Category Archives: Immigration

Who And How Many

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The immigration debate in America, and maybe the West as a whole, is not much of a debate, at least as far as public policy. Instead, it is something of a meta-debate, in that the facts and important decisions are talked about indirectly. For example, in the US, everyone sort of thinks it is about Mexican immigration, but no one ever explicitly speaks to the facts about Mexican immigration. Details about who is actually coming over the border or gaming the anchor baby system remains a mystery.

As is always the case with big issues in America, immigration is debated on purely moral terms and even there, the morality is not explicit. No one ever bothers to explain why America is a “nation of immigrants” or whether that’s salient. For that matter, no one can seem to wrap their head around why immigration of any sort is morally good. Even immigration hawks go to great lengths to speak well of legal immigrants. Ours is a meta-debate about the morality of undefined policies stripped of facts and details.

Imagine a public debate over building a bridge across a local river. The salient facts would be the cost, where to put it and who benefits from the bridge. Instead, one side talks endlessly about the morality of building bridges. It’s who they are. By extension, those who oppose bridge building in the abstract are immoral in some way. The other side, in contrast, spends its time trying prove they are not opposed to bridge building, but simply have questions about where to put this bridge and how much to spend on it.

Even when someone tries to talk about the economics of immigration, putting aside cultural preferences and demographic reality, the debate soon veers into a weird sort of romanticism. It’s just assumed that jobs are going unfilled due to the lack of labor. There’s never any examination of the claims. Further, it is assumed that temporary labor shortages in one area of a continent sized country are immoral. Rising wages are treated like an insult to the economy, this vaguely understood thing we must worship.

The fact is though, the reality of all public policy is that it is and will be a debate over the facts of the issue. That reality can be wished away for a long time, but eventually the reality comes home. That’s what we are seeing with the stand-off between Trump and the Cult of Brown Ascendancy. We’re slowing creeping up on the fact that immigration is about who and how many. That is, who will we accept and how many of them will we accept. Immigration has always been about who and how many.

Those are not a questions most Americans are equipped to answer. The how many part is the easiest, especially if you start with zero as the default. No one is walking around thinking to themselves, “We really need more Eritreans around here.” If immigration was capped at zero, no one would notice. In fact, if there was a moratorium and the government started to aggressively deport people, even those in the system, most people would not care. In other words, the how many number is a small number.

The tougher question is what sorts of immigrants will we accept, even in limited numbers. In the Mid-Atlantic, where a large Korean community exists, most people would be fine with Korean immigration. Unlike the Chinese, Koreans are not fleeing political oppression or economic uncertainty. Koreans come here for lifestyle reasons, so they assimilate rapidly. They also take pride in being the model minority, despite what what some lefty advocates claim. Koreans came here to be Americans.

At the other end, no one would want any Muslims from the Middle East, as they simply don’t fit a modern Western country. Everywhere Muslim migration has been high, we see terrorist barriers, armed patrols and absurd security measures. In fact, most Americans could be convinced that we make an exception to the First Amendment and ban Islam, maybe even deport all Muslims. It has not worked and it can never work. The Western policy toward that part of the country should first be containment.

Similarly, sub-Saharan Africans are a no-go. America has a long history of trying to integrate Africans into a Europeans country. It does not work. Most people can accept the moral obligation to the descendants of former slaves, even if their ancestors were not slave holders. Bringing in a new population of unassimilable people, with a natural hostility to Europeans makes no sense. Again, no one is walking around wondering how things are going in Chad. That and American blacks don’t like African migrants.

One of the interesting things that happens when you start to think “from where and how many” is the how many becomes an easier question the more you think honestly about the “from where” part. For Americans, the real issue is how many South Americans we will accept. That quickly reduces to a much simpler question. Do we need any of them? For most people, the answer is no, we don’t need more people. Therefore, the only question left is are we morally bound to take anyone in for permanent settlement.

That, of course, is why the open borders crowd prefers to keep this a meta-debate about meta-morality. Once you start thinking about the facts, the default on immigration swings 180 degrees. The default becomes zero and building a massive barrier to entry makes complete sense. The debate is over the exceptions and more important, the conditions for those exceptions. The moral authority becomes the will of the people, rather than a self-selected cult of true believers divorced from daily reality.

No Easy Answers

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It is natural for people to embrace simple answers to complicated problems, even when it is obvious that those simple answers have no chance for success. One reason is complicated solutions imply a lot of hard work. Most people would prefer as little struggle as possible, so the option that offers the least amount of effort is always going to have the most appeal. Then there is the fact that hard solutions mean hard problems, problems that change things. People do not like change, so they avoid facing reality as much as they can.

This is the heart of the current crisis. White people in America are faced with a set of facts that are immutable. Demographics is a straightforward issue. As of 2011, about 60% of the population was non-Hispanic white. The percentage of the minor population that is non-Hispanic white fell below 50% for the first time. Given current immigration and fertility numbers, America will be a majority-minority country within a generation. The crisis of our age is not just how we respond to this reality, but how we come to accept it.

The civic nationalists will move heaven and earth in order to avoid facing demographic reality. In fact, they do everything they can to avoid thinking about it. The results of the NY-14 election are a great example. The civic nationalists latched onto the socialist angle, with the desperation of a drowning man. The fact that the district is over 60% Hispanic was lost on them. Even when presented with the facts, they preferred to prattle on about “muh socialism.” The simple answer asks the least of them, so they go with that.

On the other hand, we have the recently red-pilled. Like ex-smokers, they demand action now, believing all they have to do is explain what they have just learned to everyone else, and public opinion will turn on a dime. Paul Nehlen and Patrick Little are good examples of how this works. They read Culture of Critique, had a revelation, and then found the nearest street corner on which they could preach the gospel. All of their efforts were based on the belief that the solution was simple. Just red pill everyone and the problem is solved.

Of course, the very act of running for office is a denial of reality. It assumes the system is fine, but the people are defective. This has been the guiding star of conservatives for three generations. The simple solution to the culture war is to get the “right people” in office and they will solve the problem. The fact that this has proven impossible, and that the system has led us to this point, is never considered. The possibility that liberal democracy inevitably leads to cultural suicide is unpleasant, so even the red-pilled look the other way.

It used to be a popular line on social media to comment about something being the reddest of red pills. The JQ’ers loved using that line to pose as the most “woke” people in the movement. The truth is, the reddest of red pills is accepting that there is nothing to be done, with regards to our demographic destiny. The die is cast. Barring genocide or some weird plague, the land currently called America will be majority-minority. We can seal the borders tomorrow and the facts will not change. There is no answer to that problem.

Further, liberal democracy assumes things about the citizenry that cannot be true in a majority-minority nation. The Founders saw this from the start and worried about factionalism ripping their new creation apart. Even in a completely white, English-speaking country like early America, there was lots of diversity. People putting loyalty to their tribe ahead of loyalty to their nation was a legitimate concern. The American Civil War was not fought along regional and cultural lines by accident. It was tribal warfare.

The fact is, another bit of that dreaded demographic reality is that what comes next cannot include the current system of governance. In a multicultural society, everyone’s primary loyalty is to their group. Liberal democracy assumes people are loyal to their narrow economic interests. The black guy will vote for what works for him, not for what blacks ad a whole think is in their interest. In an all-white society, this works as whites are the least tribal humans. In a majority-minority society, this cannot possibly work.

What comes next for us is what we see in the Middle East. In every country, one group dominates the rest, imposing their idea of order on society. Saddam controlled Iraq for his people. The Persians run Iran. The Muslims run Lebanon, where every hill and valley may as well be its own country. The rule in multi-cultural, multi-tribal societies is that one tribe rules the rest. That is our future. The question is which groups will come to dominate the rest and what sort of system they will impose in order to remain in charge.

 

The Immorality Of Immigration

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Every ruling elite has certain primary duties. These are obligations that come before anything else. Regardless of the form of government, the rulers  have to maintain things like public order. Being the tribal chief is useless if your people are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing laws and local customs.

There are other primary duties of the ruler, like organizing the common defense, that are universal to all forms of government. Then there are primary duties that are peculiar to a people or to a form of government. If the ruler is understood to be a god, then the ruler and his retainers have to maintain that myth.  In modern western countries, protecting property rights and enforcing contracts is counted as a primary duty of the state in order to maintain its legitimacy

One of the more destructive things to happen to America over the last half century is the sacralizing of immigration by the elites. The endless repetition of the nonsense phrase “nation of immigrants” has turned a temporary expedient a century ago into an essential element of the nation’s founding mythology. The fact that immigration is a violation of the state’s primary duty to the people is excused because the immigrant now has a superior place in the moral order.

In a country like America, one that allegedly is built on consensual government, citizenship has great value. In fact, the most valuable thing to a citizen of a representative democracy is his citizenship. The reason for this is that citizenship is an ownership stake in the country. In theory, the American government was voluntarily founded as an agreement among individuals, invested with the power to secure mutual protection and regulate the relations among its members.

If you had the option of selling your citizenship, let us say at some sort of auction, there would be no shortage of bidders. For example, there is no shortage of buyers for the EB-5 visa, which costs $500,000. That is right, you can buy citizenship from the US government. Your citizenship is something of value and therefore, the state has a duty to protect it, just as they have a duty to protect your property rights. This is a primary duty of government.

When the American government hands out citizenship to millions of foreigners every year, it is stealing the value of your citizenship and giving it to someone else. This is no different than a company diluting the value of its shares by selling additional shares. It is why open borders fanatics swear that immigration makes us all richer, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. They know it is essential that people believe this as even the sacred immigrant is not enough to justify theft.

The argument from open borders people is that immigration is not just holy and beneficial. It is perfectly legitimate. The trouble is, when 50% plus one vote to rob the 50% minus one, it is still theft, even if it comes after an election. This is why America is not a democracy and it is also why democracy was famously called two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. The very nature of democracy makes it an immoral form of rule because of the theft problem.

Additionally, a primary duty of the modern state is the maintenance of equality before the law. In fact, this is what makes the law legitimate. Not only do all citizens have a say in what laws are passed, but those laws apply to all citizens equally. The very nature of immigration violates this principle. Immigration steals from some citizens for the benefit of foreigners and the connected. This is true for quasi-immigration schemes like guest workers, as well as for permanent settlement.

If the primary duty of the state is to safeguard the citizens, including the value of their citizenship and maintain equality before the law, then immigration by its very nature is a direct violation of the social compact. It makes a mockery of the very idea of consensual government and sows distrust among the people. It is why all mass immigration quickly leads to a breakdown of order, because it erodes the legitimacy of the ruling authority, as the people see they are no longer willing to fulfill their basic duties.

That does not preclude all immigration. It is just that the bar is extremely high. In order to justify that which is naturally and always immoral, the offset must exceed the cost of the deed. Since this is impossible in the modern age, the open borders people have been forced to turn morality on its head, claiming the first duty of the state is to foreigners at the expense of its own citizens. It has turned America into a bust out where the value of your citizenship is stolen.

The Sacred Immigrant

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For a long time, I have made the point that the Republican Party is not really a political party, in the sense that it is a coalition held together by common interests. Instead, it is more like a dumping ground for politicians. About a third of Republican office holders would prefer to be huddling with the Democrats, but the voters of their home district or state have decided the Democrats are too crazy, so ambitious politicians run as Republicans. The result is a party held together by convenience.

You see that with the immigration disaster brewing in the House. As it stands the GOP could simply do nothing on immigration and ride the wave of popular support into the election. That would be the smart thing. Instead, they are trying to pass an immigration bill that has no chance of making it through the Senate. Now, this could be good politics if it is popular with their voters. Instead, they are about to pass a bill highly unpopular with their voters and sure to remind Trump supporters why they hate the GOP.

A leaked draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) amnesty deal could lead to the “biggest” amnesty for illegal aliens in United States history, experts tell Breitbart News.
Ryan’s immigration deal would go beyond giving amnesty to only the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

According to a leaked draft of the amnesty deal, obtained by Breitbart News, Ryan’s plan would allow the entire “DACA population” to be eligible for amnesty so long as they meet low educational, work and criminal requirements, prompting the amnesty to explode in size.

That DACA population could include the nearly 3.5 million DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, and even more illegal aliens who arrive in the U.S. to fraudulently obtain the amnesty.

NumbersUSA Governmental Affairs Director Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart News that Ryan’s amnesty will — at the least — allow 1.8 million illegal aliens to stay in the U.S.

“This has the potential to turn into the biggest amnesty we’ve ever had,” Jenks said.

The leaked amnesty deal reveals that Ryan and the Republican establishment may even be considering going beyond giving amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.

A second amnesty is included in the leaked draft, one that would allow the children of temporary foreign guest workers and “anyone who has a ‘contingent nonimmigrant status’” to apply for the amnesty.

This amnesty for the children of temporary foreign workers does not have a numerical cap, allowing for an endless amount of foreign nationals to obtain amnesty through this avenue known as “Pathway Concept B.”

“The winners are the DREAMers cause they get their amnesty, Democrats because they don’t have to concede much to get the amnesty and donor-class Republicans who are interested in perpetuating the current system,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News of Ryan’s leaked amnesty deal.

It is tempting to blame this on the secret “donor party” that allegedly manipulates the inner party, like some sort of Turkish conspiracy. There is no doubt that business pushes hard for unlimited “guest worker” visas. No matter how many indentured servants they are granted, it is never enough. Who is pushing for amnesty? In whose interests is it to hand a ballot to millions of foreigners? That actually hurts the cheap labor lobby, as it removes exploitable people from the labor pool.

This is an example of why so-called conservatives lost every fight over the last thirty years. They start with the assumption that the other team is working from facts and reason, motivated by a desire for some tangible goal. In this case, immigration patriots will demand everyone believe Paul Ryan is getting sacks of cash to push this ridiculous amnesty bill through the House. Sure, some of the provisions are bought by lobbyists, but the amnesty stuff has no obvious constituency in the Republican Party.

The fact is, people are more often motivated by a desire to be seen as on the side of angels, even if it brings personal risk. Just look at the number of pols who have driven a hole into their career opposing Trump. As they go under for the last time, they are smugly certain they are doing the Lord’s work. For many in our political class, open borders is a moral issue now. They want to grant the blessing of your town to the world, because they feel righteous as they watch it play out.

This suicidal altruism is not just confined to the political class. Any time the immigration question comes up, there are people who will blurt out “I’m not opposed to legal immigration. It is illegal immigration I oppose.” That is why the political class is working to legalize every conceivable form of immigration. If there are literally no laws against coming here, then there can be no illegal immigration, and everyone is happy. It is the natural result of sacralizing the immigrant.

It is why arguments from facts and reason about immigration have had no impact on the political class. Even as the public begins to get serious about the issue, the politicians are unresponsive, because they correctly see that the immigrant remains a magical figure in the mind of the public. Until a large majority of the voters become hostile to immigration in the spiritual sense, nothing changes. Yeah, the cheap labor lobbies play into this and exploit it, but the root problem here is immigrant worship.

The New Druze

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In the late 10th and early 11th century, a form of mysticism evolved that incorporated elements of Islam, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, bits from other esoteric faiths, which existed in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The person credited with spreading this new faith was a guy named Muhammad bin Ismail Nashtakin ad-Darazi. He came to Egypt in 1017 and began preaching and attracting converts. He was branded a heretic and executed in 1018 by the sixth Fatimid caliph.

The Caliph, al-Hakim, was not hostile to the new faith, so much as hostile to ad-Darazi, who he thought was suffering from megalomania. His move against ad-Darazi was to put Hamza ibn ‘Ali ibn Ahmad in charge of this new religious sect, which would eventually be known as Druze. Despite not being a member of this new religion, the sixth caliph became a central figure for it. His decision to kill ad-Darazi changed the nature of the religion and allowed it to spread.

This is an interesting bit of serendipity, but it has a connection to our own age in a few important ways. The most obvious, if you are a fan of the period, is al-Hakim is often blamed for starting the crusades. His decision to persecute Christians sent ripples through Europe, eventually leading to the call to recapture the Holy Land.  There were other forces at work, but it is generally accepted that al-Hakim played a crucial role in the clash with Christendom.

Eventually two main strains of Islam came to dominate the Arab world, while Christianity dominated Europe. The Levant has remained a place with lots of diversity. The Druze live mostly in Lebanon. The Samaritans are in the Palestinian territories. Maronites, Eastern Orthodox and Melkite Catholics exist in Lebanon. Syriac Christians and Alawites exist in Syria. Of course, various flavors of Judaism dominate in Israel. It is not an accident that instability is the only constant in the Levant.

That is an obvious lesson when examining this part of the world. If one wanted proof of the axiom, Diversity + Proximity = Violence, the Levant has more than enough for any argument. The pathological zeal of Western leaders for inviting the world into Western lands, can only have one end. That is the what we see in Lebanon, a country blessed with a great location, abundant natural resources and natural barriers. Yet, it is a land riven by sectarian violence and the lack of a unifying identity.

There is another lesson from the history of the Levant and that is the cauldrons of diversity tend to create more diversity. The reason this part of the world was popular with schismatics is its diversity attracted these people. Diversity turns the culture into an open are market for every idea imaginable. The openness to new ideas is constantly destabilizing society, open the door for new cracks and crackpots. Diversity rewards diversity, which makes stability impossible.

That is something to keep in mind as Europe works to invite the world. Throw a bunch of people together with a wide range of beliefs and inevitably it spawns a bunch of new combinations. The flow of Muslims into Europe, a land that has abandoned Christianity for various secular passions, is going to spawn new spiritual movements. The recent conversion to Islam of an AfD leader is the sort of thing that is happening with increasing frequency. Islam is now a thing in Europe.

The other aspect to this is the West is now an open country, when it comes to the religion business. Just as Catholicism faced a dying collection of pagan beliefs, Islam is now flowing into a world held together by pointless social fads. The soul of Europe died a long time ago. To be a European today means to be a deracinated stranger in a land that is increasingly unfamiliar to you. That makes Europe fertile ground everyone looking for converts..

That does not mean Europe will be Islamic. Islam always adapts to the local environment. Islam in Asia is Islam with very Asian characteristics. Islam in the Caucasus is a mountain man version of Islam. Biology is the root of everything and that means cultural items like religion flow from it. The Islamification of Europe will inevitably result in something that is very European. The Germans will have their take, the Danes will have theirs and the French will do something French.

It also means all sorts of other permutation that result from mixing Western empiricism, Oriental mysticism and traditional Christianity. The Druze we started with in this post combine Ismailism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism and Hinduism. It is an esoteric faith that is also an ethnicity. The Druze do not accept converts and they do not allow out-marriage. A person who marries outside the faith is no longer Druze and their children will not be Druze. Imagine something like that happening Bulgaria.

The point of this somewhat disjointed post is that Europe is dead. The civilization that was created by the culture born of the Enlightenment carries on, but the culture that is the West is dead. Something will come to replace it and that something will, in whole or part, be carried by the people now attempting to replace the Europeans. The resulting culture that rises next will be some combination of the ingredients being tossed into the cauldron, but it will look nothing like the ingredients.

Somewhere To Run

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One of the themes of this post at American Renaissance, was that there is no where for the race aware white person to go in America. The war on whiteness is happening at every point on the social structure and in every town in the country, even the rural areas where whites dominate. Wherever white people congregate, a cosmopolitan wrecker will be there to try and brown the place. Therefore, there is no running away from the slow moving white genocide being perpetrated on us by our rulers.

The generally accepted view of this process is it will play out in one of two ways. One version has Team Brown, which is the coalition of blacks, Hispanics, miscellaneous foreigners, Jews and white feminists, will become the new ruling class. The alternative, the Alt-Right version, holds that whites will become race aware and unite against the dusky hordes to form an ethno-state. In fairness, there is a CivNat version, which argues in favor of unicorn riding leprechauns, but no adult takes them seriously.

Looking at the current fight over immigration, it is not hard to argue with either vision of the future. Team Brown is unwilling to give an inch on their plans for unlimited non-white immigration. The only justification for this is they are seeking to replace whites in America via the miracle of open borders. Logic further dictates that even the dumbest tricorn hat wearing BoomerCon will eventually wake up to this reality. Think about how many people you know who were CivNat a decade ago but are race realists today.

Neither of those scenarios sound appealing and that is an important thing to keep in mind when looking down the road. Given enough time, human organizations faced with two bad choices will evolve alternatives. It is a natural result of seeking to mitigate the costs of each choice by addressing the underlying premises. In the case of American racial conflict, the underlying premise is that the future is a transcendent, winner take all, fight that will be decided in Washington and imposed on the rest of us.

That is not the only future and probably not the likely one. Look at what is happening in the states. The other day I wrote about one of the consequences of the marijuana legalization efforts at the state level. Here we have, for the first time in generations, the states forcing policy changes on the Federal government. In fact, the most likely result is the states will force the Feds to retreat from this area of civic life. The regulation of recreational drugs will be a local issue. Replace “marijuana” with “discrimination” and the enormity is clear.

Another thing going on in the states is the idea of disaggregation. When you look closely at the CalExit thing, what you see is not a secessionist movement, but a reductionist movement. California is too big to manage as a whole, so the culturally homogeneous areas will be broken off from the culturally Progressive zones, to form at least two states, but there is no reason the concept could not result in three or four states. California has forty million people. Rhode Island has a little over one million people.

What is going on in California is possible because of something that has been going on with Progressives for the past thirty years. They have been self-ghettoizing. The ethnic cleansing we see going on in coastal cities is so Progressives can have swanky urban centers in which they can live. When you look at the last electoral map, at the county level, you see the slow re-segregation of the country between Team Brown in urban areas and Team America everywhere else. The blues will get bluer while the reds get redder.

This cultural reorganization of America is undermining the premise of a unified national culture dictated by our coastal elites. Therefore, that winner take all fight is becoming less and less likely. Further, the Progressive instinct to leave, unless they can dominate all others, an instinct they inherited from their Puritan forebears, is one cause of this reorganization. It is why Progressives are talking about abandoning the national model in favor of the smaller, local, more autonomous model. Peaceful separation, so to speak.

It is important to keep in mind that Team Brown seized on open borders and mass immigration when they began to lose the support of white ethnics. Progressives controlled the national government from the Civil War forward but had to rely on urban white ethnics for building a coalition. Once those voters started joining Team America, Team Brown needed new voters and we got the 1965 Immigration Act. Then twenty years later they built on it with the 1986 amnesty. Open borders are a defensive strategy.

If Trump is able to strong arm Republicans into ending wholesale immigration, Team Brown’s strategy for dominating the nation is foreclosed. When even minor setbacks, like the 2016 election, results in calls for retreat, it is reasonable to wonder if the Progressive pendulum is about to swing the other way, away from national dominance back toward local autonomy. It has been a little over two hundred years since the Hartford Convention. Perhaps this is the end of a long cycle and the return to normalcy.

The Answer Is Always More

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One of the more entertaining bits of black humor on Steve Sailer’s blog are the stories he posts about how every problem can be solved with more immigration. No matter the problem, someone will have a reason why the solution to it is more immigration. It’s as if our elites have a bizarre form of Tourette’s, where any stimulation causes them to blurt out lines from Emma Lazarus. When the lunacy of their claims is pointed out, the response is usually just a blank stare, suggesting their enthusiasm for open borders is involuntary.

The reason for this is the people championing open borders are not working from a set of facts, or arguments from those facts. Sure, the indentured servant lobbies are thinking in economic terms. The refugee lobbies want the money spigot to remain open, but these are relatively small influences on public debate. The vast majority of people championing open borders have no monetary incentives. They are doing it because they view the issue in purely moral terms. They are pro-immigrant in the same way normal people are pro-life.

Among the cognitive elites, there is a strong social incentive for embracing ever more extreme positions on the popular fads of the moment. It’s how we went so quickly from tolerating homosexuals to embracing mentally disturbed men in sundresses. Similarly, it is how miscegenation went from casual outlier to the only acceptable form of mating. When it comes to immigration, the furthest possible extreme is open borders, so the game is to come up with ever more creative ways of justifying it.

When looking at it in moral terms, it helps explain why both types of Progressive have gone berserk on the issue of immigration. Fundamentally, the so-called Left and the so-called Right share the same moral framework. Both sides of Progressivism embrace an intolerant, smothering set of universal principles rooted in the blank slate. All people everywhere are the same and interchangeable. As Senator Lindsey Graham would put it, people don’t exist as flesh and blood beings, but rather as ideals.

Anyway, it is good to keep that in mind when seeing so-called conservatives make their pitch for open borders. This piece in the hilariously misnamed American Conservative is a a rather bizarre attempt to justify redefining temporary to mean permanent.

That’s why this recent decision will be particularly advantageous for MS-13. Realistically, the federal government will be unable to enforce this immigration policy. Likewise, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans are unlikely to voluntarily leave. Instead, they’ll live in the shadows as prey for MS-13.

Trump has masterfully used MS-13 as a straw man in the immigration debate. The constant references to this glorified street gang leave the impression that most illegal immigrants are violent felons. It is a particularly artful tactic, given that 80 percent of voters believe that illegal immigrants convicted of a felony should be deported.

However, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans aren’t violent criminals. Although Hurricane Mitch is listed as their official reason for refugee status, the reality is that a high percentage of these people fled to the U.S. to escape violence in El Salvador.

Those who do return will be much more vulnerable back in El Salvador where MS-13 and their rival, Barrio 18, control large swaths of the country. In turn, assets these immigrants acquired while working in the U.S. will eventually be appropriated by these gangs.

There is a common misconception that a “weak immigration policy” led to the rise of MS-13. In fact, it was the aggressive deportation policy of the Clinton administration that transformed MS-13 into a transnational criminal organization.

You see how this works?

Enforcing the law creates more criminals. This sort of sophistry that has become common, because there is no rational argument in favor of open borders. As Americans have become familiar with the facts, the open borders people are left with mendacity as their only option. Coming up with the most extreme justifications inevitably leads to defending the indefensible, not on merit, but as a form of virtue signalling. Demanding easy access to Americans by bloodthirsty criminal gangs is extreme in the extreme.

This quest for the most virtuous position on the immigration topic answers the question posed in this post by Sailer. If all people are the same, that we’re just interchangeable meat sticks, there can be no moral justification for inequality and diversity. Our elites see diversity as the result of some evil force. Nothing can be too extreme when combating evil. More important, one cannot be seen by his coevals as beyond the pale when he is engaged in combating evil. The crazier the better when it comes fanatics.

It’s also why appeals to reason never work with these people. We are ruled over by fanatics, convinced that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. They are like addicts seeking a high more intense than the one before it. You don’t talk an addict out of his blind quest for the ultimate high. He has to find that limit on his own. That usually means dying in a pool of his own vomit. That’s most likely the fate of our rulers. They will realize they have gone too far just as the trap door snaps open and they begin the drop.

Fences Make Good Neighbors

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During the election, when Trump was still just an annoyance, the obvious way to cut him off at the pass was to co-opt his issues. This is a tried and true way for establishments to neutralize outside challengers in electoral politics. In the case of Republicans, they just needed their guys to take immigration and trade seriously. A guy like Kasich was perfect, as he had been fairly good on both issues in his career. He could have been the reasonable guy and stolen both issues.

That did not happen, of course. Instead, all of the candidates went the exact opposite direction, thinking that their ticket to the winner’s circle was to be the most over-the-top anti-Trump loon on the ballot. It was a crazy thing to watch. No matter the reason, the decision has turned out to be a big one. In the fullness of time, it will be looked upon as one of those small decisions that had world changing consequences, and not just for Americans. News brings word that Mexico is looking for a Trump of their own.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s campaign rhetoric can make him sound like a Mexican Donald Trump.

The left-leaning front-runner in Mexico’s presidential race is overtly nationalistic, pushes “Mexican people first” policies and peppers his speeches with anti-establishment slogans that thrill the working-class Mexicans who flock to his rallies.

But while his style might be distinctly Trumpian, his policy prescriptions could not be more different. Indeed, the election of the former mayor of Mexico City could be disastrous for Trump and his administration, creating an even more charged relationship between the two countries that could reduce cooperation on border security, trade and immigration.

That worries U.S. politicians and business leaders, including House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas), who was not shy about expressing his disdain for López Obrador at an event last fall hosted by the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce.

“I do not want to see President [López] Obrador take office next year,” McCaul said, adding he fears the Trump administration could increase those chances if it mishandles talks on revamping the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

We live in a time when every event will be cast as bad news for Trump, every Trump move will be bad news for us and all the good news will be pitched as bad news in the long run. This was the pattern in the Reagan years. The booming economy was always bracketed by stories about the homeless and stories about middle-aged men working at fast food joints. That is what we see here. Mexico electing a nationalist may or may not be bad news for Mexico, but it is unquestionably good news for Trump and America.

The one card the globalists have to play against the nationalists is that globalism promotes peace and cooperation among national elites. The rulers of European countries meet over cocktails and wildly expensive appetizers, rather than on the battlefield. Cooperation, between Mexican elites and American elites, means cordial relations between the two countries on issues like trade, drugs and migration. If every country is going for nationalists leaders all of a sudden, the globalists no longer have that card to play.

In the case of Mexico, their elites are so corrupt they make our elites look like good government idealists by comparison. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, Mexico has been run by an organized crime family for generations. The Bush family is monstrous, but they are nowhere near as toxic as the Salinas family. That said, populism in that part of the world tends to mean crazy Marxists and deranged academics, who also happen to be Marxists. Making Mexico Venezuela is the most likely result of populism.

Still, the right answer for Americans is for our rulers to put pressure on Mexican elites to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into America. The dirty little secret is that the migrants coming over the border are not Mexicans. These are Central Americans given safe passage and aid by the Mexican government. The same is true of the drug trade, which is a key source of revenue for the Mexican ruling class. It is not an accident that Mexican Donald Trump is promising to amnesty drug war criminals.

The bigger issue though is a tough talking Mexican president would crystallize support in America for a hard line with Mexico. Americans may have doubts about Trump, but they will rally to his side in a dispute with a foreign leader. With a booming economy, fear of economic repercussions loses its bite. That and good times give American presidents more room to maneuver on the world stage. The last thing the Mexican ruling class needs right now is a head of state who is going to be a foil to Donald Trump.

The truth is the Mexican ruling class needs to be on good terms with America. If the cost of doing that is reining in their criminal element, that is good for the people of both countries. Mexico does not have to be Afghanistan, where warlords run the countryside, living off criminal enterprises. If Trump’s rhetoric helps put pressure on the Mexican political system, forcing a degree of responsible government on them, that is good for Mexicans and Americans. if not, then we just need to build a big wall on the border.

Narcissistic Altruism

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One of the great unanswered questions of our age is why Western rulers are obsessed with importing tens of millions of unassimilable foreigners into their lands. In the US, the conventional wisdom among immigration patriots is that one side of the political class wants cheap votes, while the other side wants cheap labor. In Europe, the theories range from female hysteria to poorly conceived economics. The one common thread is that across the West, the ruling elites appear to be trying to crash their cultures.

The trouble with these reductionist theories is they do not make much sense at the individual level, so they cannot very well scale up. For example, the cheap labor argument does not hold up very well when you examine it. Helot labor is great for the business owner, just as long as he is the only guy doing it. When every landscaper is using Aztec workers, there’s little benefit to the landscaping companies. That is not to say there is no benefit, but does it warrant the suicidal drive to import Mexico into the US?

In Europe, the cheap labor argument makes less sense. Depending upon who is counting, between 80% and 90% of migrants are on public assistance. Even if these migrants wanted to work, there is little demand for low-IQ unskilled workers. Even if there was some demand, the labor laws in Europe would make it impossible to hire them. One of the vexing problems the Euros have are restricted labor markets, which prevent the sort of labor mobility we have in the US. There’s just little demand for cheap foreign labor.

The cheap voter argument is a better one, but even so, the returns are spotty. In the US, Latin voters have been unreliable. They have low turnout numbers, relative to other groups. Unlike blacks, they are not easily agitated into rushing out to stage big protests or shoot white people. There is also the fact that they tend to cause the white vote to coalesce around white candidates regardless of party. That or it results in white flight, as we see in California. So far, open borders have been a disaster for white Democrats.

A similar result has been seen in Europe. The Brits are the example closest to the US for obvious reasons. Open borders have destroyed the party that advocated for it. On the continent, the anti-Euro movements are entirely driven by the immigration waves triggered by Merkel. Even docile countries run by cat ladies and cucks are starting to see the rise of nationalism and anti-immigrant parties. Exactly no where is immigration helping the political class. Yet, the ruling class is universally in favor of open borders.

The fact is, there are no good political or economic arguments in favor of mass immigration. In some places, the arguments have some plausibility, but even the best nuts and bolts arguments in favor of elevated immigration levels do not justify the high political and cultural costs. Yet, our political classes have an unshakable loyalty to foreign migrants. In every Western nation, the smart political play is to oppose high immigration levels. In many countries, banning all immigration is overwhelmingly popular.

There must be something else at work, beyond money and power. Even if we extend the bounds of the ruling class beyond the elected class and their attendants, there is no upside for the elites. Why is Mark Zuckerberg berserk for high immigration? He is even in favor of importing Muslims. The same is true for Hollywood people. They get nothing from open borders, other than fewer job opportunities. Ditto the mass media. About the only thing the self-actualizing classes get from open borders is domestic labor.

That may be the key to it. I’ve pointed out before that the self-actualizing class may prefer Spanish landscapers, as it avoids them having to see blacks raking leaves, while singing old fashioned negro work songs. It also avoids seeing downscale whites, who remind them of the tenuousness of their position. Asian and Caribbean domestics not only avoid those problems, but everyone can pretend they make better workers in those roles. The Korean nanny is like a tiger mom for hire. It makes the deception more palatable.

The underlying cause here may be narcissistic altruism. It is generally assumed that altruism is selfless, while narcissism is selfish. That may not be the correct framing, as lots of people do charity work because it makes them feel good. Similarly, lots of self-absorbed people commit public acts of piety because it makes them look good and elevates their status. The guy funding the museum and demanding his name be over the front door is not acting from pure selflessness. He wants glory too.

It has always been known that men often become more religious as they grow older, often returning to the religion of their youth in a serious way. The pattern is not as obvious with women as they are much more likely to stay in their church as young adults. Young mothers will often get involved with their church for family services and socializing with other mothers. Men, on the other hand, often have a religious awakening in their middle years and not only return to their religion but do so with vigor.

George Vaillant was a researcher at Harvard and did a 50 year study on men, tracking them from their teens to old age. One of the areas he studied was altruism and he found that as the men aged, their altruism increased significantly. This was not simply due to selflessness. Helping others becomes increasing rewarding as we age. Neuroimaging has revealed that helping others brings pleasure to the person providing the help. Altruism activates brain centers that are associated with selfish pleasures like sex.

Organized religion, obviously, provides a ready made structure into which this selfish desire to help others can flow. Not only does organized religion have structured charity, but it also comes with a spiritually rewarding purpose and generations of others who have followed the same path. The female desire to provide charity is funneled into activities that support the community the church serves. The late onset male altruism follows on providing money and intellectual capital to society-strengthening altruism.

Again, this is not pure selflessness. When you volunteer at your church, you feel good about it, because the pleasure centers of your brain are stimulated. It could simply be that as we age, the vanity of youth is no longer effective. To get the same pleasure from life, that desire for selfish pleasure (sex, wealth, status), is redirected into other areas like church participation and charitable giving. Doing good makes the person feel good for having voluntarily done a good work on behalf of their fellows.

The collapse of organized religion, particularly among the Cloud People, is leaving them with no structured outlet for this normal human impulse. The reason a Lyndsay Graham cares more about Dreamers, than his fellow South Carolinians is he feels like he is helping those who need help. It is why John McCain spent the last three decades chanting about “causes greater than yourself.” Without a structure into which his narcissistic altruism could flow, he searched around for causes and purposes, most of which were destructive.

The Disaggregation

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Living at the end of a great historical cycle, we take for granted that the way things are currently organized, is the way they have always been organized. Ours is the natural order of things. One reason we think this is that we can only really know our age. We can read about prior epochs, but we cannot truly know what it was like to be alive in those times. It will always feel alien to us. The other reason is that a product of our epoch is the linear theory of history. All of the events of the past led to this point in time.

The linear thinking of our age is why a guy like Francis Fukuyama could write a book titled The End of History and not be laughed out of the room. The truth is, the West has gone through a number of cycles, which had a beginning, middle and end. The feudal period is the easiest example. It was born out of the ruins of Rome, flourished through the Middle Ages and then collapsed in the Enlightenment. The period between the scientific revolution and the French Revolution, was the great transition from old epoch to the new.

To flesh this out a bit, think about the natural trajectory of human organization. The trend has always been for larger and larger organizational units. First settlements were a few tribes making up a few hundred people. The first settlements were small but grew into villages and then towns. The more successful became cities and eventually, the political units we call city-states. The first empires were collections of city-states, but in Europe, that model never scaled up very well, which is why counties were the maximum unit.

This is one of great forces in human history, the natural tendency for human societies to “level up” by getting bigger, taking over neighboring societies. The Han Chinese are a great example of this phenomenon. The Huaxia ethnic group is believed to be the ancestors of the Han, who formed into a tribe and slowly dominated the neighboring tribes. They moved north and south, eventually occupying most of what we think of as China today. Put another way, a bunch of small tribes combined into one big tribe.

We see a bit of this at the end of our epoch. The great industrial wars of the 20th century made war for territory unacceptable. Borders were drawn and respected. Changes to borders were to be negotiated. Then the idea of eliminating borders entirely became the default position of elites. Europe was to combine into a single political unit. Asia would slowly combine into an economic unit. North America was to be the glue, binding it all together. Human organization would be global and managed.

Just as the Bronze Age empires collapsed with the coming of the great migrations and the Iron Age, our commercial empires are showing signs of stress. That is because of the other great force in human history. Disaggregation is when a large entity breaks into its constituent parts. The simplest example is a big company splitting into a bunch of specialized little companies. Men have gotten extraordinarily rich figuring out how to break apart large companies into many smaller, more valuable little companies.

In history, the most obvious example is the Roman Empire. The Romans managed to stitch together people from the Levant to Britain, but the cost of holding it together exhausted them and it broke apart into more logical units. First the Britons, then the various German tribes broke free of Rome. Eventually, the Western Empire collapsed into its tribal parts. Even the Italian peninsular broke into its parts. The end of the Western Roman Empire was also the end of a great historic epoch.

Today, the signs of disaggregation are appearing in all over Europe. The Catalonian revolt is one good example. It has deep historic roots, going back to the Roman Empire, but it is boiling over now for a reason. The same is true of the Visegrad Group. There is more history in those lands than the rest of Europe, but that is not why they are in dissent from the rest of Europe. The reason for the break ups is that the underlying logic of these great combinations no longer makes any sense. The EU is a solution to a problem of the past.

From the Enlightenment through the end of the Cold War, the great debates were about how whites would deal with whites. How would whites organize their lands politically? How would whites describe and maintain borders between groups of whites? How would whites manage commerce in their own lands and between other groups of whites? These were the great questions. The answer was social democracy, separate borders for separate peoples and regulated markets for goods and services.

The end of an historical epoch is not just when the great questions of that epoch are answered. The end comes when new questions arise that the old answers cannot address. The EU is proving to be less than worthless in the face of mass migration from the south. The Yankee Imperium over America has no answers for the demographic challenges facing the white population. It is why the arrangements of the old era are showing stress and beginning to break.

In the European world, large countries and supra-national organizations are solutions to past problems. The new problems, like how Europe will deal with four billion Africans to their south, demand new solutions. If the current social arrangements do not address the coming problems, then those arrangement will fall apart and be replaced by new ones. That first means tearing down the old arrangements to make way for the new. The era of disaggregation will be about the old organization units breaking into their parts.