DISQUS

Adina,

I didn't say "all of [you]" would have no connection to the country. Given the fact that Canada has extraordinarily lax req'ts for citizenship already, and given the tendency of emigrants to retain their citiizenship long after having left the country for good, this reform must necessarily scoop up a great many people who have no connection to Canada.

There are additional problems, of course: the fact that citizenship entitles these "new Canadians" to a plethora of welfare state goodies that they haven't paid into, the fact that these people have citizenship as a matter of right and thus won't be vetted (criminal record checks, disease testing, etc.) like garden-variety immigrants, etc.

"Anyway, if you want to move to the U.S., I say welcome, to you and most everyone else."

Funnily enough, I am in an analogous position to WW. My mother was born in the States. I used to visit relatives and friends just across the border on a fairly regular basis. I certainly wouldn't be averse to having the permission to live and work in the US - by all means, write your Congressman on my behalf. I would say, though, that if everyone who wanted to move to the States were permitted to, it would very swiftly become a place in which no one wanted to live.

Great. Just what Canada needs... more deracinated foreign dross with zero connection to the country.

"watching that I really notice the dearth of non-stereotypical symbolism in Canada"

Sir, in case you didn't see, the mountie was black. It doesn't get much more non-stereotypical than that, does it?

Brennan,

What's your objection to swearing an oath to the Queen? Is it garden variety libertarian antinomianism or a particvualrly Irish Anglophobia?

Given the extraordinarily low quality of most of the human capital brought into the United States, it's hard to imagine robots could be less productive.

Also, those Japanese "club members" (what a grotesque way to concieve of a nation!) are likely more averse to being raped, robbed, and murdered than Americans are: all things which, the Onion clip notwithstanding, robots do not do. You might want to work that into your little calculus.

The racist Japanese seem to have a pretty good thing going for themselves (lowest crime on Earth, extraordinarily high social capital and trust) and they have gained these things by being solicitous of their national interest, not by treating immigration as some sort of half-baked international welfare scheme.

Well, Ross's question can be tweaked and his intent preserved. Should it be legal for a 19 yr old daughter (or whatever the age of majority is in your jurisdiction) to have sex with her father for money?

MM,

I didn't realise it was still possible to be expelled from University. I do hope you'll elaborate in a future blog post.

I would have thought a brisk stroll through the streets of Washington, D.C. would be the quickest road to disillusionment with the present system (you're perhaps too hard on Woodrow Wilson: his policies vis-a-vis civil service staffing were unexceptionable). Of course, that walk could potentially cost you a great deal more than $120 grand in tuition.

Brad,

Don't be too hard on Iowa State. They have an interdisciplinary program in Continental Philosophy and Animal Husbandry which is simply to die for. Considering the amount of intellectual dog-fucking WW does on this site, his preference was likely for the latter.

MM,

Good link. I particularly liked this bit: "The current freshman counselor program includes 90 residential counselors — who students call freshman counselors — and 13 ethnic counselors... With more boots on the ground..."

I sure hope God is on the side of the best shots and not of the big battalions.

Unfortunately though, only one of the schools you mentioned isn't crap (hint: it's not John-John's alma mater).

"Most of the world’s least happy places are ethnically homogeneous"

Well, Will, dense though I be, I think ethnic homogeneity might be a necessary, but not a sufficient, criterion for happiness. But let's discuss the cultural element further, since it was brought up and emphasized greatly by the impeccably cosmopolitan Eric Weiner. He emphasized the mistrust, atomism and the absence of a unifying culture as the important reasons for Molodova's notable unhappiness. Would even "slightly liberalised" immigration ameliorate or exacerbate these qualities in the United States? If you're perplexed, there's a kindly professor at Harvard named Putnam (formerly of Bob Jones U., no doubt) who has the answer.

"Economic growth (or lack thereof) is I think the best and least tendentious measure of counterproductivity."

Amazing how you can beg a question so completely whilst simultaneously proclaiming your lack of tendentiousness. If your attitude is: let the Heavens fall if it raise GDP 1%, then I pray to God you travel as far from the levers of power as the Orange Line will take you. Mass immigration has resulted in the infusion of people with higher incarceration rates, gang membership and violent crime rates, greater welfare dependency (especially beyond the first generation), higher drop-out rates, even (as though all that weren't enough) greater obesity. Have those trends irreparably damaged the fabric of American society in any way that can be quanitified to your satisfaction? I highly doubt it, but that has more to do with the standard you've selected than with the actual harm inflicted (none of them have helped the withering-away of the state you ostensibly crave).

Pity about those racists; well, I'm sure your legion of right-thinking readers will leap to your defence any day now.

Appropos of nothing in particular, I was just over at Bloggingheads.tv, where I watched a most interesting program. It was the interview of a journalist named Eric Weiner who has just written a book about happiness. When pressed by his interlocutor to declare the happiest country on earth, he mentioned "Iceland" because, in part, (and I am quoting from memory here): it is small and ethnically-homogeneous. At that point, the interviewer made a lame attempt to change the subject (mustn't give the crypto-fascists any more ammunition, of course) but he made no effort to contradict the filthy, cross-burning nativist. Weiner also mentioned the importance of a strong native culture in the inclucation of happiness, a position which Wilkinson has, on this blog, denounced as veiled racism.

What was the matter? Didn't you feel like debating the gentleman?

p.s. "slightly liberalized immigration regime"

What happened to the dream of totally unindered travel of peoples, labour moving toward its highest value and all that jazz?

Stuart,

Well, Steve said that Wilkinson "seldom" includes any numbers in his discussions of immigration. He was actually being quite charitable: substituing "never" would have increased the sentence's accuracy (as a quick skim of the post will verify).

Didn't you find the appending of those two final sentences incongruous with the piece at large? A call for concrete, empirical investigation of an issue the rest of the piece had treated at the loftiest level of philosophical abstraction? Quite aesthetically displeasing, no...

Mr. Donald,

As someone in another thread noted, just because they wouldn't have the franchise wouldn't mean they couldn't kick up a fuss. Countries with notably high rates of immigration usually manage it through authoritarian policing and Draconian punishment(Dubai, Singapore).

WW,

The reason people have affection for the nation-states in which they live is because of this funny little thing called the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia which concluded it. I could explain all that to you, but I'm sure a good monograph or two has been written on the subject.

Are you going to address the point, raised by both Moldbug and TGGP, that the best way to turn the United States into a chauvinistic, communitarian wasteland would be to import millions more unassimilable peasants? Those fellows make the rubes you grew up with in Nebraska look like Vladimir Nabokov.

I would think a necessary precursor for the borderless world you propose would be convincing everyone on earth of the merits of secular cosmopolitanism. So, learn Spanish, go forth, and evangelize. Until you are successful, quit trying to shame and browbeat your fellow citizens into an act of collective suicide.

Ah, so Wilkinson's aesthetic preferences run the entire gamut, from the inhuman sterility of Modernist architecture to the mindless wankery of Postmodern performance art...

I guess it's true what they say: even at Northern Iowa University, you can't teach taste.

Will,

I think I can elucidate the reasons for Mr. Grace's contempt: there is nothing more loathsome than a sanctimonious libertine, that is someone who loudly and smugly proclaims his own inerrant moral sense (founded primarily on only the most faddish and meretricious of notions) while vigorously drilling away at the foundations of true morality (religion, civil society, the "little platoons").

It's an unvarnished delight to see two of my favourite bloggers (Moldbug and KMG) take you to the woodshed. If Daniel Larison joins in, I may have to pop that good bottle of champagne I was saving for my son's 21st.

Given the amount of plugging Ms. Howley gets here, it seems like being the wife of a "big man" has the same practical advantage in the libertarian blogosphere as it does in SE Asia, eh?

But of course, I kid.

Well, you'd have to specify what "empirical evidence" you're talking about. To my knowledge, no one has suggested that massive low-skill, Latin American immigration is conducive to social cohesion (Prof. Putnam's recent study says precisely the opposite) and the arguments that illegal immigrants committ crime at rates lower than the American average are highly dubious. If cultural continuity has "racial elements", by all means "unpack" it; don't jump immediately to the slur.

The "racism" charged isn't disliked because it "stings"; it's application is resented because, in modern-day America, it has the same relationship to reasoned debate as the atomic bomb has to conventional warfare. It is an ad hominem attack, which bypasses the merits of the interlocutor's arguments and proclaims to an audience "I have looked into my opponent's soul, perfectly understood his motivations, and have decided that he is beyond the pale of civilised discourse; under no circumstances should anything he says be considered".

Because this slur tends to be unanswearble, has enormous deterrent effect (no one wants to be labelled a racist) and helps the user to convince himself that he is battling unadulterated evil rather than engaging in reasoned discourse, it takes some discipline and no small amount of good faith not to engage it at any and all opportunities. Both these qualities are in short supply.

Will,

That's fine. Some libertarians speak as though the right to contract with whomever whenever were some sort of fundamental, inalienable right which ought to trump all other interests.

The fact is, economic concerns are but one-tenth of the argument against immigration. The failure to grapple with externalities (in terms of crime, population density, social cohesion, cultural continuity, etc.) ensures that libertarians absent themselves from 90% of the debate.

To the extent that these concerns are addressed by libertarians, they usually adopt Alphie's technique: the mindless and facile slur of "racism".

Just a quick question, Will. Your pro-migration argument seems premised on the notion that people have some sort of absolute (natural) right to freely contract which is unjustifiably impinged upon by the various gov'ts. Would you argue that an American company ought to be permitted, for example, to sell weapons to a foreign nation with which the United States was at war?