sector as the El Salvadoran gangster.
The "if immigrants commit less crime and use fewer government resources, the country is better off with them than without" frame doesn't make sense to conservatives. Since that frame (which smuggles in liberal morality) is implicit in most of these conversations, people talk past each other.
Conservatives feel they have a duty to seek the well-being of fellow citizens, which they don't have to foreigners. Also, that the primary purpose of government is to address crime, not to move money around. So they feel that if a permissive immigration policy leads to *even very little* additional crime (in absolute terms, not per capita), supporters of that policy have failed in their duty to their fellow citizens who are victimized by it -- whereas a strict immigration policy doesn't fail in any duty.
It's like: You have a duty to both a criminal fellow citizen and their victim; to the one you owe due process, and to the other you owe justice. But in the case of a criminal foreigner, you only have a duty to the victim.
So when liberals say stuff like, "immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives", the conservative response is something like, "that number of crimes should be zero, and if you vote MAGA, it will be". Even one serious crime by a foreigner against a fellow citizen outweighs all the benefits to foreigners, since you owe a duty to the citizen, but not the foreigners. And the cultural enrichment those foreigners bring weighs very little against crime, since cultural enrichment is not the government's job, but crime is. You have no duty to culturally or even economically enrich your neighbors; you do have a duty to support government policy that protects them against crime.
^^^ That's a simplified picture. Most conservatives feel a small but real humanitarian duty to foreigners, and would feel more duty to fellow citizens who are closer to themselves, like family, coworkers, people from the same state or region, etc. But none of that changes the fundamental dynamic.
For the terminally online, this is a heatmap meme thing. Liberals see no problem weighing the relative criminality and government dependence of different populations, and making a decision on that basis, since their moral duty is to all human beings equally, citizens and foreigners alike. National borders are morally-neutral, historically-contingent administrative structures, so all you need to do to answer the question is pull up the statistics. (That's liberals; progressives are different.)
It's like: liberals think that by bringing in populations with a lower criminals per person ratio, they're lowering the overall criminals per person ratio for the country. And they are! They're increasing the criminal numerator, but they're also increasing the normie denominator by way more, so the ratio ends up better.
Whereas, for conservatives, you're increasing the criminal numerator, but the relevant denominator -- "people I have a duty to protect" -- is unchanged; so the ratio is getting worse, not better.
I find myself in the awkward position of not totally agreeing with either side and finding both kind of ridiculous right now. I thought I'd chime in since Scott doesn't seem to notice the framing issue and I feel like I can explain it well enough.
1. Surely many of the people who say they have that seeking the well-being of fellow citizens is their duty in this context would dismiss it as an insane liberal idea in other contexts; a person who were consistent on this would be liberal towards fellow citizens (in practice, quite often: those of native origin). What people really enjoy is creating a category of people that is completely outside their sphere of concern, and indeed, in essence, outside the law (notice you've tacitly included "due process" among the things a foreigner is not owed), and whom one can even actively target for harm while feeling unctuous about the process.
2. Two things are confused here (and most likely in the discourse you describe). Say you have someone whose only concern is the total amount of crime perpetrated against People Who Matter (here, citizens). It doesn't follow that they should consider per capita rates irrelevant and tolerate no additional crime. Why? The entire premise of "per capita rates are irrelevant" is not just that part of the denominator shouldn't matter - it also implicitly assumes that all crime committed is committed against the native-born, which is ridiculous.
Not only that: some criminals in the native population will prey on the newcomers *instead*: they are probably easier to bilk, rob, and also exploit, in ways that are legal and ways that aren't. That's an added benefit to the native-born population that isn't even directly reflected in per-capita crime rates. (The word 'benefit' here would have to be devoid of irony here under the moral framework sketched here.)
Having a sphere of concern that includes people regardless of whether they are born is not in itself 'ridiculous'. Yes, other people may mind it - especially those would like more privileges and feel they are being insufficiently subsidized, as a reward, of course, for the achievement of being born in a particular place; sure, we understand that.
Peter - what you said would make perfect sense if you were embedded with an Einsatzkommando and were trying to justify shooting suspected partisans, but I've literally quoted from Matthew Talamini's post.
>Surely many of the people who say they have that seeking the well-being of fellow citizens is their duty in this context would dismiss it as an insane liberal idea in other contexts; a person who were consistent on this would be liberal towards fellow citizens (in practice, quite often: those of native origin).
Would they? Conservatives generally volunteer more and give more to charity than liberals, which seems like evidence that they do think they have a duty to seek the well-being of their fellow-citizens.
The bit about "charity" has any chance of being true only if you include giving to religious organizations. Volunteering is performative. At any rate, the operative word here is 'duty', not 'charity' or 'volunteering', which are different even just by definition.
>The bit about "charity" has any chance of being true only if you include giving to religious organizations.
I doubt it, but even if it's true, it's not really relevant. Donating to Churches United Against Poverty is no less dutiful than donating to Oxfam.
>Volunteering is performative.
In my experience, most volunteers tend not to trumpet their volunteering work, which suggests they are not doing it for performative reasons.
>At any rate, the operative word here is 'duty', not 'charity' or 'volunteering', which are different even just by definition.
They're different in that they refer to different concepts, not in that they're mutually exclusive. "People who can afford to have a duty to give to charity" is a perfectly comprehensible statement, and one that a lot of people would probably agree with.
You very commonly hear liberals/progressives make the argument that it is just a matter of luck that they were born in a functional country. But the reason I was born in a fair and functional country was my ancestors fought and died for justice and fairness and to build a clean and beautiful country. The Eritreans' ancestors had different priorities and values and as a result they were born in a s*ithole. They are getting their deserts and I am getting mine and it us fundamentally unfair for them to take and deteriorate my birthright.
1. This is a point where it's useful to distinguish conservatives from libertarians. In the ... say, 90s? ... it was much more possible not to feel any contradiction between conservative and libertarian values. But since the covid years, the difference has become very stark. People who haven't resolved that tension yet will often be guilty of the hypocrisy you mention. That's real. On the other hand, I think MAGA represents a true resolution, much to the loss of the libertarian principles. Conservatives like Auron Macintyre, for instance, explicitly call for setting up patronage networks (parallel to what they see as progressive patronage networks) where the police extract taxes from your enemies and give them to your supporters. Very, very not libertarian. Very explicit that there is a People Who Matter, and that correct politics is to serve the interests of those people.
2. It doesn't need to assume that all crime will be against native-born people; just that some likely will -- because *even very little* additional crime, in absolute terms, is a failure of duty. So even if a criminal foreigner mostly preys on other foreigners, or native-born criminals mostly prey on foreigners, too, just the disorder and chaos that that situation causes is sufficient to feel like a failure of duty.
I'll add that conservatives (not libertarians, though!) are mostly immune to shame tactics at this point. Implying that they're some kind of bigot for caring that somebody was born in a particular place makes you sound like a heartless inhuman monster. What they hear is, this liberal genuinely thinks it's wrong and bigoted to spend more time and money on caring for your own mother than on any random Eritrean or Salvadoran or Chinese citizen you'll never meet. Why would you care for your own children more than some Russian children? What, you're going to privilege and subsidize them for the grand achievement of being born in a particular place? How bigoted. Heatmap meme.
Because that is where that principle ends up -- it does dissolve even the family. Look at how liberals talk about homeschooling. You're falling back on the liberal principle of the equal value of all human life, which is a real liberal principle, but obviously can't be applied absolutely. And so when you invoke it, you're really invoking the authority to be the one who decides when and how it's applied. And, to be frank, the main thing conservatives want is for you to stop doing that. At this point they are very sensitive to absolute, totalizing principles selectively applied to advance Democratic party interests. They interpret it as bad faith.
I myself have religious commitments that compel me to take both sides seriously. On the one hand, The Good Samaritan; on the other, Honor Thy Father and Mother. If the example of the Samaritan extends to cover Guatemalan immigrants, the example of my parents extends to cover my town, my state, my country. It's funny how the commitment to both ethical principles, even knowing they sometimes contradict and can't always be resolved satisfactorily, makes the people who are strictly committed to only one or the other seem ridiculous.
>Because that is where that principle ends up -- it does dissolve even the family. Look at how liberals talk about homeschooling.
Keir Starmer once said in an interview that he wouldn't take his own child to a private hospital, even if said child had some kind of rare and fatal disease which couldn't be treated on the NHS. I don't know whether that's actually true or whether he was just virtue-signalling, but even if it's the latter, the fact that he chose to virtue-signal in this particular way is quite striking.
And yet in John 19:25-27, one of the last things that He does is ask one of the disciples to look after His mom. "Woman, behold your son" then, "Behold, your mother". He doesn't ask the disciple to care for all bereaved widows equally. He asks for care for one specific bereaved widow (presumably Joseph is dead by this point) who's more important to Him than all the other bereaved widows, because she's His mother.
Don't the other bereaved widows have equal human dignity and value as Mary? Why should His sphere of concern be so exclusive?
And even regarding nations, He preferred Israel. In Matthew 15, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." He does what the Canaanite woman wants, but He also calls her a dog. She gets her way not by contradicting Him but by accepting that premise. "Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."
Later, He would tell them to go to the whole world, in the Great Commission. But it's clearly not wrong for Him to prefer His native country.
Possibly, it's something smarter people than both of us have argued over the ages and which Paul goes out of his way to "revise" (as you might imagine, I heavily discount Paul for the most part). In my particular branch those were interpreted in relationship to Luke's passage as evidence of his humanity, i.e. Jesus wasn't speaking as the Godhead in asking others to watch after his mother but as in his human form hypostasis similar to when he cried "father why have you forsaken me", i.e. even Jesus had to poop during his mortal phase, after all he was mortal incarnate, not a simulacrum.
"American liberals either ignore them or call them problematic, giving the conservatives a second victory: they can paint intellectuals as mealy-mouthed and unwilling to acknowledge reality."
That pattern, which has played out on many topics, has been at the core of American liberals' collective self-own going back a quarter-century. Speaking from deep in the heart of Blue America, the above was far too familiar well before Trump realized that by making disgust with us his political hobbyhorse he could ride to electoral victory.
Housing is another example of this: english-speaking people complain about housing, Americans respond in detail that it's actually not that bad relative to incomes outside of SF/NYC... While missing the fact that the housing situation actually is quite grim in the UK and prices are absolutely insane relative to (stagnant) incomes (let alone that the quality of the housing stock is absolute shite in the UK both in terms of size and quality).
On the subject of political backflow, I can only think of one example of political backflow from Australia to the US, and that's the "millennials can't afford houses because they spend all their money on avocado toast" discourse.
This whole discourse started with a 2016 column in The Australian by Bernard Salt in 2016, and somehow found its way to the US, where "eating too much avocado toast" was an even worse synecdoche for these sorts of expensive millennial lifestyle decisions. (I'm aware that there was an American fad for avocado toast around the same time, but it wasn't as a big a thing, and American breakfast culture is just fundamentally different).
I will take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate this forum since finding it a couple months ago. It has quality discussions seldom found elsewhere. Reddit without the domineering moderators and passive aggressive downvoting, Sailer's with far fewer lunatics, and Marginal Revolution without the AI fixation and incessant links to paywalled articles.
Re: footnote 6, Patrick McKenzie's latest (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/fraud-investigation/) explicitly notes that fraud usually follows ethnic and cultural networks for mundane non-problematic reasons, in an otherwise conservative-coded analysis of the MN daycare fraud story. So I wouldn't consider this point controversial outside of MAGA-party-line circles and I don't think it requires special justification.
This is true. Caplan doesn't decouple his various ideologies on immigration. He doesn't think that locals have priority. He believes in libertarianism fiercely. But then writes a book pretending that it's good for locals etc. But he can't genuinely decouple and he mixes up his "locals poorer for the benefit of migrants OK" with "it's better for locals too"
I don't see what makes a cartoon about asylum seekers from the fictional land of Elbonia "apparently" take place in the US (or any other specific real-world country).
> partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans
Lmao I can see a conservative talking point of "America has already received too much immigrants, that why more immigrants won't appear in statistics. ~~thats why we have to expel every single one!!!!~~"
When the article starts by talking about how European political discourse is colored by America, I am reminded of what tvtropes.com call "Eagleland Osmosis"- non-Americans depicted as expecting things in their country to happen the way it would in America, because that is what they saw on television.
How precisely do you define benefits or welfare? The Supreme Court has ruled that children who are not in the country legally are entitled to public education. That might sound fine, but most of them aren't going to be fluent in English; you are probably going to have to hire a number of English as a Second Language teachers, and those tend to be more expensive than English as a Standard Language teachers. And when the court ruled, most of them spoke Spanish. When a significant number speak Mandarin, Hindi, Farsi, or Native American languages, it gets worse. When law-abiding citizens get told that their taxes will go up, or educational programs that they were counting on for their kids are being cut, all to pay for bilingual teachers for kids who are not in the country legally, it is understandable that they can see one way of controlling the cost. You can say that, in the long run, they will benefit, but the long run can be a long time. And a lot of them won't believe it anyway.
I also suspect that there is a question of "how far can it go?" Almost everyone seems to think that admitting a certain amount of immigrants is good, almost nobody seems to favor truly open borders, because that would admit more people than the system can handle. Where do we draw the line?
On a related note, I think that much of the ire on illegal immigration is a question of the rule of law. We have laws against illegal immigration on the books, but there have been long stretches where presidents appeared to be effectively allowing the law to be violated, or coming up with creative interpretations to not enforce it. That is a problem.
The question of asylum has been raised. There is a fascinating documentary available on YouTube called "Walk the Line." It is by CNA, a Singaporean station, and it is about Chinese migrants travelling to America illegally. It is interesting, and at one point you will see them talking about being harassed by officials in China, and in the next, saying that they think that can make $10,000 a month in America. What is really going through their heads?
I have no quick, simple, easy answers. If anybody does, I'd love to hear them.
I have to agree that America is especially blessed in the nature of our immigrants, relative to Europe. What Europe and America have in common is that we both are ruled by an elite class which clearly favors mass immigration and refuses to respond to the express will of the public to limit it. This transparent perfidy of the elites with respect to immigration is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Americans may perceive immigration as harmful to their particular economic circumstance, regardless of GDP (as it clearly has been for the underclass in Europe). They may infer something nefarious wrought by the elites in the inexplicable dearth of reliable crime data (as the elites have covered up immigrant crime in Europe). They may just prefer to live among people who speak the same language (which is increasingly rare in Europe).
We know where the elites want to take us. Clearly, America is not yet as far down that road as Europe is. But the lesson is equally applicable, and should not be wasted.
"They may just prefer to live among people who speak the same language " because you can all speak English, which is ironic giving Brexit. How it must burn French of a certain persuasion the linga franca of the EU is English in practice given that exit lol.
It’s always amazing to me when people assume Somalis will assimilate “like the Irish and Italians” into middle-class, white-picket-fence American culture, instead of assimilating into perpetually underclass black urban culture and all the dysfunction that comes with it.
As a Minnesotan, it very much appears they’re assimilating into the latter — and to anyone familiar with HBD, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
One of the American (and Canadian, and maybe other breakaways from the British Empire) exceptionalisms that I subscribe to is that we handle immigration astonishingly well. Not perfectly, of course. But from a broad historical perspective, immigration is a really hard problem. Because of our histories as intentionally working hard to welcome strangers from abroad for centuries, we actually have social and legal institutions in place to make immigration not only functional, but actively beneficial.
Benjamin Franklin complained about the German newcomers in very unkind terms saying in 1753 "Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation". Poor German immigrants gave Scarlett Fever to Beth in 1868's Little Women, causing her death. Nationwide there was a racist panic that caused the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The 20th century were full of this stuff too. So the current panic about immigrants? For the US, it's old hat. We've done this before. We've passed good laws and bad laws in response to this in the past. Our society has a level of practice, trying lots of different things, getting it right and wrong in dozens of ways, that means we are much better positioned to set ourselves up for success now. If we'd only remember who we are and what we've already learned.
Obviously one of the best solutions to a very difficult problem that humans have ever come up with can still feel inadequate. The famous Churchill quote about democracy comes to mind, for instance.
I wish it was widely celebrated and touted as the impressive accomplishment that it is.
Here's an important point (which I thought was obvious, but from a cursory glance at the comments I don't see this obvious point being made).
It's difficult for an immigrant group in the US to commit more crime than natives, and easy for an immigrant group in Europe, because the American native murder rate is an order of magnitude higher than the European one!!!
The difference remains huge even if you account for race (US whites are much more murderous than Europeans).
Hispanics in the US aren't particularly criminal by US standard (as Ron Unz demonstrated in his piece "The myth of Hispanic crime", hispanic Americans commit crime at the same rate as white Americans), but if millions of Hispanic Americans moved to Europe, and continued to commit crime at exactly the same rate, then they would become a high-crime immigrant group, and that would fuel anti-immigration narratives.
In fact, if millions of white Americans moved to Europe, and continued to commit crime at the same rate, they too would become a high-crime immigrant group.
Conversely, if you took the scary asylum-seeker in Germany, the ones Scott says are causing the other Scott to fear asylum seekers, and you dropped them in the US, they would not be particularly criminal by US standards. Scott writes that "In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate". The murder rate in the US is 6.3 higher than in Germany, so those asylum-seekers would not stand out at all in the US.
This very simply explains why immigrants are criminal in Europe but not in the US.
Not in the article but in the footnotes, which I had skipped. Thank you for telling me.
Scott mentions the difference in native crime rates as one of many reasons for the phenomenon. He says:
——————
Partly because differing geography and history expose them to different immigrant groups, partly because differing legal systems mean they select immigrants differently, partly because different culture makes it easier for immigrants to integrate into America, and partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans, so the same immigrant crime rate can be lower than Americans but higher than Germans.
——————
If we're talking about asylum seekers specifically, who apparently behave better in the US than Germany even in absolute terms, then I agree that a multi-part explanation is needed. But if we're talking about immigrants in general, then I think that the native crime rate being much higher in the US than in Europe should be the only explanation, not one part in a multi-part explanation.
Anyhow, I feel uncomfortable saying this, because it makes me sound like an America-hater. I love Americans and I'm not saying this to diss them.
> I think that the native crime rate being much higher in the US than in Europe should be the only explanation, not one part in a multi-part explanation.
Several other comments have tried to unpack "native crime rate" in ways that I personally disagree with but that are probably worth your while reading if you are interested in this.
The natural question to ask surely is why is the "native crime rate" so much higher in the US. Not surprisingly "liberals" answer "guns and poverty" here and "conservatives" answer "blacks".
Not exactly new ground of political discourse unfortunately.
Incarceration rate is a very perverse metric, given the conservative narrative in USA focuses to a great degree on the fact that your woke DAs and prosecutors refuse to put these people in jail and/or keep releasing them no matter what they do.
> In the 1990s the Russian immigrant community in NYC grew by orders of magnitude. One thing the newly imported entrepreneurs quickly figured out is that America is extremely vulnerable to large scale fraud in almost every sphere of life. Story time!
> First, something people don't realize-- immigrant communities have higher levels of trust within than they do with the host. People will trust criminals in their own community more than they trust local institutions. Language and cultural barriers play a huge role.
> All right. So they figure out that if you get into a car accident, you can claim pain and it's impossible to medically verify. They start doing that. Fake light fender benders, claim pain, six months later get a settlement.
> But of course they had to deal with lots of American middle men-- doctors, accident lawyers, etc. That's a lot of money on the table. Why not cut the middlemen out and take all that money themselves? So they start building out the fraud infrastructure.
> By then there were enough russian lawyers and doctors. They start building law/medical offices dedicated to accident insurance. The lawyers deal with court cases, the doctors provide necessary paperwork and fake the evidence. Vertical integration means more $$$$.
> But they need clients. So they start advertising it on local russian TV and radio stations. Because the ads are in russian, they pretty much tell you how the thing works straight up. Trust and language barriers provide plausible deniability.
> Eventually it got really out of control. Dozens upon dozens of offices, competing with each other on experience and price. They also get Russian limo companies in the game. Rent two limos, fill them with 16 ppl each, crash them into each other. Boom. 32 clients.
> The insurance cos realize something's wrong. They're bleeding money in a small area of Brooklyn. They get investigators on the case. But now what? *Everyone* is Russian. Lawyers/doctors/limo cos all know each other. The "customers" don't speak any english.
> Word around the grapevine is that there is a crackdown. But the biz doesn't slow down at all. End user would get $20-30k/accident. Lawyers/doctors would probably split as much. That's really good unit economics to shut it all down.
> Eventually the way insurance cos pull it off is that they give large contracts to russian immigrant PI companies. They compensate per hour + upon producing evidence of fraud. That's what unravels the whole thing. The invisible hand strikes again.
> This gold rush lasted from ~1992 to ~2000. About a decade, give or take. News were that insurance co losses were in the billions. Good times for all.
I can confirm that we import our political debate wholesale from the US even where this makes zero sense because the issues are different. The article mentions BLM protests. Another examples are local conservatives discovering that they are suddenly anti-abortion (but without the religious underpinnings that have to play some role in the US, no?) and local "liberals" (this is a US term, hence the quotes) fighting for abortion rights they already have.
This is extremely annoying.
2) I now live under the most conservative government this country has had for nearly 30 years. Somehow they did not "fix" all the problems they claimed have easy fixes. I do not believe that the diagosis of "Europe has an immigration Problem" is correct, but the people who do believe that are in power now and somehow not a single one of my problems was solved by that. There must be some lesson in this observation, no?
They mostly talk about the UK, not the EU. And, see, Rotherham is really, really hard to explain, that was a gigantic systemic fuckup.
It is strange to see low immigrant crime rates in the US knowing how big a problem crime is in Mexico. What explains this? The cartels don't dare to mess with the FBI?
1) If you are an educated liberal, you rather know educated immigrants who are very globalized, you have Western values, and you don't notice the problems with the less educated ones. Example: massive Indian nepotism in the IT industry which is already breeding a racist or xenophobic backlash. Speak with a broadly liberal software dev and mention Indians and watch him transform into a massive hater.
2) Poaching the best educated people - the kind of people you know - from developing countries is pretty much glass beads for ivory nepotism. They did not spend taxpayer money on educating their doctors so that we can steal them. The basic minimum would be paying 2x their education costs to their home country. Either that, or rotate them, if they spend 3 years in the West, they will likely learn something they can use at home. (Or not. Like, how to operate equipment they cannot afford.)
"The ethnic background of defendants prosecuted for child sexual abuse offences was recorded in 69% (6,356) of cases in 2023 (Ministry of Justice, 2024a). Among these individuals, nine-tenths were White (5,731); across all other ethnicities, there was a much lower proportion than in the general population of England and Wales (see Table 4). This is likely to be related to the under-identification of child sexual abuse in minority ethnic communities.
There was a near-identical pattern of ethnic backgrounds, where this information was recorded, among defendants convicted in 2023."
- Child Abuse in 2023/24 : Trends in Official Data, Center of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse
While, admittedly it is hard to reconcile the great Grooming Gang scandals, with these data - which year after year - fail to show any Ethnic Pattern to Child Sex Abuse cases. However, one clue can be found :
"only in 3.7% cases of child sexual abuse, there were more than one offenders working together."
> What about the recent Somali fraud case? I agree this is bad, but obviously much less bad than grooming gangs
Hell nah! This is the "think of the children fallacy", mixed with the "government money are monopoly money". If you have fraud of sufficiently large proportions, you can directly convert it to lives, QALY, or whatever metric you chose at whatever rate you can cherry pick - and you still end up with, at the very least, hundreds of lives lost. And just to keep the anchoring somewhere in the middle, if you cherry pick at the other end, closer to "3k USD in malaria nets will save a life in Africa", only let's make it 10k for inflation, you're at 100k lives lost per billion stolen.
Play with those numbers as much as you can, but hundreds of rapes are not _automatically_ worse than _any_ amount stolen.
You seem to be confusing asylum seekers with immigrants in general.
It's plausible that asylum seekers are a self-selecting nicey-nice group while other immigrant types in general are just out to get theirs and illegal immigrants are likely to be even worse (since they're already flouting the country's laws).
The immigration-related problems in various European countries are mainly caused by asylum seekers, many of whom enter illegally in order to seek asylum.
The BLM movement is interesting. In Israel, homicide rates among arab-israelis skyrocketed in the last decade. The main response to this from law-abiding arabs was to blame the criminals or to blame the police for not being active enough in arab towns and not solving enough murder cases. Some arabs even want to involve the shabak, the israeli domestic intelligence service, in tackling arab organized crime.
BLM seem to be focused mostly on police brutality, not black-on-black crime or insufficient policing in black areas. Sure, black people have a troubled history with the state, but it's not like jewish-arab relations have been a smooth ride.
It's actually a good question what would happen in this case, I imagine bringing a baby with only a US birth certificate would raise some questions at the border, and I'm not sure I'd assume they'd automatically get Chinese citizenship. They probably actually would be considered a foreign national and some process would have to be followed to get them a Chinese birth certificate, during which they might be required to renounce any foreign citizenship?
Want to point out that anti-immigration often feels misdirected, even when based on correct info on criminality and welfare benefits. I think, at least in Sweeden, immigrants are often not given the opportunities to study and work that they need, instead becoming dependent on benefits and probably end up in circumstances making criminality more likely.
Sometimes hear stories about already employed immigrants being deported, or previous doctors having to work as taxi drivers. Don't know the statistics though.
Being anti bad-immigration-policy seems more reasonable
Heiner Rindermann et al. (2024) drew on three IQ-test studies to show that the cognitive ability of refugees in Germany was 12–15 IQ points below the national average. Cognitive ability as measured by IQ-tests is “the best predictor and the most important causal factor in job performance, innovation, and breakthrough ideas". Given also best evidence on national IQ of the countries supplying immigrants to Europe, this suggests it is not lack of opportunity but lack of ability that explains the poor performance of immigrants. Of course some immigrants will be positively selected but as the IQ of sub-Saharan Africa is probably 30 IQ points below Europe this would be compatible with Rindermann's report.
For sure there could be work for them, but in European countries people who earn less than the average are net drains on the fisc and so are their children and grandchildren. And they have more children and grandchildren than people who are net contributors. So importing low IQ people is financially unsustainable let alone the impact on culture. Unfortunately, on average low IQ people are louder, dirtier, fatter, sicker, more prone to litter, to fight, to commit crime and be generally less pleasant to be around than high IQ people. Obviously I am talking averages and distributions and exceptions always exist.
>What about the recent Somali fraud case? I agree this is bad, but obviously much less bad than grooming gangs, and forcing conservatives to focus “only” on Somali fraud rather than child rape would be a victory.
Funny you should say that, because I came across this story recently:
"Twenty-nine people have been indicted in a sex trafficking ring in which Somali gangs in Minneapolis and St. Paul allegedly forced girls under age 14 into prostitution in Minnesota, Tennessee and Ohio, according to an indictment unsealed Monday...
The indictment details several instances in which young Somali or African American girls were taken from place to place and forced to engage in sex acts with multiple people. One girl was under 13 when she was first prostituted. Another girl was 18 when she was raped by multiple men in a hotel room, the indictment said.
John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the case is significant because the girls were repeatedly victimized over several years and transported to many places. The indictment lists incidents involving four victims...
"Jane Doe Two was informed ... that selling Jane Doe Two for sex would be called a 'Mission.' It was a rule that members of the (gangs) would not be charged for sex with Jane Doe Two as they were fellow gang members," the indictment said.
One defendant, Haji Osman Salad, nicknamed "Hollywood," later made Jane Doe Two "his girl," picking her up from school, engaging in sex acts with her, and then instructing her to engage in sex acts with other men, the indictment said.
Over the course of two-day period in April 2009, the girl was forced to engage in sex acts at least 10 times with nine different men, it said. Then, she was driven to Nashville. On the way there, Salad made a cell phone video of her engaging in sex acts with some of the occupants of the vehicle, the indictment said."
If you go out of your way to avoid finding something, you probably won't find it, and it is abundantly clear that the U.S. government goes out of its way not to find migrant crime.
We wouldn't even know about the enormous scale of fraud in Minnesota if it weren't for freelance investigators digging it up. As many conservatives have pointed out, most Americans do not get anywhere near that level of leeway.
Needs more research but seems to me there is a link between the violence / murder rate in the source country - ie those who grew up in war zones or effective war zones being more likely to commit murder.
I wonder how that compares with native ex-military vs non-military population?
Is the error in trying to treat all immigrants equally, rather the recognising some need years of therapy ($$$)
Correlation or causation? And if causal what direction(s)? People who are genetically more predisposed to violence (because they have lived in societies where violence was selected for rather than against) are more likely to turn their country into a war zone.
Not sure I wholly buy that - Europe was a war zone for centuries, and violence has dramatically declined even in my lifetime in ways that I don’t think could be explained by genetic change alone.
Cultures and subcultures definitely have different attitudes towards violence, and they shift over time. I don’t think a genetic theory could explain the rise of ISIS and collapse of Syria, but a cultural one does - culture can spread faster than genes.
Hence my question about how things would look compared to military veterans - we have spent decades drilling violence out of young boys and men, the military then has to undo that training - at clearly some psychological cost as many veterans struggle to reintegrate.
That’s neutral to the question about what our moral duty is towards refugees.
It’s never going to be zero, nor is it unlimited - so regardless of numbers, what is the best way to reduce risk - to get the homicide down to a proportional level.
I may be wrong, and it is 100% genetic - which would explain Trump’s Bavarian attitudes.
It is not my theory - it was developed by Gregory Clark and also Peter Frost - you might enjoy their books. Basically they provide evidence that European society underwent a process of "genetic pacification," where the higher reproductive success of the economic elite spread traits like thrift, patience, and non-violence throughout the population. This resulted in a more civilized, literate, and productive populace over centuries. Other cultures did not undergo similar gene-culture selection.
You need to differentiate between reactive impulsive violence (which has indeed gone down in civilized countries) and deliberate violence (such as war) which has not gone down, See Goodness Paradox of Richard Wrangham.
"Why shouldn’t the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US and looms large in the American imagination. Why shouldn’t we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don’t make sense in the American context?"
Probably 80%+ of modern progressivism is European (and other) imports - Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, Maoism, social democracy, etc. Our native brand of progressivism is very Protestant (Social Gospel) stuff mixed with Enlightenment liberal thought. MLK was one of the last major more or less pure American progressives on this model. (Though he was copying Gandhian nonviolence but Gandhi got a fair bit of that from Thoureau).
Likewise, the paramilitarization of the far right is mostly a post 1970s thing and is because they are copying Nazis. Native far right was basically a weird, evil Lions club for white racists.
We basically imported European extremism and mostly replaced our native kind. We did, however, keep a very American flavor while doing it - lots of consumption to perform it (ARs and In This House We Believe signs) and individualistic pontificating.
"Why then do Dilbert readers nod along with the idea of three people per workday getting stabbed by asylum-seekers?"
Because most of them aren't reading detailed statistical analysis but are constantly watching viral videos and news reports about some illegal alien or asylum claimant who stabbed someone on a train. They then massively over update on these sensational events.
My dad who lives in a rural area was completely convinced all large cities had become war zones full of looters and antifa rioters during the summer of Floyd. He kept constantly advising me on all the ways I needed to be careful and would not believe me that absolutely nothing like this was happening anywhere near my boring Houston suburb. He also thought I was in mortal peril because I worked inside a police station at the time (civilian IT worker) and some random person would attack me leaving work one day because they were antipolice or maybe even burn down the police station.
Your story made me smile as it reminds me of Minneapolis right now. My sister is like "Just got back from Costco, the only ICE I seen in the last three months was frost scraped off my windshield in the morning".
You see this all over the place, in comparisons of American and European experiences of immigration - and it’s ridiculous :
“The average immigrant [to America] is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen.”
The only reason this is true is because the US has such a large, dysfunctional and culturally distinct African-American portion that throws the “native-born” numbers out of whack. It’s only because this population is so incredibly dysfunctional that even the poor of Latin America look perfectly orderly, by comparison. Relative to the non-Hispanic white majority, though, they’re at least competitive with Arabs in Europe for violent criminality, gang-formation and so on.
European countries - with exceptions, like France - tend to include such populations in “Immigrants and descendants” categories, giving a more honest majority-minority differential. If African-Africans were present in Europe, they’d be discussed as an unassimilated block of criminal and cultural dysfunction of the kind that Americans are shocked to find in Brussels, Paris and so on. African-American “migration” remains a colossal failure of American immigration policy, if considered as such.
Then there are skilled migrants in both Europe and the US, which tilt the numbers positively in both, but aren’t really the subject of this conservative narrative.
The article paints "Europe" with the same broad brush with which it accuses others painting "the West". Even if we just focus on the European Union (comprising less than half of Europe's landmass and about 60% of its population), the demographics of immigrants and asylum seekers is very different in different member states or even sub-state regions. When conservatives make an example of the supposedly tough immigration policies of Poland and Hungary (which is objectively not true either), contrasting it with that of, say, Germany, they fail to consider that the population of immigrants is both quantitatively and qualitatively very-very different in these countries. What further complicates this issue is that the freedom to relocate within the EU applies very differently to different classes of humans and the enforcement of restrictions is also very varied, making the reality on the ground very different from legal fiction and official statistics.
Wow, Even shitlibs like Scott are starting to admit what has been obvious for more than 10 years, that mass immigration of muslims and africans is ruining Europe.
Will they apologise for advocating for it for decades and insinuating that anyone who is warning against it and pointing out the negative outcomes is a racist white supremacist? Obviously not since that would require honour and accountability.
Liberals like to do this dishonest reframing of saying "immigration is good" where they pretend that all immigration is the same and that accepting say a million immigrants from Japan and South Korea will have the same affect on your country as accepting a million immigrants from Pakistan or Morocco.
Liberals are pure scum of the earth who have absolutely ruined one of the greatest regions of the planet out of some perverse worship of brown people where any rational, evidence-based appraisal of their behavioural outcomes is forbidden as blasphemy.
I've studied this, looking at crime statistics from different European countries. What's interesting is that per immigrant group, they don't differ much. I.e. France isn't better at "integrating" Moroccans than Belgium, or Denmark. Turks don't integrate better in an other country than they do in Germany, despite claims that they can't integrate in Germany because of German politics.
> Immigrants could do everything right and conservatives would still hate them for taking jobs
There's a problem that remains when you take away all other problems, but it's not jobs, it's culture. People are attached to the culture they live in, and they don't want to see it displaced or overly altered.
You can look at places where recent immigrants outperform the "native" population in every way, like Hawaii (counting all non-Polynesians as immigrants for this purpose), and they have materially improved the lives of the native people considerably. You'll still find a lot of resentment of that, and some of that is quite legitimate.
The culture changes without immigration, you're not cool anymore old man. This reminds me of my country, growing up it was virtually all catholic, nowadays I was surprised to see that something like 40% are some flavor of protestant, courtesy of US missionaries. Always sad to see something like this happen. And of all things to take from the US, why the weird religious stuff?
>The culture changes without immigration, you're not cool anymore old man.
Yes, but like most things, there's a threshold beyond which the rate of change becomes harmful and alienating, and mass immigration tends to push the rate beyond that threshold.
The daycare stuff has been going on for [a long time](https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2019/03/what-we-learned-from-the-audit-of-minnesotas-child-care-assistance-program-no-suitcases-full-of-cash-but-plenty-of-baggage/), though the exact degree continues to be up for debate. It's interesting to see how Republicans overindex on it and Democrats like to ignore it exists at all.
>most of the other people involved were Somalin, but most people in parts of Minnesota are Somalin,
what a fascinating phrasing.
Surely it is significant that the money was collected, and now after presumably it’s all shut down - there is no widespread, where is my daycare? Where will I find childcare now?
Well, it wouldn’t be a fraud if the daycares have been functioning normally all this time and continue to do so versus being empty shells or mailing addresses. I guess your contention is that it did not happen at all. I don’t even think Tim Walz is claiming that, but I haven’t followed recent developments.
Literally the one from the video.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minneapolis-day-care-quality-learning-center-closed-after-nick-shirley-video/
I'm mostly ignoring the Somali aspect and I'm more fascinated that Minnesota seems to have a significant amount of fraud that's kind of broadly tolerated. Like, yes, there was the Feeding Our Future prosecution, so is the threshold somewhere in the 8-9 figures before they care? What other states have similar issues of widespread but broadly-tolerated welfare fraud?
To throat clear a bit, I'm quite sure, for example, West Virginia has significant amount of various forms of fraud, and that is also bad.
>So when a white women in Minnesota wanted to set up a fraud operation and hire people, she was gonna hire Somalis, the same way a German would hire Germans
Well, uh, no, I don't think that's the case at all. It could still be coincidental but your analogy is way off.
Minnesota is less than 2% Somali; Germany is 73% German. Hiring specifically in Minneapolis, or specific neighborhoods like Columbia Heights, your point is a little stronger but still nowhere close to the same ratio.
>Do you dispute nick Shirley's dishonesty/low intelligence?
I mean if you really want my opinion on journalists, you know what forum we're in, right?
The Rio Grande Valley has a great deal of Medicare or Medicaid fraud. Things become embedded rather readily.
The fraud in Minnesota is part of the political system and is specific to the Somali community. The Somalis are organized, insular, and loyal to their ethnic group. They are allowed to commit fraud because they reward and punish politicians by directing votes and political donations. You can see this in the leaked audio between Somali fraudsters and the Minnesota AG, where they are open about looking out for the Somali community and rewarding politicians who play ball. A random non-Somali fraudster will not benefit from the same political protection.
Trump BS vs fact
https://mn.gov/dhs/program-integrity/factcheck/
West Virginia pays its taxes (its citizens have a higher tax rate than we do). I never mind sending federal funds to West Virginia. Scofflaws like South Carolina are a different story.
And I've heard of the corruption in West Virginia. It's minor. (As in hundreds of dollars, when a good bribe to a local politician is around $2000 -- where I'm at we're still in Appalachia, so this isn't cali money talking).
LOL, fair enough about South Carolina!
I'm originally from West Virginia and I was thinking of stuff like questionable disability declarations, of otherwise able-bodied people finding the right doc to sign off on 100%.
Supposedly it's a widespread thing in the military these days too.
Disability's a problem pretty much round the country by this point. Welfare is stigmatized more than disability, so people get disability when they possibly can.
Didn’t the base rate change fairly recently?
Surely you meant to say "lower than Americans but higher than Germans"?
Thanks, fixed.
I don't know the statistics about immigration in Europe broadly, but I certainly know enough to know that immigration is not monolithic across the continent. (This is also true for America, but since in Europe we can break countries down more narrowly, it is useful to do so).
Immigration in the UK does not match "the American conservative narrative on immigration" at all. Immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial and basically good, and commit crimes at much lower rates. They often outperform the native-born on standardized testing (as a general rule).
Okay, I know you mentioned that one can cherry-pick from European countries, but I just want to add this on behalf of the UK, because I think we may be getting the American backflow from the European backflow! :)
That is an amazing view of immigration to the UK which accurately reflects the immigration of generations of Indians and of African elites, and neatly elides the entire last 15 years.
I think Scott was suggesting that one _not_ do exactly that.
I am saying that the last 15 years have also been good, if you look at the statistics, despite what one may hear.
I'm confused.
My understanding is that the net migration to the UK has ballooned in the past 10 years - https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/unprecedented-increases - and that the expected economic contribution of the marginal immigrant to the UK is now significantly negative - https://www.edrith.co.uk/p/britain-isnt-working-part-1-of-3 . Do you disagree with either of those statements?
Net migration to the UK has ballooned (this is good). I agree with that.
The expected economic contribution of the marginal immigrant to the UK is positive, quite clearly. So I disagree with that. I mean it depends how you rank marginal, obviously there will be some that will have a negative expected economic contribution so if you list by expected economic contribution then yes negative, but this is true everywhere because basically everywhere needs to overhaul their immigration system (the US too).
It's not when it's a driver of the Cost of Housing and Living, where we haven't been building enough houses to match population growth since the 70s.
Well let's be a bit careful with our economic analysis here.
The cost of living crisis is basically a ridiculous farce driven by the fact that far too few british people are skilled and working good jobs, and they expect a higher standard of living without putting in the work to achieve it.
The housing crisis is pretty true, but the counterpoint to the housing crisis is rising house prices, which is good for homeowners. Now, I agree that the housing crisis is an issue, and we need to build more houses, but it is not a simple "positive" or "negative" to the economy as a whole.
Housing crises are almost always artificial and supply-induced, not demand. Building more housing is not actually a hard problem, we're very good at it. We just refuse to.
Seems to me like the problem then is the part where we don't build houses.
Imagine if there wasn't immigration and Britain miraculously had a high fertility. Would you tell people "stop having children" because there's not enough houses for them?
Visit a hospital. Wait until you or one of your relatives needs care, either in their own home or in a care home. The presence of immigrants prepared to do what we Brits choose not to do, is a huge benefit in real terms, whatever the money says.
This is entirely the product of policy though. The BMA have a hard limit on how many doctors can be trained and the Boris government made it so that native doctors don't have any priority on training spaces. Likewise we have extremely high rates of economic inactivity. No wonder the hospitals are full of (often not very good due to lesser quality training) doctors from the developing world when we actively prevent British citizens from becoming doctors and nurses!
True! We need to reform the BMA massively! Hugely rent-seeking!
I understand that one of the key limits on training places is that there are simply not enough senior people to train new starters as they are too busy treating people to train others. This is in part a consequence of the pressures on the NHS - reducing waiting lists is good short term but removes training capacity in the NHS thus creating a long term problem, which is the limit on training.
Fundamentally the NHS has been operating above capacity for so long that the processes needed to keep it going broke.
I don't know about the UK, but in Germany, the health care sector runs on immigrant labor, and that's specifically true for the non-doctor roles. No one is stopping Germans from becoming nurses and the like. There are simply not enough who want to do it, so we need immigrants to fill these roles.
Of course, you can argue that, if working conditions were better, we wouldn't have to rely on people from poorer countries, but I don't think that the general population is willing to pay what it takes to make that happen.
"Visit a hospital"
The demographics of NHS staff are identical to the demographics of the UK as a whole, the idea that the health service (or elderly care) is disproportionate reliant on immigrant labour is a false one.
Those sectors are certainly reliant on immigrant labour to suppress wages, but immigrants don't make up more than their expected share of heath staff.
This is not true, if you don't estimate by skin color only, it is really common to fly in docs from Eastern Europe for 36-hour shifts, clearly the NHS is massively understaffed.
Also, the vast majority of British immigrants do not work in the NHS. Even if we assume that the NHS is reliant on immigrant labour (which as you point out isn't true, but let's pretend for argument's sake), we could still cut immigration by a good 90% and still keep the NHS fully staffed.
Interestingly I visited a hospital in Australia recently and found that the majority of nurses were either British or Irish immigrants. A lot of them talked about how much better things are in Australia than at home, both in terms of the pay and conditions and in terms of how well the overall medical system works.
So it's not that British people aren't willing to be nurses, it's just that the NHS is unwilling to pay British people to be nurses.
The "vast majority" of Doctors who were struck off or suspended were trained overseas per GMC. The UK must reduce immigration as a public health measure.
https://healthcareleadernews.com/news/majority-of-doctors-struck-off-were-trained-overseas/
The article doesn't contain the total number of doctors, so it's not possible to tell if that's a big problem.
Twice as likely to be struck off isn't great, but it's not clear if it's much at all in total terms.
Riding a bike is more lethal than walking. Doesn't mean we need to stop riding bikes as a public health measure.
The article is from 2013 btw.
Britbongs visiting the hospital is a prime reason riots have been breaking out recently. Amerifat out.
Does that article offer some evidence of migrants having negative contributions that I'm missing? he just seems to be generically saying they're bad without any details.
That said: asylum seekers in the UK are not legally allowed to work (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/handling-applications-for-permission-to-take-employment-instruction/permission-to-work-and-volunteering-for-asylum-seekers-accessible), which certainly decreases their economic contributions. And which certainly doesn't say anything about immigrants who are given citizenship and full rights and allowed to participate normally in the economy.
This is why arguing about foreign countries is dangerous - they have just as much nuance and important context as the US, but we are much less likely to know about them and consider them in our arguments.
It's easy to become a 'man of one study' when talking about a culture you're not immersed in and have just read one study about.
The economic contribution metric is often a joke because it focuses on essentially tax on income. In a welfare system, it's normal that there's going to be a lower tier of tax payers who are net receivers whereas the richer side are net contributors. This is what the system is *designed to do*: redistribution from the rich to the poor. The implication that because someone is a net negative on the public balance (namely, receives more in healthcare and other benefits than they pay in taxes) means they're overall a burden on the economy is absurd, because it doesn't count all the economic activity those people enable (both as workers and consumers), activity which is *also* taxed, but does not figure directly as part of their income. And the lower your income, the higher a % of your total real contributions to the economy that activity likely is.
Crazy as it sounds, UK economists thought of that already. But no matter how hard you squeeze, there's just not enough juice in non-EEA immigration to the UK (which is most of it). We even tried adding back non-cash credits for the education costs we didn't have to provide. Just can't get those numbers over the line.
I don't quite understand this comment. To me it parses like vulgar Keynesian "broken window fallacy" stuff. Yes, there are weird times when an economy can be harmed by a slump in consumption, but we still want productivity and net takers are still a burden. Even when doing Keynesian demand-side interventions, there are more and less wasteful ways to do them. Going to the store while living on the dole does not make you a net contributor to the economy. Having too many such people is how you become 2015 Greece.
Of course that is all obvious, so I suspect that I am missing what you tried to say.
> net takers are still a burden
What would an economy with no net takers look like? How do you even achieve that? Does the state just not get taxes at all? Do they take them and spend them on... what? I assume nothing that ever directly benefits any one individual?
Again, the whole point of a welfare system is redistribution and sort of countering some of the starker inequality creating economic forces. So yes, it goes without saying that part of it is essentially "the richer half pays healthcare/pensions/whatever to the poorer half". You need the two sides to be balanced and that's done via deciding on the precise level of welfare as well as the tax burden. But generally speaking it's normal that some people will be net takers. This is not some horrible dysfunction of the system. It happens because those people have low income, something we know happens in a market economy and can happen even for very vital jobs (street cleaner, mailman, even teacher or nurse), but the principle of a welfare state is that they should still be able to have a dignified life.
Could you just find ways to have the market solve that by paying them higher salaries? Maybe, I don't know - historical examples aren't very encouraging. But even if, you would risk needing to push things to an extreme for that to happen (e.g. roads keep getting filthier until enough people finally decide it's necessary to be willing to pay road cleaners more). Welfare is the compromise between trying to keep the society capitalist and simply letting most workers get double fucked by both doing hard, dangerous, necessary jobs and still not even managing to gain enough to live on. Because ultimately salaries aren't determined just by societal necessity of a job, they're determined by bargaining power factors which mean those people often aren't in a good position to capture much of the value they produce and that leads to them appearing as "net takers" in the books, not that they are actually useless.
Generally speaking, if you could just make all the "net takers" by this definition vanish overnight, you wouldn't get a rich and prosperous society now free from economic parasitism. You would get instantaneous collapse into barbarism. That says something about how meaningful the concept is in actually reflecting the real usefulness of people to society.
"Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal
From the late 1980s until 2013, group-based child sexual exploitation affected an estimated 1,400 girls, commonly from care home backgrounds, in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. Between 1997 and 2013, girls were abused by grooming gangs of predominantly Pakistani men. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
Yes, I am aware. It is a big scandal and a problem. But in the grand scheme of such things it is clearly not determinative on whether immigration is overall positive or negative. Should be dealt with though, for sure. But, though I am reticent to say it, it has become slightly overblown in political discourse in the UK/about the UK (but of course for the victims it remains horrific and has to be dealt with promptly and swiftly).
In the grand scheme of such things, "Just in this one instance, immigrants have systematically raped hundreds of children for decades" sounds like a pretty heavy weight on the 'negative' scale. How many excellent ethnic restaurants does it take to balance this out in your book?
I mean just in the grand scheme of child sexual abuse it makes up like 2.5% of all cases (hard to estimate such things because the Casey Report wasn't able to find great numbers, but let's assume it is 5x underreported compared to baseline).
I am not saying it's not horrific, I'm just saying there are other factors here, and if immigrants are also incredibly entrepreneurial then increasing the UK's GDP will increase people's socioeconomic status, which is probably one of the most predictive factors for whether children will suffer abuse. So immigrants still net out positive.
In a world where people are more and more atomized and people of good socio-economic status have so few children, it seems far from clear that ”growing the economy” just automatically equals children in society doing well.
Is this a make-people-happy vs make-happy-people distinction?
"people's socioeconomic status, which is probably one of the most predictive factors for whether children will suffer abuse."
Why? Seems like mistaking correlation for causation.
I mean it's hard to work out causation. I'm open to better hypotheses.
And if they are not as incredibly entrepreneurial as you keep claiming without any reference to data, then they are a clear net negative. Where is your break-even point? Where is the threshold at which you can confidently say that this is somehow worth it?
I referenced data in a reply to you below.
"Only this specific case involved UK authorities covering up extremely prevalent crime from importing pets to terrorize native Britons"
Some authorities covered it up and some didn’t.
Blacks and Asians are fiscally negative in the UK, per UK gov't.
So the grooming gangs (biggest ever peacetime mass rape) is just the cherry on top.
Have you seen UK's GDP growth rates in the past decade? The least we can say is that explosion of immigration in this case *did not* lead to this sorts of benefits. This is in fact the greatest natural experiment we had to disprove the 'trillion dollars on the sidewalk' argument for open borders.
Well, yes, we also did Brexit which had a negative impact. I mean it's not a great natural experiment, since you'd need a control. Maybe Ireland, but I'd guess their immigration stats look a bit different.
One of the common themes of the grooming gangs is that the perpetrators' co-ethnics in the police and local government helped cover up their crimes, so it's not "just" children being raped, it's the integrity of the state and the rule of law being compromised by ethnic mafias.
Forget the restaurants. How many doctors, nurses and care workers does it take?
Why do you need foreign doctors? As in: What value are they providing over domestic doctors? Being easier to exploit?
“Easier to exploit” is quite the dysphemism for “reducing the absolutely ballooning amount of money we are spending on healthcare, mostly for old pensioners (who are broadly themselves net takers from the welfare state)”
Because, as a policy decision intended to "starve the beast" so that it can be replaced with systems that make cashflows easier for private investors to extract, we have decided not to offer our medical staff rates that are copetitive by Western standards, so they are all going to the US where they get paid more while working fewer hours; but this agenda is at odds with people still wanting to not get sick and die, so there is pressure to acquire medical staff willing to work the hours we want for the pay we offer from somewhere so the system can limp along for a little while longer despite the factions attempting to kill it.
Simply the lack of domestic doctors.
The majority of UK doctors struck off were foreign trained, so they don't go in the positive column.
Friendly reminder that positive outliers matter too! https://blog.outlandish.claims/p/theoxenia
Or to be less U.S.-centric (at the cost of some quick slapdash research), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syma_Khalid was the daughter of working-class Pakistani immigrants in the similar-population town of Wolverhampton over the same time period, and is currently running https://www.hecbiosim.ac.uk.
Slightly? We're currently in the eighth formal inquiry, and Rupert Lowe is doing a ninth one.
Well, we should get to the bottom of it as much as possible. But yes, it is clearly overblown.
Yes, but I think we'd be better off implementing the first seven.
I think the thing is that basically it was swept under the rug (bad), and not addressed properly when it happened. And now, no matter how many inquiries one does, the evidence is simply not there to find the perpetrators, and the networks have basically stopped existing due to other crackdowns that have already happened. So it will be hard to find justice, but people really really want justice here (which makes sense, but it will be extremely hard to get).
How is it overblown? It is becoming increasingly evident that the numbers of British children raped is in the 6 to even 7 figure range. The Casey report explicitly stated that the media and government were trying to cover it up and deliberately deflecting from its severity. If this had occurred during a civil war it would be taught in ethics textbooks about crimes against humanity.
That’s simply false. But if you have a reputable source for this I would be happy to look.
The population of Rotherham is about 100k. If the number of British children raped by the Rotherham gangs were in six figures then that would mean that every inhabitant of Rotherham was raped by them.
Perhaps they somehow managed to arrange for hundreds of thousands of people not living in Rotherham to pass through Rotherham's care homes so that they could molest them. If the number of British children raped by the Rotherham gangs were in seven figures then that would mean that more than 1% of _the whole UK population_ are among their victims.
Just by way of reminder, the usual estimate is "at least 1400". (That was the figure found by the Jay enquiry; the subsequent Casey enquiry's report, which you cite, says "we fully endorse" Jay's findings. Jay and Casey both stress that the actual number may be higher. But they would not write the way they do if they thought it was _three orders of magnitude_ higher. I don't think they would write the way they do if they thought it was _one_ order of magnitude higher.)
Wherever you are getting your numbers from is not even _trying_ to make them have any correspondence with reality. They are deliberately deceiving you and I think you should stop trusting them.
(For the avoidance of doubt: yes, 1400 children is 1400 too many. "At least 1400" children is at least 1400 too many. And it does indeed look as if local government in Rotherham attempted to cover it up, which is appalling. All of that is true. None of that justifies inflating the figures by three orders of magnitude.)
Overblown? It's the 3rd biggest organised mass rape in history, and the largest in peacetime. We've had war courts and new treaties over less.
What’s 1st, 2nd, and 4th?
We probably have different moral systems, but I cannot fathom how any positives from immigration outweigh hundreds of raped children. Ideally you would just have an immigration system that does a better job of filtering out child rapists and a police system less likely to cover it up, but as it exists now, I can’t imagine arguing it to be a net benefit.
Because there are other things that matter in the world, basically.
Hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you’re looking at numbers and other people are looking at raped children.
The stance is: literally nothing is worth this.
I was at the ‘ literally nothing is worth this ‘ when Sweden starting having hand grenade battles for Europe and ‘ my roofer friend can’t find a job because the Haitians are getting paid 12$ an hour ‘ for America - so I’m sure you understand how I feel.
The same way we still allow private cars even though lots of children get run over each year. Banning the whole concept is not the right solution to the problem.
Does this logic apply to the Catholic Church as well? They covered up notorious sex abuse for decades, often with help from police, and probably at a similar scale to the grooming gangs. What should America do about its catholic problem? Is catholic culture compatible with American values?
(Basically you can find horrific scandals involving any group, and it’s usually a bad idea to use those scandals as the sole criterion for policy, because as other people have pointed out there are actually other things that matter)
"If you think this wave of immigrant rape-torturers is bad, then get a load of how molest-y the Catholics our forefathers tried to keep out of the country are!" is probably not the most watertight pro-immigration argument I've ever seen.
Unless the reader himself is catholic and too "ethnocentric" to even consider whether his own group could ever be a net-negative anywhere.
Boy I guess I haven’t been exposed to the “we shouldn’t have let Catholics into the country” side of the internet. But my hot take is: the many Catholics we let into the country have been a net good for america, and are now held up by most people as assimilated exemplars of American values. If we deported them because of the sexual abuse scandals, it would be a net loss for everyone. If you don’t buy that premise, Okee doke.
>probably at a similar scale to the grooming gangs.
Citation very much needed.
“Between 2001 and 2010, the Holy See reviewed approximately 3,000 cases involving priests, some of which dated back decades.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_cases?wprov=sfti1#
Sheesh. Ideally, you would have an immigration system that didn't allow the importation of minors for rape.
Do you trust crime statistics released by a government that did that? I sure don't.
To me it just seems weird to talk about "migration" as either a net positive or net negative. It seems obvious that immigrants are not all the same and their cultural compatibility with the native population is not going to be the same, either. Would it be completely out of bounds to make distinctions like "these immigrants have been great, these kind merely good, and these other ones not so good?"
Yes, but one has to engage on a systems-level. I think basically everyone agrees we should change the system somehow, but it's really nontrivial to do that, and as it stands the three reputable positions are basically "more immigration" "same/similar immigration" or "less immigration."
It is nice to speculate about how we can cherry-pick only the best entrepreneurs who are also going to acculturate quickly and do well in school, and be high human capital etc etc etc. But ultimately that level of granularity ought to be reserved for economics papers. The political question is basically a trichotomy (unfortunately, but this is the truth)
The only countries with good data - Denmark and Holland - show clearly migrants from non-Western countries have massive costs and migrants from Western countries have net benefits. That might be a good start to a sane migration policy.
This seems unclear. I think other countries also have good data, and non-western is a super broad category (as is western).
In the UK, people from the Balkans seem to do on average way worse than e.g. Indian immigrants.
Haven't Canada and Australia managed to do so? You guys can't let yourselves be outshone by former colonies! Get with it!
Well, according to my dialog with James below, it *is* out of bounds: "immigrants from virtually every nation are a net benefit."
(See, James, this is why I was asking about your response to John Smith: in your reply below, it *seems as if* you grant that some groups of immigrants are not good—just as it *seemed* [to me, anyway] as if you granted J.S.'s contention about the statistics *in re* immigrants from the Global South—but it is not actually what you think!)
Cultural compatibility with genocide ought to be put on the table, too. Many cultures consider genocide to be less bad than Gringos do.
It was a scandal for two reasons: mass child rape, and the authorities knowing about it but doing nothing for ideological reasons.
Now we're looking at a reasonable chance of Farage becoming PM, while Starmer is dealing with the consequences of a different child rape scandal. It's all very depressing.
Clearly not determinative? It IS determinative for many, maybe most people.
I guess it depends on how much you value children not being raped.
Also depends on how much you value everything else that exists in the world.
>But, though I am reticent to say it, it has become slightly overblown in political discourse in the UK/about the UK (but of course for the victims it remains horrific and has to be dealt with promptly and swiftly).
What do you think is the correct level of salience for the systematic, ethnically-based rape of tens of thousands of schoolgirls over several decades with the tacit and sometimes active support of state authorities?
Pretty low given the hundreds of thousands innocent people that have been imprisoned and raped and not just sometimes, but fully and actively supported, by the state authorities doesn't even warrant a blink in the UK political narrative.
There are several towns with official numbers of victims of grooming gangs like that in the several hundred to 1,400 range. London has no official figure. I took these figures, adjusted to the total UK Pakistani population, assumed continuity, and used 80% unreported. This gave me a figure of several tens of thousands. I don't know why any mainstream source I've seen hasn't speculated on this
Because there's little to no evidence that it was an issue in London. It seemed like it was more of an issue in northern cities and towns.
"Was" is an unlikely term for the situation. Cousin marriage naturally creates extreme kinship groups who have little regard for outgroups and can very easily coordinate among closely related family members. People who are not protected by their own kinship group rely on the police, who appear to be influenced by the local political power of the perpetrating groups
Are you claiming this is still ongoing on a systemic level nationwide? Source? (I don't want a source on the kinship thing, that's whatever)
The Labour government voted against a national inquiry in 2025, indicating that the psychological and political influences that prevented a serious police response are very much in effect
>Are you claiming this is still ongoing on a systemic level nationwide? Source?
The factors that led to decades-long systematic abuse still apply, so it would really be quite astonishing if the abuse had just magically stopped.
This was covered up by the British state, which also covered up the Savile case, the Kincora boys home, had Prince Andrew (and Lord Mountbatten before him) in the royal family, etc.
Rather than a problem caused by immigration, I think this kind of scandal is caused by British elites ranging from "actively molesting children" to "prepared to look the other way at institutionalized child rape".
I can't think of a counterpart to Rotherham in Pakistan itself.
Because in Pakistan, you ~never meet a woman walking alone, without male relatives who will try to kill you if you try to speak to her. Going from there to Britain must be an experience similar to that of hungry sailors discovering an island full of tasty, flightless birds with no fear of humans.
We will note that when Pakistani men encounter a defended little girl, they call the police like every other adult ought to, in order to ... remove the knife-wielding child, and ... well, you know how this happens.
If we instituted justice like Pakistan, they'd learn to chop their own dicks real quick.
>I can't think of a counterpart to Rotherham in Pakistan itself.
In Pakistan itself, they keep their womenfolk inside, because everybody knows that any unaccompanied women walking abroad would be considered fair game for rape.
This is not the case in Eritrea, for example, where women fought for their homeland.
Counterpoint :
"The ethnic background of defendants prosecuted for child sexual abuse offences was recorded in 69% (6,356) of cases in 2023 (Ministry of Justice, 2024a). Among these individuals, nine-tenths were White (5,731); across all other ethnicities, there was a much lower proportion than in the general population of England and Wales (see Table 4). This is likely to be related to the under-identification of child sexual abuse in minority ethnic communities.
There was a near-identical pattern of ethnic backgrounds, where this information was recorded, among defendants convicted in 2023."
- Child Abuse in 2023/24 : Trends in Official Data, Center of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse
While, admittedly it is hard to reconcile the great Grooming Gang scandals, with these data - which year after year - fail to show any Ethnic Pattern to Child Sex Abuse cases. However, one clue can be found :
"only in 3.7% cases of child sexual abuse, there were more than one offenders working together."
I don't live in the UK, but I don't think your claims are accurate.
The UK's prison service freely admits that "people from minority ethnic groups are over-represented within the prison population" and that "In the prison population, around 27% identified as being from a minority ethnic group in 2025, compared with 18% in the general population." (https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04334/SN04334.pdf, pg 21) Granted that many of these people may be British nationals.
This study found that conviction rates for British nationals and foreign nationals are broadly similar (https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/migrant-convictions-and-prison-population/).
This study (https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/a-levels-apprenticeships-further-education/average-score-for-students-taking-a-levels-and-other-qualifications/latest/) compared A-level results by ethnicity. In 2021/22, the only ethnic groups to outperform "White British" were "Indian", "Chinese", "mixed white and Asian" and "White Irish" (go us!). In 2022/23, the only groups to outperform "White British" were "Indian", "Chinese", "mixed white and Asian", "White Irish" and "White other". So four ethnic groups outperformed the native population, and twelve underperformed it.
If you adjust for age, migrants are underrepresented in prison populations.
"Indian", "Chinese", "mixed white and Asian" make up a large proportion of GCSE results, and again, if you adjust for socioeconomic status, the margins become even larger.
Also I think Black British outperform at GCSE. Perhaps different at A-level. Basically they're broadly comparable to native-born (but vastly more entrepreneurial).
In the study comparing A-level results, the period 2021/22 included 28,535 students, of which 19,923 were "white British". Of the remaining 8,612 students, the ethnicity of 6,709 was known. Of these, 955 outperformed the "white British" cohort, with the remaining 5,754 (or 86%) underperforming.
Equivalent figures for 2022/23:
• Total cohort: 28,023
• of which white British: 19,117
• of which not white British and ethnicity known: 7,029
• of which outperformed white British: 2,415
• of which underperformed white British: 66%
So, on average, 76% of A-level students who are not white Britons will receive worse marks than white Britons.
I think glossing this as "They often outperform the native-born on standardized testing" is profoundly misleading. Three times out of four, they do not.
Sorry, I think it may be different at A-level compared to GCSE. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/gcse-results-attainment-8-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest/
A-level seems like a worse measure to me for reasons that we could get into, but basically I think other weird factors start influencing, and it's not very standardized so comparisons become hard and weird.
Given you think they are underrepresented - are you open to the idea that different cultures produce different levels of crime?
Why do you think that migrants are less criminal? Are they richer than British Nationals on the whole? Are they poorer but being poorer makes people less likely to commit crimes? Are less sex crimes committed by Muslim migrants because Islam is especially tolerant and respectful of female rights? Or does it all correlate with entrepreneurial, presumably because deciding to go to the UK was entrepreneurial. I guess now I'm really interested in how well entrepreneurial parents correlates with genetic traits like intelligence to outperform at school.
Well, actually even if they were slightly more criminal, I would still probably take them. My reasoning here is similar to Lee Kuan Yew's reasoning when he introduced an education system:
"The decisive factor for high performance was a pair of well-educated parents. [...] 1960 and 1970 data analyses [showed] most of our top students who won scholarships for universities abroad had parents who were not well-educated: storekeepers, hawkers, taxi drivers, and laborers. I compared them to the 1980 and 1990 data that revealed over 50 percent of the best 100 scholarship winners had at least one parent who was a professional or self-employed. The conclusion was obvious, that the parents of these scholarship winners of the 1960s and 1970s would have made it to university had they been born a generation later when education was universal." (A quote from From Third World to First)
I think the UK and places accepting immigrants more broadly are arbitraging a little bit of underperformance today (though in the UK's case we are still getting overperformance today), for massive overperformance in future generations, essentially. I also think this explains a lot of America's success.
Yes, sure those inmigrants with 80 average IQ are gonna be amazing doctors and engineers that will be incredibly helpful for the natives, especially in the age of AI!
Unsure what AI has to do with this? I think the average IQ of immigrants to the UK is higher than 80 (we don't have stats on this, but I would be pretty surprised if it wasn't).
Also IQ (a la Stanford-Binet) seems like a poor measure if coming from countries with much worse educational systems. I expect their children to overperform them.
Lee Kuan Yew also said that ethnically homogenous countries are easier to run and that many of his policies were directly aimed at ameliorating the problems of diversity. He would not be in favour of mass immigration.
That looked wrong, but turns out to be true for foreign nationals ("migrants" isn't a category anyone's using in prison stats, and the UK has a policy of not compiling immigration status statistics for crime)...
...because the UK's homegrown and naturalised Black Caribbean and Pakistani populations bring up the home team advantage.
Having said that, it looks from eyeballing it like that foreign nationals are underrepresented as serving prisoners on long sentences due to being deported.
>"people from minority ethnic groups are over-represented within the prison population"
Of course, there are lots of potential explanations for that.
Just to make the ad absurdum explicit, lots of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. Is this evidence they were uniquely criminal and dangerous?
One of the explanations is "they commit more crimes." Perhaps we can think of a way to determine if this is so; e.g., in the U.S., there's the victimization surveys.
The link provided in the parent post about conviction rates seems to suggest that "they commit more crimes" probably ought be the default assumption, I'd think—we would expect to see disproportion there, otherwise. Of course, one can always come up with alternative explanations, but at a certain point we should maybe admit that we're reaching.¹
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¹(*I'll* never do so, naturally, but *others* should–)
Jesus Christ dude, I'm so glad you've been (repeatedly!) banned from the Motte.
Yes, the UK (that nation which turned a blind eye to Pakistani grooming gangs for decades so as not to "inflame community tensions", and in which the prime minister is routinely dubbed "two- tier Keir") is going door to door rounding up racial minorities to toss them in prison and throw away the key. Sure. That must be the explanation for their overrepresentation in the prison system.
If the example of the grooming gangs is any indication, these statistics probably understate the scale of the differential in criminality: there are thousands of white Britons in prison who shouldn't be (because they were convicted for "hate speech" or some similar act of thoughtcrime) and probably thousands of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who ought to be in prison but aren't.
The grooming gangs are not a good example. It's more complex than it's been made out, and to do with classism issues, and intra-community problems (not just pakistani grooming gangs going after white girls, as it is often portrayed, it's vastly more mixed than that when you read the actual Casey report).
There are also definitely not thousands of white britons who have been convicted of hate speech. Source? Usually in these cases people are arrested but it is not followed up on (still bad, but not thousands).
>it's vastly more mixed than that when you read the actual Casey report
Let's have a look, shall we? https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685559d05225e4ed0bf3ce54/National_Audit_on_Group-based_Child_Sexual_Exploitation_and_Abuse.pdf
From page 61: "Ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators. Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data were much higher in police data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Their data shows there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity in these police force areas."
Sounds suspiciously like "recording the ethnicity of these perpetrators would inflame community tensions, so we decided not to bother".
From page 71: "Ethnicity in the VKPP report was only recorded for 35% of victims, with nearly two-thirds unknown. Despite that, the report shows that for victims of CSAE with self-identified ethnicity that, in 2023:
• 87% of identified victims were recorded as White or White British"
>There are also definitely not thousands of white britons who have been convicted of hate speech. Source?
I'm a bit confused as to why you asked for a source when you've already decided I'm wrong, but nevertheless.
https://inforrm.org/2015/05/31/judicial-statistics-internet-troll-convictions-soar-media-lawyer/
"[In 2014] 1,209 people were found guilty of offences under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003... Of those convicted, 155 were jailed – compared with just seven a decade before. The average custodial sentence was 2.2 months."
https://thetimes.com/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day-in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d
According to the Times, 1,399 people were convicted under this act in 2023.
That's two data points. Let's assume the rate of convictions is constant, and of those convicted, the proportion who serve jail time is constant. The average of the 2014 convictions and 2023 convictions is 1,304. Of those convicted in 2014, 155 served jail time, or 12.8%. The bill was passed in 2003. If 1,304 are convicted under it every year, that means 28,688 convictions in total, of which 3,672 served jail time.
And this is only assuming a totally flat rate of arrests, convictions and prison sentences: the real figure could well be higher.
See also this page (https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003/Section_127) which cites data from the Ministry of Justice indicating that 8,992 people were convicted under this act in the period 2003-2014, and that the conviction ratio crept up from 67% in 2003 to 78% by 2010. That's an average of 817 convictions a year. If we assume that figure remained flat for the period 2015-2025, there have been a total of 17,162 people convicted under this act. If 12.8% of those served jail time, that's 2,196.
I've provided you with two credible back-of-the-envelope estimates of how many people have served jail time under Section 127 of the Communications Act, both of which were in excess of 2,000 i.e. "thousands".
See also Greg Lukianoff (https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-speech-in, https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/online-censorship-in-the-uk-has-led), who noted that, in the period 2014-15, more people were arrested under this act than the total number arrested during the first Red Scare, even though the population of the UK was only 70% that of the US in 1920.
And bear in mind – this is just ONE piece of legislation under which can face imprisonment for saying nasty things. Lucy Connolly, for example, was convicted under a completely different act, section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986.
Grateful you took the time to cite sources here, so I'll respond, but this may take a while, and I probably won't reply if you decide to reply to this.
> Sounds suspiciously like "recording the ethnicity of these perpetrators would inflame community tensions, so we decided not to bother".
No it doesn't. The data just wasn't collected. The Casey Report goes into detail about this at length. Here are some quotes:
"Reviews, recommendations and strategies on child sexual exploitation raise the same issues repeatedly: system failures in information sharing, the need for more training, understanding of risk factors of victims, and the importance of collecting better data and information on perpetrators, including on ethnicity." page 6
"The ethnicity data collected for victims and perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation is not sufficient to allow any conclusions to be drawn at the national level." page 8
In Greater Manchester, they managed to collect pretty good data on ethnicity, and this data can be found on page 81. The conclusions are 54% Asian, 3% Black, 35% White, 8% Other. This is the region for which the best data were collected. But of course, as the Casey Report states *multiple times*, there is insufficient data to draw conclusions (no, not even conclusions about a coverup on ethnicity, they were just really bad at collecting this data systematically).
--------
It's a similar story for the victims, you cite 87% were white, but there is insufficient evidence to draw this conclusion. Casey again says this explicitly:
"This audit does not believe it is accurate to make this statement given the low levels of ethnicity recorded, even with the note of caution that has been included." page 71
Though it is worth noting that the distributions given are basically the distribution of ethnicity among the UK population in 2011, maybe slightly biased towards more Asian victims than White victims. But I won't speculate further because the honest truth is that there is not enough data.
--------
I said there were not thousands who were convicted of hate speech. You have just cited the statistic for how many people were convicted under the malicious communications act. I really do not want to be the defender of the government here, because I think the malicious communications act is terrible, and the UK needs more free speech than it currently has. However, your implication was that they were convicted for thought crimes, or speaking out against immigrants, when this actually makes up a vanishingly small percentage of the convictions, and most of it is for rape threats/death threats as is spoken about in the articles you link.
Lucy Connolly's conviction is honestly an edge case. During a time of riots against immigrant and muslim communities, she posted in a group chat saying:
"Mass deportation now, set fire to all fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care [...] if that makes me a racist, so be it"
I just want you to suppose the counterfactual, that there were muslim-led riots against white britons, and that in an islamist group chat, someone posted:
"Mass Sharia now, set fire to all the fucking apartments full of the whites for all I care [...] if that makes me a terrorist, so be it"
I think probably we should not convict that person. But honestly it's a difficult call. It comes close to incitement in my opinion. Obviously the context in which it was happening matters too.
Those are some nice assertions you make.
I agree that if your unfounded narratives are correct, then your unfounded narratives are correct.
Shocker, I don't think they're correct.
Which unfounded narratives of mine are incorrect? Are you claiming that British police *didn't* turn a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oxford for decades? Are you claiming that British police *don't* arrest and convict thousands of people for speech crimes every year?
Here's the alternative hypothesis for the grooming gangs: it's not that the police turned a blind eye because of the race of the perpetrators. It's that no one gave a shit about the girls involved. I can tell you bluntly that if the police encountered a thirteen year old who had a lot of sexual encounters with adult men, their reaction was not "this is a traumatised and vulnerable young girl who is being sexually exploited and is under the age of consent". It was "lol slag". I think this is very evident from the multiple enquiries that have since taken place if you read them without cherry picking for a preexisting agenda.
No, but Japanese internment was a specific wartime military measure (that many people thought was misguided and motivated by racial animus against the Japanese in the US rather than actual wartime security concerns), not conviction and imprisonment under the ordinary civilian criminal justice system. After the war ended and the internment camps were dismantled, it was no longer the case that Japanese in America were over-represented in prisons.
Presumably the Ni'ihau Incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%CA%BBihau_incident) was also weighing heavily on people's minds.
In a natural experiment where two random civilians ofJapanese descent had the chance to aid a downed pilot from the Pearl Harbor attack, they went full send in a violent kidnapping that resulted in multiple fatalities.
Like imagine that a member of the 9/11 terror cell seeks help in NYC, runs into a random Saudi emigre, and that emigre ends up harboring the terrorist and getting into a shootout with NYPD over it.
I think that would cause most people to see Saudi foreign naturals in a somewhat different light.
Not quite, this is what is says
"Certain nationalities – including Albanians, Iranians, and Afghans – are among the most common non-UK nationalities in the prison population but have relatively small populations living in the UK. They are therefore highly likely to be overrepresented in prisons, even if it is difficult to calculate precisely how much."
So they basically excluded them from the charts based on arbitrary population size criterion.
The way they present the data it's impossible to see whether migrants from certain countries are overrepresented in more serious crime types. When you look at "Sexual crimes" in aggregate you group Australians and Pakistanis and when you look at Pakistanis in aggregate you also see both "Sexual crimes" and "Summary motoring". Murders are not shown at all, presumably because there are too few of them.
Also it's weird that migrants' incarceration rate for "Miscellaneous crime" is so high - I wonder what hides there.
>Granted that many of these people may be British nationals.
TBH I don't think that "Actually, these people were second- and third-generation immigrants" really helps the pro-immigration argument.
Agreed.
The statistics broadly show that EU and other Western immigrants have been a net asset to the UK and immigrants from the Global South for a range of different reasons have been a net negative. Conflating these two very different immigration flows might show a marginal positive effect overall but it’s hiding a significant difference between them. Of course obsessing about melanin content and aryan skull shape is just making the exact opposite mistake. This is a problem with the quality of the human capital being brought in, not their race or country of origin.
Depends on where in the global south, but immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China are broadly quite good (the UK just has a very different immigration profile than Germany or France).
Also immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean have also broadly been very positive.
Even just discussing Pakistan are we talking about educated middle-class Muhajirs such as the London or New York mayors or ill-educated Mirapuri peasant communities who form the criminal base for northern grooming gangs and the support base for ISIS?
The Caribbean, are you having a laugh?
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/summaries/black-caribbean-ethnic-group/#education
IIRC, it isn't true for Bangladesh or Pakistan, either. That fellow's awful fond of giant, sweeping, unsupported assertions (...he said, adding his own–)!
I think it is true, that I am making sweeping assertions, but that they are true.
I am saying that the impact of their immigrating here has been broadly positive. That is *not* a claim about their educational attainment (I have made such claims, but they were more precise, and I made claims based on GCSE that FionnM then pushed back on, citing A-level statistics, there are many ways to judge these sorts of claims).
But the claim I made above was a claim about their *impact* on UK society, economy, democracy, etc. There have been good and bad effects, to be sure, I am not shying away from that. But since everyone in the thread seems happy to point out the bad without much nuance, I will have to be the one pointing out the good, and I am trying my *best* to retain some nuance.
I think you can do this "break it down by ethnicity" game, and I will join in and I will defend basically the vast majority of ethnicities that have immigrated to the UK, since I think overall the vast majority of them have been broadly good on the UK's potential for long-run economic growth (as is virtually all immigration, always). There are some edge cases where this is not true, but by-and-large, you basically want more people in your country.
It's hard for me to support this beyond directing you to read, like, Bryan Caplan, or something? I mean it's just honestly hard for immigration to be a negative for your country.
This is kind of a difficult comment-thread to navigate because it kind of all blurs into one omni-anti-immigration claim eventually for me. There are like 10 people giving random different anti-immigration takes, and I am trying to argue against all of them at once. This may elide some nuance. It is not helpful when I make a claim that is about "the impact of immigration on the UK," and someone responds with "No, look at educational attainment, hehe." My response is quite simply: that is not the claim I made!
Note that my link was not just about education but also crime, social housing and mental health. That's the UK government's own summary of how Black Caribbeans are doing.
"I think you can do this "break it down by ethnicity" game, and I will join in"
Join in? You brought up the Caribbean, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
"you basically want more people in your country."
Like India? Weird how they're so keen to leave then.
Yeah, it can be very difficult when people pile on—I was most just trying to be humorous with that trailing comment ("I'm accusing this guy of doing exactly what I just did!", heh).
Out of curiosity, though, if you have time: the (great-great-)grandparent comment said "immigrants to the U.K. from the Global South have been a net negative"; you responding by saying something to the effect of "sure, but it depends on where exactly from the Global South", with migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China (does that one count as "Globally Southern", actually?–), the Caribbean, and Africa all being claimed as beneficial on net.
Even if we grant that all of that is true—that, e.g., Bangladeshi immigrants to the U.K. are economic powerhouses & less criminal than the native white population (which I don't think *is* in fact true; but if we stipulate that it is)—well, then, it seems as if you actually *totally disagree* with John Smith's assertion regarding the statistics about emigrants from the Global South: there's not much south (in terms of "major U.K.-immigrating populations") *left* after subtracting all of the above! Maybe, like... Afghans, and that's it—every other group is fine?
Is that fair to say?
Do you have any stats on this you can point me to? Cheers.
This article is useful: https://open.substack.com/pub/almondtree/p/the-new-migration-system-isnt-working?r=6u7p0v&utm_medium=ios
It's not true that immigrants to the UK commit crimes at a "much" lower rate than British citizens. The evidence from analysing the prison population suggests that overall there is not a big difference between these two groups. But it also shows big differences between immigrant country of origin. People from ustralia, India, most of Western Europe are very low. Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, for example, are very high. I've not checked for similar patterns on things like average income, but I'd bet you'd get a similar picture. The India versus Bangladesh and Pakistan differences are well known, for example.
Would it be sensible for the UK immigration system to discriminate, at least to some degree, on grounds of potential immigrant nationality? I'd say so. Is this racist? I guess that depends on definitions, but it would favour Indians over others from the Sub-Continent, for instance, so it definitely would not be about skin colour.
>Immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial
Of the eight million people who received universal credit in June 2025, 16% are neither British nor Irish nationals, and 1.5% are refugees. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx5pw8pwg5o)
I mean both these things can be true?
I don't know how you square "extremely entrepreneurial" with "claim public benefits at a rate proportional to their share of population". Surely "extremely entrepreneurial" implies that they would be significantly less likely to claim public benefits relative to their share of population?
Some are entrepreneurial and some are not, but it nets out that they are more entrepreneurial on average.
Okay, well I think glossing that as "immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial" is highly misleading.
What's more, essentially every ethnic group reports higher rates of unemployment than white Britons, and collectively are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than white Britons are: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/unemployment-and-economic-inactivity/unemployment/latest/
Data supporting this claim?
https://workpermit.com/news/immigrant-entrepreneurs-found-14-uk-start-businesses-20140314
https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-new-data-shows-significance-immigrants-uks-startup-ecosystem
This is mostly focused on massively performing startups, but more broadly just look at London. Massive overrepresentation of stores that are run by immigrants. I guess that's anecdotal so you can take it or leave it, but it seems pretty clear to me.
"commit crimes at much lower rates"
do you have per-country-of-origin data?
not really. just ethnicity-level. there's discussion of it in the thread with FionnM. Basically it is "higher" in some sense, but not if you adjust for age and sex etc.
Thanks, I've responded there
This is fascinating to read because lately for some reason Substack's algorithm has been showing me hysterical sounding posts by UK nativists that claim immigration has been a disaster for the UK. I assumed they were making it up or exaggerating just because nativists are wrong more often than not, but it was interesting to hear someone calmly state the exact opposite.
It is a similar situation to the US, most such opinions are from people living in communities with vanishingly few immigrants, and the people (like me!) who live in communities with a lot of immigrants (I think I am in one of the largest-immigrant constituencies in the country, certainly top 10) are basically broadly quite bullish.
The UK's economy is in significantly worse shape than the US's, those immigrant-free communities tend to be poorer, and "it's immigration's fault" is the go-to explanation. The narrative may be wrong, but it's certainly competitive.
How do you feel about a majority Muslim England?
How do you think 100% of English people pre say 1997 would feel?
Some people are too busy looking at all the trees to see the forest imo.
The NHS recently developed a policy on cousin marriage that doesn't even meet 6th-century standards of science.
I suspect you are wildly overrating any economic and cultural value, likely due to a default "immigration good" moral foundation, or the very closely related "anything that even looks vaguely like it could have racist connotations is bad, regardless of reality" moral foundation.
I don’t think that’s how I’m reasoning at all.
I think the cousin-marriage thing is stupid. We should outlaw it, obviously.
First cousins marrying is basically harmless; the chance of genetic defects is doubled compared to non-consanguineous coupling, but twice fuck-all is still fuck-all.
The USA has a taboo on it as a result of the overzealous eugenics movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (which was strongest in the USA, at least until the Nazis came along). It's been legal in the non-US West for ages.
r=0.125 is fine. r=0.25 (double first cousins, uncle-niece, and half-siblings) is really pushing it, as the risk increases far more than linearly, and siblings (r=0.5) is about as dangerous as "one of the parents has Huntington's". Then again... we don't ban Huntington's sufferers from procreation, do we? I'd suggest you go after them before you even think about banning cousin marriage.
There’s fewer people with Huntington’s than there are consanguineous marriages, but I think I’m pretty willing to bite this bullet.
It’s also easier to screen for huntington’s in-utero.
Well, okay, guess I picked too easy a case (one which I'm personally less than sure about).
How about mandatory abortions for Down's? That's as bad, and if identified that's a 100% chance as compared to a couple of percent - in many cases even the risk a priori for Down's is in the double digit percent. Are you beginning to see the dystopia that this kind of liberty:eugenics exchange rate would build if applied consistently?
(Note that there's no ongoing harm to future generations from consanguinity-related defects; the offspring of someone inbred with fresh blood - even someone inbred in a different family - aren't inbred at all. So I'm not sneaking anything in that way.)
Even the Beeb was willing to publish someone speaking against it back in 2017: https://www.bbc.com/bbcthree/article/6af25e7b-0545-42ba-a6fa-82ac1023b4ed
Going from 2-3% to 5-6% is hardly fuckall, imo, especially when you're talking about a culture where it's not some quirky one-off; long-term cumulative effects are going to be higher.
>It's been legal in the non-US West for ages.
Legal is not the same as wise or good. The Roman standard and Pope Gregory's policy was better, and even if the church got a little extreme with it later, that probably played a significant role in breaking clannishness and creating much to the culture we actually like.
Huntington's is quite rare and also not a choice. Clannishness is a choice.
A single instance of first cousins marrying is biologically low-risk, though not harmless. If a couple wants to do it and is aware of the risks, I don't see a strong case for banning it.
A broad tradition of first- and second-cousin marriage is likely to be socially disastrous, at least if your society depends on Western levels of peace and prosperity, because it tends to produce an extremely clannish society with low social trust outside of the clan, and none of the things we expect from Western civilization are going to occur in that environment.
We should probably try to discourage that, though by the least-draconian means that would still be effective. Talking about the genetics is a red herring.
This seems to boil down to "get multiculturalism out of public schools", yes?
That's a gross oversimplification. There are multiple cultures that don't regularly practice cousin marriage; we can certainly incorporate all of those in the course of public education. And the cultures which do practice cousin marriage can be accommodated by either not teaching to that part or by explaining the adverse consequences as appropriate.
Also, though a single instance of otherwise unrelated first cousins marrying is biologically low-risk, if there's no taboo around it pretty soon there'll be first cousins marrying who have more great-grandparents in common then if they were just first cousins.
And yet that would be a claim for making children illegal, not marriage. Two lesbian cousins getting married aren't making kids.
Why? Last I checked TFR is falling and two gay cousin husbands aren't making babies, nor are brother husbands which also leads to I'm curious why they didn't remove the incest marriage ban.
What is that policy?
As an American, there are two narratives I hear about UK immigration that make me question your assessment.
1) The migrant rape gang scandal. If the UK is systematically turning a blind eye to migrant crime - even very serious crimes like rape - out of racial sensitivity, then how can we trust their crime statistics?
2) How does this square with the intense censorship of anti-migrant sentiment in the UK? If immigration were really such a benefit, then why would it be necessary to criminalize anti-immigration speech?
Have you considered these, or do you believe they are a misrepresentation of the facts?
I've spoken about it at length elsewhere in the thread.
1) This is overblown. (The UK is dealing with this. The scandal you have heard so much about is 15 years old, and has since been cracked down on, the issue is that it is hard to get justice because a blind-eye was turned to it when it originally happened, so we now have investigation after investigation, but ultimately we are unlikely to turn up anything definitive, because it just happened too long ago. This is obviously a tragedy, but not a major issue currently). It also was not _that_ massive as issues with child sexual abuse go. It probably made up at most 2.5% of such issues.
2) This is also overblown. (But less so, because in the UK such abridgement of freedom of speech is much more accepted, and this is terrible. But it is usually not to silence dissenting voices on immigration. It has been used vastly more against e.g. pro-palestine protestors in recent years.)
I believe they are both a misrepresentation of the facts. There are kernels of truth in both of them, but they are often framed poorly.
It is interesting how commentators have provided evidence that mass child rape happened in >80 towns and cities from the 1950s to the present day and was repeatedly ignored or downplayed by authorities and thousands of people have been arrested for speech violations and yes you insouciantly claim everything is fine just fine and the victims and advocates are hallucinating or exaggerating. It seems people are talking past eachother or lacking common definitions.
I am certainly not claiming the victims are exaggerating about what happened to them. I feel I have said repeatedly it is tragic and horrible.
I am saying that it is occupying an outsized role in UK political discourse given what actually happened, and that unfortunately we can do inquiry after inquiry, and we likely will, and some people will be brought to justice, but many unfortunately will not.
Also I don't think anyone has claimed it continues significantly to the present-day? Maybe I am wrong here? It seems like the worst of it happened around 1997-2013.
"I feel I have said repeatedly it is tragic and horrible."
also
"Because there are other things that matter in the world, basically."
So why do you think the system that turned a blind-eye to it then isn't doing to the same to similar occurrences now?
Because it is a different system.
The government is different, the political pressures are different. In 2013 it hit the news that this had happened, and there started to be prosecutions. Safeguarding guidance was changed. The Jay inquiry came out. People became more alert to it. I mean 2013 was kind of the big year for this stuff.
It looks to like the change is primarily that you're no longer going to hear about something like this when it happens, with gag orders and hate crime prosecutions for anyone trying to tell people.
Seems wrong
The Casey Report explicitly says (p. 149) that "Improvements have not been implemented with sufficient rigour or determination,
have been allowed to drift, or have not been acted on."
"Immigrants in the UK are broadly extremely entrepreneurial and basically good, and commit crimes at much lower rates."
I'm not sure you can make that claim. Ethnic minorities (e.g. first, second or third generation immigrants) are overrepresented in the prison population. Partly this is due to the age-makeup of immigrant groups, but not entirely. The crime is mainly driven, as in America, with extremely high crime rates among Subsaharan Africans.
Some groups (e.g. Pakistanis) have average crime rates overall but are overrepresented in sex crimes, as we see with the rape gangs.
Some previously high-performing immigrant groups have also been diluted by the Boriswave. Nigerians and Indians used to have above-average wages, but the Tories imported so many low-skilled people from those countries that Indian and Nigerian wages are now below average.
Asylum-seekers and other illegal immigrants are also disproportionately criminal. We're seeing an epidemic of Afghan sex crimes against teenage girls work its way through the system as we speak. If I remember correctly, Afghans are something like 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than native men.
While there are certainly elements of the UK immigration regime that bring in high-performing immigrants (e.g. the NHS importing doctors), those elements are outweighed by mechanisms that bring in more dysfunctional immigrants (the asylum system, chain migration through Muslim cousin-marriage, care-worker visas).
Also controlling for age is the Everest-fallacy. If our immigrants were mainly aged, Australian women no doubt there would be less immigrant-associated crime. But they are not. You can't just control away their age and gender as if this also controls away their victims' experiences of being mugged or raped.
I wish there was consistent data across countries to allow comparison, but I suspect at the root of a lot of differences is that the developing world has a huge number of smart, capable people who speak English as a first or second language, a smaller but still substantial number fluent in French or Spanish, and almost zero for other European languages. This will shape where such highly skilled immigrants want to emigrate and gives the Anglophone world an advantage.
There's a pretty big grooming gang running the US composed almost exclusively of native borns. We just call them Epstein's friends on this side of the pond.
Seems like that is probably pretty overblown too, to be honest. But that’s a separate conversation, and I am much less sure of that, since there haven’t been any serious, official inquiries or anything really.
No, there actually aren't that many convictions among Epstein's associates, nor was Epstein's case actually similar to these gangs.
You surely mean PDiddy's friends?
Empirically false. Take Sexual Offenses for example, where ethnic minorities are <20% of the population but >40% of offenses:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-june-2024
I said immigrants, not ethnic minorities.
Britain was 99% white just in my lifetime. Ethnic minorities might be 2nd or 3rd gen immigrants, but immigrants they are.
Apart from the worst ethnic minority in all of the UK, the normans.
By dint of being here since the creation of England a millennium ago, Normans became part of the ethnogenesis.
The distinctive genetic structure of the native English peoples has its roots in part on the Normans, not the Nigerians.
But somehow the UK has the worst examples, meaning Rotherham. In the EU crimes happen on a smaller scale, randomly, not thousands of victims in a very organized way.
Immigrants in the UK commit "crimes" at much lower rates, naturally. I mean, that's exactly why they refuse to talk about the race of the person who commits crimes, innit? Because they all whitey over there? Because britbongs go around stabbing their neighbors?
Europe is the Conservatives’ Motte and the Liberal’s Bailey, America is the Conservatives’ Bailey and the Liberal’s Motte. It’s confusing.
I think both sides just use Europe (or any foreign nation) as a place where they can more safely be a 'man of one study.'
You just have to find one statistic or translated article or etc. that says what you want to believe, and be confident that it will be much harder to debunk it because your interlocutors won't speak the language or know where to look for contradictory evidence.
Very convenient.
Europeans often do this with the US too.
They do, but my impression is that the US is seen more critically across the political spectrum in Europe, whereas American liberals and right-wingers very divided on Europe
Most Europeans I've met are convinced that you can routinely hear gunshots on American cities and that school shootings happen everywhere all the time. Meanwhile I haven't heard a single gunshot (outside of a gun range) in my 6 years of living in Seattle.
To be fair, most Americans think that this is true of red states, and yet for the 9 years I lived in Texas, I only once saw a gun in Texas, and the most common place I saw guns while live in Texas was at Charles de Gaulle airport where the French gendarmes just casually walk around with what look to me like automatic rifles strapped to their chest.
Ain't seen no hawgs in texas, have you?
(Texans may have guns in the city, but they don't -use- guns in the city. They use guns because the varmits are bigger than two men combined).
When I was staying in Queens in New York I feel like I did hear gunshots but I may have been psy-opping myself and also agree on the general claim that guns are not a massive issue in the US (though to a European mind, you can understand, they are a significantly bigger issue than here).
Going from being a 0.0001% issue to a 0.001% issue is technically a "order of magnitude" increase in severity and yet both are trivial enough to completely ignore in practice :-)
Can you distinguish between a car backfiring and a gunshot? Do you hit the deck when you hear a car backfire?
I've heard gunshots in my town. They're not necessarily easy to say "ha, that's a gunshot."
>We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations
There are constant small (few hundred people) demonstrations by various lefty groups on a great variety of topics that happen abroad. I visited Brussels two weeks back and when we got to the European Parliament there was a small pro-Kurdish demonstration right there. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have of course been a fixture for the recent years. However, these even happen when it's not a literal war being talked about; for instance, there have been solidarity demonstrations for Polish pro-choice activists, for example.
The BLM marches should be seen in the same context; small lefty groups that are continuously thinking about foreign causes to support decided that right now, in this instance, *this* is the foreign cause to support, and that was that. Of course there were also tie-ins to local causes; I remember the Finnish BLM marches being connected to some local event that escapes me at the moment.
Americans seem to find this far stranger than it actually is, since Americans are so unused to thinking about America as "someone else's foreign country" in this way, ie. something that a non-American could see as comparable as a potential cause for solidarity to various smaller, more obscure regions.
Also, American conservative narratives of European immigration are complicated by the fact that Americans seem to assume there are more immigrants in Europe there actually is (or at least more non-Western immigrants; it often seems to escape people that a large portion of immigrants in whatever European country tend to be other Europeans moving around, often temporarily due to studies etc. due to EU's free internal movement).
Often this is compounded by personal anecdotes like "I went to this country's capital and visited the most touristy sport there is there and it was FULL OF NON-EUROPEANS!" (American conservatives often sneer at Europe as a museum continent, but such anecdotes make me think it's people like this that, most of all, want it to be a museum, ie. a place where they can experience the Old World without any perceived-to-be-incongruent brown people to ruin their museum experience.)
>such anecdotes make me think it's people like this that, most of all, want it to be a museum
When one visits Paris, they want to see the Musee d'Orsay and eat good cheese, not be harassed by con artists and trash hawkers. We've already got NYC and DC for dealing with that.
When one visits DC and NY, they want to see museums and go to shows, not be harassed by con artists and trash hawkers. We've already got London, Paris and Rome for dealing with that.
Rome's been like that for ages, though. It's not new there. Paris Syndrome's a real thing too. Not new, either.
If you wanted to eat good cheese, France is pretty much the last place you'd go. You'd get better results going to England, Holland, Spain, Greece... Serbia...
LOL, this tears it. Time for the force de frappe.
Are you making fun of their plastic cheese again?
>it's people like this that, most of all, want it to be a museum
It's not like the Old World goes out of its way to contradict this in its tourism marketing. At most it may allude to perfectly integrated model minorities, which certainly haven't converted large parts of cities into wretched slums.
If you go to London and walk through a neighborhood to find that all the signs are in a foreign language, the women dress in full burqa, the houses of worship are for a foreign religion, and nobody there is a native, then the obvious conclusion is that London is in the process of being colonized by foreigners. It seems silly to argue about the current foreign-born proportion of the population when you can look at the rate of change, look at the impact it has already had, and then extrapolate about the obvious consequences if that rate remains stable.
If someone's assumptions and arguments are based on numbers that are wrong, it is of course never silly to argue for the correct numbers.
The other obvious conclusion would be that you are in an ethnic enclave. I visited London two years ago and my hotel was a block or two away from a Turkish neighborhood, which was much as you describe, but the parts of the city that were not specifically ethnic neighborhoods (i.e., most of the city) seemed pretty British. So the enclave conclusion seems much more accurate to me than the colonization one.
Are ethnic enclaves a good thing or a bad thing? Denmark (in)famously passed the law that made them illegal.
They're also illegal in Singapore.
Cockney not talking with rhyming slang because they're all a non-white ghetto seems wrong, somehow.
What are your opinions on Chinatowns? Do you also view that as "[city] colonized by foreigners"?
Potentially, but there are important differences.
Not every foreign group is the same. Chinese people (and other east asians) are one of the least problematic groups to integrate into western society. (Very low crime rates, cultural emphasis on education, minimal religious/ideological tension, fairly high willingness to assimilate.) So the existence of Chinatowns is less threatening in general.
The Chinatowns that do exist seem to be mostly historical, not significantly expanding (to my knowledge), unproblematic, and with younger generations well integrated.
However, a mass of new Chinese immigrants rapidly expanding into non-historical Chinatowns would still be a concern. The fact that there are many older residents in existing Chinatowns who still struggle to communicate in English is a bad thing and demonstrates how long and difficult the process of integration actually is.
Don't confuse a very low crime rate with a very low crime rate, yes I wrote that twice. There is giant measurement bias there.
How to rate Vancouver? Or urban Australia? Or perhaps the US/Cali West Coast before WW2? (Though I'll leave that to the historians.)
I think this is an important point, yeah. Definitely matches my experience.
True, but I still think the broader point stands that narratives born in one context can influence politics in another where it doesn't apply.
Like for instance, Sweden not too long ago had an attack at a university, where 11 people were killed. This is basically unheard of here, and was seemingly just some crazy 35yo (white) guy losing it. The govt response was to put in new restrictions on access to semi-automatic hunting weapons. I strongly doubt this would have happened if not for the case vaguely matching the shape of the american "School Shooting -> Ban ARs" narrative, when here it was realistically a one-off.
The biggest ones that I can remember here were the massive support for Poland in the mid 80s and then the protesting of South Africa not too long after that
Also, the IRA hunger strike. This is all completely biased though because I live in New York City.
This is a great point and one that took me a while to understand as an American living in Europe. The two contexts differ dramatically and it’s dangerous to import your framework for thinking about race or immigration from one to the other.
Another example of Americans reacting to European news was the discourse around „lockdowns“ during COVID. At least where all of my family and friends lived, there was no such thing as a true „lockdown“. Some states closed stores for a very short period and many enforced mask mandates. Many private businesses and local governments tried to follow guidance restricting certain activities. But the true „lockdowns“ that Europe and Asia experienced - months of people not being allowed to leave their homes except under limited circumstances - just did not happen. Nobody I knew in the US was unable to go to a store or visit relatives or whatever anytime they wanted. But they were seeing constant news about people being confined to their homes in Spain and talked about this as if it was something they were all experiencing.
Unfortunately the decline of national media and rise of social media means America and Europe increasingly occupy the same discursive space despite being politically quite different. I could cite many examples of Europeans becoming negatively polarized by things they see in America.
I was told not to visit relatives. I don't think there was any enforcement, but I definitely would have felt like I was breaking the rules if I'd done so.
Knowing you are breaking the rules is quite different to thinking its fairly likely you will be caught and have to explain yourself. Seeing police patrol your streets for the first time in your life and knowing they are only patrolling to catch you. Having to carry old ID with a family address to prevent cops turning you around on the road if you want to see your parents and knowing they can pull you over just for being on it. Hurrying your kid as they tie their lace at the park because the police are just behind you shouting at anyone they perceive as stationary "SUNBATHING ISN'T EXERCISE".
That's the UK.
My impression is in say Spain, fairly likely to be caught turned into very likely and full roadblocks and checkpoints replaced the probabilistic, "we pulled you over for a safety stop."
The UK and Europe go more totalitarian under perceived pressure.
As an aside, I personally view the NY times fiasco which took your thoughts offline over a chunk of that period was a massive stroke of luck for me. As much as I'd have appreciated your rational and fair approach to describing the world as you see it. I wouldn't have wanted to take the downside risk that too much sympathy was given to lockdown policies. My emotions were running very high at what I saw (and see) as tragic mistakes. It would have been a shame, for me alone, to have run any risk that I didn't want to read the blog anymore. Aside from opinion spite being a mistake - this article is a useful reminder that experiences and perceptions do differ hugely on things over the Atlantic.
The situation within Europe was very different. I was living in Germany and there was literally never a situation where police was patrolling the streets or checking cars and people. People were at all times allowed to go outside, wherever they wanted to as individuals or small groups.
I think Germany might have been the most liberal place in all of Europe during the "Covid lockdowns". Our then chancellor openly said on TV that while she respects the virologists calls for lockdowns, she as a politician has to make a political decision - and that includes epidemiology, as well as other factors. I guess you could find the scene on youtube if you looked hard enough.
There were a few isolated incidents, were people were fined heavily, e.g. for having a marriage in their garden with close to triple digit guests during the worst outbreaks. I'm not going to defend the fines here, but as I said, such occurrences were rare and localised to states which are known for having more authoritarian bureaucracy and police (and snitching neighbours).
I was shocked to hear that even in France, there were times were people were officially only allowed to go outside around their "block", for exercise and groceries. I would have expected more french reactions - you know, chaos and backlash.
"People were at all times allowed to go outside, wherever they wanted to as individuals or small groups."
Unless you were in Bavaria.🙃
(Da gab es Ausgangssperren und Sperrstunden.)
Were the curfews enforced in any way in Bavaria?
In Hessen, we also had one or two instances of "curfews", but in reality nothing happened. Streets were full of cars and people, police was completely ignoring the situation, and literally no-one cared or was impeded or fined. It turned out to be an evening like any other.
I specifically remember one on a good weather day, so it seemed even more busy than usual for the time of year. We were driving home from small daytime rave after curfew, car packed with 5 people, police next to us at traffic lights, and that was it. "Nothing ever happens".
Norway was similar to what you describe in germany. Sweden was famously even more liberal.
This is wildly, unrecognisably, different to my first-hand experience of the panic here in the UK, any of the stories I heard from friends, or the impression I got from the media here.
Wildly unrecognisably different?
Police changing their patterns of patrol - is that wild and unrecognisable as an impression? I can imagine for many people given the small sample set of observations when confined to your home, particularly if you didn't live in a city that no difference would be directly observed. But you did see any news stories mentioning this to the degree that my impression is wildly unrecognisable? I struggle to imagine that.,
My description of needing something indicating I lived at a different address to be able to travel there is wildly unrecognisable to you. Did you ever plan a journey like that? You missed all the stories about police turning people around trying to travel to second homes in the country? You missed the stories and government edicts forbidding that kind of travel? Or you thought it wasn't in any way enforced? You assumed the police don't pull people over on empty roads to the degree that my description was wildly unrecognisable?
With regards to how police treated people in parks - perhaps that was specific to London, perhaps you didn't go to any parks. But you missed all the stories talking about the zealousness of policing. The walkers fined for carrying cups of coffee on their walk because that made it a social meet-up. People watched a lot more news during the lockdown because they were stuck at home. If you didn't consume any news how can you even have an impression strong enough to make mine "wildly, unrecognisably, different"?
It's funny how people's opinion on the validity of a policy shapes their memory or reporting or that policy's details even when we aren't discussing the ratio of costs and benefits.
In NYC they really did throw Jews in jail for weddings, while letting black street parties go on unabated.
But isn't that just the panopticon? Installing a policeman in your own head, where none actually exists to stop you (most likely)?
I very much believe that the panopticon is a huge problem that's shredding our society and mental health in this digital age. But I don't think you can use that to translate 'advisories' as 'lockdowns' and imply authoritarian overreach (or w/e the point is). It's a separate problem that we all feel anxious about doing legal things that are generally frowned upon.
I don't think so, people really did go to prison for breaking lockdown rules, got arrested, etc. I did three days in jail myself for not wearing a mask to an outdoor farmers market (in America). I.e. your "most likely" isn't never.
wait what? what were you charged with when you were arrested? did the judge find probable cause?
I wasn't charged, I got to sit in jail for seventy-one hours and fifty-nine minutes to the second because that is the release window without charging in my state. The cops had great fun with it too.
I do know people though that were actually charged for violating the mask statue and got a criminal conviction from it though "time served" plus out the bail fee, a fine, and a year of supervised probation.
That's really strange. In the US, the police cannot arrest you without probable cause - if it happened to you, this would be a trivial 4th amendment based civil lawsuit. What was the alleged crime at the time of your arrest?
CDC's authoritarian overreach in cancelling all rents for years is a true thing. Not perhaps a "lockdown" issue, but a Very Real Issue nonetheless, with longer term ramifications.
Non-rhetorical question - do you always follow the speed limit on the highway?
No.
So you think (like most people) there are laws you really have to follow, and others that aren't so important and it's tacitly accepted if you bend or break them. What puts the COVID stuff in one category vs the other?
I didn't say I always followed them. But to answer your question, if most other people are following them and taking them seriously, and there's a possibility of real harm if they're broken, and other people are sacrificing their own convenience in order to prevent me from getting the harm, then I feel pretty strong pressure to reciprocate rather than defect.
I should have assumed California was different. At least where I know people, there were no such rules. Obviously many people were told by authorities or friends that they shouldn't be visiting relatives and many people chose not to, but it was still largely mediated through individual feelings of guilt. My relatives mostly couldn't be bothered and had a massive 60th wedding anniversary in late Spring of 2020, but still talk about the "lockdowns."
With many companies actually shut down, including hotels and restaurants, but also including "nonessentials" like balloon operators, furniture stores, etc... we had a pretty sharp lockdown under Trump. For a few months, like February through Aprilish. Then red states started bucking, and Georgia opened up, in about May, and everyone thought Georgia was gonna die.
That’s still very different from being told that you would be arrested if you spent more than an hour outdoors or ventured more than 5 km from your house! The Bay Area “shelter in place” orders made it very clear from the beginning that you could always do as much “exercise” as you like outdoors.
I don't know, I distinctly remember sheriffs in Malibu arresting a surfer in April 2020 for disobeying shelter-in-place orders
Yeah, that was because they did the stupid thing of closing the beaches. They shouldn't have done that. But even with the stupid policies they actually implemented, there were no restrictions on going for a stroll on sidewalks or going for a bike ride in the street. Unlike in many other countries.
I lived in the United States during that period. Specifically, the state of California. For approximately six months, I was not allowed to leave my home except under limited circumstances. I was allowed to visit grocery stores, which were operated in a very regimented manner to minimize any sort of human contact. I was not allowed to visit relatives, at all, during that period. I was not allowed to walk alone in the local nature preserve. I was not allowed to "or whatever".
Now you know. Please don't ever say again that you don't know.
AFAIK absolutely none of the above was ever enforced in any state other than Hawaii. No one would've arrested you for breaking the rules at any point.
I feel like that just makes it worse. Tyrannical rules that don't even get enforced affect good people but not bad people.
Only if you believe that following the law is always morally good / not following the law is always morally bad.
Trivial example: I wouldn't consider a Japanese man in 1942 to be a bad person if they've found a way to evade the internment camps.
> Only if you believe that following the law is always morally good / not following the law is always morally bad.
This belief is extremely common. Common enough that it is routinely assumed by almost all public discussion.
(Public discussion of civil disobedience assumes the opposite; there is no attempt to reconcile the two beliefs.)
True civil disobedience includes the willingness to go to jail for your crimes. You then persuade the jury to nullify your sentence.
That is absolutely not true. If you read the orders, they always said you could go outdoors to exercise as much as you like. If you wanted to go for a walk or a bike ride, the law would congratulate you.
It was only going *in* some place that was ever banned (though to be fair, it was a *lot* of places you were banned to go into). You were never banned from going *out*.
This guy was arrested for paddleboarding at the beach.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/09/viral-image/la-county-sheriffs-deputies-arrested-paddle-boarde/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
This article documents the measures taken to prevent people from accessing all public recreation areas, as well as a second man cited for surfing.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-29/surfer-fined-1-000-for-ignoring-coronavirus-closure-in-manhattan-beach?utm_source=chatgpt.com
It was bad that they closed beaches and some parks. I agree with that.
But again, that was a ban on going *to* those places. If you just went for a stroll on the sidewalk or bike rides on the streets, that was completely in line with the orders.
There is no such thing as a ban on going "in" but not "out". Every time you leave one place, you necessarily enter another place.
Right, but there was a broad mass of public spaces that were always permissible to go to anywhere in the United States, even if there were places that were banned for entry that shouldn't have been. This is a very big contrast with the situation in many European countries, when there were periods where it was stated that people could only leave their home for an hour a day, or that people couldn't travel more than 5 km from their home, and even at later points in the pandemic there were often curfews where people weren't allowed to be outside the house after certain hours.
A ban that lists 100 types of place that you're not allowed to go in might *feel* like a rule that says you can't go out, but as long as streets and sidewalks weren't on that list, it was still quite different.
Yes, I was allowed to go out of my house to exercise. Which basically meant walking around the block, because e.g. the local park and wilderness preserve were locked. I don't think I ever stated otherwise.
I was not allowed to visit friends, or relatives, or anyone else, as "Jude" stated all Americans could do. I was not allowed to "whatever". About the only human contact I was allowed was to occasionally pass a cartload of groceries to a clerk on the far side of two masks, a sheet of plexiglass, and six feet.
If you're going to tell me I can't complain about that very substantial infringement on my civil liberties because I was allowed to *walk around the block*, then I'm not sure what else to say except hell no, I am absolutely going to complain.
I'm not saying you're not allowed to complain. Just that you should complain about the *actual* restrictions you had, not some imagined version that is actually what other people in other parts of the world had.
People are mostly complaining about the actual things that happened to them, as far as I can tell, unless you are objecting to the use of the word "lockdown."
The post I was replying to was not. It made the false claim that "I was not allowed to leave my home except under limited circumstances". In California you were always allowed to leave your home under any circumstances. It's true that there were too many places you weren't allowed to go, but the complaint that was expressed was about the kind of restriction that people in China and the UK and France sometimes had, not about restrictions that the person (who said they were in California) ever had.
I lived in California during that time too, and none of that was true. I visited relatives, relatives visited me, I walked around on the trails near my suburban home. No one threatened to arrest me.
Sorry, with all due respect, I think you are significantly exaggerating the experiences on the ground in California. I was in mountain view, and had friends in SF and in LA. I would give it to you if you said 2 months, but 6? You don't strike me as the kind to strictly follow the speed limit and never jaywalk.
First, my ability to visit my friends and family is constrained by more than my own personal willingness to break the law.
Second, lots of gay men were able to have sex with each before Lawrence v. Texas, even in Red States like Texas. Very few of them were arrested, and fewer still charged. Those laws are now broadly considered abhorrent in our community, and this should be no different.
Re one: again, "You don't strike me as the kind to strictly follow the speed limit and never jaywalk."
Re two: sorry, just on face this is silly. 'Encoding homophobic prejudice into law' is not the same as 'state government trying to deal with a once-in-a-lifetime crisis using temporary measures'.
Based on everything you've said so far, and the clearly emotional way you are writing, I think you were traumatized, and I'm sorry for that. But your personal emotional state is clouding your judgement. You have several people *in this comment thread* who lived in the same places as you who had vastly different experiences. *YOU* may have constrained yourself in a way that no one else did. I'm sorry that you felt the need to do that.
> But the true „lockdowns“ that Europe and Asia experienced - months of people not being allowed to leave their homes except under limited circumstances - just did not happen. Nobody I knew in the US was unable to go to a store or visit relatives or whatever anytime they wanted.
I guess it is a big mistake when people use words like "lockdowns" without specifying what exactly they mean, so it can turn out that everyone was talking about something different.
Actually, I am not even sure what to think about your comment. Are "going to a store" and "visiting relatives" not possible examples of "limited circumstances"? If you are allowed to leave your home only for a few selected reasons, which include going to your job, going to a store, visiting your relatives, and walking in nature in groups not exceeding five people, is that a "true lockdown" or not?
Stay at home orders were definitely a thing, although not actually enforced as you describe. Most people still followed them, though, and almost everyone in my community and social circle did, which created a very oppressive atmosphere. Even if you wanted to ignore it and go out, there would have been nobody to do so with. Social pressure can be an effective means of enforcing rules, which means it's a problem if social pressure is applied to enforce a bad rule.
There are multiple levels here.
CA, NY and many other states issued executive orders codifying rules very similar to europe.
Not only were they unenforced they didnt take basic steps to make enforcement possible, say by setting checkpoints on roads.
So the legal lockdown becomes subjective. A certain rule following sort may insist they were not allowed to leave. A different sort would say cmon what lockdown.
However, we live in an advanced capitalist society and there are only so many times we can enjoy riding a bike around the block. To enjoy being out and about in an urban environment we need businesses and amenities to be open, and many weren't, so we were locked down in practice in ways that go beyond legal enforcement.
I lived in nyc at the time and my kids spent 2020 and 2021 summers in japan. Their border was closed but their businesses were not and so they were less locked down in japan than in nyc. Cant say anything about europe.
What does "rules very similar to Europe" even mean? Sweden had essentially no rules while Spain criminalized going outside.
I meant rules similar to what ppl cite as the worst examples. As others on this thread point out, the order stated ppl in CA are not allowed to go outside except for narrowly defined purposes. So on paper, bad like Spain.
I was under lockdown in the US. AOC sent uniformed military to the store to buy her groceries. Lockdowns meant "everyone closed everything" and you couldn't even go to the hotels that didn't close for the f-*(* civil war!
No, we didn't quarantine NYC. But we lost months of restaurants, and lost more after that from "questionable virtue signalling" (where people would visit someone else's local, instead of their own).
American conservatives and liberals could both respond, "Europe today is a warning of what may come to us tomorrow. Therefore we must—" (continuation varying according to who is speaking).
And European conservatives and liberals can say the same thing referencing America...
Yes, if they were saying so, it would be reasonable. But are they saying it?
Keep in mind that one reason migrants to Germany are more likely to be on welfare and less likely to work is that they often literally banned from working (and I suspect Germany has less developed informal institutions for migrants to work under the table than the US has.)
Barring young men from productive work would probably also increase their crime rate.
I do not have any data but have the impression that there was much less of a problem with Ukrainians in 2022 than with Syrians (...or whatever) in 2015. Is this wrong? Or was there actually a learning and the procedures for claiming asylum were updated?
The Ukrainians were allowed to work from the start. But it was a political decision regarding Ukrainian refugees, not a general update of the procedures.
I see, thanks. Good work then.
This doesn't add anything to the discussion, but let me also say that I loathe the "of course bored young men are going to do crime" argument, especially in the German context where you don't have to do it because welfare is enough to not let you go hungry, or homeless.
Ok cool, bored young men without purpose but with enough welfare who do crime are bad people. Agreed. Then what? The fact remains that they will, in higher proportions than young men who are in work and have a purpose. If we care about reducing crime, yoir individual-moral-responsibility feelings just get in the way.
Many young men do crime because of boredom, not to sustain themselves.
Not really, that's a Protestant (culturally) trope. At best, rich Protestants made poor entertainment illegal to punish their "underserved" lives of leasure ala Bastit's bridges.
The data from any source you look at will show you young men have the highest propensity for committing crimes. This is likely due to biology (poor impulse control), but we know culture plays its role as well. It’s why long prison sentences don’t make a lot of sense for public safety reasons. Men who committed crimes when they were young and went to prison will literally age out of crime.
Yes, really. Crime does not pay https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html
Those are very different groups. The vast majority of Ukrainian refugees were women and children.
This is true in the UK too, the working rules are really strange.
The rules exist to disincentivise economic migrants from falsely claiming asylum. Otherwise anyone who overstays a student or work visa would immediately claim asylum and the system would be overwhelmed.
I know. 'Those foreigners are taking our jobs.' and all that. Alas.
One more sensible solution would be to pay them welfare rates to plant trees or pick up rubbish or even just to dig holes and fill them in again, which would keep them busy without them competing for private sector jobs.
I imagine the scheme would cost more to run than it would give you back in productive labour. Anyone with an inclination to ‘make themselves useful’ can still volunteer from day one, or apply to start working after a hundred days on any of the jobs on the priority list.
There's no 'competition for private sector jobs'. At least the economy doesn't work that way: there's no Lump of Labour to be divided up.
It's all about appeasing stupid voters who have no clue how the economy works, alas.
So your suggestion would be sensible, if there were a limited number of private sector jobs..
>Barring young men from productive work would probably also increase their crime rate
Very true from my personal experience both as a citizen of host country and as an immigrant.
Russia has imported significant numbers of Central Asians (mostly Uzbek or Tajik) as a cheap labor since 2000s. Many stay, have children, etc. Not certain if this diaspora is more law-abiding than native populace, but at least it isn't seen as a general threat by anyone except literal neonazis. A niche of "scary foreign thugs in our cities" is occupied mostly by Caucasus peoples, as in folks from Caucasus mountains (not pointing any fingers on any particular formerly separatist republics), who are technically citizens of RF. There is some ethnic tension, but it's pretty weakly related to emigration.
As a Russian in Serbia, I'm part of probably one of the most law-abiding diasporas ever. Over three years I haven't even once heard of a local Russian committing anything more than a drunk fight or maybe a little tax fraud. And that's a nationality that went from <1% to ~10% of population in some cities (eg Novi Sad) basically overnight. Not claiming any moral superiority, it's just due to the fact that most of us have come already having a jobs, either remote or in relocated tech companies. The same should probably be true for at least a subset of Ukrainians in EU, but I don't have much experience with them.
Russia also does a lot to celebrate being a mutt-country like America. There's less "inherent friction" in a country that doesn't see "you look funny" as an inherent problem. (Today's humor is to look at Lukashenko's sons. Very different looks).
Interesting that Russians in Serbia are so law-abiding. Russians in Israel (yes, different ethnicity probably), were quite the gang-problem for a while.
Of all policies, allowing someone to enter your country and then *not* allowing them to work seems the most obviously self-destructive. There is no reason for such a category to exist.
Aside from student visas, tourist visas, etc. of course. The US has, or at least had, a version of this, the idea being that refugees legitimately fleeing for their lives can still immigrate but people who just want to move here for economic opportunity will be discouraged. I won't argue that it's a good or effective policy but I think that was the intent behind it.
Germany is excluded from https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/tr_final_after_last_revision_21052019.pdf
> Third, as some countries, namely Germany, Estonia, Malta and Slovenia, do not distinguish between third-country nationals and EU immigrants, we have decided to drop these countries from the analysis as well
In addition,
> We opt for the country of birth criteria and define as an immigrant any person who lives temporarily or permanently in a country where he or she was not born.
I wonder how much this warps the numbers, as Europe let in a large amount of immigrants to do manual labor (e.g. Gastarbeiter, many of whom are still alive), many of whom decades later naturalized. Anecdotally, these groups are still underrepresented in white collar and over-represented in blue collar jobs.
I suspect the numbers may start to look differently if one adjusts for type of employment one holds (or last held), as it's understandable that someone who worked in a factory for decades would need to rely more welfare to take care of family or for complications of old age.
This is pretty much just a lie, the time it takes to get a work permit is measured in weeks, while time in unemployment or welfare tends to be measured in years.
What is an issue is the high dependence in the German labour market on formal qualifications, even for trades and so on.
Ernsthaft wenn versucht du zu verarschen?
I thought the unstated assumption was that the right wing argument was about preventing a disaster before it happens. People who talk about the white replacement theory are not talking about right now necessarily except in terms of anecdotes that they claim are an early sign of what's to come. It's about what happens in the future if trends persist, that's where the disagreement lies.
That's why those predictions of England or Germany being only X % white by 2060 are so divisive. One side predicts the collapse of Western civilization, the other predicts a prosperous multicultural Western civilization.
A lot of far right groups in Europe argue that immigration is already a disaster. They favor not only closing the doors to new immigrants, but expelling the ones that are already there (and, disturbingly, their children).
That's a rather weak argument, though, surely. Italians and Irish were considered different, undesirable races 120 years ago, and nativists warned that we needed to hold them out to avert disaster. That prediction looks wrong in hindsight.
I don't think you're right, anyway. I think most nativists believe that current immigrants to the US are violent, lazy, or both
>nativists warned that we needed to hold them out to avert disaster. That prediction looks wrong in hindsight.
Because they actually assimilated over time, instead of staying enclaved or getting worse.
There's been enough immigration long enough that we can be reasonably confident certain populations *don't* assimilate- 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants in the UK and France are often more likely to be radicalized than the 1st, who actually wanted to be there.
I should have been clear, to avoid the error the original post is about -- I'm talking about America. I don't think there is compelling evidence that 2nd and 3rd generation American immigrants have failed to assimilate and/or are especially criminal or dependent on welfare.
Ah, fair. I'm curious to see how it plays out with the recent insular groups to the US but the 2nd gen there is still pretty young.
You might want to look at Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc.
I'm not sure what you mean. You're saying those places contain a lot of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants that failed to assimilate? Or are you saying that they have native-born cultural enclaves that aren't assimilated into the US? If the latter, that doesn't seem terribly relevant to the immigration question.
The former though honestly the latter is relevant too as it's indicative of ghettoization and how those cultures refuse to adapt, the where is irrelevant to that as it's a cultural flaw.
I'm not sure what gen they'd be at but Hawaiian independence and resentment does seem to be a growing rather than shrinking phenomenon.
> Or are you saying that they have native-born cultural enclaves that aren't assimilated into the US? If the latter, that doesn't seem terribly relevant to the immigration question.
You realize that those "unassimilated" native-born cultural enclaves reflect the fact that immigrants to the region never assimilated?
Black people in the US are primarily 8+th generation immigrants who still haven't assimilated into mainstream society.
Well, for about five of those eight generations, they weren’t really encouraged to were they?
Not really, no.
Are current immigrants encouraged to?
Anyway it definitely puts some kind of floor on how much assimilation you can expect. Assimilation can happen fully within a generation, or it might take forever.
Jews in Europe are another example, as a minority population that existed within another population for over a thousand years and did not assimilate, despite (sporadic and inconsistent) pressure to do so.
I don't think one can claim with confidence that certain populations *don't* assimilate, when there's also the competing hypothesis that we have in recent years deprecated assimilation and let the machinery of assimilation go to rot.
If the United States imported half a million poor uneducated monolingual Italians today, I am not at all confident that they would assimilate in the way their cultural ancestors did a century ago.
**This**
This is like when Republican shoot out (GOVERNING BODIES) kneecaps, then say "Look at GOVERNING BODY limping along, it doesn't work, we need to privatise!".
The right half of the political spectrum in the US is fully committed to saying as loud as it can get away with "Assimilation is impossible. Only heritage americans are real americans", and then turning around and complaining that communities don't assimilate.
No shit they don't assimilate, the president told them they cant!
It's worth noting that Europe has been less welcoming to immigrants wanting to assimilate.
Even second, third generation immigrants that don't look like the native population or don't have a name that looks like one, do tend to be seen as an immigrant even if they've been born and raised there.
As a first gen immigrant in Germany, I'll never be fully accepted as "German" in the way that one might throughout their lifetime become "American", no matter how hard I try to assimilate. This was a fact I accepted before I decided to take an offer that involved moving here.
I am of course trying to assimilate to an achievable point, but assimilation is definitely a two way street.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/european-immigrants-were-always-considered
I am not claiming that Italians and Irish were not considered white! Cremieux's post seems pretty narrowly about whether the term "white" legally included Italians, Irish, etc. I accept his argument that it did.
Rather, I'm claiming they were considered a different and undesirable race than native-born Americans.
I am fairly confident that people in the 19th and early 20th century did not conceive of "white" as a single monolithic race, and it would have seemed strange then to conceive of Irish, Greeks, Russians, Italians, and Armenians as all a part of a single ethnic or racial group.
I do not claim to have deep firsthand knowledge of this issue, but unless the text of these articles is mostly or entirely false, it seems that the phenomenon I'm speaking of is widely agreed upon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italian_sentiment; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment.
The books I have read that discuss American nativism and the racial politics of this period generally assume the existence of broad hostile sentiment to various European immigrant groups and/or fears that their failure to assimilate would have disastrous consequences for the country. A few contemporary quotations I was able to verify after they were brought to my attention by AI:
1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, noted suffragist, in an 1869 letter, decrying the fact that uneducated, undesirable men would have suffrage while women did not. Her list of undesirables is "Hans, Yung Tung, Patrick, and Sambo." To me, this is evidently German, East Asian, Irish, and Black people. [https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/march-2016]
2. The New York Times on the subject of the victims of the 1891 New Orleans lynching: "These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation." [https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1891/03/16/103299119.html?pageNumber=4]
3. A historical particle on the Library of Congress website suggests that in the late 19th century "racialist theories circulated in the press, advancing pseudo scientific theories that alleged that 'Mediterranean' types were inherently inferior to people of northern European heritage." [https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/under-attack/]
4. Grant M. Hudson, US Representative from Michigan, evidently in 1924: "Now, what do we find in all our large cities? Entire sections containing a population incapable of understanding our institutions, with no comprehension of our national ideals, and for the most part incapable of speaking the English language." [https://www.uua.org/files/documents/washingtonoffice/immigration/studyguides/handout2.4.pdf]
5. Benjamin Franklin, 1753 (!) letter to Peter Collinson: "I am perfectly of your mind, that measures of great Temper are necessary with the Germans... . Few of their children in the Country learn English; they import many Books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English ... . In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other Colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not [in My Opinion] be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious." [https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0173]
This is straight wrong in the case of italians at least; anecdota of 1 family unit allowed. Jews pre 1900's were pretty iffy also.
It’s interesting that in the period referenced, when there was more Italian and Irish immigration, whatever else - America was simultaneously enjoying a conservation movement to set aside public land for wildlife and for aesthetic reasons, and also a City Beautiful movement was getting started.
Now we can’t have those things because we are told they are no longer a priority and never will be again because we have a new priority which is letting people in and those people don’t care about those things nor should they.
Just a pretty significant difference. I wonder why the mindset changed, but also I wonder if it is not somehow more complementary of the attitudes of past people?
From where have you heard this sentiment? As far as I know, progressive ideology in this country does not explicitly reject conservationism and environmentalism in the name of higher immigration. I don't think I've ever heard anyone put it that way.
Why have the major national environmental groups been captured by the omnicause? (This you would know if you worked for them.) Why did the Sierra Club become impotent on its original mission? Why do people like Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen endorse selling off public land? Why is "we're not crowded" the crowing reply to all objections, as though we didn't at one time used to be concerned about: sprawl, biodiversity, water use, energy use? How did population go from being a buzzword, and a neutral one at that - to verboten? Why is there so much trash everywhere and yet litter campaigns are a quaint thing of the past? Even on Dumb Reddit, there is once in awhile someone who's not gotten the memo, who complains about trash, and the moronic response is some combination of: why don't you pick it *all* up yourself, and - talk about First World problems! Ditto decaying buildings and unkempt civic spaces: disorder is an aesthetic preference merely, it reflects badly on you to have mentioned it.
Why is the environment about 1-2% of philanthropy when the population has grown by more than 65% in my lifetime? Does it surprise you to know that dog and cat rescues and humane societies make up part of that total?
Why on a forum like this, do people talk about AI constantly, and never about declining species populations, as people of your education once would have, had internet forums existed then? Why did that subject die?
Why do people now think that *talking* about climate change *is* the conservation movement?
And why do they think the left, which once genuinely led on environmentalism, even if it was conservatives who paid for it - would care about that if it could not frame it as "poor people's lives disrupted" - only?
I see, thanks for sharing your perspective.
I agree that the American environmentalist movement peaked some time in the 20th century, and is less prominent now. If those issues are of primary importance to you, I can see why this would be distressing. On the other hand, I think a lot of the movement's ideas and results are still with us and not going anywhere.
I appreciate the not-weird exchange on ACX. (Why am I even here lol? A long-ago delightful book review of Malcolm Muggeridge.)
I think it is probably difficult for younger people to understand how big a deal, and mainstream, the environmental movement once was. It was always a choice on menus of “issues of concern” say on surveys. No longer. I search for it in vain, take surveys just to see if it is there.
It is natural for issues to be like fads, perhaps, and wane. But what’s happened is so much more than that.
There are smart young professionals, in conservation. But the volunteers, the meetings … all gray heads alas.
>Why on a forum like this, do people talk about AI constantly, and never about declining species populations, as people of your education once would have, had internet forums existed then?
You've picked about the one cause where this argument falls flat.
See, what we're mostly worried about is rogue AI rendering everything down for resources, as instrumental convergence predicts. "Everything" includes all the animals and plants, too. Failure to stop AI means essentially all environmental conservation efforts end in total failure; there is no point in them if you do not stop AI as well. Hell, it's unlikely the *planet* would still be there after a victorious Skynet was finished with it; it'd probably strip-mine it until there was nothing left, although it's hard to be sure.
Meanwhile all the stuff that happens between now and the supposed then, is of no interest. In a way, it’s admirable that y’all are able to drum up s much interest in something that … doesn’t actually interest you much.
> Why on a forum like this, do people talk about AI constantly
That is driven by Scott. It's a pet issue of his, and it's his forum.
> Why have the major national environmental groups been captured by the omnicause? (This you would know if you worked for them.) Why did the Sierra Club become impotent on its original mission?
Note that there's nothing special about environmental groups. The ACLU was persuaded to reverse its position on civil liberties. At some point maybe they'll change the name.
The commentary I've seen on the ACLU blamed the following process:
1. Donald Trump is elected;
2. A bunch of people panic and donate to the ACLU;
3. But they don't support the ACLU's beliefs;
4. So the ACLU changes what it's doing to avoid alienating all the new guys.
5. Ultimately, the ACLU hires new staff who believe in the new mission, and the old mission is forgotten.
> Why do people like Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen endorse selling off public land?
This one's simpler; they're economists.
It must be a mere “pet” despite the thousands of words on it, by him or by commenters, because the real world current impacts - admittedly, enabled by dumb local pols: “Why are we letting this happen to our community, to our prime farmland, to our forest (*yes, we got an actual call about this*)?” Local pol: “That’s for us not to know or understand and you not to find out about” - are massive, and irrelevant to the blog.
Thanks, that explains a lot.
The people who want to not let people in also want to destroy the NPS and clear cut/drill/develop all the public land they can, though.
I've been fighting with local representatives about it for years now, the R's keep trying to destroy as much coastal chaparral as they can get away with; there's only any left in my region 'cause the state government is blue.
No doubt about it, the libertarian wing - which is increasingly *the* wing - of the GOP definitely benefits and co-opts this rhetoric from the left. Overall, I think it is particularly funny that they claim we need to "build more houses" (which is gonne be sprawl) when the people we are building the houses for - are immigrants, full stop.
Of course the GOP has always been happy to co-opt the left and open the border. It is only recently that a few pretend otherwise. Trump was a one-off, who reflected the will of the people and demonstrated the fiction that is democracy.
And it used to be Democrats who advocated - at times - for those things, joined by Republicans quite often. But it's not their bailiwick anymore either. I can count on two hands the people in my state fighting new dams. The Dems have not weighed in on that sort of thing in years.
Just getting Mike Lee off the Energy and Natural Resource Committee would open the door for normal people to get things done, though they won't have the help of either party.
Maybe we could make him Ambassador to the Moon.
The existence of the Italian mafia doesn't count as a disaster to you? In hindsight, to you, the nativists were wrong to count the many murders and other crimes the Italian mafia would go on to commit as having any moral weight?
Surely what you mean is that, although the disaster the nativists predicted absolutely did happen (and we made some cool movies about it) and it was really bad, and the damage is ongoing -- that, in your judgement, according to your values, the contributions made by Italian-Americans to US society outweigh the (factually accurate) harms that the nativists feared.
Nope, I don't think the existence of the Italian Mafia would count as a national disaster. I am happy to be proven wrong, but my prior, not disconfirmed by a little cursory research, is that in the grand scheme of things the mob was a relatively minor part of American history, and a very small fraction of Italian immigrants were involved in it. I think the Volstead Act probably does more to explain the rise of organized crime in the 20th century than immigration demographics.
Is your view that absent Italian immigrants, the US wouldn't have organized crime today?
Yes, you of course have to take the good with the bad and pass judgment on the whole lot. Otherwise, the presence of every ethnic or racial group of significance is a disaster because they all contain a fair number of scoundrels.
If we agree that a prospective group of immigrants will do some crimes, but on the whole will make the world a better place, then it hardly seems fair to call their presence a disaster. The question is whether, in a counterfactual world where fewer Italians had immigrated, the nation would be better off. I do not think there is very good evidence for the affirmative answer to that question. If, say, Italian immigrants were on average less criminal than native born Americans, the fact that some Italians are criminals would not be a reason to exclude the entire group.
Are we talking about the same mafia? The one that extorted money from every construction project in New York City for fifty years? The tax fraud, pension theft, wholesale cargo robbery, prostitution, drug smuggling, murder? For a small number of scoundrels, they caused a lot of trouble.
I think we agree that it's a value judgment. Like, for instance, if you value eating a really good sandwich at +1 and getting criminally extorted as -100, then overall, Italian immigration was a great deal for you. There are _so_ many more Italian sandwiches than Italian crimes, way more than 100 to 1. But if you value a sandwich at +1 and getting criminally extorted at -300,000, then it's not such a good deal. (My very rough estimate is 250,000 mafia crimes per sandwich. Seriously, look it up, the mafia victimized a LOT of people from the 30s through the 80s.)
I think, ultimately, I would probably make the same judgment as you, and prefer mass Italian immigration over not. I just don't think it's trivial, I think you have to admit the people who were against it at the time had a point.
I agree the Mafia is not trivial, but it isn't a nationwide social catastrophe that fulfilled the worst fears of 19the century nativists either.
My point is that few people today would look back on the immigration policy of the late 19th and early 20th century in this country and say that the admission of too many immigrants was a disaster, or US history has gone poorly as a result. This should serve as at least some evidence against the notion that today's immigrants will ruin the country in the future.
That seems to approach the problem from the wrong direction. Would people looking forward from the late 18th century say the admission of too many immigrants was a disaster? Why would we judge the policy by whether the immigrants were happy with it?
Not from our perspective. It's evidence that, from the perspective of the future, the immigrants of the 2020s won't ruin the future. The thesis "people judge their own period by their own period's standards and like it" doesn't tell us how we, now, would judge the future, if we could see it. But you're right, we can learn from history: from the perspective of the 1900s, the US is far, far more catastrophically destroyed than they could have possibly feared or imagined. Not materially, of course, but socially.
You've got to understand, not even the most insane radicals of 1900s America could even conceptualize the moral norms of 2020s America. It's an exercise in creative writing just to try to express the change.
Imagine if the Nazi party won all 3 branches of the US government and re-enslaved all the Black people. And legalized pedophilia, and took away women's right to vote, and make them wear these ugly red and white outfits. And we won't say what happens to the Jews, but it's not good.
That's not extreme enough, because you can imagine it. The changes that actually took place since 1900 were unimaginable to people in 1900. Try to find even one thinker before 1950 who predicted the number of legal abortions that would take place in the 80s and 90s. Even one thinker before 1950 who predicted full homosexual legality.
If the analogy holds (1900 is to 2020 as 2020 is to the future) then imagine the worst, most evil things that the people of future America could possibly do, according to your moral standards. Now multiply it by 100. That barely scratches the surface of what future Americans will consider normal. And they'll see you as malicious and evil for not supporting it, the way most 2020 Americans see the Victorians.
So I mostly agree with you about immigration; the nativists were wrong, the Italians and Irish have been, on balance, worth it. And the material abundance we enjoy in 2020 is amazing. But I think it's undeniable that anybody in 1900 looking at 2020 would say that American history has gone extremely poorly.
What you are missing is his point often lost on New Yorkers, that other places exist in the USA, I know I know, unfathomable. And in all those other imaginary places like Boston or Helena organized crime also existed with all the same problems but no mafia nor Eyetalians, i.e. New Yorkers were going to get victimized regardless.
(wrote more than I meant to, sorry, you don't have to read all this nonsense)
I've heard this theory before; all crime is fated, inevitable. It's caused by socio-economic forces, not individual agency. If there wasn't an Italian there to pull the trigger, socio-economic forces would have supplied an Irishman, or, lacking Irishmen, a Pole. Or even a native citizen. But everywhere the dark god Socio-Economic Forces spreads his dread influence, the crime will happen, and we mortals are merely his pawns. There would have been exactly as much murder in New York without Italians; there would have been exactly as much fraud in Minnesota without Somalis. It's Hegelian. The individual is nothing to the working-out of the convolutions of the world-spirit in history.
The problem with this theory is that it has to posit strange gaps in Socio-Economic Forces' power -- for instance, at the magic holy portals of Ellis Island, all traces of Sicily's Socio-Economic Forces are entirely purged, leaving the immigrant wholly subject to American Socio-Economic Forces. Nothing left over from Sicily can be permitted to explain crime, not even the otherwise all-powerful Socio-Economic Forces; that would be nativist. Discriminatory. It might lead you to prefer immigrants from a homeland with kinder, gentler Socio-Economic Forces over those from places with dark, cruel Socio-Economic Forces. No, foreign Socio-Economic Forces have no power on these shores; the Lethe wand of Ellis Island erases all trace of former lives, habits, assumptions, morality, leaving behind pure untouched Americans.
Anyway, I live in Rhode Island. This is the territory of the Patriarca family; the power of the New York bosses stops at the Connecticut River. Or, it used to, anyway.
The specific Sicilian practice of Omerta insulated the mafia from prosecution under existing US law until the 1970s RICO act. Omerta works like this: made men don't talk to the authorities; only Italians can be made men; made men don't do the dirtiest crimes themselves, they use non-Italian buffers. The made man never signs the checks or contracts, never owns the bank accounts himself, always has a perfect alibi during the massacre. So it didn't matter how many thieves, pimps, loansharks and murderers the police caught -- the core 100 or so made men could never be charged with any crime.
Omerta was a strategic innovation that the Jewish and Irish street gangs prior to the rise of the mafia didn't use. Omerta didn't have to exist in the United States, it was an accidental consequence of Italian immigration.
So no, all organized crime does not have the same problems. A lot of people died because the magic Ellis Island portals failed to erase the Omerta strategy from the minds of Sicilian immigrants.
This is dunderheaded. Clean out the cobwebs. There was mob everywhere, except maybe the good ol' south. The Eytalions won over the Jewish mob, the Irish mob, and every other mob by being more violent.
Isn't that just the "people were wrong in the past, therefore you're wrong now" argument?
No, it's the "A not following B in the past is evidence against it following from B in the future" argument.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that history is irrelevant?
>Italians and Irish were considered different, undesirable races 120 years ago, and nativists warned that we needed to hold them out to avert disaster. That prediction looks wrong in hindsight.
It looks wrong because we've spent all our lives living in a world shaped by the consequences of their immigration, so we don't really notice them. But Italian and Irish immigration did bring major problems with corruption and organised crime (Tammany Hall, the Mafia), and Italian- and Irish-Americans were important parts of the New Deal coalition that resulted in America becoming substantially more centralised and statist than it previously had been. Somebody in, say, 1890 who liked the US as it then was and predicted that immigration would reshape the country in a way he regarded as negative would have been quite correct.
Agreed -- if you're willing to bite the bullet and say the immigration of the late 19th and early 20th century was bad for America, then my argument has no sway over you.
American immigration restrictionists point to the crime issue because most of them aren't brave/stupid enough to talk about the thing that really bothers them about mass immigration, which is the transformation of society into something they find foreign and bad via the arrival and eventual influence of people with alien cultures and mores. Also some basic racism for a lot of them.
I often wonder why haven't tried making the anti-immigration argument to wealthy and influential liberals, who are disproportionately likely to be hardcore NIMBY's, using "preserving neighborhood character" style terms and framing.
>I often wonder why haven't tried making the anti-immigration argument to wealthy and influential liberals, who are disproportionately likely to be hardcore NIMBY's, using "preserving neighborhood character" style terms and framing.
Anti-immigration types tend to despise those people.
"NIMBYs could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be NIMBYs anywhere." The fresh air felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE NIMBYs" he thought.
You can despise people and still find a way to work with them. See culturally conservative ethnic blocs aligning with progressive coalitions.
For a little while. The muslims are quite upfront about bringing sharia to America, after all. It's a Life Goal for them.
>the transformation of society into something they find foreign and bad via the arrival and eventual influence of people with alien cultures and mores. Also some basic racism for a lot of them.
Because a lot of conservatives are still bothered by being called racist, as you go on to do, and if they say "I like my ~~doctor~~ culture and want to keep it," they know they'll be called racist. This stigma doesn't work as well as it used to, and I don't think anyone's going to like what comes next.
Appealing to crime is ostensibly more objective and playing into a vaguely technocratic role, but it fails since liberals would also rather have more crime than look like they're even remotely racist (in disparate impact and "community wellbeing" terms).
I think the majority of immigration restrictionists are not racist, by any useful definition of the term, but there are no question some sizable factions among them who are at least partially motivated by simple racism. And I agree about why they don't make the cultural argument straight up, because it makes it too easy for the dominant cultural actors to paint them as racist and thereby deligimitize their project to normies.
By that note, the crime argument does actually work fairly well, when viewed in the context of how do we get normies onside. The Laken Riley Act is a pretty powerful example of that.
In the sense that “alien cultures and mores” include disdain for law and order, disdain for freedom and self-government, disdain for individual freedom of conscience on religious questions, a tribe-based dog-eat-dog culture of corruption, and a sense that they are citizens of, let us say, Somalia first and the United States second, you are damned right I consider it bad.
And I am very sympathetic to your point of view, with some qualifications
I probably have the same qualifications. :-)
I am sure, for example, that there are a lot of, let us say, Somali who come here with the same desire for freedom, self-government, and desire to be Americans that marked my own ancestors (which, I hasten to add, came over *quite* a while after the Pilgrims). My barber is a hard-working Persian who is delighted to be an American citizen despite having relatives still in Iran. My career was spent in tech, and I have the utmost respect for my various immigrant colleagues of all races over the years. Nothing I said above was meant to deny the existence of exceptions, nor even to assert that the exceptions are rare.
But, as I've probably said here before, the culture and mores of the U.S. are children of the Enlightenment, which was born in northern Europe, and more precisely children of the flavor formulated in England and Scotland. (Think Mill and Smith rather than Rousseau.) The farther a potential immigrant was raised from that crucible of Enlightenment values, the less likely he is to successfully assimilate when he gets here. When our immigration policy was focused on people that probably were brought up with Enlightenment values in their water, along with a small seasoning of people from outside that area, assimilation tended to work pretty well over time.
In the middle of the last century, though, the Zeitgeist changed. Citizens stopped making it clear that immigrants would be better off if they treated assimilation as a goal, and in fact began to feel embarrassed about even suggesting it. The 1965 "reform" stopped giving preference to people with a shared political and ethical background, and we congratulated ourselves on not being bigots.
The result, a half century later, is appalling formulations like the Smithsonian's poster about "whiteness and white culture in the United States", which suggested that many of the foundational things that made America great, like self-reliance, autonomy, the scientific method, hard work, promptness, responsibility, and planning for the future, are "white" and should accordingly be questioned and even abhorred.
When I grew up I never thought of myself as "white" especially, though I am probably about as white as anybody. When the vibe began to appear in recent years that I should admit to being white, and also that I should be ashamed of it, I remarked to my wife that this was not going to end well -- they would regret ever suggesting to whites that we were an ethnic group. Nothing has given me any reason to doubt that initial assessment.
I want to be a fly on the wall when the Smithsonian starts telling Indians or Iranians that showing up on time is a white people thing.
Maybe it’s a Caucasian thing? Except what about Greeks and Spaniards? :-) Okay, I’m straying into cheap shot territory. Enough.
It's been done before... (They started passing out the "timeliness" is a white people thing, as was science etc.)
Now, children, remember, burning yourself with hot cups is Just As Effective against Measles as vaccination! All Cultures Good!
I was under the impression that a very large percentage of migrants arriving in the U.S. are "seeking asylum" (not just Afghanis, Chinese, and Venezuelans) in the sense that they claim persecution from organized crime or poor economic opportunity or whatever at home. Is that wrong?
I don't think you can claim persecution/oppression/suffering/whatever from poor economic conditions as a reason for claiming asylum. The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) exemption granted to Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. (it's set to expire soon) was granted on the grounds of the socioeconomic and political crisis Venezuela was experiencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_protected_status#Countries_with_nationals_under_temporary_protected_status_set_to_be_terminated
You can always claim persecution etc on the basis of a made-up story. Whatever country you come from, there's probably *somebody* their being oppressed and you can claim to be one of those. Venezuela, there were a lot of people being oppressed.
And for a while you can claim asylum with the reasonable expectation that you'd be told "fine, wait over there, don't do any crimes, don't take anyone's job, we'll get around to investigating your claim about persecution", but that nobody would really check to make sure you were "waiting over there" etc and that you could indefinitely postpone the "let's hash out this persecution story" part.
I am fairly certain that a number of people who were primarily interested in the economic opportunities of the United States of America, found it expedient to follow the "sob story, asylum claim, wader off and get a job, hope nobody notices" plan, and that it worked fairly well for them. At least until 2025.
Numbers matter, at least to nerds like us, and it's hard to get good numbers on how much of a problem this is. But most politics is done by normies who don't generally think about numbers.
I wasn't trying to answer the "large percentage of migrants" question from the original poster. I was just trying to clarify that in most countries (I understand also America) you can't claim asylum on the basis of escaping from poverty.
It would be nice to have good numbers though.
True. However, poverty is not grounds for asylum under our laws. Part of the complication of the Biden-era migration crisis was the administration's commitment to due process for asylum claims, often allowing claimants to remain in the US while waiting for a court hearing. This incentivized people who were fundamentally economic migrants to claim asylum, knowing it could be years before their claim was examined in court.
A lot of this is just that the same labels cover different realities. Asylum seeker in Germany and asylum seeker in the US aren’t the same population, because the way people end up in that bucket is different. But the anecdotes travel as a whole script....villains, implied setup, all of it, and the script outperforms the actual facts.
I don't know the numbers on this, but my read is that asylum claim is (was?) the preferred loophole to get your foot in the door. Many people *claim* asylum and are not granted it, but by that point they're already in the country and just dodge the courts. Perhaps the stats that Scott is referencing people who were actually granted asylum.
Yeah, that sounds plausible. You’ve got at least three different groups mixed together - - people who file, people who are granted, and people who file and then disappear into the backlog.
You need to be within the country to apply for asylum. If you're okay with dodging the courts, you can also just overstay your tourist visa and avoid the entire legal hassle.
That is why German embassies will NOT give a tourist-visa to Syrians (and a looooooong list of other countries) - not even to medical doctors. "Dodging the courts" may be a thing in the US, but here you are much better off to *embrace* 'the entire legal hassle': you do not pay the fees, anyway.
I would like sources on your claim that they don't give tourist visas to a long list of countries.
Syrians who seek asylum still need to come here one way or the other though, and if they get smuggled across borders or come with a schengen visa from another country, they can still overstay instead of seeking asylum.
That said seeking asylum in Germany probably has more tangible benefits than the US. My right to work was checked every time I started a job here and from what I heard asylum seekers can be granted right to work (requiring approval on each position, which is a reportedly a bureaucratic headache that discourages many low skill employers), and there's various other benefits around housing, pocket money and healthcare.
I closely cooperated with the German embassy in Riyadh, KSA (2010-2015). And it does not depend on where the embassy is, but from where the applicant comes from. Any country with a considerable number of citizens seeking asylum in Germany will get on the 'blacklist' (ie, it has to be a long list), the country being poor mattering less. (One embassy-guy told me once (1992?), they never had trouble with Nepalesi.)
If one fulfills the requirements for work-visa/student-visa/spouse.... or is obviously really rich: different story, of course. So, Dr. Mohammed still got a solo tourist Schengen-Visa from the Italian embassy (and with this, he visited me in Germany) - and he had offers to smuggle him (with his family) to the EU, too. In the end he ended up with a work-visa to the UK and works there as medic.
See it from the position of the staff at the German embassy: if you give a tourist-visa to anyone who then later claims asylum in Germany: you will be reprimanded - and your account checked, if it happens more often. I would have refused Dr. M's application, too, though I would have hated the dumb system that forced me to.
But sure, get the numbers/ratios of applications and refusals - though people obviously learn quickly and not even try to get the German visa, thus the numbers underplay how restrictive the embassy really is.
Embassies love to give visa, where they are not to make a decision of their own: as in giving your foreign spouse a "family-reunion-visa" if you have a kid together (who is German, naturally) - but giving a spouse visa is already a headache (could be a fake marriage).
The statistics also come out very differently in America if you compare *white* Americans to *non-white* immigrants.
If you compare immigrants to Americans overall, immigrants can look especially low because the U.S.-born average includes groups with much higher incarceration rates. If you compare immigrants only to U.S.-born whites, the gap usually shrinks. But it still generally goes the same direction: immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born whites.
What about illegal immigrants? I'm under the impression that conservatives are mostly anti-illegal immigration, and only a niche minority are more broadly against immigration in general, so I find it confusing that these types of discussions always conflate legal and illegal immigrants into just "immigrants" when the populations are clearly very distinct.
Agreed. 'Immigrant' gets used as a catch-all (illegal, legal, asylum, overstays) and the debate changes depending on which one you mean. Which I think is basically Scott’s point: Europe’s asylum story gets treated as if it’s the US story.
I read somewhere that the difference also goes away if you account for the fact that an average native has been present for longer than an average immigrant. (I don’t remember where it was or how likely they are to cheat — if they’re computing per-year chance of incarceration but giving natives credit for ages 0 through 12, I’m not that impressed. But I have the feeling it was somebody more reputable than that.)
Yeah, that’s a real issue. If you compare “ever incarcerated” for people who’ve lived here their whole lives to people who arrived 5–10 years ago, the second group has had less time for anything to show up. The remedy depends on how it’s done. The weak version is giving natives a bunch of “risk time” from childhood. I think a better version looks at adult years, or compares people at the same ages.
My impression is that once you do that, the gap usually gets smaller (but doesn’t disappear.) If you happen to remember where you saw it, I’d like to look at what they actually did.
Now coming from Europe I don't have a good feeling for what mainstream American conservatives would say. I also do not know the actual numbers here, but I noticed that you used statistics for all native-born Americans. I can imagine that the New Right, overrepresented in online discourse, would start using race-based arguments and compare immigrants to native groups with worse crime statistics. If you know what I mean.
This is different from Europe where the native population is homogenous.
Several European countries have a sizable native gypsy minority. E.g in Bulgaria, they are believed to make up about one tenth of the general population and about half of the prison population, which is more extreme than the situation with blacks in the US.
Bingo, there is a lot of "European" conversations on here where Europe means the EU + UK. Conspicuous they ignore your point about Gypsies or let's say immigration numbers in other parts of Europe like Moldova, Turkey, Belarus, Cyprus, Malta, FYROM, etc.
Cyprus (although de facto not true for Northern Cyprus) and Malta are part of EU.
Edit: And Bulgaria as well, as I assume you thinking the opposite triggered that reply.
I know that, I simply don't a good short hand for Western Europe + UK + Scandinavia + Germany hence why I didn't say "non-EU nations" and instead listed a few as examples. Non former-Warsaw Pact doesn't capture it, OSCE comes close but most people don't know what OCSE is anymore and I feel OSCE has vastly expanded as well. European NATO nations comes close as well but it also captures Turkey while not capturing Austria and Switzerland which also have the same Islamification issues.
"We" all "know" what Europe means in American just like Americans know what America means unlike a Mr. Bunny who seems to think America means every nation in the two continents. But this is a case where I think the former is extremely unfair as Austria is definitely culturally European as is both Transnistria and Russia and as much so as France is whereas Bolivia and the Illinois, not so much.
> I know that, I simply don't a good short hand for Western Europe + UK + Scandinavia + Germany
From an American perspective, you'd just call that "Western Europe".
Also, I'm curious what perspective suggests to you that Western Europe excludes every Germanic group... except the Dutch.
On your last part I have no idea, never really thought about it. I think my brain has always made the dividing line between Western and Central Europe the WW1/2 western demarcation i.e. the German border, not the French one, and I'm betting most American would agree, i.e. if you asked Tyrone Jackson if Amsterdam was in Western or Central Europe I'm betting she would say Western plus vertical lines are easier to visualize than North-Western diagonal ones, people like their boxes lol.
The problem with “Western Europe” as you mention is Central Europe exists as a commonly used term too but that includes places like Hungary and Liechtenstein which most Americans nor Frenchmen I'd suggest don't think about or mean when they are talking about “Europe”. And if Germany is in Western Europe then it's not really in Central Europe.
It's a hard one because modern Europe has become like porn, “you know it when you see it”. We all know what “Europe” is but the edge cases on that usage is hard and will probably differ by a couple countries person to person context to context.
BUT what it's not, which is how many EU and their American supporters use it, is a euphemism for the EU as the UK is the most glaring example plus nobody is going to seriously claim Monaco or the Vatican aren't European.
It's more extreme, but not a lot more extreme. Your numbers are vague enough that it might not be more extreme.
By way of comparison, I found https://worldmetrics.org/prison-race-statistics/ , suggesting that blacks are 12.2% of the adult population and 40.5% of the prisoners.
The numbers also don't really compare directly; I tend to suspect that American blacks are more criminal in an absolute sense than Bulgarian gypsies, but their share of the prison population gets driven down by most American groups being more criminal than would be expected in Bulgaria. I would also bet that American whites are more criminal than Bulgarian whites. But the share-of-prisoners metric says nothing about this.
Those Sinti/Roma numbers look a bit worse than they are (and they are bad), as gypsies who do well and assimilate in Bulgaria/Romania etc. often stop to self-identify as anything 'gypsy' on forms/in surveys etc.
That's a good point, and the US one-drop rule also affects the numbers in the opposite way.
That is exactly what they do, but this reply doesn't get them far in the discourse because all the same statistics are true for white, native-born Americans, who also commit crimes at a higher rate than immigrants - both legal and illegal. Also, within each racial category, the native-born citizens commit more crimes than the non-native counterparts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104727971730279X
even this doesn't capture the full nuance. A right-winger might bring up:
1) nonwhites being marked as "white" in police reports (a bunch of viral cases of an obviously not white guy's mugshot next to RACE: WHITE).
2) sanctuary laws that prevent reporting to the feds of illegals who commit crimes (this was a sticking point in minnesota IIRC -- there is still disagreement about exactly how much they reported to the federal government/ICE)
3) nonwhite immigrants living in self-policed ethnic enclaves with corrupt police that prosecute crime in a biased way, letting off violators of their own tribe.
4) a lot of crime happens within, a community. e.g. black crime is a huge thing in America, but most of it is black-on-black crime. It is likely that if a crime happens to an illegal immigrant, probably by another illegal immigrant, they will be less likely to report it (esp. if they are worried that if they call the police they will get caught and deported).
We're still calling Arabs white, right? I mean, that's still a thing? I don't think they fit other categories terribly well (except for the Yemeni, which do fit black).
Trying to make sense of the stats on welfare use by US immigrants--
The CATO report makes the case that immigrants use less welfare per capita.
This CIS (opposite political bias of CATO) report shows that a majority of US immigrants are on at least one form of welfare: https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrants-and-USBorn-2024
So presumably this means that immigrants are more likely to receive welfare than citizens, but that they use less overall?
Also the CATO report states that naturalized citizens use more welfare than native born citizens or immigrant non-citizens, which is fascinating.
Good question. I think the most likely explanation is that some welfare programs specifically ban immigrants, so even though immigrants are dispositionally more likely to use welfare (and therefore be on at least one program), they can't use as many programs (and therefore collect less)
It also depends on what a particular report counts as welfare. In some European studies a huge expense is the welfare benefitting the migrant's dependents which other studies don't even count.
The statistics are all over the board and are going to vary heavily by region and data set- migrants in NYC between 2020-2025 probably received *way* more than the average, depending how you calculate all the benefits. How does public schooling count? Et cetera.
immigrant households have children who are recipients of very cheap forms of welfare, such as discounts on eating cardboard from a school cafeteria. Immigrant households rarely contain anyone eligible for the more expensive kinds of welfare, which are for old people.
Looks like it mostly comes down to social security plus medicare. The CATO study is all welfare and entitlements. CIS includes SSI, but not the main social security program. That could be defensible as the beneficiaries paid for it. But its certainly going to skew the numbers.
Some other points CIS finds that although immigrants use the school lunch program more, its not the only driver. Medicaid looks to be the biggest expensive program they over consume.
In cash welfare programs they count EITC. Views on whether thats proper welfare will differ. Excluding that, cash welfare use doesnt differ much.
Comparing to the violent crime rate of native-born Americans is weird, since that is an average of very disparate rates. For example the homicide rate of black Americans is 8 times that of white Americans. I suspect that the crime rate of migrants is higher than that of white Americans but less than the very-high rate among blacks.
I think this is a valid point. An ethnic group that commits violently crime marginally less frequently than black Americans (but still many multiples of the rate for white Americans) doesn't sound like a net positive.
Why not? You have what you have, and no one is seriously considering deporting black americans.
I, for one, would seriously consider paying them to move.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe/comment/213034432
In any case, just because you're stuck with a problem doesn't mean you want to enlarge it.
Wasn't this already tried with Liberia and broadly it basically worked quite poorly for everyone involved? Though I do not know the details.
Liberia was a disaster, but if US blacks think that the US is oppressing them and that lacking money and land is the root of their problems, then they're more than welcome to be educated by experience. In some other country, far far away.
Sure, I mean I don't know that much about the black american experience, being a white british person. It seems broadly like most of them are proud to be americans.
Probably around 50% of white americans would also express hypothetical interest in moving to another country, and I would assume a higher proportion of white americans actually _do_. I don't think this is necessarily because they hate the US and think its evil.
If I was considering whether to allow migration from a specific country, and studies found that immigrants from that country committed violent crime at a rate vastly higher than the white majority but slightly lower than black Americans, I would not be in favour of doing so.
Just because you're stuck with a Demographic A who commit violent crime at very high rates, doesn't mean you're morally obligated to accept immigrants from every other demographic that commits violent crime at an even marginally lower rate than Demographic A.
Is that meant to be sarcastic? I don't think most people here would even be particularly against that (as long as you include the better parts of Europe as well).
You're not obligated to, but if on the margin it is an improvement, why not improve on the margin?
It really doesn't sound like an improvement on the margin.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, if immigrants commit crime at lower rates than average native-born, that seems like the definition of an improvement on the margin re: crime rates? Isn't this the point of contention?
If a group has a higher crime rate than the median but lower than the mean then in most neighborhoods they would increase the crime rate, no?
seems true, yes.
I guess it would depend on how mixed the neighbourhoods are and how much crime varies by neighbourhood, but given reasonable assumptions this seems true.
Instead of comparing to the native-born population, why not compare to the best possible set of immigrants you could get?
If the US were to have a different set of immigration policies then it would be reasonably easy to get the immigrant crime rate far, far lower.
But that's not what we're talking about. If immigrants are less criminal than natives, and black people are only an eighth of the overall population, immigrants are much less than slightly less criminal than black people.
But they are still much more criminal than the majority of the non black population, because the black population weighs so heavily on crime. There huge gap hidden in 'average'.
That seems wrong. The premise of the original comment in this thread is that while immigrants have lower criminality than the general native-born population, it's higher than the non-black majority.
If black criminality is 8, and blacks are 1/8th of the population, while the remainder has a criminality of 1 then overall average criminality is 1.875. So immigrants would be between 1 and 1.875. Much closer to the non-black majority than the black minority.
And as pointed out by others, if you think that crime is mostly a black problem, you should be in favor of diluting the black population with less criminal people. This would weakly imply both pro-natalism and support for immigration.
Lincoln was into re-colonizing them into Liberia, but relatively little of that wound up happening. It doesn't seem practical.
mathematically this doesn't work. there are still way more whites than blacks in america, so the average crime rate is closer to that of whites than blacks, and if an immigrant is on par / better than that they are much better than american blacks and close to whites, not other way round
Depends to some extent upon how disproportionate the black crime rate is (and how many of the immigrants are also white, if we're trying to pin down racial effects). Consider a model wherein 15% of the native population commits 50% of the crime; then the limit beyond which immigrants would not increase crime-rate still has them committing crimes at twice the rate of the remaining 85% (and at one-third the rate of the aforesaid 15%). Whether that counts as "close to" the former depends upon how one interprets "close", I suppose; *closer* to the 85% than to the 15%, certainly... but not particularly *close, per se,* to either, if you ask me.
Not sure how to think about this. Suppose that American natives were ethnically homogenous. We could always separate them into two groups, high-crime-committers and low-crime-committers, and show that immigrants committed more crime than the low-crime-committers (but still less than the average). But this would be tautological and boring. Why does it become interesting when the groups start being color-coded?
I think most of what we're trying to do here is say "If America let in lots of immigrants, should the average citizen expect higher or lower crime than today?" Since some crime now is committed by black people, and they would be diluted as share of the population, I think using the full national statistics is an okay approximation.
The non-approximate version would require thinking hard about cross-victimization rates. That is, I could tell a story where immigration makes the average white American experience less crime (because immigrant criminals mostly prey on other immigrants, and some native criminals also prey on immigrants in ways that make them prey on natives less). Or I could tell a story where immigration makes the average white American experience more crime (because immigrant criminals prey on natives, and native criminals don't switch to preying on immigrants). I'm not sure how this would pan out, and it probably depends a lot on details of effective segregation in each region.
>Why does it become interesting when the groups start being color-coded?<
For a large variety of reasons, if you ask me:
* Compare white Americans to non-white Americans—or non-white immigrants; it seems as if color is a highly salient proxy for various traits of interest. Such a strong & easily-evident proxy is pretty useful; we might, for example, also compare immigrants via racial groupings thereof: we now have—esp. combined with the evidence of our own population—an easy way to determine what sort of immigrants we ought to let in.
* (Possibly we ought especially compare, where & if possible, relatively-less-selected populations; e.g., lottery immigrants vs. immigrants who made it here on some sort of merit: this might provide some information on the mean we might expect regression toward.)
* It isn't just about "color"—as I know you know! Beyond genetics that go deeper than skin-, there's a cultural question; one could make an argument that we ought to import only the more compatible cultures, and/or only the relatively less toxic cultures. (I think even some on the left are coming around to the idea that some cultures are better than others—I would hope, anyway—if not in some universal moral sense of "better", at least in a very easily definable "better for human flourishing as the modern West views it".)
* The dialogue is *already* "color-coded"—we aren't starting from square one and choosing a way to divide up populations; it has already been chosen for us, on both the Left & Right (albeit with different directions of sympathy, so to speak).
* The "cross-victimization" thing is not at all a wash, I think you'd find, for white Americans. This certainly isn't the pattern we find in Europe, nor with our native black population; I'd be pretty surprised if disproportionate cross-racial victimization rates went the *other* direction when the immigrants are Haitians or Somalis or what-have-you. East Asians, sure, maybe. ("Some native criminals also prey on immigrants in ways that make them prey on natives less" seems, *prima facie,* implausible as any sort of major factor, as well—and that would have to be the main mechanism which washes out the known-to-be-so "immigrant criminals also prey upon natives... and certain 'color-salient' groups prey upon *everyone else* disproportionately" element.)
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[Note: I myself have a known propensity to prey upon the "Edit" button disproportionately, so the arguments in this comment—such as they are—will probably continue to slowly improve over the next day... but these are at least the responses that immediately jump to mind; may or may not be too convincing, but I'll try to put my intuitions into gooder words as I can.]
All those things are true, but they seem rather tangential to the point Scott is bringing up. Presumably, when people bring up immigrant crime, it's because they're afraid immigrants will make the country a more violent place on average. But if immigrants have lower crime rates than natives, they'll bring the crime rate down, even if all the native criminals are the same race. Between whites, blacks, and immigrants, the only people who would experience an increase in crime in the average case are the immigrants themselves. If the immigrants are moving to white areas, then it would be whites to experience this increase in crime, but as far as I know, they're more likely to move to black areas on account of being poor.
My comment above is a response to "why is looking at race more interesting than looking at other ways of dividing people up?"; I don't think it's tangential to the larger question either, though: if non-white immigrants are more likely to be criminal than whites, I'd rather we not let the former in *regardless of their criminality relative to black Americans*—just as, if I were to desire to dilute a flask of acid, and I had a choice of "pour in water" or "pour in solution of NaOH", I'd rather do the latter:¹ even if the water is better than nothing, the choice isn't *between* "water or nothing".
(...and if the goal is "as pure & concentrated a solution of NaOH as possible", water *isn't* better than nothing... but that's a different argument, to some extent; I'll just say that criminality is not the only concern: I live right on the southern border of Texas, and good God has social order deteriorated in the past decade or two—everything's run down, everything must be locked up tight, every social service is overwhelmed, every event must be heavily policed or canceled; we can't have nice things, because we import people who aren't conducive to having nice things. Only one demographic is a net benefit to the nation, financially speaking, and that seems to go also for the social fabric.²
(I suppose the question is, in the end, whether one wishes their nation to resemble Mississippi, or Pakistan, or Liberia—or Vermont.)
>If the immigrants are moving to white areas, then it would be whites to experience this increase in crime, but as far as I know, they're more likely to move to black areas on account of being poor.<
Unfortunately, one cannot completely isolate one demographic from another. If you're very wealthy, perhaps you can live in a gated neighborhood & deal only with fellow richie-riches—but that's not the modal white experience.
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¹(...even though, ideally, we'd be adding acid to water rather than vice versa. literally, I mean, not in the metaphor—I guess, what, in the metaphor that'd be advocating for a... deportation program, or something?–)
²(I don't mean that the Mexicans are a big problem; hell, I love 'em—almost all of my coworkers, the majority of my buddies, a plurality of my partners, and a quarter of my parents have been Mexican, heh... it's the massive influx of folks from farther south, and—weirdly—a sudden increase in Africans.)
> why is looking at race more interesting than looking at other ways of dividing people up?
But looking at race doesn't change the overall picture that immigrants aren't dragging up the crime rate of the country. I agree that in general, looking at race is interesting because it correlates with a bunch of other things. I just don't see how the specific objection of native crime differentials has any bearing on the immigration question if you've established that immigrants are less criminal than the national average. I think that's what Scott was trying to communicate when he asked why is looking at race interesting here.
> if I were to desire to dilute a flask of acid, and I had a choice of "pour in water" or "pour in solution of NaOH", I'd rather do the latter:¹ even if the water is better than nothing, the choice isn't between "water or nothing"
What if you had so little caustic soda that even after using it all, the water would still serve to dilute the acid further? I would say that's the situation we face with regards to immigration and crime. If you were to ban all immigrant groups who commit more crime than whites, even if they commit less crime than the national average, I don't think you'd then receive enough immigrants to drag the crime rate below the native white average. So admitting immigrants who are more criminal than whites but less criminal than the average would still serve to reduce the crime rate.
> and if the goal is "as pure & concentrated a solution of NaOH as possible", water isn't better than nothing... but that's a different argument, to some extent
Yes, there are other objections to immigration (which I would say are mostly wrong as well), but I specifically wanted to respond to the one about crime.
I think it's relatively obvious that the reason it becomes interesting when the groups are color-coded is because you can use that coding as a metric to gain the positive effects and minimize the negative without expensive background testing. It even works better than the nearly-as-simple country test most conservatives use, it just comes at the cost of making you the worst villain of the current time and a general pariah, which only serves to make it become even more interesting
It's not helpful in this context, where the commenter is separating Americans by color and crime rate, but trying to use it for policy on immigrants which they are not separating by crime rate or color.
If they were proposing deporting black Americans, that would be terrible, but the policy is based on the metric. Likewise, if they were banning immigrants by some visible quality that statistically correlated with higher crime rates than the native citizens, the policy is based on the metric. But what they were actually proposing is just a logical fallacy. Their policy only make the average crime rate higher.
I didn't see a policy prescription, I only saw where the commenter suggested that the comparison of "native-born Americans" is higher due to a specific population and where Scott suggested it wasn't interesting. I also am not making a policy prescription, I am just saying (if you'll pardon me showing my age) "Big if true". You can say that it is true that there is a causal relationship between race/ethnicity/culture and crime, or you can say that it is false (mitigating factors, incorrect data, correlation vs. causation, etc.), but you can't say that it isn't interesting
It really isn't interesting for the question of immigration and crime. If the crime rate of immigrants is less than that of natives, the average rate of crime will go down if you let them in, even if all the native criminals are the same color.
Now if deporting blacks were a serious policy option in this country, then this would be a valid objection because taking in immigrants could be a crime increase over the counterfactual as the only natives that are gonna stay in the country are the non-black ones and they have lower crime rates than the immigrants. But because this is not a serious policy option, this objection is not relevant.
It's not interesting in that it suggests deporting black Americans (though, I suppose it would), it's interesting in that it would suggest that you could generally massively increase the upside of immigration while decreasing the downside if you just allowed or disallowed immigration based on race. The color chart the police officer uses in the Simpson's would be incredibly cheap and, if the data were true, more effective than the current bureaucratic immigration system. (Note: I am not genuinely advocating this, just saying that it would have very interesting implications if it were true)
So, um, can we use the general Carribean "Haitians are low status" to decide that no more Haitians? Or is using that part of Global Culture somehow bad? Is it weird that other countries are anti-immigration? Is that a bad part of their culture?
I don't think the "lower average crime rate" is how people really assess this question.
People compare the hypothetical immigrant to themselves, not the average.
I do think it's an interesting and open question what the correct algorithm here is. Like increasing pop at all could increase victimization rate by increasing encounter frequency.
I should take actions that reduce my personal expected victimization rate. If we take a hypothetical of letting in 1 billion UNIFORM people who slightly shift the average for the better, I would expect my own victimization rate to increase since I'll have more trouble filtering my average encounter to be only with people who were better than average, as i already have. If they are non uniform (obviously) now it depends on the variation. I doubt incoming groups individually vary as much as the American population, hence it could be logical to reject a group with a lower rate maybe?
I think the high Black rate is an outlier that needs specific policy prescription. We should not be looking to allow migrants who have higher crime rates than native whites - why should we?
This just seems arbitrary. Why whites? Why not native Chinese Americans? Or even better, just pick a number. 1%.
But then you get into a thornier question: you have an individual in front of you, not a population. How do you determine that individual's "crime rate"? You might say something like 'look at their skin color', but that's ridiculously low signal. You could be smarter and say 'look at their ethnic background' and maybe that's better, but then you need to be ok with letting in large numbers of people with low criminal backgrounds (Indian folks, Chinese folks, whatever). Or you could do the smartest thing and look at socioeconomic status. But now you're definitely not optimizing for a 'white' country, which is what I think secretly everyone who talks about these things in these terms wants anyway
Whites are more representative of the US than any other racial group simply because they still make up 58%. Latinos are 20% and Blacks are 13%. My main point was to take out Blacks out because they are an outlier because of the history of slavery and oppression in various forms that they suffered continuously till at least the passage of civil rights act in 1960s.
I don't see why we should allow racial groups that have higher incarceration rates even when they fear being deported than native born whites. We simply don't have enough information about individual migrants to treat them as individuals, so we have to approximate based on group characteristics. The point is if we don't want the next generation of these migrants making our society more violent, we should not let the migrants in in the first place. Turns out native born Latinos have higher incarceration rate than native born Americans.
My point is not to advocate for more Chinese and Indian illegal immigration - I think we should have ZERO illegal immigration. My post was to challenge Scott's contention that almost all illegal immigrant groups in the US have lower incarceration rates compared with US born natives.
And my main point was that you don't have to look at race at all. If you were actually interested in criminality, you would use socioeconomic status as your individual marker. Instead you arbitrarily insist on using race, and then create an arbitrary carve out where American doesn't mean American, and then use a different arbitrary carve out for why, if we are focusing on race, we should not just use the rate of the lowest criminality racial group. There is *no* reason to use 'white americans' as the measuring stick, unless you have a vested interest in 'white americans' being the default. But that makes me think you care way more about race than about the crime.
Respectfully, you're wrong. You have to be obtuse to an extent I cannot imagine to explain the difference between criminality amongst African American and American Whites to "socio economic status." That theory is discredited and dead for some time now.
Secret Societies of Racists are everywhere! Also secret societies of goat f***ckers, but at least we can document that one.
I've seen your posts on this and other threads, and you seem like a deeply unpleasant person. Blocked and reported.
I think the reason why this is interesting is that you would get a more apples to apples comparison with Europe. I *believe* when you separate out education in America by race, you end up finding out that America has one of the best education rates in the world. In theory, if you separate out white America on crime you'd get something like a European country on crime and then ask "if you view white America as Europe, is the counterfactual impact of immigration similar to what Europeans are experiencing, or is America really just built different?". I think this is an interesting question beyond just trying to gerrymander high crime and low crime groups.
Obviously this would require a lot more analysis on where immigrants end up etc. etc. etc. but I think even a low granularity analysis of this would be informative. Or just doing the analysis where you compare American immigrants to European natives would be simple enough.
I did not think of that but i agree this would be insightful. My main point was two fold: 1) whites have defined the US for a long time, and they still do even if their population has dropped to 58% - they're still the largest group and the next bigger group is Latinos at 20% - a huge drop-off. 2) Blacks are an outlier because of the history slavery and oppression in various forms that they suffered continuously till at least the passage if civil rights act in 1960s - and it is so much higher than any other group by a huge margin. We just need to treat this as a special case and implement policies to specifically address it.
The idea that the right policy analysis approach is to break Americans into demographic groups and focus on disparate impacts seems pretty woke.
(Also, The violent crime rate of immigrants is also an average of disparate rates, but I guess we're not worried about that right now?)
>(Also, The violent crime rate of immigrants is also an average of disparate rates, but I guess we're not worried about that right now?)<
Sure we are—that's a main reason to consider race!
Another confounding factor is the lumping together of legal and illegal immigrants into just "immigrants" despite them being very distinct populations with I suspect a vast gap in crime rates (ignoring crossing the border illegally itself).
Aren't the majority of illegal immigrants people who came in on completely legal work visas and then failed to renew them? I think the actual border hoppers who get literally smuggled into the country are a minority.
I thought so too but I think this is a pre-Obama model; at least during Biden's admin I think the typical case was a border hopper who gets immediately caught, claims asylum as a refugee from violence or something similar, and is then released into the US where they disappear
No.
And the majority (around 75%) of immigrants are legal, so my point is that conflating legal and illegal immigrants by saying immigrants in general commit less crime than the native population is obfuscating.
You can break down the illegal population down further into subgroups of over stayers vs. border hoppers, but I'm not sure what the point would be.
Yes, the actual border hoppers kidnapped and not trying to enter the country AT All are a minority.
This is what I thought. The overall crime rate in the US is useful for thinking about some issues and not others. I have lived in areas with, for all practical purposes, zero property or violent crime all of my life. I have never been afraid to go out at night, I have never been the victim of any crime, I know almost no one who has been. I'm not talking about gated communities either, these are normal suburbs in normal mid-sized cities all over the US. Almost everyone I know owns guns, some of them many many guns, and I have never known anyone who's been shot on purpose or accident. The crime in these areas was things like occasional vandalism from kids, drug possession, DUIs, etc. I'm sure there were financial crimes, domestic disputes, things like that. And while these show up in the stats, and these laws should be enforced because these crimes of course create serious problems of their own, they have very little impact on the overall sense of safety and order in these communities in most cases.
I think this is what a lot of the big brained analysis from the big city types misses. There are actually still huge areas with ~0 "scary" crime. And when that number goes from zero to "the national average" it feels very very bad for the people who live there and they want it to stop. And no amount of talk about national crime stats or long term impact on GDP or labor productivity makes any of that feel better.
For me the question this raises isn't so much why are European immigrants so criminal, it's why in the world is the American born population so likely to be criminal? In like the second richest country in the world, why aren't immigrants, from a poor corrupt country struggling to survive in a new place, more likely to be criminal than the natives? Why do you have the highest prison population in the world by a mile? What is going on?
This is not me trying to be America Bad, I'm genuinely curious about this. Poverty is highly correlated with crime and violence. Is there simply so much poverty in the US that traumatized immigrants from literal Mexico doesn't make a dent?
Is the crime rate worse in America or just the murder rate? Because the high murder rate seems much more to do with the abundance of guns.
That only works when you compare the US and Europe and ignore the rest of the world. Actually a high murder rate has much more to do with the abundance of gangs. Brazil and South Africa have extremely restrictive gun laws and high murder rates because they are full of gangs. El Salvador was full of gangs and had an incredibly high murder rate. They cracked down on gangs, not guns, and now the murder rate is very low.
I've heard the same - that it's not so much some inborn personality flaw, but more likely hard-to-change cultural mores. I'm not an American and have no clue, but I've seen sociologists suggest that the main culprit is the "honour culture" in poor black communities. Which probably correlates with gangs. And honour culture pops up easily in very different societies, regardless of ethnicity, usually when the police are weak or nonexistent. The US black honour culture is supposed to be at least decades old, maybe from the pre-war-on-drugs period, when the police didn't bother with poorer neighborhoods that much (if such a period existed)?
This tracks with the issues with immigrants from honour cultures in Europe.
Gangs are generally "unable to go to the courts" so there's a real "economic" thing going on, and the honor culture is only somewhat wrapped in that.
If someone doesn't pay up, what you gonna do? Well, you knee cap them. See if they pay then. If not, you kill them. This is what happens when your gun is your enforcement strategy, and it's rather independent of honor culture.
That makes sense, yes. Well, I suppose, as a gang man, one needs to keep one's honour by showing that one's not messed with, and just kills whoever doesn't pay or doesn't take him seriously.
Around half of American homicides involve a firearm, so most developed countries (and some undeveloped ones) have a lower *total* homicide rate than our *gun* homicide rate.
Regarding the US prison population, this article might be helpful https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/prisons-arent-filled-with-harmless
See also https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/does-poverty-cause-violent-crime
It's not a big mystery.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe/comment/213030419
Poverty is actually a relatively weak predictor of crime, as any time-traveller from the 1950s could attest.
Still, why? "They are black" does not answer the question at all
No, that literally is most of the answer. IQ is mostly genetic, as is a good chunk of personality, and it's literally the first factor that pops out of a principle component analysis when the analyser is allowed to do wrongthink.
Except that doesn't explain why native British blacks are so much less criminal than American blacks. And why British blacks have roughly double the crime rate of British whites while American blacks have 8x the crime rate of American whites.
Sure it does. British blacks are more highly selected; we had, and have had, wholesale import of black populations. Britain hasn't—and yet...
The 8-10x multiplier is for homicide (and I think burglaries), the overall black/white difference in US crime more generally is more modest.
But yeah, in any case British blacks were more selected from the jamaican/west-indian upper-class, as I understand it. British-Nigerians do relatively well in the school system as well, though how much of this is due to the distorting effects of diversity initiatives is hard to say.
> The 8-10x multiplier is for homicide (and I think burglaries), the overall black/white difference in US crime more generally is more modest.
Note also that the 8x multiplier for homicide also holds between British blacks and British whites.
Selection bias, goddamnit! American blacks ain't the sharpest, because they were sent over as the "oh, who don't we want to deal with no more" from the Black Slavers on the African Continent.
"new immigrant" blacks in America used to be a quite well thought of immigrant group, because that had the same selection we did with everyone else.
IQ is not "mostly genetic", there was an entire thread here about how the current consensus is that it's around 40-60% genetic based on the most current studies. Of course I have other views, but that's the average opinion of experts.
Those estimates are mostly based on studies in children/young-adults, which ignores the Wilson Effect. It's 70-80% genetic in adults.
70-80% genetic in twin studies, which are highly unreliable. The Wilson paper is widely criticised and genomic studies and meta analyses of twin studies have much lower estimates.
50-60% would be "mostly".
40-60%* which is 50% average which is not mostly. Even 60% is a weak "mostly" and cannot fully explain the behaviour in question. Even 70-80% would not fully explain it.
around 70-75% of black babies are born to single mothers. couple that with the fact a disproportionate share of young black males are in prison or have done time and you end up with kids who just have no family infrastructure or role models to grow up to be law abiding. this was different 40-50 years ago btw.
This is the simplest and most plausible explanation, but an uncomfortable fact for some.
I haven't seen twin studies specifically looking at the effects of single-parent households, but I do recall at least one researcher commenting that these effects largely disappear after controlling for the mother's IQ (and the great majority of these absent fathers weren't great role models to begin with.)
Especially not when white Americans are also much more homicidal than Europeans. Is gun culture perhaps stronger among black Americans? Anything else about black American culture that might explain?
White americans have about 2x the homicide rate of white europeans, although that varies substantially by country, and yeah, gun culture might be part of that, but it's not that hard to point out white districts or even entire countries with sky-high rates of gun ownership and minimal violent crime. (Canada and Switzerland, for example.)
Yeah, "% black" is a *much* stronger predictor of murder-rate than "% gun-ownership"; IIRC, the latter is actually pretty weak once racial factors & suicides have been sifted out. Actually, I think Scott did a post upon this a long time ago & came to essentially the same conclusion.
I think immigration selects for people who are pretty competent and agentic, and they're less likely to be criminals.
This is true; as I edited into my above comment, though: even given this selective effect, perhaps we ought be concerned about regression to the mean.
Or at least not the "beat randos on the street" kind of criminal. I'd assume importing a lot of people with a good skill at tax evasion won't please IRS very much, but it won't make streets more dangerous.
"Selects for" is the entire point. I think very few people have a problem with selective immigration and a whole lot of people have a problem with whoever crosses the border and says "assylum" immigration.
My claim is that existing asylum seekers (ie the people who showed up as low-crime in the asylum seeker statistics I mentioned above) are selected for this. I think there are a few reasons for this:
- In practice, US asylum seekers are disproportionately rich people fleeing Communist regimes.
- The US actually makes it pretty hard to claim asylum.
- It takes more agency and competence to escape a failed state than to stay in it.
- It takes agency and competence to navigate the US immigration system.
- The US actually makes it pretty hard to claim asylum.
The Democratic innovation was to simply overload the whole system to functionally ignore the law by inviting and giving free release and a court date 10 years down the line to the hundreds of thousands saying the magic word. More or less everyone arguing in good faith knows that most asylum seekers, especially those coming during the Biden years, are economic migrants not legitimate asylum seekers, because one required factor in true asylum is "first safe country", which for almost all of them is not the US - they passed through others (especially Mexico) first.
- It takes agency and competence to navigate the US immigration system.
Again, this was more true prior to the Obama / Biden era influx. Most of these folks are not "navigating" the system in any meaningful sense. They're simply overloading it and then being ignored for years at a time.
> one required factor in true asylum is "first safe country"
Can you share your source for this? This appears in neither UN convention on refugees to my knowledge. EU has Dublin Regulation for this reason, but notably US is not in the EU.
It's a general principle of asylum claims. The general principle is implemented in a couple ways in the US regulatory regime. Most directly there is the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Rule which creates a rebuttable presumption of asylum ineligibility for those who cross the southwest border without first applying for (and being denied) asylum in a country they traveled through. Also under 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(2)(A)(vi), an applicant is barred from asylum if they were "firmly resettled" in another country prior to arriving in the U.S.. There are also Safe Third Country Agreements where the third country will agree to take asylees. I think Canada is the only active one currently, there used to be more.
> In practice, US asylum seekers are disproportionately rich people fleeing Communist regimes.
I do not see this in the data when I look. Do you have a source for this claim?
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-refugees-are-entering-the-us/
> The US actually makes it pretty hard to claim asylum.
I disagree with this point on a technicality, but a critically important one here. The US makes it hard to be granted asylum, but extremely easy to claim asylum and remain in the country. This is why Trump's remain in Mexico policy was a great idea and Biden made a huge mistake removing it.
> It takes more agency and competence to escape a failed state than to stay in it.
Agreed
> It takes agency and competence to navigate the US immigration system.
Agreed, but this is the selective immigration system which I am not arguing against.
A significant fraction of the American born population is descended from immigrants, and many from places with much, much higher crime rates than the United States of America. And some from places that used to have much higher crime rates but became nice and peaceful about the time most of the malcontents had migrated to the US and elsewhere. America at its best has been pretty good at assimilating immigrants and turning them into normal Americans complete with European-level crime rates, but America has not always been on its best behavior in this regard.
In particular, one large group of involuntary immigrants was actively discouraged from assimilation until fairly recently in historic terms, and wound up with a rather different culture that's now pretty baked in.
My personal guess is that America disproportionaly drew in risk takers as its immigrants (e.g. the Gold Rush and the 49-ers). Especially as its reputation grew as a place for entrepreneurs, who are a rather interesting group of people, psychologically speaking. (I don't have the reference on me, but I remember reading an interesting book about the inception of casino loyalty / customer loyalty programs in Las Vegas. The old hands at the pioneering casino, Caesar's Palace if I remember correctly, expected that it would show bankers, financiers, and stockbrokers as their best customers, the people they should tailor their programs around. Turns out instead that it was coin operated laundry owners, or something like that. Shopkeepers. Carwash owners. Little old Chinese grandmas, who owned a single Chinese takeout place. Small business owners, self-made.
The bankers, financiers, and stockbrokers, meanwhile, turned out to be risk adverse people. People who chose steady, safe paychecks in respectable careers. People with enough self-discipline to complete higher education, and therefore had enough self-discipline to recognize that they should only gamble with other people's money. Never their own. A nation formed of such people, is very different from a nation formed from the 1849 equivalent of the crypto-bro.)
I think one factor is that there's less of a social safety net, so you end up with entire communities that are largely in poverty, have dysfunctional values and norms, etc. etc.
Crime in rich or middle-class areas is typically quite low; working-class areas vary but are also often fine. From what I hear, the worst areas, on the other hand, are war zones.
Immigrants from Mexico are the "good ones" in general, or at least they have been for a while (good folks defined as "work hard, don't cause much trouble" -- they may be as a general rule pro-genocide, but that's a different pollgame). not so sure now that we've been arming spanish speakers in the Ukraine (whee, mercs).
If you follow this logic a bit further, it's evident that America's run of "good immigration" can't go on forever. The US has disproportionately attracted good immigrants from other parts of the world (likely helping the US and hurting the poor countries which they come from).
Europe has attracted "bad immigration." But if we acknowledge this, it's inevitable that the returns from good immigration will diminish if the numbers get large enough. In large enough (and uncontrolled enough) numbers, all immigration will eventually look like European immigration.
Europe attracted bad immigration at one specific time, the Syrian refugee crisis. That crisis is now long over but its aftereffects will likely linger for decades.
Whether Europe is still attracting bad or good immigration is difficult to answer because that huge run of bad immigration is polluting both the data and all public discourse surrounding it.
Obviously Syrians and other North Africans who came in all at once with no positive self-selection and very often no documentation are a completely different group from migrant workers from Nepal or the Philippines coming in smaller groups on work visas.
Europe has attracted bad immigration since long before that. Low IQ immigrants don't have good outcomes in subsequent generations even if they come on a work visa. This is also true for Hispanics in the US, but African-Americans make them look good by comparison.
>Europe has attracted bad immigration since long before that
Do you have data on this? European immigration is overwhelmingly internal and was a net positive over most of the cold war era.
>Low IQ immigrants don't have good outcomes in subsequent generations even if they come on a work visa
Immigrants on work visas are far less likely to stay long-term and start a family than asylum seekers are. Obviously some still do but it's a much smaller fraction. Most come in, work for 10-20 years for wages that would be insanely high in their home countries, then go back and live like kings compared to their neighbors.
And according to the 2024 IIT tests Nepal and the Philippines average 97 while India averages 99. Germany averages 100 so it's really not that big a deal, especially when you account for all the positive self-selection you have with people willing to learn another language and work in another country.
But as I've said in the previous comment properly measuring the impacts is as of right now almost impossible.
"European immigration is overwhelmingly internal and was a net positive over most of the cold war era. "
As opposed to "Europe has attracted bad immigration"? I don't see those as conflicting claims. For example, North Africans in France and Pakistanis in the UK have been coming since like the 1960s, Syrian refugee crisis is far from the only problem.
I don't know what the IIT tests are, but to be clear I'm not talking about software engineers or whatever.
>I don't know what the IIT tests are, but to be clear I'm not talking about software engineers or whatever.
International IQ Test, a standardised test taken by people all over the world and a much better representation of national IQ averages than previous attempts.
>For example, North Africans in France and Pakistanis in the UK have been coming since like the 1960s, Syrian refugee crisis is far from the only problem.
In much smaller numbers than the refugee crisis and definitely not large enough numbers to change the overall effects of immigration from net positive to net negative(like the refugee crisis did).
"In much smaller numbers than the refugee crisis and definitely not large enough numbers to change the overall effects of immigration from net positive to net negative(like the refugee crisis did). "
But the claim was about "Europe attracting bad immigration", not about bad immigration being outweighed by good internal migration within Europe.
And I'm not even sure the net benefit of internal migration within Europe is all that much more than zero, given that one country's gain may be another's loss to a large extent.
I could see that IQ test being representative of the kind of person who moves to the west on a work visa, but as for national averages in many countries half the people don't have internet access, and it's not a random half.
The "International IQ Test" is an online, self-administered quiz designed to provide a quick, free estimate of cognitive ability. It is not a standardized or proctored exam, and results are for entertainment or personal curiosity rather than official psychological assessment.
Are you referring to some sort of on-line test? These are startlingly unrepresentative and quite unreliable. Published IQ studies and school achievement tests clearly imply relatively low IQ/g in India, Nepal and the Philippines.
An article* from 2020 says "15 out of 32 gang leaders who are now on the focus list of the Stockholm police in Operation Rimfrost are born outside Sweden, and the others arrived as children – and among those, 14 out of 17 immigrated more than 20 years ago." I.e. much of the bad immigration that is behind Sweden's gang-crime problems happened in the last millennium, not in 2015.
* https://www.expressen.se/kronikorer/fredrik-sjoshult/nastan-halften-av-utpekade-gangledarna-fodda-i-sverige/
My Italian gangster ancestors would like to dispute this narrative.
Is it really instructive to compare to the “native” population? Like, in pre-Bukele El Salvador, would it be sensible to allow immigrants from literally anywhere because their murder rate was lower than the natives? In reality, it seems super obvious to me that you should prioritize groups that don’t commit many crimes outright, whether you’re in America, Germany, or El Salvador.
"Lower the crime rate" is generally not stated as a reason for migration.
With that logic you should favor old people as they're significantly less criminal.
But they can't work. Why should the country settle for anything less than the migrants that are most useful to them?
In the case of Germany, that has to do with humanitarian reasons: After WW2 and the Holocaust, right to seek refugee in case of war was deeply ingrained into our laws. And in that context, sorting by "usefulness" seems contra-humanitarian
> Like, in pre-Bukele El Salvador, would it be sensible to allow immigrants from literally anywhere because their murder rate was lower than the natives?
I'm pretty sure we would consider that to be colonization at that point... I'm sure the natives wouldn't be happy, but it would still be a net postive for the world.
But in practice, the only people who would want to move to El Salvador are people from countries that are even worse than El Salvador.
> "The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals. As our news sources love to remind us, this is untrue in the American context. The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen."
(1) Comparing general immigrant statistics with Americans in general (which already have hugely inflated crime/welfare stats thanks to the country's black/hispanic fraction), is pretty misleading. Compare immigrant stats with white Americans and the benefits are a lot more dubious. Why would white voters want this?
(2) Compare the tax/welfare/crime statistics of 2nd/3rd-generation hispanics (the most common immigrant group) with white Americans. It's obvious that the continuous expansion of this group is totally unsustainable without massive increases in taxation or massive cuts to the welfare state. It only looks good in the first generation because of relatively limited welfare access, age structure and regression-to-the-mean not kicking in.
(3) None of this speaks to the larger political hazards of immigration, where both high and low-skill migrant groups wind up in coalitions that push toward resentment-drive marxist politics at the expense of whites (and less selective migration policies.) For example: https://youtu.be/C069vPPUnmE?t=642
> Why would white voters want this?
They'd want it because immigrants absorb more crime from blacks than they commit themselves.
I think you're right, and I'll say there's another analogy American conservatives make. They not only apply European lessons to America, but generalize from the black experience to immigrants.
Black Americans do have high crime rates and more welfare use, and vote overwhelmingly for the left. When the country started filling up with Hispanics, conservatives thought of them as "black lite." But although this is true to a (very) limited extent, they're much closer to white norms than black norms on most of the measures people care about, and are not forming some kind of permanent separatist underclass that threatens the long run future of the country.
Liberals didn't help by putting all non-whites under the "people of color" umbrella, crowing about the browning of America, and feeding into conservative paranoia.
The perpetual expansion of the US hispanic population is still totally unsustainable without either massive cuts to welfare spending and/or massive increases in taxation, to say nothing of the general risks of introducing Latin-American-style politics (i.e, marked by erratic oscillations between nutjob socialism on the left and authoritarian caudillos on the right.) I would say that AOC isn't quite as toxic as Ibram Kendi, Ilhan Omar or Zohran Mamdani, but it's not a million miles of difference.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe/comment/213025981
> [..] and authoritarian caudillos on the right.
hey, don't blame Trump on the hispanics!
I will, a little, since some of them voted for him and others are reacting to the problems created by immigrants. But yeah, arguably the US is entering LatAM basket-case territory already.
The US’s GDP per capita is 8th in the world, and 4x that of the nearest major LatAM nations (Panama and Costa Rica).
I would expect those numbers to converge over time as the demographics and culture become more similar, either through growth in LatAM countries or recession in the US (or both.) Are you proposing some mechanism for economic development that is independent of both genes and culture?
Costa Rica did catch up by a factor of two from about 2010-2020, before that the US had 10x their GDP per capita and now it’s more like 4-5x. According to AI, they established a free trade agreement during that time (CAFTA-DR) and built up med tech manufacturing and engineering as an industry.
"are not forming some kind of permanent separatist underclass that threatens the long run future of the country."
I would normally agree, but the triumphalist rhetoric from Latinos after the recent Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show is making me scratch my chin a little bit.
There are lots of based/trad hispanics out there, and they don't vote for the Democrats by quite the same margins that black or jewish-Americans do, especially in states where the immigration situation was most obviously out of control and harming communities near the border. But the net effect of hispanic migration is still to shift the Overton Window leftward. (Much as is and was the case with the Irish, I have to say.)
Really? Perhaps it has changed with the new Pope, but where I grew up in a rural city with a 40% hispanic population, my white schoolteachers and classmates seemed significantly farther left than my hispanic ones.
There's publicly available data on how different racial/ethnic groups break down by party affiliation. Whites are the only majority-republican group.
It is broadly uncontroversial (here, anyway) to note that left-wing identity politics alienates white voters who would otherwise be more inclined to vote Democratic, but the flip side is also true: the GOP could pull in a lot of votes from conservative minority voters if they themselves were not seen (largely correctly) as the anti-minorities party.
If you're calling for the abandonment of identity politics of any stripe, I would remind you it is impossible to have colour-blind standards of merit that don't wind up excluding the vast, vast majority of candidates from low-IQ racial groups. Low-IQ groups do not tolerate this, certainly without explanation, and any forthcoming explanation from the high-IQ groups will be seen as another form of "identity politics". It's inescapable.
The ultimate unsustainability of the current tax vs. welfare setup (and some of the risk of marxist politics) in the US is largely downstream of biological factors particular to specific ethnic backgrounds. (It's also unsustainable because of ageing and collapsing TFR, but this can theoretically be remedied by cultural/economic incentives- genetics cannot.) None of this will be altered how much or how little the GOP panders to minority groups (and even asking for cultural assimilation is now considered a form of 'racism'.) What does the winner get by importing ten million Somalis, exactly?
Being 'anti-minority' is the only morally defensible position when most potential "minority" groups on earth are not constitutionally capable of running an industrial civilisation and will use democratic enfranchisement to punish you for building one. If there is a solution to either the biological or political dimensions of this problem, then I am going to demand it be discovered and implemented BEFORE importing more of them. Not after.
>> But the net effect of hispanic migration is still to shift the Overton Window leftward.
> where I grew up in a rural city with a 40% hispanic population, my white schoolteachers and classmates seemed significantly farther left than my hispanic ones.
For this question, thinking of policies as being "right" or "left" is going to lead you to wrong conclusions. The effect of hispanic migration is to shift everything toward hispanic preferences. Their vote is currently, net of everything, Democratic. But party positions aren't fixed; they constantly change in response to voters. As you get more and more hispanics, both parties will adopt policies to appeal to them.
Some obvious examples of the kind of change you'd expect:
Tax-and-spend: great idea, do more of it.
Women in the workplace: dumb idea, do less of it.
Prayer in school: great idea; do a lot more of it.
Mosques: bad idea; less of them.
So that's why woke people get so mad about stereotypes. Now I understand. I am also hispanic, by the way.
I would say rather:
Government spending: Less of that, governments are easily corrupted and we're in too much debt
The outdoors: More of that, and you can even talk to your neighbors while you're there
Bureaucratic red tape: If you don't see it, it can't see you
Diversity initiatives: Less of that
Working hours: Less of that
Mental health: More encouragement to stand strong, less reliance on doctors and prescriptions
That's because complaining about immigration is both more socially acceptable and more seemingly-solvable than complaining about black Americans. Black crime doesn't really go anywhere in policy terms; it's high but not high enough to justify overt Jim Crowe-type discrimination to anyone sane and fair-minded (bearing in mind the bulk of black Americans aren't criminals), and while there might be some hypothetically effective social interventions to deal with a lot of the disfunction they have no-one in the real world knows how to do these effectively for people whose dysfunction means they aren't interested in being helped. You can say something about profiling more, but everyone already does that anyway and then lies about it, so it becomes "do what we're doing anyway, but be ruder to people."
You can have a fairly fun time reading both conservatism and liberalism as responses to, "We have a massive unsolvable problem that's gutting all our cities and no solution" by opting for cope-y fake solutions, namely "Deport the Mexicans" and "Fight racism."
I would say, speaking as a European who's spent time in America, your Mexicans and Mexican-adjacents are obviously 95+% fine and just need filtering for a handful of criminals (plus whatever fix you need to your education system to make the kids turn out like their parents). They're much more like the UK's Indians than their Pakistanis.
Something around 50% of US blacks have expressed a hypothetical interest in moving to another country, and technically it would be financially rational to pay them half a million dollars to relocate. I don't think this problem is as unsolvable as people think.
Paying 40 million people to leave the country and go *somewhere* is not a sane solution. The difficulty isn't even the 20 trillion dollars, it's that there's no country on Earth that could absorb 40 million people other than, possibly, the US.
If you're ignoring common sense, the Overton window etc., creating an independent Blackistan in Georgia, South Carolina Alabama and Mississippi (possibly with adjustments to include New Orleans, Memphis and the Florida panhandle) and doing Indian partition-style population transfers is more viable. It's still a completely mental non-starter.
> "The difficulty isn't even the 20 trillion dollars, it's that there's no country on Earth that could absorb 40 million people other than, possibly, the US"
I don't know if 20 million (50% of) US blacks would all take the offer simultaneously, but there are literally a billion people living in sub-saharan Africa right now, so there'd be plenty of potential destinations where they could get set up and would absorb the numbers trivially. Or heck, maybe parts of Latin America or SE Asia would take migrants with half a million USD of spending money. It's not like they all have to go one place.
Sure, the Overton Window is an obstacle, I'm just pointing out there's no technical reason why other americans have to be carrying this ball and chain forever. If US blacks really think the country is oppressing them, they're more than welcome to try their luck elsewhere with a bunch of seed capital, and see what happens.
Money doesn't magically make infrastructure, goods, and services appear. If millions of foreigners with a ton of money in their pocket appear overnight, it would just collapse the local economy with hyperinflation.
You could put the money in trust funds and release it relatively slowly over 10-20 years or so, but I honestly don't think half the US black population is large enough to collapse Africa's economy.
And how is that the US's problem? If the black population find themselves stranded in a collapsing Africa, the US does not need to let them back in. Forfeiture of citizenship would be a part of the deal.
If you told me that there was an immigrant group of Catholic small-business owners who drive big trucks and spend their weekends grilling meat, drinking beer and watching futbo- er football, I would say they certainly must be Republicans.
The fact that hispanics still largely vote Democrat seems a clear repudiation of Republican views on race.
There was a massive swing toward Trump among Latino voters in the past three elections. According to CNN exit polls, he went from 28% in 2016 to 44% in 2024. He won Hispanic men in 2024 by 10 percentage points.
(Trump also went from 8% of the black vote in 2016 to 13% in 2024.)
I have to admit that when I read "In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate," I immediately subvocalised "so, still lower than the murder rate in the US?"
Turns out that's not quite right, but pretty close: According to UNODC (https://data.unodc.org/datareport/hom-victim), Germany's intentional homicide rate was 0.91 per 100k inhabitants in 2023, and the US's intentional homicide rate was 5.76 in 2023. So the US baseline intentional homicide rate was ~6.33 times higher than the German one.
Which is to say, even if you expected asylum-seekers to be equally violent in both countries, it would show up much less strikingly in the US statistics.
Nearly half of that difference is due to US blacks alone, without even factoring in other non-white groups of a mostly-immigrant background. White americans do still have about 2x the homicide rate of white europeans, last I checked, and you could plausibly blame that on gun culture or whatever, but none of this turns into a positive argument in favour of more asylum-seekers.
I needed a while to untangle your comment since it's such a non-sequitur to me, but I think I understand the source of confusion, so, to clarify: I live in Germany, and I don't actually have any opinion on immigration either here or there, I just noticed, with amusement, that the statistic is not nearly as comparable (not in the sense of "same" but literally in the sense of "comparable") as the article suggests.
If you don't mind, I don't have very much interest in discussing US politics, so I'm not going to engage much more with this comment, but it's not personal, I just try to curate my interactions on the internet somewhat consciously. Wishing you all the best. :)
I'm not disagreeing with you from a technical PoV, it's just that I think the US demographics most likely to object to immigration are unfairly framed as being "worse than immigrants", and a lot of this relies on selective reporting.
I think I understand his point. When interpreting this claim: "In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate" -- you have to keep in mind that the German native rate has far fewer Blacks in it than the US native rate does. It could be that the ratio of "US asylum-seeker murder rate" to "US white murder rate" is much more similar to the ratio of "German asylum-seeker murder rate" to "German native murder rate" because Blacks commit such a disproportionate share of murders and are a much smaller share of the native German population than they are of the native US population. Probably the US's white murder rate is still higher than Germany's because of gun culture, etc., but not to the same degree as the US's total native murder rate, which is skewed by a relatively larger Black population.
But when it comes to immigration, what you should be comparing to is the total murder rate for all groups, since the question you actually want to answer is: Will allowing one more Somali refugee raise or lower your chance of being murdered?
If the US crime rate is high because of some specific subgroups, then letting in more people with an overall lower crime rate would decrease mean crime, meaning that everyone is slightly safer. Meanwhile in Germany that same group of refugees would increase mean crime rates.
An immigration restrictionist might reply that nobody experiences the national mean murder rate. What matters for your chances of being murdered is the local murder rate around you. So, in your framing, if somebody doesn't live near many Black people, then yes, an influx of Somalis may well raise their local murder rate above what it was; even if that same influx in a more Black-populated area would lower the local murder rate there, and even if it lowers the national mean.
In practice, since refugees are generally poorer, they tend to end up living in high-crime areas where they probably do lower the local rate. In fact they kind of provide a service to the rest of us by absorbing the high-crime externalities and acting as a buffer.
But an ethical restrictionist (or just one with basic solidarity for his own people which most restrictionist claim to have) should care more about the mean rate of the country, that is an effect which slightly raise crime in one city but lowers it everywhere else is good, even if you happen to live in the unlucky city.
Also I think I remember Richard Hannania writing somewhere that middle eastern migrants have provided exactly the service you predict they would, by running small businesses in poor neighborhoods
Something that's highly underrated is that US immigration critics would be largely unconcerned with legal high skill immigration. The 10 million illegal immigrants Biden let in may well commit crime relative to legal skilled immigrants at a similar ratio as the high crime groups in Europe do relative to natives
If conservatives are not nativists but white ethnocentrists, is the right comparable “US average crime” or “white average crime”?
If you're a white ethnocentrist, literally no statistic about non-whites being great could ever make you want to allow them in. So any statistics based on that premise are pointless.
That's sort of why people don't bother talking to bigots, you can use logic to fix someone's decision strategy, but not to fix their utility function.
If talking, statistics and logic is hopeless against ethnocentrism and bigotry then it sure is a good thing we don't have any ethnocentric or bigoted immigrant groups coming into our countries.
Believing that populations rather than individuals are bigoted/violent/etc is one of the symptoms, yes.
Sounds like no statistics about non-whites being bad could ever make you want to not allow them in. Who's being impervious to statistics now?
I'd want to have individual assessments rather than racial bans if you cited any stats less than 95%, yes.
This is not the own you think it is.
"I have a totally arbitrary 95% rule so I'm logical and you're not."
Besides, individual assessments could use demographic facts as one factor in predicting individual outcomes.
> If you're a white ethnocentrist, literally no statistic about non-whites being great could ever make you want to allow them in. So any statistics based on that premise are pointless.
What about "99% percent of XXX immigrants want to adopt white names and culture, want their children to only marry white people and raise their grandchildren as white"?
I mean I guess that depends what flavor of white ethnocentrist you are, I'd expect most of them to not care about that but it's not like hang out in their forums and know their policies well.
You are correct because the one drop rule. Obama is never going to be white no matter how much he acts it even if he's genetically more white than black (at best), equal parts (at worst,). This isn't a case of German moving to France. Not really just a white thing either, Japanese don't consider Blasians Japanese either nor do Spaniards consider mestizos Spanish.
A really interesting natural experiment here is what does Israel look like with the mass Beta Israeli influx a hundred years hence and do they integrate and vanish or ghettoize?
I think that depends on the source of the ethnocentrism. If someone's belief structure is simply: "white = good" as an axiom with no other reasoning other than pure racism, then obviously no statistics would change their mind.
However, if someone's belief structure is something like "ABC are good, XYZ are bad, white people have way more ABC and way less XYZ than everyone else, therefore white people are good" then statistics could matter. Because if you convince them that other races are equal or better at ABC and equal or lesser at XYZ then they'd accept those races. Because they don't truly care about race, they care about ABC and XYZ.
I refer you to Scott's "Aganst Murderism" https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
Now, I suspect most racists are some combination of the two. They ultimately care about things like crime and pro-social behaviors, and in combination with anecdotes, statistics, and biased reasoning, come to the conclusion that their own race is inherently better and other races are incapable of behaving themselves. But given strong enough evidence (usually in the form of personal experience, not official statistics) some of them could be convinced otherwise.
Comparing immigrant crime rate to "US natives" rather than to "whites" (which is what right wingers mean when they say US natives) is why this discrepancy seems confusing to you. US natives crime rates are skewed upwards by the black minority and the existing Hispanic population, both of which are also "problems" from a US right wingers POV. A Hispanic/Somali immigrant in a black neighbourhood lowers the crime rate, but in a white neighbourhood (which is what right wingers care about) they raise the crime rate.
One of the challenges I have with rationalists is their apparent trust in academic studies and willingness to generalize therefrom.
Example: immigrants commit fewer crimes.
I am well aware of an iconic study being used to support that point (Texas 2019). I am also aware that most cite it not as saying what I would say it did. I would say it says: we inferred the rate of incarcerations in 2018 in Texas for legal and illegal immigrants when guessing the number of illegals present to be lower than the incarceration rate of citizens. Unlike my interpretation, I would say the general interpretation (and citation?) of the statistic is to say "Illegals commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens." (Though recognize Scott is not saying that, here.)
The problem is I see are issues hanging off all sides of a study like that. Incarceration does not equal committing crime. Many commit crimes and are never arrested. Texas 2018 does not equal the nation today. The number of illegals in such a study seems likely to be highly unknown.
The gap between what the study said and immigrants commit fewer crimes is just stark.
What's my guess as to the actual situation? I don't know, but I know I'm not going to use that paper as a strong prior for my guess.
I'm not sure what the relative rate of crime would be.
I suspect illegal immigrants commit far more crimes per capita than citizens, and legal immigrants probably commit similar or fewer than citizens.
We know that an illegal immigrant has to have at least one more crime on their tally sheet than a citizen - they're here illegally. They also skew demographically into high crime demo pools (young, male, poor, etc.). Further, as an illegal, it's effectively impossible to be a typical resident without committing other crimes (e.g., how to legally work). Those seem really strong priors to leave me thinking illegals are likely skew high crime.
For the portion of immigrants that are legal, I'm not particularly interested (the topic of the moment is really illegal, not legal), but I'd guess they skew low-crime in part due to the fact that they could have chosen an illegal route but didn't, so they're probably disproportionately rule-followers - if nothing else. The demographic skews I'm not so sure about (are they young? are they male? are they poor?). Don't know. And, more to my point, I'm not sure I care.
The notion that we can hold as bedrock the fact that "immigrants commit fewer crimes" becomes an insufficiently examined prior for a mountain of subsequent logic. And I recognize that Scott here is interrogating that prior slightly with additional study citations. But the skew of such studies is also going to have the same sorts of problems as the Texas study - so more studies along the same ilk don't actually buttress the original proposition if they suffer from a systemic error. If you really want that as a trustworthy prior for a mountain of highly important conclusions, don't you have to relinquish trust in the face value interpretation of the study and assess a lot of foundational issues they have with generalizability?
>We know that an illegal immigrant has to have at least one more crime on their tally sheet than a citizen - they're here illegally.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is all off-the-top-of-my-head. Someone with more knowledge should correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem with this is that I don't think illegal entry is technically a crime. This cuts all sorts of ways into the debate; I think that's why you can send illegals out of the country without a trial. There was some controversy during the Obama administration of the government playing catch and release, where they would send the border-crossers back without processing them, because crossing back in once you've been kicked out once is a crime, and without noting who had been caught once you can't prove they had re-entered. While it's not a crime, it is a breach of the law, but it allows people that want to skirt the difference to do so.
And you're right about the other violations: not just the violation of the laws with regards to working, but taxes and things like drivers licenses and insurance all amount to cases where it's hard (but not impossible) to live here illegally without doing something that is a crime.
>For the portion of immigrants that are legal, I'm not particularly interested (the topic of the moment is really illegal, not legal).
There is the debate about H1B visas and similar work problems that is still relevant. While someone who loses their job because their employer found an immigrant that will work cheaper may blame the (legal) immigrant, this is really an employer problem (and the government to the extent it lets employers flout the laws).
Legal immigration is at least as large a problem as illegal immigration, it's just that the extent of tolerance for illegal migrants is particularly galling.
Thx. Also no lawyer, but a couple of AI agents suggest to me illegals are committing a crime by crossing here illegally, and are _also_ guilty of a civil fraction that triggers the unique legal process options to ICE.
>The problem with this is that I don't think illegal entry is technically a crime. This cuts all sorts of ways into the debate; I think that's why you can send illegals out of the country without a trial.
It is a crime, it's just a crime with a big set of loopholes: magic word asylum doctrine, non-enforcement leniency, etc.
The idea of paroling is that they'll eventually come back for the trial, but enforcement is piss-poor and how do you even alert someone with no address or communication ability that they need to come back?
>We know that an illegal immigrant has to have at least one more crime on their tally sheet than a citizen - they're here illegally.
We don't know that. As a number of critics have been at pains to point out for a while, people commit various minor crimes more or less non-stop because US legal codes are a nightmare. +1 for an illegal border crossing might adjust our estimates upward (though many, of course, didn't cross the border illegally; they entered via an asylum claim or overstayed a visa), but the added risks associated with encountering law enforcement might push them downward. If we're going to ignore the evidence we have, it becomes a game of rationalizing your priors.
Of course, when people talk about crimes, they generally mean Serious Crimes. The problem is that what you think is a Serious Crime is a highly political question. There are some central examples that aren't very controversial, e.g. the vast majority of people will agree that murder and rape qualify (and are in fact The Most Serious Crimes), but when you get to the edges it starts getting fuzzy. For example, I personally think we should be waaaaay harder on moving violations. I'm pretty clearly in the minority there, as it is normal for people to break the speed limit, roll through stop signs, etc... and rigorous enforcement of these laws would lead to rioting. In the specific context of immigration, nativists believe that illegal border crossing is an extremely serious infraction - to the point of supporting abridgement of due process in some cases - while anti-nativists think it is barely a crime at all.
A lot of official statistics are flawed and you can probably improve things by dip sampling and analysing surnames. Which is hard to do and not much of an option for an ordinary observer.
Some random thoughts during my lunch break:
As some other commenters have mentioned, all this is being used as foreshadowing for America, I liken it all to your post about the "Vibecession", but with immigrants.
The conservatives and other groups in America and Europe are strictly forward looking. "This is America in the future" and "This will happen if we don't stop them", "Our country will look like London or Stockholm if we let this go on" and so on.
Whereas the only counter-argument is past-looking. Statistics. You can't convince groups who only look ahead to look behind them. The statistics either A. prove their argument or B. aren't telling the whole story because it's not yet the future.
My colleagues and I are working in the Netherlands, alongside various Europeans (Dutch, Hungarians, Polish, Turks, Brits, etc. ) we get to see a lot of the discourse on immigrants from their own countries as well as the impact of the bombardment of constant US news. Our cafeteria has a muted CNN feed on in the background for goodness sake.
I suspect that thanks to the constant "loud" American discussions about immigration, it has definitely encouraged the European equivalent. (I say loud as in it dominates English-language news and internet).
Whereas a few years ago, immigration talk was much more hush-hush, I am personally seeing a louder Dutch population complaining about the same things but with North Africans and Middle Easterners. When I first moved here, I never heard people making off-the-cuff remarks about Muslims or North Africans, but slowly, I overhear a bit more in taxis, waiting lines, cafes.
I've also heard louder talk amongst Canadians' social media complaining about the state of Canada due to all the brown people. More Swedes complaining about crime in Sweden from all the Muslims. More French complaining about violence in southern France from all the black people. In turn, the Americans use it as prophetic warnings.
A few anecdotal experiences over the last few years:
1. I remember an article during the height of BLM about a black woman who immigrated to Poland (maybe a student?), and was complaining about the Polish word for black people, murzyn... which literally means black person, and which has no slavery connection amongst Poles, and ignoring the fact that slavery of Eastern Europeans by Ottomans was a thing in the early modern era. I think a protest followed with a rather sad showing. Never heard anything of it again after that, but your post reminded me of it.
2. I am noticing a vocal Swedish media sphere with English posts and op-eds from women increasingly fearful of crime in Sweden due to all the African/Arabic immigrants. These posts in turn get picked up by communities elsewhere in Europe worried about the same happening to them. I also see these articles get picked up by American conservatives, for the reasons you mentioned.
3. I also never used to hear about Brits complaining about immigrants not integrating until Trump's re-election, and the latest fuel to that fire was an article last week in The Guardian by Sangeeta Pillai telling people to stop saying "thank you". That really riled readers up, largely British conservatives as well as Americans stating that integration is clearly failing if immigrants are complaining about the culture of the country they moved to and it's a good reason to halt it all.
4. I can't speak for French protests but I live in an area of the Netherlands that gets a lot of protests in general. Prior to the war in Gaza, most marches were political party rallies and the occasional farmer subsidy protest. Since the war, they have been dominated by pro-Palestinian groups, and their frequency has gotten to the point where my parents ask on the phone if the noise in the background of my Skype call is another Gaza protest. I've noticed the numbers dwindle over time, but the groups are definitely dominated by university students and retired people. (Maybe since everyone who has a job isn't spending their weekends with a megaphone and flag outside a closed politicians office). I do find myself wondering how much taxpayer money goes to the police that have to spend their afternoon keeping an eye on them each month.
Somewhat related, my Facebook (yuck, I know) feed definitely focuses more on the violent riots caused by these Gaza protests in other cities in the Netherlands. The clips show a lot of brown people smashing windows and cars and petty crime. And the responses are naturally anti-immigrant and wanting them all sent back. Voting results are a mess out here so I can't really get numbers, but the "vibe" has definitely gotten louder and more far-right.
5. One thing I noticed amongst all this social media posting and water cooler talk - is that despite the huge inflow of Ukrainian refugees and immigrants, very little has been complaining about them. It's almost entirely African / Arabic / Muslim immigrants. And of course Gypsies but even that has gotten quieter.
>One thing I noticed amongst all this social media posting and water cooler talk - is that despite the huge inflow of Ukrainian refugees and immigrants, very little has been complaining about them. It's almost entirely African / Arabic / Muslim immigrants.
There's a right-wing meme that goes something like "If the refugees were all white blonde women then liberal women would be forming SS death squads". Well, by far the biggest refugee wave of the recent years in Europe - over twice the size of the one in 2015 - have been the Ukrainians, who have, indeed, been mostly women (often blonde), at least if we're just speaking just about the adults.
And yet, liberal woman SS death squads haven't been formed. When this has been occasionally pointed out, the most the right-wingers have mustered is pointing to some poll in Poland (the biggest recipient of the women) showing the local women griping about it to some degree, but even there the women haven't actually gone as far as starting to vote for the local anti-immigration and pro-Russian parties, let alone forming death squads.
Polish anti-Russian solidarity seems stronger than any conceivable countervailing force, so the natural experiment is equivocal at best.
I didn't mean just Poland, of course, many other European countries experienced the entry of a large amount of Ukrainians as well.
>Whereas a few years ago, immigration talk was much more hush-hush, I am personally seeing a louder Dutch population complaining about the same things
Could that report a couple years ago about the sheer *cost* play a role in that, in the Dutch context?
> despite the huge inflow of Ukrainian refugees and immigrants, very little has been complaining about them
There's some "dey took er jerbs" complaining about them in Poland.
"In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate."
How do you get that number? The linked article says 2% of people livng in Germany in 2017 were asylum seekers (which seems low, those are the numbers of asylum seekers 2015-2017 alone) and that "10.4% of murder suspects ... were asylum-seekers and refugees in 2017".
That looks like 5x to me, even if we ignore that the latter number includes other refugees.
Germany had 890.000 asylum applicants in 2015, 745.545 in 2016 and 222.683 in 2017, for a sum of 1.85 million.
(https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Statistik/BundesamtinZahlen/bundesamt-in-zahlen-2017.html)
Those alone are 2.2% of 84 million people in Germany.
I was going off of "according to Germany's Interior Ministry, 27 illegal migrants either committed or attempted to commit murder or manslaughter in 2017. The 447 figure used by AfD actually refers to all asylum seekers and refugees, most of whom are in Germany legally. Overall this group was 15% of the total 2,971 suspects linked to these crimes in Germany last year". But it looks like your statistic is more specific for murder, so I'll edit it in.
The AfD tends to be a bad source on immigration related stuff, because on this topic they are as biased as you can be.
(They tend to be generally not the most truth oriented party, and fake news/ "alternative" media are part of their media strategy/ or at least of the strategy of their inner right wing. I believe it would be fair to categorize them as a populist party with (overproportional) dishonest discourse in their toolkit.)
One big example is coverage of the British monarchy in the American press. I can't think of a less relevant issue that gets regular coverage, and this has been going on for many decades.
As an American conservative with a lot of questions about the methodology involved in the cited studies, this line from the NPR article stands out as giving away some of the progressive misdirection in the current debate:
"The study also suggests that there's a real fear of getting in trouble and being deported within immigrant communities. Far from engaging in criminal activities, immigrants mostly don't want to rock the boat."
Isn't the whole point of the debate in America that certain Democrat-run localities are refusing to hand over illegal immigrants with ICE detention orders that have been arrested (causing ICE to have to go in and apprehend them directly)? If the threat of being deported is keeping illegal immigrants from committing crimes, why would you remove the threat of deportation?
I don't think NPR is necessarily lying. I think immigrants don't necessarily know the ins and outs of American politics; they may fear ICE even if the local government is on their side. The problem is the people in the debate either don't know the ins and outs of American politics or they are deceiving people. There's a massive gap between "we should not fear illegal immigrants because they are law abiding because they fear deportation" and "we should not deport illegal immigrants no matter what crimes they commit".
As far as the studies go, just from a quick and dirty perusal of the cited studies, apparently the only state that keeps track of illegal immigration status for arrests is Texas, which is a state with a reputation for law and order and more importantly hands over illegal immigrants to ICE, which deters illegal immigrants in the state from committing crimes, making Texas a statistical outlier. Seeing this makes me seriously question anyone that talks about the rates of illegal immigrants and crime (and immigrants in general and crime), and also question why we don't require states and localities to gather this information.
>Isn't the whole point of the debate in America that certain Democrat-run localities are refusing to hand over illegal immigrants with ICE detention orders that have been arrested (causing ICE to have to go in and apprehend them directly)? If the threat of being deported is keeping illegal immigrants from committing crimes, why would you remove the threat of deportation?
The whole point is that ICE *used* to primarily target immigrants accused of crimes, but is now abducting people off the side of the street largely at random based on skin tone, including citizens, because of huge quotas they're required to meet to get paid.
If you target people whether or not they've committed a crime, that also gets rid of the incentive not to commit crimes.
This proves my point about the massive gap between the arguments and the actual policies. "Don't hand over any illegal immigrant for deportation no matter what they did" (which is Minnesota's policy) is electorally indefensible to the median American voter, so the progressives have to pretend they approved of when ICE was only deporting criminals and place the blame on ICE, even though the order of causality works the other way. The ICE surge results from sanctuary policies, not the other way around.
It's not hard to get away with it; the media has let Democrat politicians play to both sides; Obama could pretend that he was enforcing the law to the credulous median voters while winking at the progressive left about not enforcing the law in sanctuary jurisdictions.
Yes, more interactions means more mistakes by ICE, though I find more mistakes by the media (or 'mistakes' / deliberate blood libel) in reporting what actually happened. But remember the current head of ICE was head of ICE during the Obama administration where he could do enough of his job to let Obama appease the median voter; he didn't suddenly become a bad guy. ICE's policies are no different, the difference is the number of illegals, the commitment of the Administration to actually enforcing the law, the organization and commitment of the far left to fighting law enforcement, and the openness of Democratic politicians to support the far left.
>"Don't hand over any illegal immigrant for deportation no matter what they did" (which is Minnesota's policy)
This is simply not true.
The DHS is presenting a lot of complete fabrications about Minnesota which is in keeping with the Trump administration transparent method of operation.
In plain words they simply lie to justify an insane authoritarian spectacle. The cruelty is the very point.
"Minnesota Department of Corrections Addresses False Claims by the Department of Homeland Security"
"The Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) is releasing new evidence demonstrating that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to publish false Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “arrest” claims in press releases and on their website by mischaracterizing routine custody transfers from Minnesota state prisons. DHS’s “Worst of the Worst” (WOW) website, allows users to search by state and city for “criminal illegal aliens that have been removed from their state.”
DOC quickly identified 68 cases in which individuals were lawfully transferred from Minnesota Department of Corrections custody directly to ICE, only for DHS officials to falsely claim these same"
https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/news-releases/?id=1089-719911#/list/appId/1/filterType//filterValue//page/1/sort//order/
Minnesota’s policy is to hand over all illegal immigrants after they serve their sentence, and indeed many of the “worst of the worst” that the trump admin brags about catching were simply handed over to them by Minnesota DOC. The city and county jail system in Minneapolis specifically is more complicated and closer to “they do not cooperate” but many people in city and county jails are awaiting trial or bail and are not eligible for deportation.
https://mn.gov/doc/assets/ICE%20Presser%20Fact%20Sheet%20Jan%2022%202026_tcm1089-720763.pdf
https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/
https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2026/01/30/minnesota-jails-ice-immigration-detainers
At the very least I think you can agree that allowing state agents to go masked and unidentifiable is a new change in policy.
I appreciate some pushback on the numbers. We're at the point where I can admit that both sides have incentive to shade the truth (and probably are to some degree). It may also be Minneapolis specifically rather than Minnesota where the issue lies, and I may have been too hasty by saying Minnesota. However, there's obviously something wrong, since the high-profile incidents from Minneapolis that have made the news have involved protesters stopping ICE from taking into custody illegal immigrant criminals with extensive records that it didn't take ICE too much trouble to find, not "random street abductions".
You admit Minneapolis is complicated, but why would someone awaiting trial or bail not be eligible for deportation... and which is it? If ICE is accidentally requesting someone awaiting trial for a felony, it's one thing, but why would you grant bail to someone with a pending deportation order? What are the levels of the crimes involved? I'd love the numbers, but I'd settle for even some examples to look at.
The encouragement by government officials of people to fight law enforcement is also a new change in 'policy' (and dates back to BLM, rather than ICE). I remember when it was the fear that it would be right-wing idiots killing cops (the ATF) rather than left-wing ones. I mean, during COVID you had anonymous masked law enforcement officers going after people using the beaches. I can agree with criticism of some level of the 'protect the cops at all costs' mentality that contributes to some of the police violence, but that pales in comparison to the effect of the 'cops are racist pigs! fight the power!' rhetoric from the far left; if anything, they've given law enforcement a very good reason to want to be anonymous when dealing with anarchist terrorists.
And that raises another point; part of the reason this issue is so hard is that the raw numbers are hard to come by. One of the reasons I'm more given to trust the right on this is that the right was more accurate when it came to numbers when it came to 'amount of police violence' vs 'amount of crime' during BLM. We saw the 'defund the police' rhetoric and where it led to: more crime. Now we've seen Trump's law and order push (including against illegal immigration) and we've seen the reduction in crime, which even the mainstream left has had to acknowledge. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it does raise at least a significant argument for it.
At the same time, the far left has been pushing for fighting law enforcement since at least BLM; pretending that this current drive to fight ICE is something due to the nature of ICE and not just a continuation of BLM is silly. Likewise, the complaints about progressive cities failing to hold onto repeat violent offenders (and then finally doing something when they cross the line by doing something heinous enough to make the news and thus cause median voters to pay attention and consider voting Republican) is also not new; there's no reason to think they'd be any less lenient when the criminals in the revolving door are illegal immigrants.
In the past, you'd have the Democratic-administration federal government charge right wing idiots with federal civil rights charges when the local government failed to convict them, because that was what the federal government had the power to do. The Democrats established that the Federal government was supreme when it came to enforcing immigration law. Why would you not expect that the Trump administration would follow precedent and use federal law when it was the appropriate mechanism when local government failed?
>pretending that this current drive to fight ICE is something due to the nature of ICE and not just a continuation of BLM is silly.
It's not ICE enforcement, it's the thuggish methods.
It was all prefaced by this goonish promise:
"FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!"
And that is exactly how ICE came across, knocking out window in cars, grabbing the driver and letting the in-gear car roll into traffic.
Knocking on doors in peaceful residential neighborhoods and asking "Where do the Asians live?"
Off duty police who look Hispanic have been stopped and asked for papers.
Trigger happy, unprofessional ICE agents killing people for bush league civil disobedience. Afterwards adding as an authoritarian grace note "Fucking bitch". Good's last words were, "I'm not mad at you dude."
Ask the health care professionals in the Twin Cities if they are pretending anything.
https://www.startribune.com/ice-claim-that-a-man-shattered-his-skull-running-into-wall-triggers-tension-at-a-minnesota-hospital/601574491?utm_source=gift
Ah, the wonders of a pay wall. And it's not like the health care professionals didn't suddenly decide that the BLM protests were a reason to suddenly change all the advice they had given during the COVID lockdowns, so you know they're not politically unbiased.
Yes, I've admitted law enforcement hasn't covered itself in glory. I'm sure it's possible that the ICE agents did something wrong (and certain that I can find some agents doing something wrong somewhere). Although seeing a drama-laden emotional headline rather than an actual by the facts story causes me to suspect that there is more to this particular story than what the headline suggests, such as another side.
I'm sure I can go through and find some sob story, say about people that got killed by some illegal immigrant who should have been deported. I don't want to play that sort of game. What I want is numbers. And here some are:
"Federal authorities are aware of but not currently detaining 13,099 illegal immigrants living in the US who have been convicted of homicide and 1,845 who are accused of it, according to the data set."
https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/shocking-data-shows-15k-illegal-immigrants-accused-of-murder-as-kamala-harris-visits-border/
[I admit, I assume the NY Post to be biased towards removing illegal immigrants. However, these numbers come from the 2024 administration, so no Trump bias here.]
I'll add that the victim with both sides of his skull broken came to the US legally - not sure if a visa expired or anything, but definitely not the worst of the worst - and has a registered roofing business in Saint Paul.
Far left suburban soccer mom BLM activists:
https://www.startribune.com/the-unexpected-resistance-to-ice-in-minnesota-the-soccer-moms-of-signal/601571253?utm_source=gift
Another example of radical left wing BLM activists:
https://www.startribune.com/parents-stand-watch-for-ice-outside-minnesota-schools/601560628?utm_source=gift
The Minnesota Star Tribune is allowing unlimited gift articles to counter the flood falsehoods - not truth shading, lies -from Trump, Noem and Miller.
> ICE's policies are no different
No way. What they are currently doing in Minneapolis (and have been doing in other cities) is not similar to anything that happened under Obama. There was also that memo that told ICE agents they didn't need warrants.
> the commitment of the Administration to actually enforcing the law
Is this a joke? The current Admin's respect for law could be shoved up a gnat's butt, and it would rattle around like a BB in a cereal box.
"The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen...Still, taken as a vague high-level claim, the news sources are right and the conservative narrative is wrong."
The average legal immigrants and/or illegal immigrant? And given the narrow scope and studies of these topics, I have trouble agreeing that the narrative is simply "wrong." Trucking has been transformed by immigration, and is now full of violations of law and social norms that do not always rise to the level of "crime" in record keeping. Roads are less safe, but how can that be reflected in studies that rely upon questionable data. But that likely does not matter, because most oikophoibic researchers have made up their minds before they even write a single word.
It's hard to tell with illegal immigrants because most of these studies use incarceration rates as a proxy for crime rates, but many illegal immigrants get deported instead of incarcerated. The statistics I gave were for legal immigrants. The statistics for illegal immigrants are facially lower, but subject to the bias above.
If the true fact is "immigrants commit fewer crimes, but more trucking accidents", I think getting people to understand that would be an improvement over the false "immigrants commit more crimes".
I think there is just too much gray area and complexity in saying something is true or false when it comes to crime and immigration, legal or illegal. Do immigrants report all crime in their communities? Are driving without insurance or using a stolen ID to work considered crimes? (And does being a victim of those things feel like a crime has been committed?) How about running non-authorized food truck? Is an entire trucking business built on fraud a crime? Of course, illegals committed a crime by entering the country illegally.
I am biased because of the way my legal-immigrant wife lost her Green Card over USCIS nonsense, but the discourse around immigration is just too biased by pre-conceived, absolute beliefs. If immigration was all sunshine and smiles it would not be the touchy subject it is around the world and has been throughout history.
It's worth noting that pretty much everything you mention in your first paragraph has to do with with illegal immigrants, so mixing "legal or illegal" is nonsensical. The examples you give are also interesting, as they're likely caused by when someone cannot do things "the correct way" due to their immigration status. I have not heard of any legal immigrant here getting a fake DL, as while a real one is costly, the cost of going from "allowed to remain legally here" to "getting deported" is much higher. This is not the case for illegal immigrants, and one of the main arguments people have in favor of regularizing status.
> If immigration was all sunshine and smiles it would not be the touchy subject it is around the world and has been throughout history.
You are right about this, but not every outrage is proportional to the actual size of the issue. In the modern day, immigrants make for a convenient scapegoat, sitting along the likes of trans people.
>the false "immigrants commit more crimes".
There's also the disagreement over what constitutes a crime. Liberals seem to ignore the whole "illegal immigration" thing as even being cognizable.
Well when the policy under discussion is “to what extent should we worry about illegal immigration” and our main proxy for that is crime rates, it’s circular reasoning to take into account the fact that illegal immigration is a crime. Saying that, technically, 100% of illegal immigrants are criminals does not help people reason about the kinds of criminality they actually care about.
Not at all, it just means you need a different metric than crime rates.
Aren't 100% of illegal immigrants criminals, by definition?
I think it makes sense to look at legal immigrants, if the argument is 'should we allow more or less people to immigrate legally?'
At a minimum, there illegal immigrants who entered the country at an age when they weren't old enough to have the mens rea to commit a crime, and therefore can't fairly be called "criminals"
If they are still children then yes, but if they have reached adulthood and haven't yet left then they're definitely exhibiting mens rea.
It's a misdemeanor to cross a border or overstay a visa but simply being here without papers is purely administrative
Just because there is no criminal penalty directly attached doesn't mean it's not illegal and generally we consider lawbreakers to be criminals.
Mens rea isn't required for crime, it's just the default. Illegal immigration is a strict liability crime like, in most jurisdictions, speeding. Their state of mind is irrelevant. We have jailed eight year olds for possession of drugs.
But whether we should allow more or less legal immigration is not remotely the argument right now, the main contention is around whether illegal immigrants should be forcibly removed.
About half of US illegal immigrants are visa overstays, which I believe is by definition an infraction but not a crime. Plus, as Herb^2 notes, the ones who were brought as young children and whose parents may or may not have committed a crime in the process.
How do you work without legal status? By committing crime.
Bingo
My understanding is that there is no crime to "be in the US illegally." It's a civil violation, and the government can remove you from the country, but not a crime.
Is this a distinction without a difference?
If a law was passed upgrading it from a "civil violation" to a "crime" then would this change anyone's opinion on anything?
Is "anyone here illegally is by definition a criminal" a meaningful statement? Or is it just https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world ? Obviously the whole point of "illegal immigrants commit crimes" is to get people to think of crimes like murder and robbery. I think pedantry is a reasonable response to pedantry.
> If a law was passed upgrading it from a "civil violation" to a "crime" then would this change anyone's opinion on anything?
No, but it might have meaningful consequences for enforcing those laws. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the fact that it's a civil rather than criminal violation means the process can be faster and skip over some of the due process that criminal defendants get.
On paper sure but in practice you get vastly more good faith due process in civil matters as there isn't the irrational violent criminal fear attached "if you free them".
>This may be true, but I propose a simpler explanation
Just a small nitpick: while I find your explanation very plausible, I would consider it roughly the same complexity as the previous one, so your argument seems unnecessarily possibly wrong here.
>There are still some ways of asking the question where you find immigrants >collecting fewer benefits than natives (for example, because immigrants are young, >natives are old, and pensions are a benefit).
This is not some sort of liberal trick, but what you want to keep track of if you want to ask: does it make sense to allow more immigrants so as to sustain our pension system? (I think by now even the Spanish right has looked at the numbers and quietly accepted that Spain would be unsustainable without immigration; they seem to have decided the best way out is to be condescending to Latin Americans and keep everybody else out. Or something.)
> But there are also more options for >asking the question in ways where yes, >immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. >The European link between >immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the >conservatives are allowed >to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries.
Well, if you are going to break down by age group and other demographic categories, you might consider doing so consistently. Even in Germany, the contrast is much less striking if you consider young male migrants to young male natives. (The great majority of asylum seekers in Germany are young men.)
Then, as someone else already pointed out, there's the utter brilliance of German asylum policy: don't allow refugees to work, and pay them an allowance instead (claimed by AfD to be princely, but actually very modest; the AfD must be counting high administrative costs pocketed by (German) administrators, or, well, go ask them). This is a legacy of the time of zero immigration policy. Not sure what sense it made even then - maybe it rhymed or something.
PS. In a welfare state, immigrants will be disproportionately on welfare because (or if) they are disproportionately poor. Of course, that's relevant for the "virtue" angle, not for balancing finances, but for the latter, again, there's no point in separating by age.
> Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs.
I think the main reason boils down to the point that Europe is more left-leaning and has been for longer, and a lot of US progressives more or less explicitly have the goal of "make USA more like Europe" and so conservatives are very interested when the European system hits problems.
Like the current topic of welfare - progressives have been wanting a European-style welfare system in the US forever - conservatives have argued "sure, you can massively increase welfare in the short term, but in the long term it's not sustainable" so news like "Britain is cannibalizing the younger generation to support welfare payments to the older generation" is very interesting to conservatives.
---
That doesn't really explain this phenomenon, where US commenters are mistaking European problems for American ones... but honestly, I think that just boils down to the current internet zeitgeist which will believe anything as long as it's bad. A European will (rightfully) complain and an American will read it uncritically because it supports their general "everything sucks nowadays" viewpoint and not realize that the original commenter's situation doesn't apply to them.
I've never heard a Leftist explain WHY illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born. After all, if crime is caused by "poor educational opportunity" and "generational poverty," you'd expect illegals to commit far more crime. They might think they don't need to, since low illegal alien crime is simply a fact, but when you combine that with their history of lying about the very real high crime rate among blacks, voters simply don't believe their claims about illegals. Even now, after the ICE killings, voters trust Republicans more on immigration:
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/2018730290991304994
Conservatives could easily explain low illegal immigrant crime: illegals who commit crimes risk deportation to terrible countries. Harsher punishments provide more deterrence, this is conservative crime theory 101. But they'd rather lie, it serves them well enough electorally, though the constant lying turns off the elite human capital a few of them would like to attract.
My post didn't distinguish between legal vs. illegal immigrants, because we have poor statistics on illegal immigrants (we mostly measure crime through incarceration rate, and illegal immigrants often get deported rather than incarcerated).
Still, I think we can be pretty sure your proposed explanation isn't the full story, because legal immigrants have lower crime rates than natives, so an easy explanation for if illegal immigrants did would be that they have the same immigrant-specific factors. My guess is that it takes agency and competence to immigrate to the US, and those are helpful in getting real jobs, which in turn prevent crime. My guess is that for illegal immigrants, the explanation is a combination of the overall-immigrant agency+competence effect, plus what you say about deportation fears.
I don't think I've ever actually heard a liberal say that illegal immigrant crime isn't caused at all by deportation fear.
>the constant lying turns off the elite human capital a few of them would like to attract
Constant lying doesn't seem to hurt progressives in this regard. I'd say that conservatives' problem is that they offer either explicitly religion-based ideology, or outright anti-intellectualism, and neither option is attractive to elite aspirants these days.
I wonder if part of this disconnect is that "serious" conservatives from suburban/urban areas will never experience the toxicity of rural culture. But they do routinely experience the worst of progressive culture.
Progressive rhetoric does get frustrating for me but it will never compare to the toxicity of rural culture.
Rurals are to conservative elites as blacks are to white liberal elites.
I'd argue that people like JD Vance are elite aspirants, with the distinction that they are trying to create a new elite to replace the old one. There's no reason the elite caste of a country couldn't be heavily religious.
>There's no reason the elite caste of a country couldn't be heavily religious.
There are plenty. Religious dogmas are mostly obvious nonsense that educated people can't take seriously nowadays. This isn't a problem for unambitious theocracies like Afghanistan, however if you want to maintain and develop a post-industrial society, clear social license to ditch obsolete nonsense is essential. Of course, ambitious opportunists like Vance have no trouble ignoring inconvenient parts, and also denying doing it. Such blatant hypocrisy isn't sustainable in the long term, but that isn't their main concern.
You are aware many educated people are heavy religious right? Cue Jews for example. I'm with Jimmy here, there is no inherent conflict.
My understanding is that in most jurisdictions, it was not customary to inquire of someone you’ve arrested for the 10th time, only to let go again, their immigration status. This was so in my blue city in a red state at least.
Though in truth, it would really be just as interesting or illustrative to track when their parents came here.
The weirdest part to me is that the US managed to elect someone who "solves" this even though it's a much lesser issue overall, while in the EU they just continue to vote for the same people who caused it, despite there actually being a substantial problem.
Also, on the issue itself, I increasingly dislike the word "immigrant" altogether. Generally speaking, if you really dig into the statistics, there are three points that really matter: 1. Where did the people you're talking about originally come from? 2. How selective (by status/education/whatever) was the process of getting them here? 3. How much have they culturally adapted?
For extreme examples of what I'm talking about, highly selected first worlders who are willing to adapt are basically amazing for any country they are staying in no matter whether they are recent immigrants or have been there for some generations, with very few exceptions. At the other end, unselected or even arguably negatively selected third worlders who ghettoized are awful for any country, no matter as recent immigrants or as natives with generations of time. You can invert each example by playing around with the other options, of course; Highly selected third worlders willing to culturally adapt will outperform negatively selected first worlders unwilling to adapt at some point, and plenty of examples can be found.
This is critical for the US vs EU comparison in respect to immigration. The large recent hispanic immigration into the US is high-crime compared to native whites, but it's low-crime compared to native blacks, and it ends up being mostly a wash. On the other hand, especially north europe had absolutely tiny and irrelevant native high-crime groups, so the difference to unselected middle eastern and especially north african immigration was extremely shocking and large. Once you understand this, it all fits together easily and each side can be understood.
> The weirdest part to me is that the US managed to elect someone who "solves" this even though it's a much lesser issue overall, while in the EU they just continue to vote for the same people who caused it, despite there actually being a substantial problem.
This is not true. "The EU" votes for people who "solve" this left and right. Well right, mostly. Unfortunately the "solution" does not work. Europes move to the right has not made it a better place to live.
No, not really. Denmark did successfully move to the right, solved the problem, and they are better off for it. But they are the exception.
Germany, which I'm by far most familiar with, voted for the CDU, which is nominally a right wing party, but also the party that made the disastrous decisions in 2015 under Merkel that lead to large parts of the current problems. If you look at what actually happens on the ground as opposed to rhetoric, they govern center left - which is mostly unavoidable, since they can exclusively coalition with left-wing parties nowadays thanks to the Brandmauer. Letting millions of people into the welfare system with minimal checks is not solved by deporting a few thousand. Likewise, reducing current immigration levels solves nothing, either, it merely means the problems get worse at a slightly slower pace. Instead, they go crazy on credit to finance it all for a few extra years with no fixes in sight.
Somali culture really is a lot farther from American culture than Irish or Italian culture was. Their issues back home with tribalism seem quite severe.
I don't think our ability to survive ethnic enclave fraud in the past is a guarantee of our ability to do so in the present. I would suggest that every fraud instance is a separate roll of the dice, in the sense of whether it triggers a broader-scale norm breakdown.
To be clear, I feel the same way about Trump's corruption. A lot of the Somalis are pointing at Trump and saying "how can you blame us when the president is so corrupt?" I'm concerned that we are on the verge of a phase shift, where attempts to cheat the system start outrunning our ability to catch the cheaters, and our country collapses in a whirlwind of whataboutism.
I spent some time in the Somali subreddit when the fraud story broke, having conversations, trying to be constructive, and basically concluded that assimilating them was hopeless. They aren't having tough conversations about how the fraud might've occurred; they are telling each other that they need to band together ever tighter as Somalis, and dismissing criticism of their community using standard progressive rhetoric ("white supremacy" etc.) Kari Stark's note about her conversations with Somalis in Minnesota resonates with me: https://substack.com/@karistark/note/c-193872399
Wokeness isn't helping either. I'll bet it's easy to justify defrauding the government when you're taught a caricatured version of US history which zooms in on all the bad bits and exaggerates to make us look like a supervillain:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Somalia/comments/1dvf82d/somali_americans_happy_4th_or_not/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Somalia/comments/1h21mw2/any_other_somalis_celebrating_thanksgiving/
The funny thing about open borders is that in a sense, it's a profoundly patriotic idea. Open borders ideology claims that as soon as someone steps onto American soil, they'll be transformed into a valuable worker, law-abiding citizen, and civic stalwart, due to the magic of American culture and institutions. Oddly enough, the same progressives who push for open borders also tend to insist that the US is a fundamentally flawed and deeply racist society. In addition to the obvious internal contradiction (is it really ethical for the US to allow brown immigrants if we're going to give them generational trauma from our microaggressions?), it seems to me that such progressive rhetoric undermines the "Reaganite" mechanisms of assimilation which might somehow cause the sort of magical benefits they hope for.
As one Somali put it on the subreddit, when discussing the 4th of July: No one is celebrating "America". https://old.reddit.com/r/Somalia/comments/1dvf82d/somali_americans_happy_4th_or_not/lbnp9to/
I'm not comfortable with deporting law-abiding US citizens. But I would treat this Somali incident as a lesson in what US immigration policy should NOT look like. I certainly would block any further Somali immigration or naturalization until we are sure that we've determined the full scope of Somali fraud all across the country.
I should wait until my friend actually writes their post, but I don't think this is true. When you think of Italian culture being good and easy-to-assimilate, you're probably thinking of, like, Italians in Florence having the Renaissance or something The Italians who immigrated to the US were 1800s Sicilian peasant villagers. 1800 Sicilian peasant villages were pretty dreadful - for example, they had a literacy rate (in their native language) lower than Somalis have today, no indoor plumbing, and a life expectancy of 30 (including infant mortality) or ~50 (excluding it).
> We're not talking about the kind of Italians who did the Renaissance here.
You kind of are, actually -- Renaissance Italy (which I assume is what you mean by "semi-modern"), particularly the Tuscany-Romagna area, was a fantastically violent and unstable place. It was the time-and-place of Cesare Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli, after all (though the latter was much less of a monster than his reputation suggests). Basically every figure of note from the Italian Renaissance lived through multiple regime changes and was involved in deadly brawls, assassinations, conspiracies, battles, sieges, and purges. Endemic tribal violence, for better or worse, is not at all incompatible with great art and literature. Even today, Tuscan cities (and sometimes, *rioni* within the same city) are proudly inimical to each other, though now it is *almost* entirely a joke. Interestingly, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna are the most consistently left-wing regions in modern Italy.
"Better a death in the family than a Pisan at the doorstep" -- popular proverb from Livorno, a city 20 km away from Pisa
The Italian mafia caused trouble in the US for perhaps 100 years. And it seems plausible to me that the 1920s immigration shutdown played an important role in eventually assimilating Italians. So the Italians hardly seem like compelling support for your position. Offhand, I would guess that the Italians were only truly assimilated when Giuliani (an Italian public prosecutor) successfully wielded RICO laws to take down the mob in the 1980s. This looks more like a contingent event than the outcome of an inevitable process. Somali assimilation could be similarly touch-and-go. Without a Giuliani-type figure in the Somali community, you could see an endless tug-of-war between "ethnocentric" assertion of group identity, and "xenophobic" demands to assimilate. I was hoping to somehow help foster a Giuliani-type figure by chatting with Somalis on their subreddit, and eventually gave up. Hence my pessimism.
I think your claims about underdevelopment are somewhat beside the point. I am more concerned about nepotism, which also applies to some high-development immigrants like H1B fraud. My mental model is that corruption-fighting efforts are sort of like error correction mechanisms on a noisy communication channel. Error correcting codes are built to handle a certain level of noise in the channel, using check bits and other techniques. But if the noise level gets too high, the check bits themselves become corrupted, and it's impossible to recover the signal. Similarly, I think American society can handle a certain level of corruption through our existing corruption-fighting mechanisms. But I'm concerned that there's some threshold beyond which the corruption-fighting mechanisms become corrupt themselves, and clean institutions are effectively unrecoverable. We don't know where this threshold is. It may fluctuate over time. I feel pretty confident that progressive rhetoric is lowering the "point of no return" threshold, by creating the permission structure and rhetorical defenses for immigrant groups to subvert the system. That's what happened with Rotherham in the UK. Many Brits seem to think that the UK is overall close to a point of no return, and will be going the way of Brazil or South Africa. American culture is similar enough to British culture that we can guess we are not super far from the breaking point. It already seems plausible to me that US news organizations are engaging in Rotherham behavior through bogus "debunkings" of Somali fraud (e.g. negotiating with the daycare owners the time at which the news organization will show up, making it easy for fraudsters to ensure that the daycare is full of kids at that time).
How about you send my comments to your friend so they can fortify their argument against my critiques.
I think Italians were pretty thoroughly assimilated before 1980.
I also think if a good enough prosecutor can end the problem, this is a whitepill compared to "they are temperamentally and genetically incapable of assimilating".
I agree 100 years of poor assimilation is pretty bad, and this is part of what pushes me towards a position of "open borders for easy-to-assimilate immigrants, take a limited number of hard-to-assimilate immigrants at a time and wait for them to assimilate before adding more".
There was also WW1 and WW2, which used huge levels of social pressure to force German and Italian immigrants to assimilate, and the subsequent 1950's post-war pressure where ethnic kids were discouraged (or in some cases barred) from using their old languages etc. I doubt you are either hoping for or planning on that type of shared experience or social pressure.
Yeah that's the grim thing about "assimilation", I actually suspect that social pressure from the host society can sometimes be a fairly important ingredient. Panglossian open borders advocates might want to keep that in mind. Maybe the reason previous groups assimilated is, in part, because they were on the receiving end of a certain amount of racial discrimination of the sort that's considered unacceptable in polite society.
There's also the actual wartime shared physical experience of being drafted, enduring privation, traveling to combat, rationing, trauma, etc. that helped forge the Greatest Generation's social solidarity. But I don't think anyone is proposing or hoping for another war requiring total mobilization and killing millions! But if that's key for assimilation, then what's left of the argument that it will "just happen"?
Sure, so if your notion of "thorough assimilation" permits large-scale organized crime (Italian Mafia), we aren't using "thorough assimilation" the same way. You can talk all you want about "thorough assimilation"--I just don't want more organized crime! That's more important to me than whether we have achieved some sort of arbitrary "assimilation" metric according to however you are using the word.
BTW, based on a quick Google, I'd guess the Sicilians are *still* over-represented in organized crime in the US, they're just more subtle about it nowadays: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/sicilian-mafia-and-its-impact-united-states
This blogpost could be interesting, although the site seems to be down right now: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-assimilation-myth-america
It's tricky, because I do sympathize with the position that having conversations about the relative merits of various ethnicities is not a polite thing to do in multi-ethnic society. A lot of people shy away from those conversations because they don't want to alienate friends and colleagues, which is extremely understandable! But immigration policy, in a democracy, *requires* that we have those conversations. Maybe the best solution is to require immigrants to carry quite a bit of "immigrant criminality insurance" (which pays out if the immigrant or their descendant commits a crime or engages in other notable antisocial behavior), and allow insurers to set insurance rates based on what would ordinarily be considered protected characteristics like age, gender, genetic testing, appearance, national origin, etc. so racism no longer needs to be a load-bearing part of our democratic conversation (it can just be a thing that happens quietly in insurance offices).
Immigration restriction is one of the best ways to fight racism, because it makes racism less necessary (from the perspective of people who believe immigrants won't assimilate, they no longer need to go online explaining why it's necessary to restrict immigration from country X by using characteristics of current immigrants as evidence)
>I also think if a good enough prosecutor can end the problem, this is a whitepill compared to "they are temperamentally and genetically incapable of assimilating".
I mean, if it took 100 years and a lucky break to assimilate a population that is very European visually and genetically, imagine how much time and luck it would take to assimilate a population which is *wildly* distinct in terms of genes, culture, and appearance, especially when our society is so divided on the basis of ethnic/cultural issues...
>take a limited number of hard-to-assimilate immigrants at a time and wait for them to assimilate before adding more
Why not aim for ~0? It seems much safer to undershoot than overshoot. From an effective altruist point of view, it would be better to spend those assimilation resources on research into effective development aid. Immigration is not a scaleable solution to global poverty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE (This video is old and some numbers are outdated but I think the fundamental point stands)
> I also think if a good enough prosecutor can end the problem, this is a whitepill compared to "they are temperamentally and genetically incapable of assimilating".
I think this point is actually under-appreciated with many of the issues that allegedly make immigration bad.
Crime? Our crime policies are bad. Improve them, arrest criminals whether immigrant or not, deport the immigrant ones after their sentence (or instead of, for minor crimes) if you want. Clearance rates in the US are atrocious; improving them would be a win-win.
Welfare? Immigrants are generally excluded from these programs anyway, but sure, have a less-generous welfare state and work on reducing welfare fraud. It's not like the people who oppose immigration generally want a large welfare state anyway.
These policies would just be positive-sum even before you account for the benefits of immigration; holding up policy failures as excuses for even worse policy failures is quite lazy.
Why take any "hard-to-assimilate immigrant"?
Why are Western countries bound to accept immigrants from everywhere?
Wow, is that where you were headed with this essay? I missed that entirely! That strikes me as an atypically conservative position for you, though I do welcome you to the club.
The obvious comparison is to "native" blacks, which by many metrics also haven't assimilated, and don't seem particularly interested.
Are they less assimilated than poor whites with the same culture as them?
But they were Christians like Americans.
"open borders is that in a sense, it's a profoundly patriotic idea"
Delusion is not patriotic.
When does this actually ever occur?: "fire whichever state officials allowed it to happen." I expect we can all agree the bureaucratic firing should occur, but it never really seems to. See public officials and the economic collapse of 2008, see public officials and their Covid lies, see Minnesota fraud. I personally would favor a few public hangings to concentrate the rest of the lot. Seems unlikely to actually happen.
It’s a good question, because it’s not clear which state officials are responsible for allowing fraud to happen. Some of these laws don’t have effective enforcement mechanisms baked-in to them. If someone submits a payment request for services that didn’t happen, who is responsible for ensuring that money isn’t paid out?
Is the fault with the legislators who passed the faulty bill? Is the fault with the office staff who approved the payments? They’re in an office building all day. They have no idea which payment requests are fraudulent and which ones are legit.
Presumably in an ideal system there are published standards for a childcare facility and random inspections to ensure compliance. Is the alleged fraud a consequence of a gap in this process or something more sinister ?
My understanding is that there were regular safety inspections, but that these inspectors were not responsible for verifying attendance or financial records.
> The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations...
That's true, however many European countries have a Black population % higher than some American states (New Hampshire, Vermont...). Official statistics must be taken with care because: 1) in some countries like France, using the concept of race about humans is a legal offense, so official statistics on this matter are forbidden - there are no official numbers, only more or less indirect research studies; 2) the situation for Black people is comparable to that of Latino people in the US - many don't have papers and escape statistics. A parliamentary report estimates 400k to 900k illegal migrants in France (a significant portion being Black people). So it's hard to tell, but France probably counts 2-4 million Black people, more than 3-5% of the population, with high concentration in Paris and some suburbs. No surprise that BLM has an echo. However, racism is by no means as extreme as it is in the USA.
I'm not persuaded that anti-black racism is "extreme" in the US.
All the cross-country survey stats I have seen is that the US is one of the least racist countries.
You're right. I meant not as strong as anti-Black racism can be in some US states or conservative areas.
In France, there is a general tendency toward xenophobia, just like everywhere (instinct?). But strong anti-Black racism is mostly limited to private right-wing circles and certain individuals who largely conceal it in public. Racism here is less about skin color or genetics, it's more focused on immigration and fears of "replacement."
What strikes me about the US is that genuine anti-Black racists don't hide much. Even the US President appears to be overtly anti-Black racist. I mean, when MAGA people joke about the Obamas or other black people, it's not because they are fresh immigrants. It's deep racism, and they don't even try to hide it.
I have no problem characterising Trump as an overtly anti-immigration politician. But on the topic of his supposed hatred of black people, I've always felt a bit underwhelmed by all the evidence marshalled to support it (as has the author of the blog you're commenting on, incidentally: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/). Why, exactly, do you think Trump is an *overtly* anti-black racist?
Thank you for the link. I'm not sure whether Scott would still be as nuanced in 2026 as he was in 2016 when challenging Democratic or mediatic orthodoxy. Hard to say. He did write something of a mea culpa in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords
I'll admit that my view of Trump shifted to "this guy is overtly racist" with the recent Obama affair. However, I believe there was already evidence of deep-seated and not-so-hidden racism:
Housing discrimination (1970s)
Segregation in casinos (1980s-90s)
Comments about "inherent laziness" that he acknowledged in 1997
The Central Park Five
But perhaps I'm wrong. My argument wasn't specifically against Trump to begin with. To me, he's symptomatic of the remnants of the segregation era, which isn't that far in the past, and the deep imprint it left on American society. Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between The World And Me" really marked me. I maintain that, while racism also exists, the situation for Black people is quite different in France/Europe—and that was Scott's original point anyway. My initial comment was more intended as a nuance about the fact that Black people may be more numerous in France than one may think on the other side of Atlantic (that would probably be also true to some extent for Italy, Belgium, UK, maybe Germany).
Worth noting that as with many other famously "exonerated" suspects, the evidence for the guilt of the Central Park Five is overwhelming. See e.g. this thread: https://xcancel.com/TruueDiscipline/status/1724257772295082332#m.
France, sure, bit of an outlier for their own colonial reasons. Though, ah, I would question the suggestion that they don't have extreme issues with racism.
But Ireland? *Finland*?
The wokest of the woke in Ireland sometimes cite the shooting of George Nkencho as an example of the Irish police service's supposed institutional racism. I believe he was literally the first (and, to date, last) black person killed by the police in the history of the state, and that was after they spent literal hours attempting to neutralise him with less-lethal methods like tasers and pepper spray.
The idea that BLM has any relevance to Irish society is a transparent farce and always has been.
Recent immigrants will have previously lived under persecution in a country where the govt is against them. The ones who make it out will have learnt to stay under the radar.
>Why should these numbers be so different in the US vs. Germany?
We could consider the reason given in the linked article: asylum seekers include 3x the proportion of young males as the general population, and young males commit almost all murders (and are the large majority of victims).
I bring this up not (just) to be snarky, but to point out another big factor here: It's easier to ignore nuance in a foreign country.
It's a very common experience here in the US for one side to make a broad and bold claim about something, and then for the other side to carefully sift through the data and methodology and caveats and point out that this isn't actually true, or is at least debatable and complicated, or has different causes and implications than they were implying. Scott's doing a lot of that in this post.
But when you are dealing with a foreign country, it's equally easy to make the big, bold claim, but much more difficult to do the nuanced fact-checking. You don't speak the language, you don't know what sources to use, you don't know enough about the government and culture to have intuitions about where to look.
It's much, much harder to come to a nuanced understanding, and to sort the lying narratives from the empirical facts. So liars will always get an advantage by arguing about something happening in a foreign country, rather than their own.
As a French guy, I can confirm that immigrants are disproportionately represented in crimes (especially petty crimes). So much so that it's statistically safe to bet that, if your bike was stolen, it was by immigrants. Indeed, in every single resolved case I personally know of, the culrprit was of arab/gipsy ascent.
French Catholics were puzzled by Pope Francis's take on immigration policies and thought he was a leftist. It's only after reading Hanania's pieces on immigration that I understood Pope Francis's ideas were rational in the american context. Much less so in the european one.
Still, I have to say that I'm writing this comment while in a car driven by a Moroccan who doesn't speak French. So I guess statistics don't show the exact picture. Also, having travelled to Morocco, I can day that the country is much safer than France, at least in the big cities. So I don't buy the "arabs are inherently inferior" narrative.
I believe that the left ideology has a point in that the way immigrants are welcome to France encourages them to become criminal. The combination of (generally justified though counterproductive) racist bias, impossibility to work when you're an illegal, possibility to benefit from welfare even when you're an illegal, and absolute lack of sanctions for petty crimes is absolutely perfect for turning decent people into scumbags.
To illustrate the "absolute lack of sanction", my brother was beaten to near death by a group of immigrants and had to spend 3 weeks in intensive care, with brain internal bleedings, broken orbital floor and nice stuff like that. The guys just wanted to take his debit card to buy Tacos. He had roughly 50% chances of survival when he arrived at the Hospital.
His agressors were caught (CCTV in the Tacos shop), which in itself is quite rare. 4 out of 5 were african. They were sentenced to nothing. Like absolutely nothing. Just a "rappel à la loi".
So modern medicine saves us from another murder stat.
Anecdote: My sister interned in France with a lawyer in the criminal justice system. She said all the defendants were black and spoke limited French. This was in 1990.
I feel really bad for your brother. If it were up to me those criminals (regardless of color) would get 20 years in prison, maybe more. Death penalty if he had died.
That's insane that the perps are known and caught on camera but received no consequences, how are the people tolerating this state of affairs? Is there no legal or political recourse?
Recent case in UK. Burglary at Elbit system with a policeman hit with hammer. All acquitted.
Very strange framing. It wasn't a burglary, but direct action. The jury agreed and acquitted. That's not the law to blame, but the consciences of the jurors.
Direct action? Meaning precisely what?
Meaning it was earnest political activism, which the jury recognised. You bringing this up as an example of justice not served is misleading, as it was the jury deciding to acquit, just as they have been able to do for the last 1000 years.
Political activism? Hitting a policeman with hammer? Breaking and entering?
>French Catholics were puzzled by Pope Francis's take on immigration policies and thought he was a leftist. It's only after reading Hanania's pieces on immigration that I understood Pope Francis's ideas were rational in the american context. Much less so in the european one.
Which is, IMHO, a good argument for Popes making fewer public pronouncements. There are very few "Governments need to do X" statements that apply to all the parts of the world with significant Catholic populations.
Bingo. I was visiting Normandy around twenty years ago and my rental got broke into. Mind you for Americans, Normandy is rural France and white as snow. Being from Bosnia at the time I assumed it was just local teenagers because France doesn't really have a high Gypsy population. When the cops showed up they were like “100% Algerians did it”. It wasn't even a question or a maybe lol.
This is bizarre. Were the aggressors adults? "Vol avec violences en réunion" is a felony; I do not think it is legally possible for it to be punished with a "rappel à la loi".
They weren't! That's one of the reasons they had nothing. Another one is that there is no space left in prisons.
Fun thing, to add to this conversations: I hitchhiked yesterday from Pau to Lyon, and was picked up by a nice man who has been friends with a bounty killer in Marseilles.
I'm not absolutely sure how reliable this second-party account is, but he gave me some reasons to believe that his (ex-, as he told me)friend indeed was a bounty killer, from age 13 to 15. (1)
I'd say there's roughly a 30-50% chance it's true.
My driver told me that his (ex-)friend was a very helpful and benevolent guy on most accounts (he gave me personal anecdotes about his friend's altruism), and that he deeply regretted his deeds.
Just another (somewhat unreliable) datapoint on human complexity.
(1) Said reasons were:
1. My driver didn't make a fuss about it. He gave me a general impression of being trustworthy. He seemed mentally healthy.
2. His friend confessed to being a drug dealer before confessing to being a killer.
3. The confession happened when a cousin of this guy (who, if I understand correctly, was his client), asked everyone present to never tell a word about his confession.
Wait, what do you say was one of the reasons they got nothing?
Prison overcrowding may be one of the reasons why penalties of less than two years are routinely suspended - but this sounds like a felony that would have got a lot more than two years.
I think the reason the American right makes fun of europe is because they see europe as the embodiment of the policies the American left would implement if it could. Europe is seen as the out-group.
True, but its kind of counterproductive for the "New Right" internationally, as this behaviour by the American rightists will cause a higher proportion of (Western) Europeans to side with the left, since the right in Europe is now seen as being "American Bootlickers", and the American right as the enemy, and of course, at least in Western Europe, the average person cardinally believes that the US is inferior both politically and socially to Western Europe.
I don't think the American right cares. They are American first and while they probably think it would be good to have a Europe that is in their mould, it is not a priority, and besides it's fun for them to make fun of Europe.
Maybe. But in the eyes of most voters in Western Europe, this makes right-wing Americans the enemy, and thus means that MAGA will face even more opposition than if they wouldn't be as anti-European and thus are less likely to achieve their international goals (though I guess one possible strategy for MAGA could be to antagonise the Eastern EU states against the Western EU states, but the pro-Russian attitude of MAGA makes this strategy less likely to be fruitful).
I don't think MAGA is pro-Russian as much as they are anti USA interventionism in a lost war. Some of them also understand the western propaganda and that the cause of the war is not as simple as Putin is an mad imperialist that invaded Ukraine unprovoked.
Another thing you see on the American right is steps towards limiting EU censorship and shining light on undemocratic EU compaigns that supress right wing EU parties to keep the current ones in power. So while the political machine on the american right may be alienating the EU left, it is also supporting the EU right, and increasing the chances that these groups come to power.
You don't seem to understand what I'm saying. From a Western European perspective, MAGA is just repugnant for the vast majority of people. Even right-wing populist parties parties like the RN in France or Reform in the UK are having to distance themselves from MAGA, because to most people in Western Europe they are the personification of the ignorant, uncultured and boorish American. So no, by supporting the EU right, MAGA is causing them to become less popular in most countries, and the EU that MAGAs hate so much to become more popular inside the EU, thus making it much less likely that right-wing populists can become more powerful in the EU.
From a MAGA perspective, Western Europe has always seen America (or at least the good parts thereof) as repugnant, gullible, and easily exploitable. They've given up on changing the "repugnant" part and are trying to make it clear that the gullibility and exploitation are over. To MAGA, America and Europe have been enemies for a long time, but much of America has been too foolish to see that.
MAGA's perception is, of course, not entirely in line with reality. But neither is Western Europe's.
" He answers that their ideology centers around the idea of Western civilization, which is kind of him: a more paranoid analyst might make a similar argument around white identitarianism."
Crazy. Western Civilization comes from Jews, Greeks, and Italians. Yes, they're white, as are the Arabs, Persians, and Hindus, but why would Norwegians like me identify with them?
Wasn't Norway Christianized at some point? The cultural influence of those Jews, Greeks and Italians reached your country already a while ago.
His entire paragraph is a litany of nonsense. It hard to tell whether this is extreme leftism or nordicism.
Maybe US crime statistics are misleading: the crimes are committed by blacks and Latinos, which are technically “native” Americans. But it doesn’t undermine the white identitarian thesis that these “low IQ” groups are dangerous or burdensome.
Like twelve comments here are variants of "blacks commit a lot of crime therefore groups which commit a lot less then them should not be allowed to immigrate to the United States."
You could be more charitable and read some of them along the lines of "having Crimes Georg as part of your population is not a good argument in favor of immigration."
Indeed, it is a bad stats-brained argument.
It's a response to using an average which is weighted so heavily by the small minority of blacks that it's pretty useless. The median and modal American commits far less crime than the average would lead you to believe, so saying "Immigrants commit slightly less than average crime" is severely misleading, being that slightly less than average is still way above median and mode.
Because it's a glaring issue and I hope Scott have good response in the "Highlights" article.
It seems the lesson to be learned here is that the right is looking at the wrong problem if they're looking for effective ways to improve the country's demographics.
It's looking at the 'problem' it can 'solve' (at least to some extent, if not finally). It has stumbled on the wonderful fact that it is possible to
- assign a value of zero to someone
- demonize someone
- act as if someone were essentially homo sacer
if that someone is a non-citizen (or, perhaps, a citizen born elsewhere). Its (half-confessed) target of choice would be someone else, but someone with a hammer may just choose to hit nails within reach.
They're also realizing you can just kill people who get in your way. People are going to be learning a whole lot about humanity and morality soon.
i have zero statistical proof, but am very skeptical about whether illegal immigrant and asylum seeking criminals are getting caught and their crimes documented at the same rate as those of regular citizens. a) these are people already living somewhat underground and pros at dodging the authorities even under normal circumstances b) a lot of the victims are likely to be part of the same demographic groups and they are going to go to the police to report crimes significantly less and c) even if the crime gets reported police might not focus on these cases involving marginal/transient society members quite as much, so lower solve rate. Most murders probably do go into the statistics, but everything else i doubt we are capturing at same rates.
This resonates with me from conversations I’be had online with European about immigration:
- Europeans sometimes frame their thinking about black Americans as if they are immigrants, because most black people in their own countries are immigrants, not internalizing that most black Americans have American-born ancestry from at least 1700s, longer than the average white American.
- Europeans assume that their concerns about assimilation of Muslims in Europe applies to America, not recognizing that Muslims are a minuscule proportion of American immigrants, who are mostly Christian.
> Europeans assume that their concerns about assimilation of Muslims in Europe applies to America, not recognizing that Muslims are a minuscule proportion of American immigrants, who are mostly Christian.
Europeans don’t think like that at all. We know too much about America.
Scott is saying the opposite, that American conservatives and restrictionists bring up the European experience, somewhat cynically.
Open Borders guys try to avoid mentioning European crime and welfare statistics of migrants. The only countries for which we do have long term granual data (Denmark & Sweden?) show non western non Asian migrants to be a huge cost to the state.
Caplan pretends this doesn't exist.
Hanania does say on occasion "I don't know about European migrants", to his credit. But I felt he's trying to mention this less than what honesty would proscribe. But am I too demanding of him?
The Netherlands also had a big report on the substantial lifetime costs.
Expecting honesty of Banania is more than he can provide, yes.
He's much more honest on European migration than Caplan, who wouldn't even mention that migration has negatives ever.
Hanania repeatedly said "yes, I know European migration is bad. But not so America".
My only beef with him is that he isn't mentioning this enough, which is a weak and flattering line of critique
Caplan, as a libertarian, would probably be happy to see the European welfare system collapse anyway. it’s that that makes immigration costly.
Libertarians in general see humans as eating, excreting, consuming and producing machines. Culture is irrelevant. More utils needed, as reflected in increased GDP, if not increased GDP per capita or wages.
I think the phrase "native-born Americans" is also doing a lot of work. If you consider the perspective of the modal conservative (by which I mean both right of center and politically engaged), they are in a peer group / community / neighborhood with a rather lower crime rate than the average of everyone with American citizenship. If one identifies not only as "citizen of the USA" but nationally as an "unhyphenated American", then the relevant baseline for comparison is not the crime rate of native-borns.
As an illustrative thought experiment: in the future, if the German population is comprised of 50% people whom we today would call German with a normal German crime rate, 30% immigrant groups with very high crimes rates, plus 20% other immigrant groups with normal/low crime. Arguing in favor of continued influx of groups with higher crime rates than Germans on the basis that they are lower than aggregate "native-born Germans" would rightly be seen as making the problem worse. Many conservatives see the present of the USA and the extrapolated future of Europe as a similar phenomenon. I think that view is still somewhat of a stretch, but also that your refutation of it is overstated.
> In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate. This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about this issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of “asylum seekers” as a group.
Not an expert, I just read the bbc report you linked, but I think this is overstated and considering it's a controversial topic I would have appreciated a bit of a deeper description. As far as I can see reading the report the biggest factor here is socio-economic factors, especially that young men between 14-30 commit 50% of the violent crime while making up 9% of the population. For asylum seekers the rate is 27% so 3x that. The number mentioned in the article is 2% of the population vs 8.5% of the suspects that's a factor of ~4. So adjusting we would expect the 50% of young men to commit 1.5 times the crime + the 50% else to commit another 50% for a total of 200%. There might be another adjustment for the immigrants being poor and at times not allowed to do jobs. There might still be an argument for e.g. then preferably letting in only female asylum seekers or more educated or wealthy ones.
Opposing immigration on the basis of welfare spending and criminality is actually the old right. The new right opposes immigration because of racial replacement. Whites have already lost their majority status in America, but Europe is still mostly white. So you may be correct conservatives arguing on the basis of crime rates and welfare usage will have a harder time making their case, but I don't think the new right has this problem.
>"Whites have already lost their majority status in America…"
60.5%, still very much the majority.
Is it 60.5%? Most recent estimates I've seen were more like 53%.
Probably you've been looking at the percentage of whites who aren't Hispanic and the other guy has been looking at the percentage of whites.
My bet is he's using the census data which of course fairly inflates whites as obvious non-whites get rolled up with them such Jews, Indians, Arabs, Sicilians, Spanish Moriscos, Gypsies, most Slavs, etc.
My previous comment was admittedly a bit of a drive-by. Applying a bit more rigor, the Census Bureau says 74.8% White alone (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI125224#RHI125224) and 57.5% White alone not Hispanic or Latino (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI825224).
I suspect the 60.5% was the latter metric from the 2020 census; I can't reproduce my earlier search.
In any case, still far from being reduced to the plurality.
Given that the US white population was around 90% within living memory, I'd say 57.5% is actually pretty close to becoming a plurality.
There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants, but most of the energy is directed to illegals, and I consider it a misrepresentation when people -even you, who I respect - don't make that distinction. I adopted two sons from Romania, who married women from two further countries. I have resettled refugees and still support a Sudanese church. Legals tend to be anti-illegal, and consider that Nice People who conflate the two have the net effect of making them look worse.
Crime and benefit statistics about "immigrants" are a motte-and-bailey. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital and can tell you that illegal immigrants are often not charged or charges dropped because the county doesn't want to pick up the tab at the House of Correction, as that is an entry point to penetrating the entire system. They hope they give up and go to another locale.
Hypothesising that conservatives hold their views because of some emotional comfort while not considering that possibility for liberals still seems to be the default.
> There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants
I don't think there's anyone who dislikes all immigrants. There might be some people who are opposed to all immigration, but that's a different thing.
I don't think anyone has the energy to sit around disliking, say, Henry Cavill or Margot Robbie.
There's definitely a lot of people in the current day american right that pushes to abolish the H1B visa and kick out anyone who has it. That's an anti-legal-immigrant stance, for example.
Revoking visas of students who are politically involved here is a definite anti-legal-immigrant stance taken by the government, see e.g. Rumeysa Ozturk.
ICE also appears to take too much time focusing on skin color rather than legal status.
The list goes on.
"Definitely?" Whenever I see words like obviously, unquestionably, etc I have found them to be ill-supported, but people want to cut off being challenged by using a overplayed, even bullying tone. Thus also here. Your statements are exaggerated. I have not had good success discussing things with people who are 30% correct but claim to be 100%
I don't think your post is much better than mine. You make some statements with a tone of certainty without backing them up with sources:
"There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants", "Legals tend to be anti-illegal", etc
---
Let's mend that on my part: "Anecdotally, I've seen a large number of people within the American right, particularly on reddit and twitter, having an anti-H1B stance." This is not always about an anti-immigrant belief, but moreso one of protectionism, often of oneself or those around them. Anecdotally, I've seen a large share of anti-offshoring stances within the same set of people. Practically, "protectionism" or "purely anti-immigrant stance" matters little outside of a philosophical discussion, when these people are in favor of ending or severely limiting legal immigration.
Here's a recent larger example that comes to mind:
- Trump administration put a 100k fee per accepted H-1B applicant, currently in court, on appeals. This will significantly impact the amount of companies utilizing this program, and reduce the amount of legal skilled immigrants to the US. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restriction-on-entry-of-certain-nonimmigrant-workers/
- Elon Musk responded to this in favor of H-1B visas, and well, check the replies for yourself: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872860577057448306 / (if you're not logged in:) https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1872860577057448306
You can also search "h1b" on twitter and see what people are saying about legal immigrants: https://x.com/search?q=h1b&src=typed_query
I'm getting, just from the last 10 days or so:
- https://x.com/WallStreetMav/status/2020587629109301346 (which also supports revoking 7 million existing H1B and student visas)
- https://x.com/KumarXclusive/status/2019751040430571646 (also pro deportation of existing holders)
- https://x.com/realNickTran/status/2020165492493697078 & https://x.com/realNickTran/status/2020199893357273212
- https://x.com/MarkDavis/status/2019123552444903483
- https://x.com/1776General_/status/2019793215562363051
- https://x.com/Bantering_Less/status/2020914696317022225
- https://x.com/PatriotPostGirl/status/2020548037609754905
- https://x.com/Scar17_s/status/2022193378927284735
alongside many others.
Here's a subreddit that likes to have opinions on H-1B: https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/search?q=h1b&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all
I'm not making any claims of this being a majority position, but I stand by my point that there are a lot of people who are anti legal skilled immigration. Your definition of "a lot" may not fit mine, but it's clearly a big enough crowd that it got the US government to act to restrict the programs.
Well done sir. You asserted your strongest points and retreated a bit from your overstatement and added a great deal of supporting data. You have overproduced in answering my objection.
There are some Americans who dislike all immigrants, but most of the energy is directed to illegals, and I consider it a misrepresentation when people -even you, who I respect - don't make that distinction. I adopted two sons from Romania, who married women from two further countries. I have resettled refugees and still support a Sudanese church. Legals tend to be anti-illegal, and consider that Nice People who conflate the two have the net effect of making them look worse.
Crime and benefit statistics about "immigrants" are a motte-and-bailey. I worked in a state psychiatric hospital and can tell you that illegal immigrants are often not charged or charges dropped because the county doesn't want to pick up the tab at the House of Correction, as that is an entry point to penetrating the entire system. They hope they give up and go to another locale.
Hypothesising that conservatives hold their views because of some emotional comfort while not considering that possibility for liberals still seems to be the default.
"Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs."
I don't see why that interest would be remarkable. Europe is part of Western and developed society and has been our ally in a number of areas. If everyone there turns into a rhinoceros, it's (1) sad, (2) concerning, and (3) possibly a warning of where current trends will lead us, given more time (and now pressure from all the rhinoceri running Europe.)
I don't have strong feelings about immigration either here or there, but I am concerned about creeping regulatory despotism, lack of free speech and diversity of thought, and crime-friendly policies, to the extend they're true, for the above three reasons. I'm curious if stories about safety in Germany or France announcing that it's no longer safe to walk the Seine at night are correct, and about British elite efforts to stop Britons from speaking their minds.
Maybe those stories are all overblown, and I'm taking them with a grain of salt, but I'm not sure why it's remarkable that I'm interested and potentially concerned.
Re European backflow: Americans don’t seem willing to identify themselves as “upper class.” Maybe because the US imagination reserves “upper class” for an aristocratic system we’ve never had? (Inherited titles, fixed hierarchy.) Even entrenched elites see themselves as middle class people benefiting from earned success. To do otherwise would feel un-American.
Canada has 9% more men than women in the 20-29 age group - about 10 years ago it was 2%. According to one study I read, each percent in the 16 - 25 age group causes 3.6% more crime.
- Edlund, Li, Yi & Zhang’s paper “Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China"
This would imply that we may have a 30% increase in crime from the gender ratio alone, and violent crime has increased by 30% from the 2015 low. Australia has a similar less extreme change to a 4% male gender imbalance in the age group so this may be an experience shared by Europe and the US as well.
In this source violent crime is up 30%, human trafficking has increased by 395% and extortion by 429%. Human trafficking seems like a very obvious and awful effect of the now 400,000 more working age men than women in Canada.
https://thehub.ca/2024/09/21/violent-crime-has-seen-the-most-increase-30-percent-of-all-crime-categories-in-the-past-decade/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Recently the major Canadian city of Surrey has requested the federal government declare an emergency to deal with extortion, with several extortion warning shootings in the first month of the year. Apparently those caught and charged can claim asylum, which a police video sternly described as "not a long term solution".
Scott has forgotten about the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when Castro briefly opened the door for anyone wanting to leave. Castro used the opportunity to generously seed the flow of real asylum seekers with psychotics, murderers, hardcore criminals, drug dealers, and intelligence agents. The crime wave triggered by the Boatlift lasted for years, and permanently shifted the cultural landscape. It has been described as the third most damaging attack on the United States after Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The success of this operation was noted all across the world by people who wish us ill.
Maduro released god knows how many thousands of gangsters and psychotics and pointed them northward, where they were welcomed by border guards instructed not to notice their very obvious gang tatts. Maduro flatly refused to accept deportees before partially relenting.
The reality is, many if not most of the unvetted, i.e. illegal, migrants disappear into the vast coast-to-coast immigrant underground, where they are basically invisible to the rest of us, and to the keepers of stats. The Cartels took huge advantage of the Biden Migration, first by charging each of them many thousands of dollars for the right to cross the border, then by hiring new arrivals by the thousands through postings on FaceBook and networking events wherever migrants gathered in numbers. I think it's safe to say that whatever these people are doing, it isn't in our nation's best interests. Longer term, the Mexican government has for years been pursuing a policy of quiet reconquest, La Reconquista they call it. Through a network of 50-something consulates (China has 5) they school migrants on how to maintain their culture, resist assimilation, and act (and vote) in the best interest of the Homeland. Just for grins, which political party do you think they overwhelmingly vote for?
It's working, too. There is an immigrant area the size of a zip code not 5 minutes from my house. It is 99 point something Hispanic. It used to be pretty much all Mexican, but in the last few years lots of Guatemalans and Hondurans and Salvadorans have arrived. These groups hate each other and fight constantly. It doesn't make the official stats, though, because everyone practices a form of Omerta, and obeys the rule of "snitches get stitches." These various groups signal their tribal identity with enormous flags, a common decorator item. Old Glory is notably not among them. The signs in front of the three public schools, where messages and reminders are posted, are uniformly all in Spanish. If a white person tarries a little too long, rough-looking men will appear to question him. They do not do so nicely. I had a customer who lived in the neighborhood, an older white guy in a wheelchair. He was desperate to leave because his life was basically a living hell. He was constantly harassed, and the instant he left his house for whatever someone would break in and take whatever scraps were left. Police do nothing.
This is in no way shape or form an improvement over what was there before. This is also a microcosm of what likely awaits us in the future if we stay the present course.
It's not just Mexico pushing mass migration with a purpose. Multiple adversaries are intentionally using mass migration as a weapon to weaken the United States through demographic change. China, which hankers to replace us as the preeminent power, has a state-sponsored program wherein heavily pregnant women are paid to fly to Guam or California to give birth. This practice gave us the marvelous term "birth tourism." They tarry just long enough to gather up their newborn's citizenship paperwork. Thereafter the child lives life entirely overseas, yet retains the right to vote at age 18, a right they will absolutely exercise. A million of these are known, so far. Which party do you think they will vote for when the time comes?
Crime is only part of the picture. Immigrants are being forced into the system far faster than they can be absorbed. Entire communities are being changed almost literally overnight. Increasingly, migrants are being encouraged NOT to assimilate, not just by foreign actors with agendas, but by well-meaning but naive Americans. This is terribly destabilizing. The sense of being part of a shared enterprise is what keeps this society going. Lose that and you've lost your nationhood. We are well on the way to becoming a society of mutually antagonistic, perpetually squabbling factions, jostling for dominance, motivated by clan loyalty. Places like that tend to turn into hellscapes.
We are being played for chumps by people who abuse our good and generous nature. For all his many, many flaws, Trump understands this and is pushing back.
This is all covered in "The Invisible Coup," by Peter Schweizer, legendary investigative journalist. It's a book with something for everyone. If you love America and want it to thrive, it will alarm the hell out of you. If you hate America and want it to die, you'll cheer.
Here, it is the Catholic church that does much of the work of bringing in. I assume this is why we suddenly got an American pope.
It's highly organized and well-funded. Certainly not organic.
Wait, China doesn't recognize dual citizenship and requires holders of foreign citizenships to renounce them in order to acquire Chinese citizenship, so how does the birth tourism program work? Would the babies grow up in China as American citizens?
You are correct in that China does not officially allow dual citizenship. But as with lots of things it does not officially allow, it looks the other way when it's convenient. Birth tourism is a HUGE deal in China. It's all over social media and dozens if not hundreds of companies offer full packages for those wanting to do it. This ought to be front page news here, yet somehow is not. Why? I have my suspicions.
If a Chinese couple have a child while visiting the United States - not by "birth tourism" but e.g. premature birth a day before they were planning to fly home for the Big Day, that child is a US citizen under US law, and indeed would have to go through a great deal of effort to ever not be a US citizen under US law.
Does the Chinese government say of this child, "you are Not Chinese and you don't even have a visa for China, so you are an unperson unless and until you manage to formally renounce your US citizenship (and bring us the reciepts"?
Or does it just treat the kid as a Chinese citizen the way it treats pretty much every other child born to two Chinese-citizen parents as a Chinese citizen?
Because I'm pretty sure it's the second one, which means the parents have a child who is a Chinese citizen under Chinese law and can live the best possible life in China, but who is also an American citizen under American law who has the option of moving to the United States on demand. Sometimes that will even be advantageous to the CCP; mostly it's just not so much of a problem as to be worth extraordinary effort to suppress.
It's actually a good question what would happen in this case, I imagine bringing a baby with only a US birth certificate would raise some questions at the border, and I'm not sure I'd assume they'd automatically get Chinese citizenship. They probably would be considered a foreign national and some process would have to be followed to get them a Chinese birth certificate, during which they might be required to renounce any foreign citizenship?
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_nationality_law) says that unless one of the Chinese parents is a foreign national or permanent resident, the child is a Chinese citizen at birth. And as a Jus Sanguinis state, it shouldn't matter to China which jurisdiction issued the birth certificate, so long as it properly identifies two parents who the Chinese government knows are its citizens.
In addition to differences between the nature of immigrants, I personally feel that there's an immense difference between the descendent of a white settler who arrived on the continent 75-200 years ago standing on a border and saying "stop" to a Latin American whose ancestry is largely that of people who came to the Americas during the Ice Age vs some German or Englishman whose ancestors may well have lived there ever since they migrated there from Africa (yeah yeah by way of Anatolia and Mesopotamia but you know what I mean) saying the same thing to people's whose ancestors may well have never lived north of 40° N.
Unrelatedly, I think another significant Europe->America transition is right-wing antisemitism. Not to say we were free of it in the past, but I don't think it was a coincidence that it exploded right after American rightists gained the ability to log on and talk to European rightists
> stop" to a Latin American whose ancestry is largely that of people who came to the Americas during the Ice Age
Latin Americans have significant European ancestry. On average 50-60%. It varies a lot though. Also by being south of the Rio grande they aren’t native to what is now the US.
Despite that I take the point a bit. Europe is full of ancient peoples. Who happen to be white.
Yeah people always wanna quibble with one part or another when I make this argument and I think reasonable people can do so on the particulars, erfectly possible to rationally dispute my feelings about mestizio immigrants... but even if you think settler-descendent whites have every right to exclude, its hard to see how anyone could dispute that Euro whites have *more* of a right to exclude
Well I think every nation has the right to control borders. So we agree.
At some level I would say that the national government doesn't have the right to control borders, just like the national government doesn't have the right to collect taxes, because national governments don't have the right to exist.
But I acknowledge that this is a very impractical level, that nations and governments are a necessary evil to prevent worse forms of authority from arising, and that if we're going to have nations then we need taxes and all the rest (although they don't need to be nearly as high as they are).
But the idea that someone could say governments have the right to collect taxes but they don't have the right to protect their borders seems incoherent.
> because national governments don't have the right to exist.
it’s true that nation states are a recent invention, something that may not last.
What are you hoping for though? Empires are the most common form of government in history, many quite long lasting and stable. City states pop up every so often, and the odd republic, but they either don’t last or be one empires themselves.
I don’t think anarchists, libertarians or general leftist internationalists mean that, though. Hard to know.
The real oddity, historically speaking, is the idea that borders should be fixed, or sovereignty should be equ and rulers should be chosen by voters rather than force or habit.
> What are you hoping for though?
I'm hoping for a sort of ancap paradise. But like I said, I acknowledge this is unlikely to actually work, hence governments being a necessary evil.
Completely agree. This is why I feel that "nativism" in the US is not something that is standing on solid ground, at least when compared to nativism in Europe, but instead is (for the most part) driven by white supremacy (or at least racial animosity towards "brown people" etc.).
The answer here is fairly simple.
The Americans have blacks, and blacks in the US commit crimes at a much higher rate than other ethnic groups.
So the overall American crime rate is deceptively high, and makes the immigrant ratio deceptively low.
But immigrants don't generally end up in areas where there's lots of blacks. So people in the US who aren't black look around themselves and see who's committing crimes. And it's disproportionally immigrants as long as they're not in black areas.
The entire case for immigrants using less welfare from your linked source is from old age entitlements, which is not what anybody thinks of when they say "welfare." Without that it is about the same. Also, I think you should edit your claim because the study cited dollar amount received, not likelihood to use like your statement here implies:
> The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen.
Furthermore I would argue that this entire line of analysis is irrelevant. The problem is not how likely they are to claim welfare, but rather that they claim any welfare at all. With the exception of immigrants who are now citizens, they should not be eligible for any type of welfare. If a citizen of another country needs financial support from the government that is no our job. Their visas should be revoked and the only aid offered should be a one way ticket back to their home country.
The other key statistical trick Scott uses and/or falls for is to ignore households headed by immigrants (particularly illegal immigrants) versus the immigrants themselves. Anchor children open the floodgates for welfare to households that are headed by, and were generated by, the act of immigration (usually illegal).
That's a great point. Our birthright citizenship insanity means the children of illegals are citizens. Europe doesn't have this, so the costs of their kids are correctly calculated as cost of immigrants while this is removed from the US numbers.
Why should permanent residents and visa workers who've paid taxes into the system be denied benefits? That seems incoherent.
Not really, think of it as continual residency or non-assimilation fine. If you don't like it, leave or naturalize.
Then they should call it that instead of "social security taxes" and "Medicare taxes" which imply you get services in return.
Because they do get them if they naturalize, those work quarters still count towards their social security eligibility if they do. And Medicare likewise is an investment in the future.
Now if you want to change law so they can opt out but in doing so they get a hard ban on naturalizing ever and I mean ever non-revokable, I'd be ok with that.
Btw this isn't strange either. I worked in Germany and paid German taxes, I'm pretty positive Germany isn't going to pay my American self an pension when I retire. Also America still took social security and Medicare out of my German wages.
I'm curious if anybody knows what became of most of those "translators and guides" we took in because they'd sided with us. We hear "translator" in America and think some kind of harmless bookish nerd, but as I understand it these folks worked as security forces or some other variety of henchman for local warlords. I imagined the military, CIA, or blackwater type entities might hoover up a handful of them, but the rest were hardly suitable for ordinary jobs, they'd lack the credentials required for most jobs in the US, and that kind of person isn't going to be a waiter or a janitor or a meat packer. I'd imagine them reacting like Ray Liotta at the end of Goodfellas, I'm supposed to take the bus to some job like a schmuck?
The most obvious landing spots for Afghan translators/guides therefore seemed to be either as private security for hire, or organized crime. They would make good toughs, perhaps even useful business partners if they were a bit smarter than usual for a goon, they had extensive experience with weapons and narcotics smuggling and transactions of similar character, and may even have a few useful contacts for such an enterprise. Given the typically ethno-centric nature of narcotics trafficking in the US, I'm not sure which existing group would've wanted them, but that aside it makes more sense than any other option. If they aren't popping up in crime statistics, perhaps they're just better at crime than the locals or have more personal discipline and so they aren't getting caught, or are using some CIA contact to get them out of jams.
The one translator I knew was indeed a bookish nerd.
I live in a refugee resettlement city and my wife teaches adult English classes (aka, English as a second language), so I've personally known many of the translators who came here from Afghanistan. They're mostly quiet dweebish guys who are eager for any sort of job and who work hard to keep those jobs and support their families. That's why they became translators. Often quite young (mid 20s) and eager to build new lives. The more entrepeneurial ones have started businesses.
The day after Trump's election in 2016 we were visiting a translator and his wife who had moved here about a month earlier. I asked him how he felt about moving here, given the election. His response was (approximately) "I am so happy - I can walk around outside and not worry about people shooting me". He worked as a janitor, finished community college and now has a job as an office worker. His wife also got a degree, and is working in an office. n of 1, but not atypical of my experience.
The refugees I've met from Syria have included more of the types that you describe. Many were respected teachers, doctors or lawyers and some of these find it hard to eg drive a bus. I think it's simply that they are older and have had a decade of being in respected positions in their community. I've known a few that ended up too depressed to keep a job, or simply angry, but once they see their kids integrating they mellow out a bit.
I see, I was not expecting the translators we got out of there to be that young, the descriptions I'd heard during the withdrawal in 2021 made them seem like established interlocutors with the warlords, people who had clout and privileges and knew how to handle themselves in a fight out of necessity. This is why, it was suggested, they could not pass certain vetting procedures.
I find the story of people who had respected positions having to take some menial job to be very tragic. In their shoes, I would definitely be trying to start a business, and would do about anything to avoid taking a bus driver or janitorial position, surely you would feel enormous shame.
I haven't had much contact with translators who immigrated here later (i.e., during/post US withdrawal), they could be a different type altogether.
Count me as someone who was initially skeptical of fearmongering but is now worried about immigration in Europe. The flip started when my gay German friends started talking favorably about the German far-right AfD. Their concerns with immigration were not economic, but rather centered on social justice and safety. I guess Afghans don't like gay people. Who knew? The fact that you can import hate and reopen old social divisions -- that you can hurt native minority populations via migration -- was not something I had fairly weighed or really considered. So now "defending Western civilization" and "protecting LGBTQ rights" are politically coupled in my friends' minds and the far-right is their champion. Wild world!
I think the more sophisticated conservative viewpoint is not that most asylum seekers are "parasites" (although a decent percentage of Somalians may fit that bill; I don't know), but that they're simply a net fiscal drain on state and local government services. Most of them are in low skill jobs, qualify for every social program under the sun, and depending on what region of the globe they happen to come from, may have pre-industrial fertility levels, so American taxpayers are on the hook for providing first world education and medical care to 4+ kids, also.
Spain is one country that should really benefit from immigration. Eight of the ten top source countries, the exceptions being #2 Morocco and #10 Algeria, are in Latin America: meaning the immigrants share the language, are more or less culturally similar, and are capable of assimilation.
Spanish here. The country has changed a lot in the last decade or two, the main minority we used to have were the Gypsies, now it's Moroccans and Latinos in general, with a fair number of Chinese, Pakistani, Romanians and assorted East-Europeans. When you go into a shop it's just as likely you're greeted by a Latina. In a way I think it's true we're relatively lucky, because Latinos know the language and adapt to the culture pretty well. They can easily be friendlier than the locals. We just kind of hope their kids and grandkids adapt well enough not to import South-American style of politics. Moroccans OTOH just mostly keep to themselves.
The popular sentiment so far is mostly pretty good, despite loud voices here and there from the far right. I live in a small town, and a lot of people help with various integration initiatives and programs. I've talked to a number of recent immigrants, and many of them appreciate the welcome and are keen to get up to speed, find work and even participate in local life - although I'm sure there's a selection effect there.
The main problem is insecurity. If too many young people get disaffected or can't find decent ways to make a living and turn to petty crime, entire communities can get blamed quite quickly.
To be fair, Spanish Politics are hardly any better.
Light rail and trains have always struck me as a European idea that makes little sense in the US. Why? The population centers in Europe have been stablished for centuries, and while Americans are moving less today, we still move more than the average Euro.
I might overrate this being from the rust belt, but most of the friends I knew in SF 10 years ago have moved on to hotter job markets. Bus lines and trains are a fraction of the cost and are easily re-routed when a town turns into Akron (rubber), Gary(steel), Rochester (Kodak), or Titusville (lubricants).
Still my well-educated peers yearn for trains. This despite driving when other options are available. But the grass is always greener on the other side (I usually take a train, but I secretly hope BART collapses).
That's a good one. HSR especially, which needs a number of dense, walkable cities in a line to work, really only makes sense in one part of America (the NE Accelya corridor). Commuter/light rail/subways make sense in more areas (anywhere where you have a central jobs hub and dense housing) but it's still only a handful of cities. Grade-separated trains are legitimately nicer to ride than busses, though - not dealing with traffic is the #1 perk of good public transportation.
HSR probably makes sense in a few other places, like the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio corridor, maybe Austin- Houston as well. These are big cities in the ~300km sweet range where it's a stupidly short flight or an annoyingly long drive.
HSR trains are the trains that make the least amount of sense, in general, so should be built last, after a regional network have already been built. Otherwise you just need cars at both ends anyway.
The United States has gotten really good at stupidly short flights. We've also gotten really good at using our railroad network to move slow freight. And long drives are annoying while they're going on but really convenient in that you have a car at your (probably not walkable) destination.
That leaves a pretty narrow niche for HSR. Acela Corridor, yes. LA to San Francisco might work if we could build it, but we can't. The major Texas metros are probably the best bet for a new HSR system if you insist on HSR, but even there I don't think it's a very good bet because those metros are very not walkable (or subwayable, and only marginally bussable).
People don't move nearly as much when they can commute, that's a huge rail proponent talking point.
(I've recently heard of a case study from our local equivalent of the rust belt. Jastrzębie-Zdrój, rapidly depopulating despite being one of the last places in Poland to still largely retain its mining industry. Contrast its neighboring towns like Żory and Rybnik, whose population remains more or less stable. The difference? Jastrzębie infamously lacks passenger rail. Many of its former citizens didn't move far - they moved to familiar nearby places like Rybnik or Żory, from which they can (relatively) easily and reliably commute to several other, larger urban centres. Job market suddenly becomes much hotter when it's orders of magniture larger, even when the whole surrounding region is deindustrializing.)
The left wing discourse around austerity is an example of this. Many European governments did engage in austerity during the Great Recession and American leftists adopted anti-austerity talking points from the European (probably mostly Corbynite UK) left and tried to apply it to US politics. But it was quite obviously absurd when American leftists were complaining about austerity during the Obama and especially Biden admins.
I live in a very hot area. As such, I am a frequent consumer of air conditioning. If I lived in Alaska, I probably wouldn't own an AC unit. That makes sense to most people. So why is it so hard for people to understand that immigration can be good or bad for an area DEPENDING ON INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS? Why can't people just say something like "I support immigration to Country X, but oppose it to Countries Y and Z," or "Immigration seems to be benefitting Country X, but I believe the harms outweigh the benefits in Country Z."
My own crackpot theory: immigration is good between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and bad everywhere else. The New World has the ability to assimilate. We all love to talk about the American melting pot, but Latin America gets ignored in this discussion. The former president of Peru was a guy named Fujimori. The J-Pop singer Carlos Toshiki was born in Brazil. Argentina's practically an Italian colony. There's a city called Tovar in Venezuela that still speaks German to this day. Gringos don't understand that the melting pot extends to the whole of the Americas.
There are some problems with current policy. Refugees CANNOT be taken in as whole tribes like the Somalis in Minnesota. It's a disaster as they prioritize tribe above all else. Fundamentally, we need to split the Somali tribes geographically to prevent them from organizing into a bloc. Refugees should be as widely dispersed as possible to minimize clannishness. Refugee procedure in general needs to change. If they aren't willing or able to adapt, it isn't cruel to send them back.
But thank you, Scott, for addressing an important issue. I just wanted to add my two cents about Latin American immigration.
> immigration is good between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans
Did you mean across the oceans? Or are we talking about, like, Hawaiians moving to Tenerife?
I mean the area between these two oceans. That is, the Americas.
As Scott alludes to at the start - European attitudes to immigration are also driven by American stats. As are statistics on the contribution of immigrants to the economy and pensions, which are also different.
European liberals and socialist are mostly US Democrats despite the odd claim that both parties in the US are right wing compared to Europe.
if left wing means socialist and not progressive then there are few left wing parties in Europe, where some exist on the fringes they are anti immigrant, and anti EU
Anti-immigration, not anti-immigrant. Basically the whole problem I (we, the left?) have with right-wingers is mistaking the issues of immigration as policy (bad) and immigrants as people (good by default until proven otherwise, they're your fellow humans).
Okay, it's not even that immigration is necessarily bad. It's bad in competitive exploitative capitalist labor market. If there's a [immigration good] example, it should be my native Poland, admitting millions of Ukrainians in the span of a decade to a largely positive effect. But only because it coincided with rapid increase in minimum wage and worker protections, which shielded the locals from most of its negative effects. Most, not all, we'd still need a crackdown on increasing housing costs, but our politicians sadly love their passive landlord incomes and property developers' funding way too much, although that too is slowly cracking under popular pressure.
The problem is not immigration, per se. Both Europe and the US get plenty of good immigrants. The issue is the bad immigrants.
Currently no side is saying that! The left say "Accept all immigrants" and the Right "Reject all immigrants" - when both stands are kind of Moronic.
I was recently made aware that tougher immigration regimes might have some unintended effects on migration patterns. My generic mental image of an economic migrant is a young ambitious man willing to leave his life behind and start from zero in a hope of better economic opportunities, in a place where he has no family and friends, with an unfamiliar culture and language, and often with an unpleasant weather. For those who do not manage to succeed there is strong incentive to go back home, but if the migration process was difficult and costly there is also a strong incentive not to go back once you're in, so they stay and may even do crime out of desperation. Similarly, people who might be willing to cross for seasonal work and cross back once the work dries up are now incentivized to not go back once they've made the journey.
>may even do crime out of desperation
Your mental model of criminals is more informed by fiction than reality.
Why do you think so? I didn't ask the income of the muggers, but they looked like they lived very rough.
Crime doesn't pay, criminals just tend to have poor impulse control https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html and poverty doesn't cause crime https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/does-poverty-cause-violent-crime
But the point of the tougher immigration process is to select for people who _are_ likely to succeed.
For instance if you admit a Brahmin with a degree from IIT Hyderabad then you can feel reasonably comfortable that he won't wind up as a street-dwelling shoplifter; if he can't get a job at Cisco then he'll at least wind up managing a 7/11. A dirt-poor Honduran with questionable literacy even in his own language? I'd be less confident.
One of the things that often gets overlooked in discussions about immigrants in Europe and crime is who it targets. Those immigrants to Europe hate Jews specifically, and commit violent crimes against us disproportionately. It was Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher. The American Right remembers the first and forgets the second. The American Left would rather forget the first than remember the second. It's alienating.
The phenomenon still exists in America (Dearborn, Denver), as does violence by native-born Americans (Tree of Life, Washington DC) but hating Jews is just such a lower priority for South American migrants than Middle Eastern.
I’ve come across an anti-immigration explanation for pensioner welfare in Europe, which nicely links both topics of this post. I don’t necessarily agree it fully explains support for transfers from the young to the old but maybe there’s something to it. It goes like this: To the native population, high transfers to pensioners are beneficial because they’re going to their parents. Indirectly they will benefit: either their parents are better able to support them, or they will inherit. Immigrants, on the other hand, don’t benefit because their parents are living in another country. Thus natives, who form a large majority of the electorate, establish a welfare system that hurts immigrants and benefits themselves.
That’s clearly not true for permanent immigrants although it would be true for say non immigrant or temporary visas. Like the H1B in the US. I paid pensions taxes on that and won’t get a dime in return in pension. Should I? No.
Europe should, if there is an economic argument for immigration do a lot more of this.
I read once where one healthcare worker in the UK from abroad is usually connected to like 13 relatives coming in due to chain migration.
I used to work the voting polls and it was commonplace for younger immigrants to bring in their elderly parents to vote, who had no English whatsoever. The younger person could sign an affidavit and vote for them. Or the young person would verbally convey to the pollworker, that they could aid the elders and that their vote was for the Democrat. This was more troublesome in primary elections, which none of them tended to understand. I remember thinking, if I moved to a country where I did not know the language, let alone the first thing about their candidates, I think I would lie low and not try to vote there. But we all have differing levels of chutzpah I suppose.
"The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals." This is, to put it uncomfortably bluntly, nonsense. The conservative narrative on immigration and crime is that immigrants are sometimes parasites and criminals of which we already have an ample supply, so perhaps it would be good idea to try to keep those parasites and criminals out of the country.
So that means that all immigration should be banned because even one immigrant could be a bad apple?
No. And the opposing argument is not that all immigrants should be admitted because one of them might not be a bad apple.
One place where I think the conservative immigration discourse clearly is imported from Europe is when the discussions of "demographic change" and all that sometimes veers into worrying that the US will be taken over by Sharia law.
If you are worried about "demographic change" in the US, then the obvious thing is Hispanic people, but sometimes conservatives start talking about Muslims in the US even though it doesn't fit in our situation ... rhetoric is imported from Europe.
There are parts of the US where it makes sense though.
If you were part of the non-Muslim 45% of Dearborn MI then you might find it more reasonable to worry.
Ounce of prevention & all that…
Stats aren’t very useful with crime nowadays I think we can all agree on that. Arrests, no; charges still less; convictions not at all. A map showing where 911 calls are concentrated might be most useful.
Perhaps it is also a question of baselines:
To take a extreme example: the rates of intentional homicide per 100,000 inhabitants are 0.91 in Germany and 5.763 in the USA.
(Which is ~ six times as high.)
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)
Oh well, didn't read footnote 6 close enough..
Or maybe it’s just that the reason for America’s relative success with immigration is selection, not because it’s magically “better at assimilating” and if we widen the sieve (as many want) our immigration results will be more like Europe’s.
I was first made aware of political backflow due to the English case, where we have culturally made fun of the French (depicting them as cowards), despite France being the US's first ally, and generally being good to us since then.
In practice there is a distinction between "committing a crime" and "being convicted of a crime". Nonetheless, I think a large part of the issue with immigration, legal and otherwise, is cultural / ethnic friction, and in particular religious friction. There is a limit to the rate at which a society can assimilate foreign culture, and there are some cultural elements -- jihadism, antisemitism, and misogyny, for example, that many of our citizens reject. We have enough homegrown religious fanatics and criminals already and could stand to be more selective in our admissions.
A school district in my state recently had a Hijab Fair.
I think the populist rhetoric of the right (especially Trump) in the US is to express their shared distaste for illegal immigrants by saying they are “criminals and parasites.” To me, it comes across as a low brow argument for a low brow audience. One step up from the toddler accusation of them being “a bunch of poo-poo heads.”
The populist rhetoric of the left is that anyone opposing immigration is a racist. IOW “a poo-poo head.”
The more intellectual arguments from the center and right are that illegal immigrants depress wages for lower skilled workers, are a fiscal drag on healthcare spending in states subsidizing them (Calif and others), weaken the culture of liberalism, vote for leftist candidates and solutions to problems, create an external threat, lower the country’s human capital, and get unfair affirmative action preferences for jobs and universities. If the (Biden era) high levels of illegal immigration continue or escalate, then the America that the right values is at risk — according to this view.
Some of the intellectuals on the center and right argue that if handled properly, immigrants can add value for America. They argue for well-screened guest workers and legal immigration of (for example) English speakers in higher skilled professions. They may also call for limitations on welfare, job requirements, and higher tax rates.
Others on the center/right just argue against all immigration for the earlier reasons.
On the intellectual left and libertarian are the arguments that increased immigration is good because immigrants are people too and they will benefit personally by being here, that governments should not have the power to obstruct freedom of movement, that immigrants contribute to the economy, that they can offset fertility declines, and that they will vote for leftist policies and candidates.
The vast majority of Americans — regardless of political persuasion — reject the idea of open borders. Some are racist, some believe the right’s (crime/parasite) rhetoric, some agree with some or all of the more intellectual arguments against immigration.
I believe a majority support reasonable levels of legal immigration, though they probably disagree on the details.
I think your description is broadly correct, I would like to add that one factor that I think also exists on the left/libertarian(?) axis is that historically it is hard to regulate immigration without horrible violations in how you treat people (use the word human rights, if you like it).
I don't know enough about the history of migrations vis a vis contemporary movements to say whether that's factually true, but in my eyes it is a big factor in embracing the reality of migration anyways
Thanks, I agree
> No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
I feel like these things need some substantiation/clarification. I am aware of the Rotherham scandal. I haven't seen a substantiated claim of a "no-go zone" in Europe (I know Angela Merkel at one point suggested there were some but did not identify them; also given the context I'm not sure if she was implying areas dominated by lawless immigrants or by neo-Nazis which is apparently something people claim happens in Germany). But I have ALSO seen claims that no-go zones exist in, like, Dearborn, MI or places in Minnesota. Same for claims that places are subjected to Sharia law.
I'm not sure what the definition of "no-go zone" is, but here's an article by Norwegian state media describing the situation in some areas in Sweden that have been described as such: https://www.nrk.no/urix/svensk-politi_-_-vi-er-i-ferd-med-a-miste-kontrollen-1.12920404
That was a decade ago, and judging by https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsatt_omr%C3%A5de#Lista_%C3%B6ver_omr%C3%A5den, the situation has not improved.
Something I'm surprised I didn't see you mention is that the frame of reference for the US and Europe is so different. Buoyed by high gun ownership, income inequality, and a few key hotspots of gang violence, the violent crime rate in the US is MUCH higher than in Europe. For example, the wikipedia page on "intentional homicide rate" shows the US is 6x higher than Germany!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Thus, when you say "Assylum seekers don't commit crimes at a higher rate than average in the US but commit crimes 5-8x higher in Germany," you have to normalize by the base crime rate. If I very very messily divide by 6 per the state above, then... woah, immigrants are the same!
From this, the discussion shifts to a much more interesting point. If immigrants are essentially the same in both places, BUT the US as a whole is just a more violent place while Europe has a much more peaceful society, should European countries be more restrictive on immigration to preserve their culture? That is a much more nuanced (and interesting) question that I don't know. It's the same argument I've seen posed by those who defend notoriously stringent Japanese immigration policies, because Japan has one of the least violent countries in the world (homicide rate 4x lower than even Germany!)
When US conservatives paint immigrants as criminal and depraved despite this being objectively false, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist. This is just the most normal sort of racist fantasy, it has been since like the 17th century*, and you really don't need a complicated theory like "conservatives perceive an association of immigrants with criminality in Europe which, if you focus on certain statistics for certain countries, has some basis in fact, and then get confused and apply it to the United States by accident, even though it doesn't apply here at all."
The more interesting connection to European racism, I think, is the ideology of white nationalism, the spirit-of-the-volk stuff you'll hear from the likes of JD Vance, which is closer to the language of the European far right than to American home-grown racist ideologies.
*E.g., from the American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1798: Negroes were said "to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience." Then there's The Birth of a Nation, the Central Park Five, ad infinitum...
Why can't one be pro-immigration but subject to these caveats:
1. Immigration must be lawful. Whatever laws and regulations the U.S. has should be enforced. If they are too restrictive, or not restrictive enough, that must be dealt with by changing the laws through the political process, not by ignoring them.
2. Immigrants should be screened, at least for criminal records. Who is allowed to come to this country should not be based on whether or not they can manage to get to the border.
3. It is not racist to believe that assimilation is good and immigration surges that produce ethnic enclaves can have downsides.
I think the much simpler explanation is that American media is dominant and they export their culture war issues all over the world. Even outside of Europe, in Africa and Argentina and Japan and Korea, you will find the exact same talking points and media coverage.
“Remigration” is another meme that the American right has taken from Europe that makes no sense in the American context. Weird to see DHS account constantly post that on X.
Why does it make no sense in the American context?
I guess from what I can tell charitably without using loaded terms “remigration” means there is a class of people in a country who may legally be citizens but for all other criteria are not members of the polity and they have to be deported.
In EU plausibly you could define such a group (not that I condone it) as they have a shared thousand year history. In America, defining any such group would be a mess, no one would agree regarding the definition, and it would just lead to insane politics.
If the question needs to be asked seriously then everyone is fair game, are Italians and other white ethnics like Poles, Balkans fair or do they need to be “remigrated back”. Maybe a far right white identitarian would say yes they are fine, then what about Jews? What about Chinese and Japanese who came in the 1900s. Of course, what about Hispanics who have been here since even earlier and then finally what about the blacks, many of whom have been here since 1619. Maybe if we go by time and say people before 1950 are fine, then we have the weird situation that Elon needs to be remigrated back, along with Peter Thiel.
Every economic historian in the world knows that asylum seekers are a subset of immigrants, generally distinct from their complement. This paper contains the explanation, if only implicitly. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/polygamy-the-commodification-of-women-and-underdevelopment/46B0CC134576212650F64E167C8451DE
From the comment quoted in your post: "...the average pension in France is now higher than the average salary"
This is not quite true. The average pension is higher than the average salary of all working-age adults, which includes many people who are not employed (students, stay-at-home parents, the unemployed, etc). Their $0 annual salaries bring down the average quite a bit. If you only include workers, their average salaries are still higher than pensioners.
Additionally, I think it would not be all that crazy for the average pension to be higher than the average salary. It's common to aim for the pension to be around 80% of the salary at the end of one's career, and it's common for one's salary to grow substantially during one's career. To me, it just seems like a strange comparison.
> It's common to aim for the pension to be around 80% of the salary at the end of one's career
That is an insane and clearly unaffordable standard. How could that possibly be paid for?
I don't believe old age pensions should exist, but to the extent that they must then it's reasonable for them to be some small pittance to ensure the meagre survival of anyone too foolish to have saved for their own retirement.
I don't know how it works in France, but in Sweden, people pay about 23% of their salary into the pensions system, which, if you plug those numbers into a FIRE calculator, gives 30-something years until retirement, so it doesn't seem unrealistic to me.
Immigrants are low crime in that America has a high crime native population called blacks, that push up the numbers. But if you are a white american that lives in a place without many blacks, immigrants will push up the local crime rate. This isn't a hard thing to understand, unless you are... actually I'd be lying if I pretended to believe you were not pretending not to understand it.
Oh and immigrant children regress upward in their crime rates so even this technical lawful evil truth, becomes absurd. But of course by then they are American citizens... and liberals have won another round.
The reason why European immigration discourse is taboo among american liberals, and embraced by american conservatives, is because it's just one step removed from the same awful fate which American liberals are happily imposing on their countrymen against their consent. It just takes a little bit longer, and by the time American Liberals pull it off the imposition carries a passport so it's all fine by then.
US has a relatively small and compact group of non-immigrant population that is off-the-charts in many international comparisons. For example, whether you look at victimisation or arrest rate for murders, US Black population has the rate in low-20s per 100k/year. This is higher than almost any country on Earth, and at the level of very violent places like Colombia and Mexico. This has a substantial impact on average American homicide rates, but little impact on the median neighbourhood experience. So an immigrant population may be offending at a below US-wide average level, and yet be at stark contrast for a median neighbourhood. In Europe, such disparities do not exist, or did not exist until very recently. So comparisons of immigrant crime rates and national crime rates may be misleading.
Yes, I'd love for the US to become more curious towards the circumstances of the not-US.
But I think US v EU comparisons are inherently tricky, sometimes you're comparing a country with a continent and sometimes you're comparing two federal states with varying levels of centralization.
Like your offhanded "European populists might have a point", that'd be a US v a continent comparison. Most political discussion is not on EU level and different countries have different populists (and different parties those populists respond to).
I disagree that "the American conservative narrative on immigration is mostly true in Europe, mostly false in America." An argument US conservatives make is that the existence of our welfare state, both in Europe and the US, attracts the poorest from dysfunctional societies/countries. The difference between the US and Europe is the degree of impact, but generally the above stated principle applies.
Regarding incarceration rate, it might be beneficial to look at US native born white incarceration rate rather than US native born; the really high black rate should be treated as an outlier that we need to address specifically with tailored policies. Native white rate is 747, and the illegal immigrant incarcerated rate is no longer a fraction of 747, and is in fact comparable, and at times, higher. Example: Dominican Republic - 954, Cuba - 987, Vietnam - 836, Honduras - 1307. Rates for El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia are under 747, but well over 650. So, even when these groups have the fear of being deported they still commit crimes at or over the white natives. It is really hard to make the case they are an overall asset to the US. The only argument that works is a humanitarian one - we ought to let them in because we have the resources to support them.
Because Europe has a much larger and generous welfare state accessible to all, immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. The US welfare state is a lot more limited and restricted. but it cannot be denied illegal immigrants do get some welfare benefits such as medicaid in some states. Conservatives, when comparing US illegal immigration to that Europe, worry that the much worse situation is Europe is in the US' future too unless policies are implemented to reverse the trends. Had it not been for Trump winning in 2016, we would be closer to Europe today on illegal immigration.
As a person who writes a lot about immigration to Europe, I have many issues with this post.
"In Europe, the situation is more complicated. There are still some ways of asking the question where you find immigrants collecting fewer benefits than natives (for example, because immigrants are young, natives are old, and pensions are a benefit)."
No. The situation is not complicated. It is one of the least complicated situations. My country, Denmark, gathers and analyzes data of a higher quality than any other country in the world and publishes a report with how many benefits immigrants receive and their overall fiscal impact. And Muslim/African immigrants are exceedingly costly. This has also been shown in detail in Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, and more. There are no "ways of asking the question" where immigrants collect fewer benefits. And it's not a small disparity, they collect vastly more benefits.
"The European link between immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the conservatives are allowed to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries."
This comment about cherry-picking is ridiculous. Every Western European country that keeps good statistics about it finds that Muslim/African immigrants commit way more crime.
"What about the recent Somali fraud case? I agree this is bad, but obviously much less bad than grooming gangs"
This is also a ridiculous thing to write. "It is less bad than the worst thing that has happened over the last many decades"
Ok. Great reason to support Somali mass immigration.
Denmark is an outlier in terms of honest interaction between government and population. We saw this with covid (As a Danish transplant to the US I could read the 500 page critical report they generated less than one year into covid that stated the data they based their interventions on and addressed the major critiques that had been leveled at the government, in order to conduct real time course corrections). I caught a clip from the BBC where a stunned journalist asks a politician why they publish statistics such as the ones you mention. "Because otherwise people would not trust us any more" was his reply. An outlier indeed.
My brother and father are/were in a union where the older guys got great pensions (not better per hour but its a salary). They actually bankrupted one local with their pension increases and mismanagement of funds (meant to support the unsupportable pensions), then got bailed out by another so the younger guys get much weaker pension along with other penalties. Some years my mom, as a widow, actually makes more in pension money than my brother if he takes a significant vacation or just has a gap between sent to a new job site. Not sure that scales but it's what I always think of when something like this is raised.
As you mention, clannish, lineage based cultures are a concern. As pointed out by J. Henrich, it was the eradication of lineage based relationships over a long period of time in Europe that helped shape the Western individualistic mind, upon which all Western institutions build. So any deep seated attitude of clan first, old culture first, new country second or third, might stick around for a long time, as enabled by ghettofication. That is indeed the friction area in Europe right now. For smaller countries like Denmark, which rely on trust in the system, assimilation is not optional, as erosion of trust can be triggered by smaller scaled phenomena. So Denmark has taken control over its borders.
What is similar in critiques of both US and European contexts, is the notion that borders and immigration should be controlled where they are not, and guided by the interests of the country where they are. Even if most of the people entering illegally here will be good productive law abiding folk, it leaves the question as to who has actual control over who enters and who doesn’t -and what their priorities are. Mexican cartels have their own agendas, and they have had outsize impact in this country, affecting certain communities much more than others, of course. And in a country unable to process the flux of immigrants, a de facto lower caste of workers is created, which certain industries and communities rely upon and facilitate, but which again impact other communities or populations in negative ways.
There is a difference in Europe between countries where uncomfortable topics can be discussed honestly and openly and therefore productively in the political realm, like apparently Denmark, and where they cannot, like apparently England and Germany, if you go by FIRE’s generally grounded assessments. Where they cannot, resentment of not having ones "lived" concerns listened to foments, and seek other outlets.
I think the US exemplifies a country where they cannot, sadly, so another similarity with certain European countries.
The immigration benefits statistic is extremely misleading because it judges it individually instead of per household. If immigrants have a child in the US, benefits claimed on behalf of that child will count as benefits consumed by a native-born citizen instead of benefits consumed by an immigrant, but for the purpose of the conservative hobbyhorse ('will admitting these people increase benefits usage on net'), should be treated morally as benefits consumed by immigrants. Many studies do this by accident, and the Cato study explicitly notes that it does this on purpose.
This is good to know, but the alternative (counting US-born children of immigrants as evidence of immigrants receiving benefit) seems to muddy the waters even more.
We’d be left with disproportionately hard-working, law-abiding people raising children who get counted as a drain on the social safety net
But they literally are a drain on the social safety net, to the extent their households claim resources from the social safety net. The existence of said households drawing benefits is directly caused by their immigration.
I understand this.
But given that these are children of hard-working, law-abiding parents, we expect them to be a net benefit to public resources in the long term. By the same token, we don't discourage native-born parents from having children because they will cost the state money at first. Nativists are fine with some people having many children in public schools, but not others.
I am not saying there's an objectively correct way to go about these calculations, I am just saying that either definition of "benefits received" will confuse people if not contextualized properly.
If you're trying to answer the question "Are immigrants a net financial drain on society in the long term?", it would not make sense to count their children, since they are long term beneficial.
If you are looking at short term outcomes, you need different data.
Either way, a conclusion such as "Immigration waves put a strain on social nets in the short term, but are enormously beneficial in the long term. Therefore we need to prevent massive spikes, but allow much of it overall" can only be reached by looking at data in multiple ways.
It's not just schooling. Such households are more likely to use full-on welfare programs including Medicaid and SNAP. And the schooling is not plug-and-play with these students. They overwhelm schools and increase costs due to language barriers, low SES, and again greater welfare program utilization (e.g. school lunch type things). Then most of the selection advantages - to the extent they exist - get drowned out in the second and third generations. For example second generation immigrant children have increased measured criminality in comparison to their parents (although this is very hard to measure because the methodology for their parents tends to be flawed anyway and understate the stat). There's already a fairly high bar to being a net positive taxpayer and their SES doesn't increase super fast in a generation. One estimate I saw showed net negative through 30 years of projections.
Absent actual numbers, the fact that they have increased criminality compared to their above-average law-abiding parents looks like regression to the mean, so exactly what you would expect.
Personally, I suspect it's largely a reporting artifact and they are probably about the same adjusted for SES. But as Scott noted, it's terribly difficult to get any decent data that adjusts for reporting and other factors, especially for illegal immigrants, so I can't definitely prove my suspicion there.
"I think this plays into the conservatives’ hands... they can paint intellectuals as mealy-mouthed and unwilling to acknowledge reality. I think the more honest and politically practical course would be to acknowledge when these stories ... are true."
This is not Scott's main point, and I'm also outing myself as a starry-eyed idealist in this respect (and it is reassuring at my age to discover that I have some idealism to own), but here goes: I find almost nothing so demoralizing as the realization that those with whose causes I am broadly aligned are willing to dissimulate and avoid "uncomfortable" facts. No matter whose "hands it plays into" just now, in the long run I wish so much that people on every side of every debate would simply face the awkward truth rather than plying the momentarily-convenient optics. I truly believe that a great deal (not all) of our social and political misery is downstream from just one thing: our domestic internalization of the friend/enemy distinction. One is justified in dealing less than straightforwardly with ones enemy -- trying to appear stronger than one is, playing down defeats, feinting to the north when one will strike in the south, whatever. Once one turns this strategy inwards, one will inevitably reinvent the enemy inside ones own borders. Of course, the "necessity" of this approach (supposedly) was itself downstream from the enemy already "infiltrating" -- the classic example is the Red Scare; and there really is such a thing as treason; but I maintain still that once one has torn up standards of honesty with ones fellow-citizens and replaced them all with tactics and spin, one is well on the way to losing a society worth defending, splitting it into mutually-suspicious camps (for who can trust "the other side" when one knows deep down that one would not oneself have the integrity to be forthright about whatever belies ones own Official Story?), and certainly of weakening any chance of success in that defense when the time comes. Which of course might have been the aim of "infiltrators" (if any) to begin with.
I think it's worth pointing out that there are reasons the US does better with immigration and while I generally lean left I think it's something the pro-European part of the left doesn't sufficiently appreciate.
Ironically, I tend to think exactly what makes European policies feel appealing to many liberal Americans are features that are tuned to work well in a more culturally (and to some extent ethnically) homogeneous societies and make assimilation hard.
There are real benefits to generous welfare systems and laws which make it hard to fire people like in the EU. But when firing people is hard you not only don't take chances on people but the risk to hiring the wrong sort of person is very high. Combine that with a generous social safety net and you create the perfect conditions to create an underclass who feels they won't be rewarded by joining the above board economy. For all the American way of doing finance and banking feels very cold and data driven (unlike say the UK system which seems to depend substantially on relationships) that system is much more oriented to help immigrants create their own businesses. Also, the US approach to law, rights and free speech generally -- very much about hard rights not soft judgements (no vague anti-religious insult rules) -- is better designed for a system that must accommodate different cultures.
But probably the biggest issue is culture. The very things that elite liberals dislike most about American culture -- it's mass market 'low-brow' appeal of McDonald's and pop stars -- make it easy to culturally assimilate. The things in France that make french culture seem refined and high-brow are also the barriers to entry by immigrants.
> The things in France that make french culture seem refined and high-brow are also
> the barriers to entry by immigrants.
Is it really? There's an entire mass-market genre of magazines and publications that would be difficult to imagine in the US. (I suppose the closest thing would have been Scientific American in the 70s-80s, i.e., back when it was still good.) In my old neighborhood, the shopkeeper would read Philosophie magazine, and I'm pretty sure he was of North African background. Pop culture can present its own barriers to entry .
(... and piggies just happen to be more prominent in the 'low' traditional cuisine of some regions of France than in haute cuisine or la table bourgeoise, but whatever - I think that's a coincidence. Or rather, it was economics at play, not rubbing-it-in as in 16th-century Spain.)
>The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits
When you see a claim about immigration from the Cato Institute, the big question is whether they are lying or just trying to mislead you. In this case, I think they just mislead you. The source does not actually claim they are "less likely to claim welfare benefits." It compares total spending and lumps in programs old-age programs that people pay into their whole lives like Medicare and Social Security as welfare.
CIS finds that 53% of households headed by immigrants and 61% of households headed by illegal immigrants claim welfare benefits compared to 37% of U.S.-born households: https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrants-and-USBorn-2024
Yes, this is a key point. I'd seen the CIS stats but didn't bother posting them, thank you for the link.
I have a simpler explanation. America simply has more politics. Yes, every nation has a government. But America has more elected offices than Europe and spends far more on elections and has far longer cycles and has more subsidiarity (meaning there's more relevant stories at different levels). Further, those politics are more impactful on other countries than other countries are on the US.
Do you know how long a UK election lasts? One to two months. Do you know how much they cost? A bit less than £100 million. How much news does that produce compared to an American multiyear multibillion monstrosity? And the UK doesn't really have (relevant) local governments the way the US has states. You sometimes see American professional campaigners go to Europe because they have experience in a much more intense environment and the latest technology and so are often better trained.
Plus the US has more media and it's better funded than most European counterparts. And it's got contradictions and fights and an ecosystem that feeds on itself and is highly optimized for attention.
> But America has more elected offices than Europe
Maybe but it's not like all these tens of thousands of random local dogcatcher positions are the ones producing all the noise.
To first approximation, the US has one elected office, and the noise around it drowns out everything else.
Somewhat. But a thicker ecosystem is still relevant.
The contradictions and fights are pretty much universal.
I have an even simpler explanation: sheer cultural power.
I'm not European, but I'm much more knowledgeable about current U.S. politics then my own local politics. In my case that's mostly from hanging in DSL, which is rare in its specificity, but many or most people give disproportionate attention to something from the U.S., whether news, music, games, or movies. Politics just seeps in.
Reposted from Data Secrets Lox.
I agree in principle. But what I'd add is that American culture specifically produces a lot of political content because it's a larger industry here.
A simple factoid you may find funny: in Poland, we call large part of the Left "Kserolewica" (xero from Xerox, so it's "photocopy Left") exactly because of them blindly following every trend from the US, without paying attention whether this actually fits Polish realities.
German here. That migrants are more violent seems just as wrong here as it in other comparable countries.
Sample study that looks at the effects of increasing migrant population on the local crime rate: https://www.ifo.de/publikationen/2025/aufsatz-zeitschrift/steigert-migration-die-kriminalitaet-ein-datenbasierter-blick
It finds that migrants are about as criminal as comparable Germans in the area they live in and that an influx of migrants has no measurable effect on the crime rate.
"Immigrants have higher crime because they concentrate in high crime areas" seems tautological to me. Perhaps the areas have higher crime rates because that's where the immigrants are, or perhaps people who are prone to crime are drawn to high crime areas.
GPT tells me that non-citizen conviction rates are 3-4x that for German citizens.
“Perhaps the areas have higher crime rates because that's where the immigrants are”
If that was the case you’d see a rise in crime rate with an influx of immigrants. This is precisely what was checked in the study and it couldn’t find any evidence to support that.
“perhaps people who are prone to crime are drawn to high crime areas”
Reason why they were living in those areas were also analysed in the study. They were not living there voluntarily, but rather because they were forced to.
Surroundings have been analyzed on a larger scale before. E,g. there’s strong correlation between income disparity and crime rate. https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/21/2/241/498070
“GPT tells me that non-citizen conviction rates are 3-4x that for German citizens.”
There’s no reliable data for that in German crime statistics with non-citizens meaning asylum seekers. General crime statistics only consider non-citizens in general which includes tourists, etc. And only include total numbers. Calculating a crime rate for foreigners by relating that number to people living in an area gives completely wrong numbers.
This is also true in neighbouring countries like Austria where Germans are “overrepresented” in the crime statistics relative to their population in Austria if you try to calculate crime rates like this for the same reason.
In the UK, https://www.migrationcentral.co.uk/p/over-100000-foreign-national-convictions
"Foreign nationals were convicted for sexual offences a rate 71% higher than that of the British population, 69% for drug-related crime, 25% for theft, and at 39% for all crime types."
> No-go zones, [...], rape statistics, sharia law [...] are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants >are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.
a) "No-go zones" are really an American fiction about Europe, which then may be getting reused and applied to the US. Are there rough neighborhoods in large cities? Sure. Are they safer than rough neighborhoods in US cities? If you mean you are much less likely to be shot, sure. I live in a suburb immediately adjacent to Paris (the sort that would be called part of the city in any US city other than Boston, SF, and some other places I haven't been to where people also have a strict definition of 'the city'). Do plenty of neighbors have family in North Africa? Sure. Do most people vote Communist in municipal elections? Sure. Do people come on the ring road from the business district to go to the projects to buy drugs? That's what I've read. Have I ever been bothered? Not once.
Ah wait, one exception, after a fashion. Did I call the police when some folks gathered outside my window at night to drink and play loud music for the tenth time in spite of my having talked to them as many times (and strategically watered my plants over their heads, or so they say)? Sure. Did the police come? Sure. Have I had any problems since then? I haven't.
Would I live in the US in a district where people are rumored to go buy drugs? Are you crazy? Well, possibly not: you might be one of those far-sighted people who bought in the Mission twenty years ago. Still: are you crazy?
(This is obviously a rhetorical "you", so people who actually bought in the Mission shouldn't feel insulted.)
b) France has stronger separation-of-church/mosque/temple/coven-and-state laws than the US does. They do get applied to veils.
c) Rape statistics are not part of the US experience?
Why I, an American, bring up European immigration is that what's happening there *can't* ever happen here if the principle upstream is to treat non-Western immigration with great suspicion. This reasoning is more explicit in Japanese anti-immigration discourse; you never see people suggesting that it's silly for Japanese people to get all worked up about something that's barely even happening in Japan.
>the most common countries of origin for seekers are Afghanistan, China, and Venezuela. Afghans are incarcerated at 1/10th the US average rate1, Chinese at 1/20th, and Venezuelans at 1/4th.
This misrepresents the issue. These figures are taken from asylum grants, which generally take several years to process. Asylum applications went from an average of 10-20k per year before 2020 to over 500k per year after. The recent influx is primarily from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The issue with crime isn't with the crime that illegals themselves commit, it's the crime committed by the communities that they establish. I'm sure illegals are unusually law abiding because they're afraid of being deported. In general, Hispanics are incarcerated at a rate 2-3x above the national average.
In the UK, foreign nationals were convicted of nearly one-quarter of all sexual assaults and rapes despite making up only 9% of the population. For every 10,000 people, the conviction rate among British people for drug-dealing is just 16.6 compared to a rate of 2,537 for people from Albania, 452 for Vietnam, 270 for Somalia, 260 for Congo, 208 for Gambia, and 175 for Afghanistan. Not sending their best.
Lots of comments here, but I'd just like to insist that Europe is far from a monolith. Back at the height of the US BLM craze I heard that it became a big thing in the UK. As far as I could tell, here in Spain it just didn't make an echo - probably because we have relatively few Blacks, and those tend to be African, not African-American.
OTOH, activists will activate, and you regularly see posters or small demonstrations in support for Palestine or some cause of the day. You don't see much noise about Ukraine anymore, probably because people figured that demonstrating against Putin in Spain isn't going to move anyone's needle, but I'd say grassroots support is still strong.
So yeah, issues and ideas do cross over, but I think the local context still matters a lot.
>The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals.
I don't think that's accurate: the narrative is that illegal immigrants are often parasites and criminals. When Trump famously said "They're not sending their best...They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists" he was talking about illegal immigrants, not legal ones. And he's said plenty of nice things about legal immigrants, as do most Republicans. It's a bit similar to the "You're Still Crying Wolf" thing, if you look at what Trump and Republican politicians actually say it's pretty clear that they support legal immigration and believe the illegal immigrants are a bunch of parasites and criminals, as you put it.
I've noticed that the Left uses a rhetorical critique where they always use the word "immigrants" and never distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants when critiquing the Right. If Trump says that we need to secure the border to keep out drug dealers and terrorists, the Left responds by saying "Trump believes immigrants are drug dealers and terrorists." But clearly there is a difference between someone who has jumped through all the legal hoops to enter the US and someone who paid a Coyote to smuggle them across the border.
“I don't think that's accurate: the narrative is that illegal immigrants are often parasites and criminals. “
Which doesn’t make much sense since they’re almost all coming to work and can’t receive benefits. And we know immigrant crimes rates aren’t particularly high…..
>And we know immigrant crimes rates aren’t particularly high…..
Yes, but are illegal immigrant crime rates not particularly high?
Really glad Scott wrote this. I've been making the same argument for a while: immigration and other broad issues are not literal things that have effects across contexts--policies do. Showing that Danish crime chart says nothing about how well America integrates migrants, and citing US fiscal data doesn't tell you much about Swedish asylum policy. Both sides treat "the West" as monolithic, and that's exactly the problem (alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/immigration-is-not-a-thing-that-has)
I feel like the "actually they're less likely to commit crimes than the native population" thing is just playing games with statistics.
Here is the standard I would suggest: the crime rate for immigrants in the US or any other rich country ought to be zero.
The US is in the fortunate position that demand to move to it is large; it can afford to be choosy about what immigrants it admits. If it admits anyone who turns out to be a criminal, then that is an unforced error, and an investigation should occur into exactly how this happened.
The US could fill its immigration quotas while only admitting people who are _much_ better than the average native-born citizen. The US could be setting up booths at job fairs at Oxford and ETH Zurich and the University of Tokyo, offering green cards and a relocation bonus to top grads. But it's far harder for a brilliant Swiss scientist to get into the US than for an El Salvadoran gangster, because the brilliant Swiss scientist needs to go through a long O-1 visa application process and the Salvadoran gangster can just catch a bus to Juarez and sneak across the border.
It's, in practice, far harder for a brilliant El Salvadoran scientist than for a brilliant Swiss scientist, and easiest of all for a Swiss money-launderer working ultimately in the same sector as the El Salvadoran gangster.
The "if immigrants commit less crime and use fewer government resources, the country is better off with them than without" frame doesn't make sense to conservatives. Since that frame (which smuggles in liberal morality) is implicit in most of these conversations, people talk past each other.
Conservatives feel they have a duty to seek the well-being of fellow citizens, which they don't have to foreigners. Also, that the primary purpose of government is to address crime, not to move money around. So they feel that if a permissive immigration policy leads to *even very little* additional crime (in absolute terms, not per capita), supporters of that policy have failed in their duty to their fellow citizens who are victimized by it -- whereas a strict immigration policy doesn't fail in any duty.
It's like: You have a duty to both a criminal fellow citizen and their victim; to the one you owe due process, and to the other you owe justice. But in the case of a criminal foreigner, you only have a duty to the victim.
So when liberals say stuff like, "immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives", the conservative response is something like, "that number of crimes should be zero, and if you vote MAGA, it will be". Even one serious crime by a foreigner against a fellow citizen outweighs all the benefits to foreigners, since you owe a duty to the citizen, but not the foreigners. And the cultural enrichment those foreigners bring weighs very little against crime, since cultural enrichment is not the government's job, but crime is. You have no duty to culturally or even economically enrich your neighbors; you do have a duty to support government policy that protects them against crime.
^^^ That's a simplified picture. Most conservatives feel a small but real humanitarian duty to foreigners, and would feel more duty to fellow citizens who are closer to themselves, like family, coworkers, people from the same state or region, etc. But none of that changes the fundamental dynamic.
For the terminally online, this is a heatmap meme thing. Liberals see no problem weighing the relative criminality and government dependence of different populations, and making a decision on that basis, since their moral duty is to all human beings equally, citizens and foreigners alike. National borders are morally-neutral, historically-contingent administrative structures, so all you need to do to answer the question is pull up the statistics. (That's liberals; progressives are different.)
It's like: liberals think that by bringing in populations with a lower criminals per person ratio, they're lowering the overall criminals per person ratio for the country. And they are! They're increasing the criminal numerator, but they're also increasing the normie denominator by way more, so the ratio ends up better.
Whereas, for conservatives, you're increasing the criminal numerator, but the relevant denominator -- "people I have a duty to protect" -- is unchanged; so the ratio is getting worse, not better.
I find myself in the awkward position of not totally agreeing with either side and finding both kind of ridiculous right now. I thought I'd chime in since Scott doesn't seem to notice the framing issue and I feel like I can explain it well enough.
1. Surely many of the people who say they have that seeking the well-being of fellow citizens is their duty in this context would dismiss it as an insane liberal idea in other contexts; a person who were consistent on this would be liberal towards fellow citizens (in practice, quite often: those of native origin). What people really enjoy is creating a category of people that is completely outside their sphere of concern, and indeed, in essence, outside the law (notice you've tacitly included "due process" among the things a foreigner is not owed), and whom one can even actively target for harm while feeling unctuous about the process.
2. Two things are confused here (and most likely in the discourse you describe). Say you have someone whose only concern is the total amount of crime perpetrated against People Who Matter (here, citizens). It doesn't follow that they should consider per capita rates irrelevant and tolerate no additional crime. Why? The entire premise of "per capita rates are irrelevant" is not just that part of the denominator shouldn't matter - it also implicitly assumes that all crime committed is committed against the native-born, which is ridiculous.
Not only that: some criminals in the native population will prey on the newcomers *instead*: they are probably easier to bilk, rob, and also exploit, in ways that are legal and ways that aren't. That's an added benefit to the native-born population that isn't even directly reflected in per-capita crime rates. (The word 'benefit' here would have to be devoid of irony here under the moral framework sketched here.)
Having a sphere of concern that includes people regardless of whether they are born is not in itself 'ridiculous'. Yes, other people may mind it - especially those would like more privileges and feel they are being insufficiently subsidized, as a reward, of course, for the achievement of being born in a particular place; sure, we understand that.
Peter - what you said would make perfect sense if you were embedded with an Einsatzkommando and were trying to justify shooting suspected partisans, but I've literally quoted from Matthew Talamini's post.
>Surely many of the people who say they have that seeking the well-being of fellow citizens is their duty in this context would dismiss it as an insane liberal idea in other contexts; a person who were consistent on this would be liberal towards fellow citizens (in practice, quite often: those of native origin).
Would they? Conservatives generally volunteer more and give more to charity than liberals, which seems like evidence that they do think they have a duty to seek the well-being of their fellow-citizens.
The bit about "charity" has any chance of being true only if you include giving to religious organizations. Volunteering is performative. At any rate, the operative word here is 'duty', not 'charity' or 'volunteering', which are different even just by definition.
>The bit about "charity" has any chance of being true only if you include giving to religious organizations.
I doubt it, but even if it's true, it's not really relevant. Donating to Churches United Against Poverty is no less dutiful than donating to Oxfam.
>Volunteering is performative.
In my experience, most volunteers tend not to trumpet their volunteering work, which suggests they are not doing it for performative reasons.
>At any rate, the operative word here is 'duty', not 'charity' or 'volunteering', which are different even just by definition.
They're different in that they refer to different concepts, not in that they're mutually exclusive. "People who can afford to have a duty to give to charity" is a perfectly comprehensible statement, and one that a lot of people would probably agree with.
You very commonly hear liberals/progressives make the argument that it is just a matter of luck that they were born in a functional country. But the reason I was born in a fair and functional country was my ancestors fought and died for justice and fairness and to build a clean and beautiful country. The Eritreans' ancestors had different priorities and values and as a result they were born in a s*ithole. They are getting their deserts and I am getting mine and it us fundamentally unfair for them to take and deteriorate my birthright.
Never heard that framing, I like that. Kudos.
1. This is a point where it's useful to distinguish conservatives from libertarians. In the ... say, 90s? ... it was much more possible not to feel any contradiction between conservative and libertarian values. But since the covid years, the difference has become very stark. People who haven't resolved that tension yet will often be guilty of the hypocrisy you mention. That's real. On the other hand, I think MAGA represents a true resolution, much to the loss of the libertarian principles. Conservatives like Auron Macintyre, for instance, explicitly call for setting up patronage networks (parallel to what they see as progressive patronage networks) where the police extract taxes from your enemies and give them to your supporters. Very, very not libertarian. Very explicit that there is a People Who Matter, and that correct politics is to serve the interests of those people.
2. It doesn't need to assume that all crime will be against native-born people; just that some likely will -- because *even very little* additional crime, in absolute terms, is a failure of duty. So even if a criminal foreigner mostly preys on other foreigners, or native-born criminals mostly prey on foreigners, too, just the disorder and chaos that that situation causes is sufficient to feel like a failure of duty.
I'll add that conservatives (not libertarians, though!) are mostly immune to shame tactics at this point. Implying that they're some kind of bigot for caring that somebody was born in a particular place makes you sound like a heartless inhuman monster. What they hear is, this liberal genuinely thinks it's wrong and bigoted to spend more time and money on caring for your own mother than on any random Eritrean or Salvadoran or Chinese citizen you'll never meet. Why would you care for your own children more than some Russian children? What, you're going to privilege and subsidize them for the grand achievement of being born in a particular place? How bigoted. Heatmap meme.
Because that is where that principle ends up -- it does dissolve even the family. Look at how liberals talk about homeschooling. You're falling back on the liberal principle of the equal value of all human life, which is a real liberal principle, but obviously can't be applied absolutely. And so when you invoke it, you're really invoking the authority to be the one who decides when and how it's applied. And, to be frank, the main thing conservatives want is for you to stop doing that. At this point they are very sensitive to absolute, totalizing principles selectively applied to advance Democratic party interests. They interpret it as bad faith.
I myself have religious commitments that compel me to take both sides seriously. On the one hand, The Good Samaritan; on the other, Honor Thy Father and Mother. If the example of the Samaritan extends to cover Guatemalan immigrants, the example of my parents extends to cover my town, my state, my country. It's funny how the commitment to both ethical principles, even knowing they sometimes contradict and can't always be resolved satisfactorily, makes the people who are strictly committed to only one or the other seem ridiculous.
>Because that is where that principle ends up -- it does dissolve even the family. Look at how liberals talk about homeschooling.
Keir Starmer once said in an interview that he wouldn't take his own child to a private hospital, even if said child had some kind of rare and fatal disease which couldn't be treated on the NHS. I don't know whether that's actually true or whether he was just virtue-signalling, but even if it's the latter, the fact that he chose to virtue-signal in this particular way is quite striking.
Not a snark but Luke 14:26 goes a long way to answering that; the struggle is in the implementation.
And yet in John 19:25-27, one of the last things that He does is ask one of the disciples to look after His mom. "Woman, behold your son" then, "Behold, your mother". He doesn't ask the disciple to care for all bereaved widows equally. He asks for care for one specific bereaved widow (presumably Joseph is dead by this point) who's more important to Him than all the other bereaved widows, because she's His mother.
Don't the other bereaved widows have equal human dignity and value as Mary? Why should His sphere of concern be so exclusive?
And even regarding nations, He preferred Israel. In Matthew 15, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." He does what the Canaanite woman wants, but He also calls her a dog. She gets her way not by contradicting Him but by accepting that premise. "Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."
Later, He would tell them to go to the whole world, in the Great Commission. But it's clearly not wrong for Him to prefer His native country.
Possibly, it's something smarter people than both of us have argued over the ages and which Paul goes out of his way to "revise" (as you might imagine, I heavily discount Paul for the most part). In my particular branch those were interpreted in relationship to Luke's passage as evidence of his humanity, i.e. Jesus wasn't speaking as the Godhead in asking others to watch after his mother but as in his human form hypostasis similar to when he cried "father why have you forsaken me", i.e. even Jesus had to poop during his mortal phase, after all he was mortal incarnate, not a simulacrum.
Well said. I've always intuited that but I like how you said it. Going to steal that lol.
"American liberals either ignore them or call them problematic, giving the conservatives a second victory: they can paint intellectuals as mealy-mouthed and unwilling to acknowledge reality."
That pattern, which has played out on many topics, has been at the core of American liberals' collective self-own going back a quarter-century. Speaking from deep in the heart of Blue America, the above was far too familiar well before Trump realized that by making disgust with us his political hobbyhorse he could ride to electoral victory.
Housing is another example of this: english-speaking people complain about housing, Americans respond in detail that it's actually not that bad relative to incomes outside of SF/NYC... While missing the fact that the housing situation actually is quite grim in the UK and prices are absolutely insane relative to (stagnant) incomes (let alone that the quality of the housing stock is absolute shite in the UK both in terms of size and quality).
On the subject of political backflow, I can only think of one example of political backflow from Australia to the US, and that's the "millennials can't afford houses because they spend all their money on avocado toast" discourse.
This whole discourse started with a 2016 column in The Australian by Bernard Salt in 2016, and somehow found its way to the US, where "eating too much avocado toast" was an even worse synecdoche for these sorts of expensive millennial lifestyle decisions. (I'm aware that there was an American fad for avocado toast around the same time, but it wasn't as a big a thing, and American breakfast culture is just fundamentally different).
I will take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate this forum since finding it a couple months ago. It has quality discussions seldom found elsewhere. Reddit without the domineering moderators and passive aggressive downvoting, Sailer's with far fewer lunatics, and Marginal Revolution without the AI fixation and incessant links to paywalled articles.
"The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen."
Now separate the data for native-born citizen by race and watch the immigrant success disappear.
Re: footnote 6, Patrick McKenzie's latest (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/fraud-investigation/) explicitly notes that fraud usually follows ethnic and cultural networks for mundane non-problematic reasons, in an otherwise conservative-coded analysis of the MN daycare fraud story. So I wouldn't consider this point controversial outside of MAGA-party-line circles and I don't think it requires special justification.
This is true. Caplan doesn't decouple his various ideologies on immigration. He doesn't think that locals have priority. He believes in libertarianism fiercely. But then writes a book pretending that it's good for locals etc. But he can't genuinely decouple and he mixes up his "locals poorer for the benefit of migrants OK" with "it's better for locals too"
I don't see what makes a cartoon about asylum seekers from the fictional land of Elbonia "apparently" take place in the US (or any other specific real-world country).
> partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans
Lmao I can see a conservative talking point of "America has already received too much immigrants, that why more immigrants won't appear in statistics. ~~thats why we have to expel every single one!!!!~~"
Some random thoughts in no particular order.
When the article starts by talking about how European political discourse is colored by America, I am reminded of what tvtropes.com call "Eagleland Osmosis"- non-Americans depicted as expecting things in their country to happen the way it would in America, because that is what they saw on television.
How precisely do you define benefits or welfare? The Supreme Court has ruled that children who are not in the country legally are entitled to public education. That might sound fine, but most of them aren't going to be fluent in English; you are probably going to have to hire a number of English as a Second Language teachers, and those tend to be more expensive than English as a Standard Language teachers. And when the court ruled, most of them spoke Spanish. When a significant number speak Mandarin, Hindi, Farsi, or Native American languages, it gets worse. When law-abiding citizens get told that their taxes will go up, or educational programs that they were counting on for their kids are being cut, all to pay for bilingual teachers for kids who are not in the country legally, it is understandable that they can see one way of controlling the cost. You can say that, in the long run, they will benefit, but the long run can be a long time. And a lot of them won't believe it anyway.
I also suspect that there is a question of "how far can it go?" Almost everyone seems to think that admitting a certain amount of immigrants is good, almost nobody seems to favor truly open borders, because that would admit more people than the system can handle. Where do we draw the line?
On a related note, I think that much of the ire on illegal immigration is a question of the rule of law. We have laws against illegal immigration on the books, but there have been long stretches where presidents appeared to be effectively allowing the law to be violated, or coming up with creative interpretations to not enforce it. That is a problem.
The question of asylum has been raised. There is a fascinating documentary available on YouTube called "Walk the Line." It is by CNA, a Singaporean station, and it is about Chinese migrants travelling to America illegally. It is interesting, and at one point you will see them talking about being harassed by officials in China, and in the next, saying that they think that can make $10,000 a month in America. What is really going through their heads?
I have no quick, simple, easy answers. If anybody does, I'd love to hear them.
I have to agree that America is especially blessed in the nature of our immigrants, relative to Europe. What Europe and America have in common is that we both are ruled by an elite class which clearly favors mass immigration and refuses to respond to the express will of the public to limit it. This transparent perfidy of the elites with respect to immigration is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Americans may perceive immigration as harmful to their particular economic circumstance, regardless of GDP (as it clearly has been for the underclass in Europe). They may infer something nefarious wrought by the elites in the inexplicable dearth of reliable crime data (as the elites have covered up immigrant crime in Europe). They may just prefer to live among people who speak the same language (which is increasingly rare in Europe).
We know where the elites want to take us. Clearly, America is not yet as far down that road as Europe is. But the lesson is equally applicable, and should not be wasted.
"They may just prefer to live among people who speak the same language " because you can all speak English, which is ironic giving Brexit. How it must burn French of a certain persuasion the linga franca of the EU is English in practice given that exit lol.
It’s always amazing to me when people assume Somalis will assimilate “like the Irish and Italians” into middle-class, white-picket-fence American culture, instead of assimilating into perpetually underclass black urban culture and all the dysfunction that comes with it.
As a Minnesotan, it very much appears they’re assimilating into the latter — and to anyone familiar with HBD, this shouldn’t be a surprise.
One of the American (and Canadian, and maybe other breakaways from the British Empire) exceptionalisms that I subscribe to is that we handle immigration astonishingly well. Not perfectly, of course. But from a broad historical perspective, immigration is a really hard problem. Because of our histories as intentionally working hard to welcome strangers from abroad for centuries, we actually have social and legal institutions in place to make immigration not only functional, but actively beneficial.
Benjamin Franklin complained about the German newcomers in very unkind terms saying in 1753 "Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation". Poor German immigrants gave Scarlett Fever to Beth in 1868's Little Women, causing her death. Nationwide there was a racist panic that caused the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The 20th century were full of this stuff too. So the current panic about immigrants? For the US, it's old hat. We've done this before. We've passed good laws and bad laws in response to this in the past. Our society has a level of practice, trying lots of different things, getting it right and wrong in dozens of ways, that means we are much better positioned to set ourselves up for success now. If we'd only remember who we are and what we've already learned.
Obviously one of the best solutions to a very difficult problem that humans have ever come up with can still feel inadequate. The famous Churchill quote about democracy comes to mind, for instance.
I wish it was widely celebrated and touted as the impressive accomplishment that it is.
Here's an important point (which I thought was obvious, but from a cursory glance at the comments I don't see this obvious point being made).
It's difficult for an immigrant group in the US to commit more crime than natives, and easy for an immigrant group in Europe, because the American native murder rate is an order of magnitude higher than the European one!!!
The difference remains huge even if you account for race (US whites are much more murderous than Europeans).
Hispanics in the US aren't particularly criminal by US standard (as Ron Unz demonstrated in his piece "The myth of Hispanic crime", hispanic Americans commit crime at the same rate as white Americans), but if millions of Hispanic Americans moved to Europe, and continued to commit crime at exactly the same rate, then they would become a high-crime immigrant group, and that would fuel anti-immigration narratives.
In fact, if millions of white Americans moved to Europe, and continued to commit crime at the same rate, they too would become a high-crime immigrant group.
Conversely, if you took the scary asylum-seeker in Germany, the ones Scott says are causing the other Scott to fear asylum seekers, and you dropped them in the US, they would not be particularly criminal by US standards. Scott writes that "In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate". The murder rate in the US is 6.3 higher than in Germany, so those asylum-seekers would not stand out at all in the US.
This very simply explains why immigrants are criminal in Europe but not in the US.
This point is made in the article itself.
Not in the article but in the footnotes, which I had skipped. Thank you for telling me.
Scott mentions the difference in native crime rates as one of many reasons for the phenomenon. He says:
——————
Partly because differing geography and history expose them to different immigrant groups, partly because differing legal systems mean they select immigrants differently, partly because different culture makes it easier for immigrants to integrate into America, and partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans, so the same immigrant crime rate can be lower than Americans but higher than Germans.
——————
If we're talking about asylum seekers specifically, who apparently behave better in the US than Germany even in absolute terms, then I agree that a multi-part explanation is needed. But if we're talking about immigrants in general, then I think that the native crime rate being much higher in the US than in Europe should be the only explanation, not one part in a multi-part explanation.
Anyhow, I feel uncomfortable saying this, because it makes me sound like an America-hater. I love Americans and I'm not saying this to diss them.
> I think that the native crime rate being much higher in the US than in Europe should be the only explanation, not one part in a multi-part explanation.
Several other comments have tried to unpack "native crime rate" in ways that I personally disagree with but that are probably worth your while reading if you are interested in this.
The natural question to ask surely is why is the "native crime rate" so much higher in the US. Not surprisingly "liberals" answer "guns and poverty" here and "conservatives" answer "blacks".
Not exactly new ground of political discourse unfortunately.
Incarceration rate is a very perverse metric, given the conservative narrative in USA focuses to a great degree on the fact that your woke DAs and prosecutors refuse to put these people in jail and/or keep releasing them no matter what they do.
Speaking of a long American tradition of ethnic enclave fraud: https://web.archive.org/web/20201128160054/https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1332698991012835329
> In the 1990s the Russian immigrant community in NYC grew by orders of magnitude. One thing the newly imported entrepreneurs quickly figured out is that America is extremely vulnerable to large scale fraud in almost every sphere of life. Story time!
> First, something people don't realize-- immigrant communities have higher levels of trust within than they do with the host. People will trust criminals in their own community more than they trust local institutions. Language and cultural barriers play a huge role.
> All right. So they figure out that if you get into a car accident, you can claim pain and it's impossible to medically verify. They start doing that. Fake light fender benders, claim pain, six months later get a settlement.
> But of course they had to deal with lots of American middle men-- doctors, accident lawyers, etc. That's a lot of money on the table. Why not cut the middlemen out and take all that money themselves? So they start building out the fraud infrastructure.
> By then there were enough russian lawyers and doctors. They start building law/medical offices dedicated to accident insurance. The lawyers deal with court cases, the doctors provide necessary paperwork and fake the evidence. Vertical integration means more $$$$.
> But they need clients. So they start advertising it on local russian TV and radio stations. Because the ads are in russian, they pretty much tell you how the thing works straight up. Trust and language barriers provide plausible deniability.
> Eventually it got really out of control. Dozens upon dozens of offices, competing with each other on experience and price. They also get Russian limo companies in the game. Rent two limos, fill them with 16 ppl each, crash them into each other. Boom. 32 clients.
> The insurance cos realize something's wrong. They're bleeding money in a small area of Brooklyn. They get investigators on the case. But now what? *Everyone* is Russian. Lawyers/doctors/limo cos all know each other. The "customers" don't speak any english.
> Word around the grapevine is that there is a crackdown. But the biz doesn't slow down at all. End user would get $20-30k/accident. Lawyers/doctors would probably split as much. That's really good unit economics to shut it all down.
> Eventually the way insurance cos pull it off is that they give large contracts to russian immigrant PI companies. They compensate per hour + upon producing evidence of fraud. That's what unravels the whole thing. The invisible hand strikes again.
> This gold rush lasted from ~1992 to ~2000. About a decade, give or take. News were that insurance co losses were in the billions. Good times for all.
1)
I can confirm that we import our political debate wholesale from the US even where this makes zero sense because the issues are different. The article mentions BLM protests. Another examples are local conservatives discovering that they are suddenly anti-abortion (but without the religious underpinnings that have to play some role in the US, no?) and local "liberals" (this is a US term, hence the quotes) fighting for abortion rights they already have.
This is extremely annoying.
2) I now live under the most conservative government this country has had for nearly 30 years. Somehow they did not "fix" all the problems they claimed have easy fixes. I do not believe that the diagosis of "Europe has an immigration Problem" is correct, but the people who do believe that are in power now and somehow not a single one of my problems was solved by that. There must be some lesson in this observation, no?
What country?
I'm asking what country because, here in Italy, I don't think at all that we import our political debate from the US.
They mostly talk about the UK, not the EU. And, see, Rotherham is really, really hard to explain, that was a gigantic systemic fuckup.
It is strange to see low immigrant crime rates in the US knowing how big a problem crime is in Mexico. What explains this? The cartels don't dare to mess with the FBI?
Non-conservative yet immigration-skeptical musings:
1) If you are an educated liberal, you rather know educated immigrants who are very globalized, you have Western values, and you don't notice the problems with the less educated ones. Example: massive Indian nepotism in the IT industry which is already breeding a racist or xenophobic backlash. Speak with a broadly liberal software dev and mention Indians and watch him transform into a massive hater.
2) Poaching the best educated people - the kind of people you know - from developing countries is pretty much glass beads for ivory nepotism. They did not spend taxpayer money on educating their doctors so that we can steal them. The basic minimum would be paying 2x their education costs to their home country. Either that, or rotate them, if they spend 3 years in the West, they will likely learn something they can use at home. (Or not. Like, how to operate equipment they cannot afford.)
Doesn't America have a higher murder rate than Europe?
How much of this is just "the average immigrant is more criminal than the average European, but less than the average American"?
"The ethnic background of defendants prosecuted for child sexual abuse offences was recorded in 69% (6,356) of cases in 2023 (Ministry of Justice, 2024a). Among these individuals, nine-tenths were White (5,731); across all other ethnicities, there was a much lower proportion than in the general population of England and Wales (see Table 4). This is likely to be related to the under-identification of child sexual abuse in minority ethnic communities.
There was a near-identical pattern of ethnic backgrounds, where this information was recorded, among defendants convicted in 2023."
- Child Abuse in 2023/24 : Trends in Official Data, Center of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse
While, admittedly it is hard to reconcile the great Grooming Gang scandals, with these data - which year after year - fail to show any Ethnic Pattern to Child Sex Abuse cases. However, one clue can be found :
"only in 3.7% cases of child sexual abuse, there were more than one offenders working together."
> What about the recent Somali fraud case? I agree this is bad, but obviously much less bad than grooming gangs
Hell nah! This is the "think of the children fallacy", mixed with the "government money are monopoly money". If you have fraud of sufficiently large proportions, you can directly convert it to lives, QALY, or whatever metric you chose at whatever rate you can cherry pick - and you still end up with, at the very least, hundreds of lives lost. And just to keep the anchoring somewhere in the middle, if you cherry pick at the other end, closer to "3k USD in malaria nets will save a life in Africa", only let's make it 10k for inflation, you're at 100k lives lost per billion stolen.
Play with those numbers as much as you can, but hundreds of rapes are not _automatically_ worse than _any_ amount stolen.
Right. So the native population, with its disproportionate number of *very* expensive pensioners, would drag down these numbers. Got it.
You seem to be confusing asylum seekers with immigrants in general.
It's plausible that asylum seekers are a self-selecting nicey-nice group while other immigrant types in general are just out to get theirs and illegal immigrants are likely to be even worse (since they're already flouting the country's laws).
The immigration-related problems in various European countries are mainly caused by asylum seekers, many of whom enter illegally in order to seek asylum.
The BLM movement is interesting. In Israel, homicide rates among arab-israelis skyrocketed in the last decade. The main response to this from law-abiding arabs was to blame the criminals or to blame the police for not being active enough in arab towns and not solving enough murder cases. Some arabs even want to involve the shabak, the israeli domestic intelligence service, in tackling arab organized crime.
BLM seem to be focused mostly on police brutality, not black-on-black crime or insufficient policing in black areas. Sure, black people have a troubled history with the state, but it's not like jewish-arab relations have been a smooth ride.
It's actually a good question what would happen in this case, I imagine bringing a baby with only a US birth certificate would raise some questions at the border, and I'm not sure I'd assume they'd automatically get Chinese citizenship. They probably actually would be considered a foreign national and some process would have to be followed to get them a Chinese birth certificate, during which they might be required to renounce any foreign citizenship?
Want to point out that anti-immigration often feels misdirected, even when based on correct info on criminality and welfare benefits. I think, at least in Sweeden, immigrants are often not given the opportunities to study and work that they need, instead becoming dependent on benefits and probably end up in circumstances making criminality more likely.
Sometimes hear stories about already employed immigrants being deported, or previous doctors having to work as taxi drivers. Don't know the statistics though.
Being anti bad-immigration-policy seems more reasonable
Heiner Rindermann et al. (2024) drew on three IQ-test studies to show that the cognitive ability of refugees in Germany was 12–15 IQ points below the national average. Cognitive ability as measured by IQ-tests is “the best predictor and the most important causal factor in job performance, innovation, and breakthrough ideas". Given also best evidence on national IQ of the countries supplying immigrants to Europe, this suggests it is not lack of opportunity but lack of ability that explains the poor performance of immigrants. Of course some immigrants will be positively selected but as the IQ of sub-Saharan Africa is probably 30 IQ points below Europe this would be compatible with Rindermann's report.
Even if true, there may be work even for those with low IQ with proper labour market training.
For sure there could be work for them, but in European countries people who earn less than the average are net drains on the fisc and so are their children and grandchildren. And they have more children and grandchildren than people who are net contributors. So importing low IQ people is financially unsustainable let alone the impact on culture. Unfortunately, on average low IQ people are louder, dirtier, fatter, sicker, more prone to litter, to fight, to commit crime and be generally less pleasant to be around than high IQ people. Obviously I am talking averages and distributions and exceptions always exist.
>What about the recent Somali fraud case? I agree this is bad, but obviously much less bad than grooming gangs, and forcing conservatives to focus “only” on Somali fraud rather than child rape would be a victory.
Funny you should say that, because I came across this story recently:
"Twenty-nine people have been indicted in a sex trafficking ring in which Somali gangs in Minneapolis and St. Paul allegedly forced girls under age 14 into prostitution in Minnesota, Tennessee and Ohio, according to an indictment unsealed Monday...
The indictment details several instances in which young Somali or African American girls were taken from place to place and forced to engage in sex acts with multiple people. One girl was under 13 when she was first prostituted. Another girl was 18 when she was raped by multiple men in a hotel room, the indictment said.
John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the case is significant because the girls were repeatedly victimized over several years and transported to many places. The indictment lists incidents involving four victims...
"Jane Doe Two was informed ... that selling Jane Doe Two for sex would be called a 'Mission.' It was a rule that members of the (gangs) would not be charged for sex with Jane Doe Two as they were fellow gang members," the indictment said.
One defendant, Haji Osman Salad, nicknamed "Hollywood," later made Jane Doe Two "his girl," picking her up from school, engaging in sex acts with her, and then instructing her to engage in sex acts with other men, the indictment said.
Over the course of two-day period in April 2009, the girl was forced to engage in sex acts at least 10 times with nine different men, it said. Then, she was driven to Nashville. On the way there, Salad made a cell phone video of her engaging in sex acts with some of the occupants of the vehicle, the indictment said."
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna40073234
If you go out of your way to avoid finding something, you probably won't find it, and it is abundantly clear that the U.S. government goes out of its way not to find migrant crime.
We wouldn't even know about the enormous scale of fraud in Minnesota if it weren't for freelance investigators digging it up. As many conservatives have pointed out, most Americans do not get anywhere near that level of leeway.
Needs more research but seems to me there is a link between the violence / murder rate in the source country - ie those who grew up in war zones or effective war zones being more likely to commit murder.
I wonder how that compares with native ex-military vs non-military population?
Is the error in trying to treat all immigrants equally, rather the recognising some need years of therapy ($$$)
Correlation or causation? And if causal what direction(s)? People who are genetically more predisposed to violence (because they have lived in societies where violence was selected for rather than against) are more likely to turn their country into a war zone.
Not sure I wholly buy that - Europe was a war zone for centuries, and violence has dramatically declined even in my lifetime in ways that I don’t think could be explained by genetic change alone.
Cultures and subcultures definitely have different attitudes towards violence, and they shift over time. I don’t think a genetic theory could explain the rise of ISIS and collapse of Syria, but a cultural one does - culture can spread faster than genes.
Hence my question about how things would look compared to military veterans - we have spent decades drilling violence out of young boys and men, the military then has to undo that training - at clearly some psychological cost as many veterans struggle to reintegrate.
That’s neutral to the question about what our moral duty is towards refugees.
It’s never going to be zero, nor is it unlimited - so regardless of numbers, what is the best way to reduce risk - to get the homicide down to a proportional level.
I may be wrong, and it is 100% genetic - which would explain Trump’s Bavarian attitudes.
It is not my theory - it was developed by Gregory Clark and also Peter Frost - you might enjoy their books. Basically they provide evidence that European society underwent a process of "genetic pacification," where the higher reproductive success of the economic elite spread traits like thrift, patience, and non-violence throughout the population. This resulted in a more civilized, literate, and productive populace over centuries. Other cultures did not undergo similar gene-culture selection.
You need to differentiate between reactive impulsive violence (which has indeed gone down in civilized countries) and deliberate violence (such as war) which has not gone down, See Goodness Paradox of Richard Wrangham.
"Why shouldn’t the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US and looms large in the American imagination. Why shouldn’t we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don’t make sense in the American context?"
Probably 80%+ of modern progressivism is European (and other) imports - Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, Maoism, social democracy, etc. Our native brand of progressivism is very Protestant (Social Gospel) stuff mixed with Enlightenment liberal thought. MLK was one of the last major more or less pure American progressives on this model. (Though he was copying Gandhian nonviolence but Gandhi got a fair bit of that from Thoureau).
Likewise, the paramilitarization of the far right is mostly a post 1970s thing and is because they are copying Nazis. Native far right was basically a weird, evil Lions club for white racists.
We basically imported European extremism and mostly replaced our native kind. We did, however, keep a very American flavor while doing it - lots of consumption to perform it (ARs and In This House We Believe signs) and individualistic pontificating.
"Why then do Dilbert readers nod along with the idea of three people per workday getting stabbed by asylum-seekers?"
Because most of them aren't reading detailed statistical analysis but are constantly watching viral videos and news reports about some illegal alien or asylum claimant who stabbed someone on a train. They then massively over update on these sensational events.
My dad who lives in a rural area was completely convinced all large cities had become war zones full of looters and antifa rioters during the summer of Floyd. He kept constantly advising me on all the ways I needed to be careful and would not believe me that absolutely nothing like this was happening anywhere near my boring Houston suburb. He also thought I was in mortal peril because I worked inside a police station at the time (civilian IT worker) and some random person would attack me leaving work one day because they were antipolice or maybe even burn down the police station.
Your story made me smile as it reminds me of Minneapolis right now. My sister is like "Just got back from Costco, the only ICE I seen in the last three months was frost scraped off my windshield in the morning".
You see this all over the place, in comparisons of American and European experiences of immigration - and it’s ridiculous :
“The average immigrant [to America] is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen.”
The only reason this is true is because the US has such a large, dysfunctional and culturally distinct African-American portion that throws the “native-born” numbers out of whack. It’s only because this population is so incredibly dysfunctional that even the poor of Latin America look perfectly orderly, by comparison. Relative to the non-Hispanic white majority, though, they’re at least competitive with Arabs in Europe for violent criminality, gang-formation and so on.
European countries - with exceptions, like France - tend to include such populations in “Immigrants and descendants” categories, giving a more honest majority-minority differential. If African-Africans were present in Europe, they’d be discussed as an unassimilated block of criminal and cultural dysfunction of the kind that Americans are shocked to find in Brussels, Paris and so on. African-American “migration” remains a colossal failure of American immigration policy, if considered as such.
Then there are skilled migrants in both Europe and the US, which tilt the numbers positively in both, but aren’t really the subject of this conservative narrative.
The article paints "Europe" with the same broad brush with which it accuses others painting "the West". Even if we just focus on the European Union (comprising less than half of Europe's landmass and about 60% of its population), the demographics of immigrants and asylum seekers is very different in different member states or even sub-state regions. When conservatives make an example of the supposedly tough immigration policies of Poland and Hungary (which is objectively not true either), contrasting it with that of, say, Germany, they fail to consider that the population of immigrants is both quantitatively and qualitatively very-very different in these countries. What further complicates this issue is that the freedom to relocate within the EU applies very differently to different classes of humans and the enforcement of restrictions is also very varied, making the reality on the ground very different from legal fiction and official statistics.
'Countries without constitutions'
- not sure where you're referring to here, but the UK for example very much has a constitution.
It even contains rights protections.
It's just not codified into one single authoritative document
Wow, Even shitlibs like Scott are starting to admit what has been obvious for more than 10 years, that mass immigration of muslims and africans is ruining Europe.
Will they apologise for advocating for it for decades and insinuating that anyone who is warning against it and pointing out the negative outcomes is a racist white supremacist? Obviously not since that would require honour and accountability.
Liberals like to do this dishonest reframing of saying "immigration is good" where they pretend that all immigration is the same and that accepting say a million immigrants from Japan and South Korea will have the same affect on your country as accepting a million immigrants from Pakistan or Morocco.
Liberals are pure scum of the earth who have absolutely ruined one of the greatest regions of the planet out of some perverse worship of brown people where any rational, evidence-based appraisal of their behavioural outcomes is forbidden as blasphemy.
I've studied this, looking at crime statistics from different European countries. What's interesting is that per immigrant group, they don't differ much. I.e. France isn't better at "integrating" Moroccans than Belgium, or Denmark. Turks don't integrate better in an other country than they do in Germany, despite claims that they can't integrate in Germany because of German politics.
There's a pretty big difference between refugees and immigrants. An immigrant starts by choosing what country they'd like to be a member of.