13 Comments

I have always disagreed with the conservative arguments that immigrants are the least law-abiding citizens which is why there should be tighter control of the borders. But I am unable to defend my libertarian view in light of headlines like this:

"How Sweden is Destroyed by the Immigration Crisis"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUw4cs2MHwc

Expand full comment

I think we are all learning in real time that mass migration, large Numbers coming over short time scales, plus alienness, doesn't work.

In most Western nations we now see ethnic clusters not assimilating in the second or third generations. Host nations are quite entitled to react to ethnic mafias who will not assimilate into the culture.

Expand full comment

Libertarians don't have to posit spherical cows, but the ideals would work a lot better if everyone on earth were a White Anglo Saxon Protestant with an early-20th-century work ethic.

Expand full comment

Quite.

Expand full comment

I read the linked article by Thomas Sowell (published in 2011), which makes good points that Bryan doesn't address here.

The proper purpose of immigration laws and policies, Thomas says, is to serve this country's national interest -- by which he means, I take it, the collective interest of this country's current citizens. Further, he maintains that no one has a moral right to come here in violation of its legally-established limits on immigration, nor does passage of time retroactively confer any such right to violators.

"[D]octrinaire libertarians," he notes, "see the benefits of free international trade in goods and extend the same reasoning to free international movement of people. But goods do not bring a culture with them. Nor do they give birth to other goods to perpetuate that culture."

To which I would add that people also come with innate intellectual capacity largely determined by genetic combinations that will be passed along to their progeny. In view of which I submit that it's not in the best interest of our descendants to exacerbate the effect of the dysgenic birthrate skew that's firmly entrenched in this country by accepting all comers without attempting to screen out those whose ascertainable intelligence is well below the current national median. Admittedly, however, immigration restrictions won't help much in the long run if we fail to redress the birthrate skew, which is a far more politically formidable objective.

Expand full comment

In one of the final pages of Migrations and Cultures, Sowell makes a flippant anti-immigrant remark and the footnote for it was, if I recall correctly, a right-wing alarmist anti-immigrant book. So his attitudes on this go back to at least 1996.

Expand full comment

"I’m just starting my next book, Poverty: Who To Blame. But when the book finally comes out, you should definitely expect Sowell’s wise words contained therein."

If there are wise words contained therein then you must mean from the recent sober-minded Sowell & not the dreamy 80's Sowell, glimpsing through the windshield the fleeting figures in the passing fields.

Expand full comment

If memory serves, Mark Steyn said something like: 1) open immigration 2) multiculturalism 3) large welfare state, pick any 2. I suspect Sowell has sympathy for that argument.

Expand full comment

With age comes wisdom (and evolution of youth's fantasies). Hang in there, Bryan, it'll come...

Expand full comment

In researching your book on the Poverty, I would recommend Mathew Desmond's "Poverty by America". This book was recommend to me by Dr. Donna Beegle, https://www.combarriers.com/node/176, who grew up in poverty and has written "See Poverty; Be the difference". I look forward a book on poverty written from an economist's mindset.

Expand full comment

All cows eat grass, but not all grass is eaten by cows.

Expand full comment

When I was a boy cows ate all the grass. You couldn't even find any grass. Now they're lazy. Won't even eat it. I was walking downtown the other day. I saw one. Up to his neck in grass. He was drinking a white claw. I said, "what about the grass?" he lowered his sunglasses and looked at me. Said "what fu*king grass, old man?"

Expand full comment

Exactly my experience living in Tucson for 20+ years.

However, the coruptive corrosiveness of our modern society means the longer immigrants are here the more Americanized they become.

I had more than a few older Mexican men (probably illegals) say that when they got to America all they wanted to do was work but that their US born grandkids didn't.

Expand full comment