I’m just not convinced that the argument—“it’s even worse for them back home”—answers the risk to Western civilization at large of these toxic anti-liberal doctrines. Data show a rising approval of Sharia law in the UK, and with the erosion of many liberal values around freedom of expression, it’s not difficult to understand the concerns of many that the UK is losing the battle to preserve Western values.
I would prefer to reduce poverty and expand liberal values *everywhere*, but I don’t think immigration alone is a fulcrum or a lever strong enough to overcome the constraints on liberty and the economic failures “back home.”
There are some selfish reasons to not want extreme poverty or cultural backwardness in one’s own backyard. Few Americans (even retirees) want to move to rural India even though their dollars would buy a lot more there.
It seems more likely that one would spend fewer dollars buying less, because there is less to buy and the quality is lower. In other words, it may have a lower "cost of living" but only because the standard of living is lower too. Whether that is the case and whether it is the right tradeoff is of course up to each individual to decide.
But I don't see evidence that standard of living for existing residents declines due to immigration per se, even though average income technically declines.
Standards of living DEFINITELY decline for many residents. Anyone whose relative is killed by an immigrant murderer or drunk driver, or whose small town becomes a holding site for hundreds of young foreign men, or whose property value is dramatically lowered by an influx of expatriates, has seen their overall quality of life or standard of living lowered by immigration. Is standard of living lowered OVERALL? I'm sure it depends on the individual, community, country in question. That's basically an unanswerable question in the aggregate. There are simply too many factors, most of them unmeasurable.
The only question that should matter in a democracy is whether the voting citizens of a country want to admit newcomers. Of course, that is a question which is almost completely ignored in most Western countries these days.
What you are saying is that standard of living goes down when violent crime rises which is self evident. But this is not the same as saying the standard of living goes down due to immigration.
Immigration leads to more violent crime. It’s totally inevitable. Add any group of any size (even a few hundred) and you’ll get more violent crime in a country.
I’m saying that immigration will negatively affect the standard of living for SOME natives negatively.
The search engines are giving me top results that say otherwise (per capita). Can you point me to the evidence that what you say is really true? Or are you just referring to absolute amounts of crime, not per-capita?
If it's just "quality of life will decline for some, therefore the government has a right to regulate it" then that proves way too much. There's hardly anything the government might not have total control over with that sort of thinking.
I’m not referring to per capita. The government has the inherent right to control its borders, for any reason and for any end. Let’s say your daughter was raped by an illegal immigrant, or your community fabric degraded, or your neighborhood impoverished. How would knowing the average figures across 330 million people change your attitude? For things like individual opinion, standard of living, quality of life, priorities, etc, any attempt to put a number on them is going to be highly imprecise - probably worthless.
There’s a better way: the citizens of the country all express their own values and priorities at the ballot box. That smooths out economic inequalities and guides policymaking at least as good as technocracy. I would say that some communities are enriched by immigration and some ruined. Some classes are empowered and some disempowered. I suspect that it’s the working classes and poor communities that pay the heaviest cost of mass migration, which is an argument against it in a Rawlsian framework. If 1 million already-prosperous people are made better off by a policy and 1 million poorer people are made yet still poorer and less safe, is it a good policy?
You said that residents of a country don’t suffer lower standards of living due to immigration, but they do. Millions do, certainly. They’re not voting against immigration because of GDP or national home price indexes or other abstraction. They don’t like what it’s doing to their communities. If the rich and the educated were more attentive to THESE realities I think we’d have a healthier and a better run country. But that would require the rich and the educated to actually be in contact with the working class, which is less of a reality every day.
All people and cultures are neither the same, nor equal. Citizens are entitled to control borders, incl. cultures/religions/levels of education-employability-criminality. If you import the 3rd world, you become the 3rd world ($$$$, social cohesion, anti-semitism, violence/sexual offences). Those of us who served in the military didn't do so to then allow left-wingers to import the same types of people we were fighting in their home countries.
The Assimilation Myth: Across the world, ethnic socioeconomic disparities are here to stay. Do immigrants generally rapidly assimilate in human capital? The answer is a clear no. This observation is well-captured by the title of a 2011 article analyzing PISA data: “Why do the results of immigrant students depend so much on their country of origin and so little on their country of destination?” But it’s not just first-generation immigrants. It’s also their descendants. There is a very strong relationship between parents’ native country-of-origin scores and second-generation immigrant scores. That is, second-generation immigrants tend to score much more similar to people in their parents’ country-of-origin, and not like the country they were actually born and raised in. In short, human capital persists substantially across borders. This analysis shows the persitence of inferior performance in economic performance, crime and culture: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-assimilation-myth
Not all immigrants contribute equally. Economically, MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey) immigrants usually remain net negative lifetime contributors, as evidenced in Denmark’s 2018 data showing a 31bn kroner drain from non-Western immigrants, with Muslims accounting for 77% of this cost:
Non-Western immigrants overall also tend to be net negative due to higher welfare dependency and lower employment rates. Beyond economics, cultural differences exacerbate integration challenges. MENAPT immigrants often bring values clashing with Western norms, including higher propensities for crime, violence and religious conservatism, which hinder social cohesion. Their lower workforce participation, partly due to cultural attitudes toward work, compounds economic burdens. While exceptions exist, the broader trend suggests non-Western immigrants, particularly from MENAPT regions, struggle to align with host countries’ cultural and economic expectations, necessitating stricter immigration controls to preserve societal stability and welfare systems, as Denmark’s policies demonstrate.
In summary, stringent immigration policies reflect growing concerns about the economic and cultural impact of non-Western immigrants, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. Non-Western immigrants, especially from 24 Muslim countries, cost Denmark 31bn kroner ($4.9bn) annually, while Western immigrants contributed positively. Cultural concerns, particularly around Muslim values on democracy and gender roles, fuel Denmark’s push for homogeneity, rooted in historical nationalism post-1864.
No one voted for the status quo. Many of us would like to go further than Denmark, and to impose mass forced remigration.
Is there a tension between this argument and your other more general, maximally open borders argument? Perhaps Muslim women are less oppressed in the EU because the majority population is still western.
I find this argument (1) convincing and (2) difficult to stick in my brain! Subjectively, there's something real, raw, and WRONG when I imagine this sort of oppression happening in eg Belgium, while (again, subjectively, in my stupid brain) it seems fine and natural when I imagine it happening in eg Saudi Arabia. Thank you for helping me catch a glitch in my cognition!
This argument might be true in a country where the populace doesn't have voting rights and the ability to change laws for all other people. So it is in your interest to make sure the citizenry is tolerant of your culture and lifestyle
Less harder in Saudi. Often immigrants in the western world are more radicalized than people in their original countries. No doubt they form enclaves with their own rules often above State rules: a State within a State
A mix of reaction to values they don’t feel comfortable about and quality of immigrants. It seems to me quite normal for a first generation but then it should fade if people integrate.
In the last 5-7 years Saudi has caught up a lot of ground, becoming a much more modern country with a stronger legal framework protecting women and children in a marriage / divorce
I would prefer that women be genitally mutilated, slaves be lashed, children be sodomized, and blasphemers to Islam be beheaded, in other and lesser countries, thank you very much for asking.
The recent Jew-hunting on American boulevards, and the excuse-making if not cheering it has enjoyed from leading cultural institutions, has made it abundantly and redundantly clear beyond peradventure that we have enjoyed more than sufficient cultural influence from Muslim countries.
I care more about my family, and then my friends, and then my community, than I do about others. If you have a different perspective than you might be a hypocrite, you might be so privileged that these questions have become pleasant abstractions for you, or you might be ideologically captured. Perhaps there's a fourth option, but I can't imagine what it might be. I would absolutely prefer that women be oppressed outside my country more than inside it. It's MY country. It's the group of people to whom I belong and which I can influence. If you care about the people elsewhere then move there and 'help' them. Don't be surprised if they're not exceedingly grateful though.
I am not interested in babysitting backwards cultures. I'm sure they would benefit from proximity to Europeans, but I frankly don't care. Europeans deserve to benefit from the kind of environment only Europeans can create, Third Worlders do not. They are also incorrigibly ungrateful for the sacrifices Europeans have to make for their presence. All they do is lobby for their own ethnic interests and try to increase their numbers.
What we made in Europe is not as strong as we thought before 2015, it is something that must be protected to keep it beautiful as it is. It is like polyamory, I would prefer to have less risk to destroy or reduce what I have than trying to maximize external utility of people who didn't contribute to the creation of that beautiful thing in the first place. We could give IMF loans and interfere in their elections to increase liberty but they should all stay outside of Europe until they are ready to live in it.
Other countries. If they were oppressed there they might move here. So more woman per man. But only the good looking ones. The ugly ones shouldn't be oppressed so they stay home.
The emigration of Moslem men to Western countries can sometimes lead to non-Moslem women being oppressed - from pre-teens in Rotherham, UK to octogenarians in Boulder, Colorado.
This again seems like an argument against the concept of statehood.
To ensure that nobody is stuck in a worse place, everybody (in the world) would need to be granted the freedom to move to any place they consider to be a better place. If anyone can move anywhere anytime based on their own desires, what would “country” even mean?
We can not control Saudia Arabia, but we can control our own nations. Thus our moral priority is to improve the conditions of the people who belong here, even at the cost of reducing the amount of people whom we will add to "people who belong here"; and only when that is taken care of, to deign to consider the plights of faraway foreigners.
I’m just not convinced that the argument—“it’s even worse for them back home”—answers the risk to Western civilization at large of these toxic anti-liberal doctrines. Data show a rising approval of Sharia law in the UK, and with the erosion of many liberal values around freedom of expression, it’s not difficult to understand the concerns of many that the UK is losing the battle to preserve Western values.
I would prefer to reduce poverty and expand liberal values *everywhere*, but I don’t think immigration alone is a fulcrum or a lever strong enough to overcome the constraints on liberty and the economic failures “back home.”
There are some selfish reasons to not want extreme poverty or cultural backwardness in one’s own backyard. Few Americans (even retirees) want to move to rural India even though their dollars would buy a lot more there.
It seems more likely that one would spend fewer dollars buying less, because there is less to buy and the quality is lower. In other words, it may have a lower "cost of living" but only because the standard of living is lower too. Whether that is the case and whether it is the right tradeoff is of course up to each individual to decide.
But I don't see evidence that standard of living for existing residents declines due to immigration per se, even though average income technically declines.
Standards of living DEFINITELY decline for many residents. Anyone whose relative is killed by an immigrant murderer or drunk driver, or whose small town becomes a holding site for hundreds of young foreign men, or whose property value is dramatically lowered by an influx of expatriates, has seen their overall quality of life or standard of living lowered by immigration. Is standard of living lowered OVERALL? I'm sure it depends on the individual, community, country in question. That's basically an unanswerable question in the aggregate. There are simply too many factors, most of them unmeasurable.
The only question that should matter in a democracy is whether the voting citizens of a country want to admit newcomers. Of course, that is a question which is almost completely ignored in most Western countries these days.
What you are saying is that standard of living goes down when violent crime rises which is self evident. But this is not the same as saying the standard of living goes down due to immigration.
Immigration leads to more violent crime. It’s totally inevitable. Add any group of any size (even a few hundred) and you’ll get more violent crime in a country.
I’m saying that immigration will negatively affect the standard of living for SOME natives negatively.
The search engines are giving me top results that say otherwise (per capita). Can you point me to the evidence that what you say is really true? Or are you just referring to absolute amounts of crime, not per-capita?
If it's just "quality of life will decline for some, therefore the government has a right to regulate it" then that proves way too much. There's hardly anything the government might not have total control over with that sort of thinking.
I’m not referring to per capita. The government has the inherent right to control its borders, for any reason and for any end. Let’s say your daughter was raped by an illegal immigrant, or your community fabric degraded, or your neighborhood impoverished. How would knowing the average figures across 330 million people change your attitude? For things like individual opinion, standard of living, quality of life, priorities, etc, any attempt to put a number on them is going to be highly imprecise - probably worthless.
There’s a better way: the citizens of the country all express their own values and priorities at the ballot box. That smooths out economic inequalities and guides policymaking at least as good as technocracy. I would say that some communities are enriched by immigration and some ruined. Some classes are empowered and some disempowered. I suspect that it’s the working classes and poor communities that pay the heaviest cost of mass migration, which is an argument against it in a Rawlsian framework. If 1 million already-prosperous people are made better off by a policy and 1 million poorer people are made yet still poorer and less safe, is it a good policy?
You said that residents of a country don’t suffer lower standards of living due to immigration, but they do. Millions do, certainly. They’re not voting against immigration because of GDP or national home price indexes or other abstraction. They don’t like what it’s doing to their communities. If the rich and the educated were more attentive to THESE realities I think we’d have a healthier and a better run country. But that would require the rich and the educated to actually be in contact with the working class, which is less of a reality every day.
All people and cultures are neither the same, nor equal. Citizens are entitled to control borders, incl. cultures/religions/levels of education-employability-criminality. If you import the 3rd world, you become the 3rd world ($$$$, social cohesion, anti-semitism, violence/sexual offences). Those of us who served in the military didn't do so to then allow left-wingers to import the same types of people we were fighting in their home countries.
See detailed arguments here: https://controlc.com/8a8fe841
Exceprts:
The South Africanization of America is Just Beginning, 20 May 2025, https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/the-south-africanization-of-america-f4f.
The Assimilation Myth: Across the world, ethnic socioeconomic disparities are here to stay. Do immigrants generally rapidly assimilate in human capital? The answer is a clear no. This observation is well-captured by the title of a 2011 article analyzing PISA data: “Why do the results of immigrant students depend so much on their country of origin and so little on their country of destination?” But it’s not just first-generation immigrants. It’s also their descendants. There is a very strong relationship between parents’ native country-of-origin scores and second-generation immigrant scores. That is, second-generation immigrants tend to score much more similar to people in their parents’ country-of-origin, and not like the country they were actually born and raised in. In short, human capital persists substantially across borders. This analysis shows the persitence of inferior performance in economic performance, crime and culture: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-assimilation-myth
Not all immigrants contribute equally. Economically, MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Turkey) immigrants usually remain net negative lifetime contributors, as evidenced in Denmark’s 2018 data showing a 31bn kroner drain from non-Western immigrants, with Muslims accounting for 77% of this cost:
- Economist 2021 article: https://archive.is/20250515161727/https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-turned-against-immigration#selection-1119.0-1313.1
- A wider collection of analyses: https://controlc.com/8a8fe841 and https://controlc.com/c4fa8aba
Non-Western immigrants overall also tend to be net negative due to higher welfare dependency and lower employment rates. Beyond economics, cultural differences exacerbate integration challenges. MENAPT immigrants often bring values clashing with Western norms, including higher propensities for crime, violence and religious conservatism, which hinder social cohesion. Their lower workforce participation, partly due to cultural attitudes toward work, compounds economic burdens. While exceptions exist, the broader trend suggests non-Western immigrants, particularly from MENAPT regions, struggle to align with host countries’ cultural and economic expectations, necessitating stricter immigration controls to preserve societal stability and welfare systems, as Denmark’s policies demonstrate.
In summary, stringent immigration policies reflect growing concerns about the economic and cultural impact of non-Western immigrants, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. Non-Western immigrants, especially from 24 Muslim countries, cost Denmark 31bn kroner ($4.9bn) annually, while Western immigrants contributed positively. Cultural concerns, particularly around Muslim values on democracy and gender roles, fuel Denmark’s push for homogeneity, rooted in historical nationalism post-1864.
No one voted for the status quo. Many of us would like to go further than Denmark, and to impose mass forced remigration.
Is there a tension between this argument and your other more general, maximally open borders argument? Perhaps Muslim women are less oppressed in the EU because the majority population is still western.
I find this argument (1) convincing and (2) difficult to stick in my brain! Subjectively, there's something real, raw, and WRONG when I imagine this sort of oppression happening in eg Belgium, while (again, subjectively, in my stupid brain) it seems fine and natural when I imagine it happening in eg Saudi Arabia. Thank you for helping me catch a glitch in my cognition!
This argument might be true in a country where the populace doesn't have voting rights and the ability to change laws for all other people. So it is in your interest to make sure the citizenry is tolerant of your culture and lifestyle
Less harder in Saudi. Often immigrants in the western world are more radicalized than people in their original countries. No doubt they form enclaves with their own rules often above State rules: a State within a State
>Often immigrants in the western world are more radicalized than people in their original countries.
Why would this be the case?
A mix of reaction to values they don’t feel comfortable about and quality of immigrants. It seems to me quite normal for a first generation but then it should fade if people integrate.
Is that true? Might be a good point
In the last 5-7 years Saudi has caught up a lot of ground, becoming a much more modern country with a stronger legal framework protecting women and children in a marriage / divorce
I would prefer that women be genitally mutilated, slaves be lashed, children be sodomized, and blasphemers to Islam be beheaded, in other and lesser countries, thank you very much for asking.
The recent Jew-hunting on American boulevards, and the excuse-making if not cheering it has enjoyed from leading cultural institutions, has made it abundantly and redundantly clear beyond peradventure that we have enjoyed more than sufficient cultural influence from Muslim countries.
What we have ever needed is less such influence.
I care more about my family, and then my friends, and then my community, than I do about others. If you have a different perspective than you might be a hypocrite, you might be so privileged that these questions have become pleasant abstractions for you, or you might be ideologically captured. Perhaps there's a fourth option, but I can't imagine what it might be. I would absolutely prefer that women be oppressed outside my country more than inside it. It's MY country. It's the group of people to whom I belong and which I can influence. If you care about the people elsewhere then move there and 'help' them. Don't be surprised if they're not exceedingly grateful though.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/ordo-amoris-inverted
I am not interested in babysitting backwards cultures. I'm sure they would benefit from proximity to Europeans, but I frankly don't care. Europeans deserve to benefit from the kind of environment only Europeans can create, Third Worlders do not. They are also incorrigibly ungrateful for the sacrifices Europeans have to make for their presence. All they do is lobby for their own ethnic interests and try to increase their numbers.
What we made in Europe is not as strong as we thought before 2015, it is something that must be protected to keep it beautiful as it is. It is like polyamory, I would prefer to have less risk to destroy or reduce what I have than trying to maximize external utility of people who didn't contribute to the creation of that beautiful thing in the first place. We could give IMF loans and interfere in their elections to increase liberty but they should all stay outside of Europe until they are ready to live in it.
open borders for women only sounds like a great start
Other countries. If they were oppressed there they might move here. So more woman per man. But only the good looking ones. The ugly ones shouldn't be oppressed so they stay home.
The emigration of Moslem men to Western countries can sometimes lead to non-Moslem women being oppressed - from pre-teens in Rotherham, UK to octogenarians in Boulder, Colorado.
This again seems like an argument against the concept of statehood.
To ensure that nobody is stuck in a worse place, everybody (in the world) would need to be granted the freedom to move to any place they consider to be a better place. If anyone can move anywhere anytime based on their own desires, what would “country” even mean?
We can not control Saudia Arabia, but we can control our own nations. Thus our moral priority is to improve the conditions of the people who belong here, even at the cost of reducing the amount of people whom we will add to "people who belong here"; and only when that is taken care of, to deign to consider the plights of faraway foreigners.