It's like that Scooby-Doo meme.
"let's see who is really under this disguise?"
And it's only the Great Replacement Theory.
I can see where some of the voting block concerns are coming from, when it comes to mainland Chinese immigrants in Canada being targeted by pro-Chinese government propoganda to vote for pro-Chinese government conservatives. But, I don't know if we can automatically assume the propoganda is effective or that Chinese immigrants are feigning their allegiance to their countries, just like what Jewish or Japanese immigrants were accused of.
“Is it racist to assume without meaningful evidence or critical
thought that ‘other races’ are all uniformly worse in some way than
‘white people’,” says the obvious racist who is feeling clever.
A bit off topic, but seeing Hailanathema advocate for open borders
has made me realize that ancaps, left-anarchists, and
/r/neoliberal-style “radical centrists” all agree on this one fringe
policy view (open borders), making it a rare real-life example of double fish hook
theory.
Maybe it’s just that anyone who actually has principles and thought
out moral views concludes that open borders is correct? Tabarrok once
wrote a sentence that stuck with me:
No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian,
egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed
perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to
exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than
people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time.
It's interesting to me that your comment is getting a good reception here, because open borders strikes me as pretty typical rationalist nonsense, even more contrarian than the extreme EA view that there's a moral obligation to donate 100% of your disposable income to charity. One of the main things that alienates me from the SSC subreddit is that they take Bryan Caplan seriously.
The Tabarrok quote is disingenuous. I assume he doesn't believe that everybody should be able to enter his house without permission.
>I assume he doesn't believe that everybody should be able to enter his house without permission.
Eh, this is a pretty bad analogy. Of course I agree that only I should decide who can enter my house. But that's exactly why I support open borders: other Americans don't get to tell me who can and cannot enter my house! If I want to invite a non-American, give him room and board and hire him as a gardener or nanny, it ought to be my right to do so. It is the immigration restrictionists who violate the homeowner's autonomy.
I think what you're arguing for here is that your permission should be both necessary and sufficient for someone to enter your house. I was only observing that your permission is \_necessary\_ for someone to enter your house, not sufficient. Whether permission is necessary is what's relevant to open borders, because open borders means that government permission is NOT necessary for entry.
(BTW, for anyone who wants to read Tabarrok's full article: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/get-rid-borders-completely/409501/](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/get-rid-borders-completely/409501/).)
OK, but are you saying you *disagree* with the moral intuition that I should be able to allow a non-American to enter my house if I wish? You're saying in an ideal society, it would be correct to give strangers the power to forbid your friends from entering your private home?
Also, your analogy still fails, because a country is not the same as a home. For one thing, a country contains other people's homes, while my home doesn't. You already allow other people to walk inside your country every day - millions of them! And they don't ask you permission. To forbid foreigners from entering, you need some kind of moral distinction between strangers-born-on-this-side and strangers-born-on-that-side of an arbitrary line. Hence the quote:
>No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time.
>OK, but are you saying you *disagree* with the moral intuition that I should be able to allow a non-American to enter my house if I wish?
This is a subtle question. Let's be careful with what we mean by "enter your house". In practice, this involves two steps:
1. The non-American enters the US
2. The non-American, now in the US, enters your house
In current law, which I agree with, Americans as a whole, via the US government, must give permission for step #1. Once that's been done, no further permission from the government is needed for step #2, which I also agree with.
I don't know that that really answers your question, though.
>You already allow other people to walk inside your country every day - millions of them! And they don't ask you permission.
They don't ask permission of me personally, but they do ask permission from my national government, which is composed of representatives that I had a say in electing. (Edit: I might have misread you here. Are you referring to citizens-by-birth?)
>To forbid foreigners from entering, you need some kind of moral distinction between strangers-born-on-this-side and strangers-born-on-that-side of an arbitrary line.
This is somewhere I strongly disagree. I can't enter my neighbor's house without permission, but it's not because I'm worth morally less than them. It's just because it's not my house.
>This is a subtle question. Let's be careful with what we mean by "enter your house". In practice, this involves two steps:
If my house bordered a neighboring country, guests could skip step 1. But this is still illegal. In the US, evidence that I let guests in this way will cause government agents to forcefully enter my house. Now, morally speaking, what right do other citizens have to send such agents to my place? What harm did the immigrant cause them that might justify this violent act?
>They don't ask permission of me personally, but they do ask permission from my national government, which is composed of representatives that I had a say in electing. (Edit: I might have misread you here. Are you referring to citizens-by-birth?)
I'm referring to citizens by birth. They cannot be prevented from entering your country even if the majority of the other citizens want to forbid them. You might say they possess a fundamental right. So you're assigning fundamental rights based on being born on one side of a line, exactly what Tabarrok notes is inconsistent with virtually all moral philosophies.
>If my house bordered a neighboring country, guests could skip step 1. But this is still illegal.
This is a good choice for a thought experiment, but I don't think it's relevant to the practical question of how things work in the usual case. I mean, there's some things that could be debated here, but we're already far removed from typical real life scenarios. There \_are\_ cases of houses straddling borders, but that's unusual.
>I'm referring to citizens by birth. They cannot be prevented from entering your country even if the majority of the other citizens want to forbid them.
Thanks for the clarification. I agree that something needs to said about why citizens-by-birth are automatically granted permission to be in the country.
I fall back on pragmatics (which isn't to say that's the only reason). Consider the simplest case, where the parents are both citizens, with no dual citizenship, and give birth within the country. If the baby were denied permission to enter the country, how would that even work? Like, are you going to deport the baby, and to where? There's no reasonable alternative, so there's no choice except to automatically give permission to the baby.
>I fall back on pragmatics (which isn't to say that's the only reason). Consider the simplest case, where the parents are both citizens, with no dual citizenship, and give birth within the country. If the baby were denied permission to enter the country, how would that even work? Like, are you going to deport the baby, and to where? There's no reasonable alternative, so there's no choice except to automatically give permission to the baby.
Let's forget about pragmatics for a second, and think about ideals. We're talking about moral rights, after all, not about pragmatics ("how would freeing the slaves even work? Who would farm the fields? We'd all starve!" might even be a correct argument in the short term, but it's not an argument to base morality around.)
In terms of moral ideals, who should be allowed in the country? I agree with you that babies must be given permission to stay in the country. But then consider: if one country starts off with many more resources than another, is it fair - is it moral - to give those resources only to the people born on one side of an arbitrary line? If all men are created equal, shouldn't it follow that the foreigners are created equal as well? In the extreme case where the US were the only country to have natural resources allowing first-world quality of life, with every other place allowing only subsistence farming, would you still call it moral to discriminate by place of birth when choosing who gets to prosper?
Or think about welfare for a second. The US citizenry votes in a government which gives support to the American poor. Why the American poor? Isn't it more just to give support equally to *all* poor? Are the global poor somehow less deserving - have less moral worth - than those born on the right side of the arbitrary line? (At this point you might say that the US government has a duty to serve the US people, but that's not quite true; the US government has a duty to *execute the will of the US people*, and the question is why the US citizenry's will is to help only America's poor, rather than the global poor.)
>We're talking about moral rights, after all, not about pragmatics ("how would freeing the slaves even work? Who would farm the fields? We'd all starve!" might even be a correct argument in the short term, but it's not an argument to base morality around.)
In the baby example, granting the baby citizenship is the pragmatic choice. That choice is not immoral. That's unlike slavery, where, if the pragmatic choice is to keep slavery, then the pragmatic choice is immoral.
>But then consider: if one country starts off with many more resources than another, is it fair - is it moral - to give those resources only to the people born on one side of an arbitrary line?
In practice, though, the resources aren't given \_only\_ to citizens. For example, foreign aid and refugee resettlement don't require open borders.
>The US citizenry votes in a government which gives support to the American poor. Why the American poor? Isn't it more just to give support equally to all poor?
This is a good question. As a topic though it feels different enough that even just disentangling in what ways it is/isn't a good analogy for borders would be a rabbit hole.
>(At this point you might say that the US government has a duty to serve the US people, but that's not quite true; the US government has a duty to execute the will of the US people, and the question is why the US citizenry's will is to help only America's poor, rather than the global poor.)
This I agree with. The view that governments should only help their own people is an extreme position.
No trouble, just a calming reminder that while this is within the old
wheelhouse, don’t overly stink up the place with posts from /r/TheMotte
which is a shit-tip
I don't think the survey question is intended to make truthful implications, I think it's meant to tease out attitudes. For example: I don't think Adorno and company were affirming any of the implications of the following statement,
> What the youth needs most is strict discipline, rugged determination, and the will to work and fight for family and country.
when they designed the first 'authoritarian personality' test.
You’re kind of missing the point. I don’t think whether the person who wrote the question agrees with it matters. The more important aspect is that it is question written in a shitty way. It offers way too many concepts that one could disagree with. For instance, one could believe that Irish did not work their way up out of racism. It is simply that politics demanded that other whites embraced the Irish and Italians as white in order to maintain a majority.
If I was presented that statement and asked if I agreed or disagreed as my two options I could not even reach the second clause in my analysis based on my disagreement with the first. In the Adorno question you posted it is possible that one may quibble with one of the three things listed but at least there is only one clause which is being inquired about. Also in the Adorno question there is no assertion of fact unlike the question you posted.
Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonationalism
“am I racist, if I think all the other races are more racist than mine”
Yes, it is absolutely racist to believe that.
That’s definitely not what you actually believe, you’re just stupid enough to think that it’s some kind of unanswerable argument.
“Is it racist to assume without meaningful evidence or critical thought that ‘other races’ are all uniformly worse in some way than ‘white people’,” says the obvious racist who is feeling clever.
Is it racist to be a white nationalist? Well, euh… about that.
A bit off topic, but seeing Hailanathema advocate for open borders has made me realize that ancaps, left-anarchists, and /r/neoliberal-style “radical centrists” all agree on this one fringe policy view (open borders), making it a rare real-life example of double fish hook theory.
Maybe it’s just that anyone who actually has principles and thought out moral views concludes that open borders is correct? Tabarrok once wrote a sentence that stuck with me:
No trouble, just a calming reminder that while this is within the old wheelhouse, don’t overly stink up the place with posts from /r/TheMotte which is a shit-tip
“Not to sound racist, but…
aren’t you scared that “the Whites” might be treated the way “they” treated other minorities, if they become a minority themselves?”
everyone who isn’t for open borders is a nazi, no sarcasm
Relevant