Let you be the first to say.

America, or in this case Italy, is already great, Ogged.

I resent the idea that "working folks" are somehow more insulated from things than I am almost as much as I resent the idea that left-of-center politics are suspiciously anti-patriotic until proven otherwise.

Really there's no answer. For every European country, immigration is now going to be the primary political issue. And the parties of non-immigrants are going to defeat the parties of immigrants, until every party agrees on a consensus to not let in any more immigrants. How else could this end? Other than climate change becoming the primary political issue faster than we expect.

You see a fair bit of that locally. I'm not going to walk around acting like I'm a fucking guest here because I program computers instead of making steel.

What alternative is there? They don't want them there because they don't like a bunch foreigners moving in. The choices are a) let them stay, or b) kick them out. It's not an issue that lends itself to nuance.

And the parties of non-immigrants are going to defeat the parties of immigrants, until every party agrees on a consensus to not let in any more immigrants. How else could this end?

Yes. I except to see that.

except s/b expect.

Hmm usually I see more hostility from the commenters when someone tries to make a point like that about America.

6: Special cities for immigrants/refugees, operated along the lines of the charter cities proposal, but maybe within the country's borders.
Increased local authority to regulate who moves in, so that towns that like foreigners can welcome them without forcing towns that dislike them to do the same.
Aggressively proactive acculturation programs.
Hereditary citizenship only, so that allowing a lot of foreigners in doesn't mean consenting to be ruled by them.

This might be illegal under the EU and US constitutions, but there are policy alternatives aside from "let them in" and "keep them out."

Isn't "Suck it up, honky" the most broadly supported policy prescription of social media-enabled progressivism?

And yes, I would like a cookie.

I bought girl scout cookies this weekend. I wanted to support their high levels of social inclusion plus their combination of chocolate, sugar, and peanut butter.

Fuck you Moby. Not even three hours ago I stood before a wide deep shelf of cookies, prevaricated, and eventually declined, in the interests of healthcare. And now my small guttering flame of virtue is swamped in a chocolatey sea of envy.

The trick is to have a small child making the sales pitch.

Make all honkies attend lengthy HR sessions on microaggressions.

10: Yow. Those are some excitingly dystopian proposals. We could let immigrants/refugees leave their pens during daylight hours if they wore tracking devices, maybe?

There's a lot of freaking out and tut-tutting about the rise of the far right here and in Europe, but what exactly is the counter-proposal on offer by the resident liberal governments?

Query "liberal". It's not like the previously existing regimes in Poland or Hungary were particularly economically lefty or socially liberal. Nor is Rutte in the Netherlands or Merkel in Germany, by European standards, except I guess in the latter case on immigration. Hollande I'll give you, I guess, but the NF had a strong showing under Sarkozy too.

Point being, much of the rise of the far right has been harnessing anger at austerity and unemployment by rhetorically and otherwise targeting immigrants and the EU. For the most part, the austerity push was a conservative one.

NF s/b FN.

Honestly, I think you launch a well-funded PSA campaign on American Values = Melting Pot, in conjunction with well-funded schools and social services both for the honkies and the incoming refuges so that everyone feels taken care of.

Let's all go back to bed!

Yow. Those are some excitingly dystopian proposals.

I immediately thought of Maquiladoras (which are on the opposite side of the border -- foreign capital and local workers -- but share some of the dystopian aspects).

Isn't the plan to let the Fox News Geezers die off, with immigrant friendlier younger folks stepping up to take their places?

Meanwhile, we count on education and pop culture to resolve the language and religion issues.

I think you launch a well-funded PSA campaign on American Values = Melting Pot

The challenge is that this doesn't match the lived experience of baby boomers (a couple of years ago I was shocked to realize just how low the percentage of foreign born people in the county was prior to immigration changes in the 70s -- changes that began under Johnson, but I don't think the big change in numbers happened in the 70s)

20: Well, right -- what makes Benquo's ideas quite so exciting is the level of policing you'd need to keep immigrants/refugees penned in their allowed areas. We do some of this now, but there'd have to be a whole lot of policing everyplace, checking people's papers to make sure they were real Americans rather than outsiders invading localities that wanted them excluded. Internal border controls and all that sort of thing.

China has of course solved this problem already, and might just be willing to license the solution.

In other parts of Xinjiang, the government has set up political re-education centers, where Uighurs who have managed to travel abroad are detained upon reentry -- sometimes for months -- and forced to watch propaganda videos and take classes in Mandarin language and Chinese identity before being released. At a nearby coffee shop, a young Uighur woman says police now stop residents on the street and force them to hand over their phones. Then they plug them into a computer and force residents to download a government app. "The app automatically checks to see if other apps on your phone are safe," she says, meaning permitted by the government. "If not, it'll ask you to delete them. It'll also detect videos about terrorism and things like that. Some apps, like the camera apps that girls like that make you prettier, aren't allowed." As she speaks, the café manager interrupts, quietly speaking to the woman in Uighur. She nods her head and adds, "don't get me wrong -- this is all for our own safety."

The other problem, at least in PA, is that the areas that need immigrants tend to be stocked full of the sort of people who least want them around.

The challenge is that this doesn't match the lived experience of baby boomers (a couple of years ago I was shocked to realize just how low the percentage of foreign born people in the county was prior to immigration changes in the 70s

So it only tracks the last 50 years of their life, not the decade or two before that?

what makes Benquo's ideas quite so exciting is the level of policing you'd need to keep immigrants/refugees penned in their allowed areas.

Yes, that would be a big difference. But I'm sure it isn't unprecedented -- though the first thing that comes to mind is the Mariana Island scandal which isn't all that comparable.

So it only tracks the last 50 years of their life, not the decade or two before that?

Depending on where they live, yes. (As a note, here [pdf] are the figures and it really is amazing how much of an outlier 1940-1980 is. Generations before the boomers would have also grown up around a significant immigrant population (again, depending on where they lived).

Another way to put that is that the parents and grandparents of boomers were quite likely to have been immigrants.

I seem to remember some less-than-kum-ba-ya American interactions with immigrants before 1940.

I like it that "live within social democracies that provide the best level of protection for poor and working people that have been known in human history and are an American liberal's wet fream" and also "are controlled by (for Europe) right wing governments" somehow equal "precarity" insufficiently addressed by the "governing left." European don't like immigrants because many of them like their social democratic single ethnicity states, that's why this is a big issue in places like Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the end. Ogged, you are a dumbass.

The challenge is that this doesn't match the lived experience of baby boomers

Maybe we need a well funded PSA campaign encouraging native born Americans and recent immigrants to find common ground in hating the baby boomers and blaming them for everything.

29: Yes. It was pretty violent at times. I guess maybe the Slovenes ruined it for everybody?

I mean the only time in modern history immigrants were ever broadly (and even then, not very) welcomed into Western Europe was when there was such an incredible economic boom that they ran out of native workers. Just recreate Western European growth rates of the 1960s, "governing left"! You probably could if you weren't so neoliberal.

28: Yes, but my tone was sarcastic - I get that childhood imprinting is important, but I expect people to adjust over the course of 50 years.

I'm assuming that when I hit 50, I'll know everything.

The governing parties may not be offering it, really, but I think the traditional liberal-left wishlists, fully implemented, certainly could make people well-off enough not to worry about immigration (warranted or not). It's not like squaring the circle, immigration does in fact boost the total economy.

A. Income-flattening measures - not even necessarily UBI, but higher upper-level tax rates, EITC, SNAP, and SSI would go quite a way
B. Universal health care and social services
C. Major infrastructure spending so that even low-skilled labor is in high demand, in concert with a high minimum wage, plus fiscal stimulus
D. Unemployment insurance that is actually available for everyone without a million pitfalls

There is still the issue that if a lot of people become supported by the fruits of a bustling economy that relies on fewer and fewer people you get the more existential issue of people's need for relevance, not just existence. My (C) above would go some way toward that, but of course infrastructure doesn't need ditch-diggers these days so there's a limit. But that's longer-term and we can better concentrate on it when eating isn't an issue for anyone.

plus fiscal stimulus (stray clause I meant to edit out)

All of the things in 37 are absolutely great and necessary, but they are also all available in Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Holland, France, all Western European countries with huge, politics-altering tensions over immigrants, which suggests that they won't be political "solutions" to this particular problem. The only solution is for cosmopolitan parties to fight for both (workable) inclusion of immigrants and (workable) social democracy, persuade people, and win. There's no magic economic or social policy button that's going to do the trick for you, you actually have to do the politics. Fortunately
In all of those countries and the US there is also a substantial political bloc in favor of cosmopolitanism.

Now we'll never know what we're fortunate about.

9: Halford comes through for you in 31, roger. I'll help you out a bit further:

The utter failure of the governing left to offer solutions commensurate with the problem is goddamn culpable.

I think this really shows how brainwashed even smart people are by our shitty media. Of course plenty of Democrats are out there with solutions commensurate to the economic problems associated with immigration.

Any time a candidate breaks through the media-enforced silence on the actual issues, the go-to move is to then blame the candidate for being "wonky" or "uncharismatic" or "overprepared" or whatever.

Obamacare (to pick the obvious example) was an excellent policy choice that did a lot to mitigate "economic precarity." It would have been better still had the racists banded together to get guys like, say, Joe Lieberman or John McCain the fuck out of office.

When you have to choose between economic precarity with more racism and economic security with less racism, many will choose the former. That's democracy.

The other problem, at least in PA, is that the areas that need immigrants tend to be stocked full of the sort of people who least want them around.

The experience with the Roma in California*, PA is heartening. They had a rough start, but once they learned some local norms and the locals actually interacted with the newcomers, it seemed like people mostly figured it out, despite meddling by national right wing media jackasses. I think there were a few dozen of them, which is substantial to a small town. But then again, if the Roma are read as white that probably makes it easier; very different from the response to the much larger Hispanic migration into the eastern part of the state.

* I recently went through Oklahoma, PA--disappointed we don't have a state university there.

39: True. Isn't there also more social, legal, geographic, and other informal exclusion of immigrants in Europe, though? I wonder if our birthright citizenship, higher baseline diversity, etc. might mean European policies if implemented in the US would work better for social cohesion. I don't know exactly what Europe needs to do.

I'm not really sure I recognise the characterisation of Europe. I think people are much more accepting of immigration now than they were in the 60s, the supposed high water mark of 34. And Europe, in terms of its baseline population -- if you mean the big North Western European countries -- isn't much less 'immigrant' then the US. And immigration rates in much of Europe aren't wildly different from the US either.

39: Right. Right. Right. The solution is to win. The idea that liberals have failed to fight for the working man and must apologize and try something new is just bullshit.

Thomas Frank, in his less boneheaded moments, says white working folks are voting against their interests. That's still stupid, but there's a nugget of truth in it: those white folks are, in fact, voting against their economic interests.

(In Frank's more boneheaded moments, he makes an argument similar to ogged's.)

Trump voters are often patriots. They don't care if they take an economic hit if by doing so they can Make America Great Again.

I mean the only time in modern history immigrants were ever broadly (and even then, not very) welcomed into Western Europe was when there was such an incredible economic boom that they ran out of native workers.

And from an economic point of view this has continued to be the case in the sense that no country in Europe that I can think of, and least of all Italy has a replacement level birth rate. There are of course various possible workarounds to this, such as accelerating the automation of everything that can be automated (but right wing populists tend to be Luddite because they want to defend existing forms of work); or coming in hard with the Kinder, Küche, Kirche ideology (but at present women are needed in the workforce and you can't suspend the work they do while they're barefoot and pregnant for a generation or more to reverse the population trend); or you can follow Benquo's delightful suggestions in 10, which aren't at all unimaginable in terms of the conditions that have been placed on overseas labour in some parts of Europe at one time or another: the same only more so.

But the fact is that you either need to facilitate immigration in some form or ban contraception if you want to continue to run the sort of economies that most Europeans are used to. My money follows Benquo's.

There are of course various possible workarounds to this...

Laydeez.

Aren't there settings on the dial between "kick them all out" and "let everybody in"?

Are there differences between support for legal immigration and illegal immigration? Europe seems very harsh on illegal immigrants, but many Europeans seem almost as unhappy about legal immigrants.

Aren't people in Europe who are against immigration at least as unhappy about immigration from (some) other EU countries as they are about immigration from countries like Syria and Libya?

Isn't the immigration fight very different in the US versus the EU? (For example, what is the percentage of illegal immigrants in each? One hears from Europe about their populists complaining that their governments are letting in and presumably legalizing too many immigrants.

How strong is the support in Europe for open borders? Same for the US; I think I may read too many sites that take open borders as a given, on both left and right. Polls don't show that position as popular.

How strong is the support in Europe for the "no you don't have to assimilate" position? That's another position popular in some parts of the left here. I don't know how widespread it is. Again, my blogroll may be too biased in that direction.

As for climate change, once the seas rise a little more, today's migrant crisis (which is partly caused by a hotter, drier climate in the Middle East) is going to look like a walk in the park.

45.last: Maybe, but it sure looks to me like they're trying to make sure Americans who aren't them take the economic hit (e.g. cut all social welfare programs except Medicare and Social Security, tax plans crafted to increase taxes on blue states while cutting it for red states).

44 - yes, good point. (Many) European governments were more openly pro-immigrant (or pro-guestworker) in the 1960s, and the purported "economic" argument was even nore obviously bullshit since general growth rates were through the roof, but general pro-cosmopolitanism has increased a lot since then, and will probably continue to do so. That's the political coalition to build on and it's silly to pretend that it doesn't exist.

46 - also a good point, Europe, I think, has no choice but to accept some form of controlled immigration or to run into huge problems.

In terms of Italy specifically, why the country has been such a disaster since 1990 when it wasn't a disaster before then is an interesting question that I don't really know the answer to (I do know that the answer isn't the "governing left" aka proto-Trump Berlusconi) or immigrants. There's a new book I saw somewhere that looked interesting.

23: Those are all variants of things already being implemented in most countries on various scales. I also meant them as disjoint proposals; they aren't a coherent program. For instance, strong cultural standards for citizenship / permanent residency on the national level would be much less relevant if local areas were self-governing, and obviously irrelevant if citizenship were more like a property interest that could be passed to children.

Refugee camps are already a thing, but everyone pretends they're temporary, so there's little investment in governance. It seems like it should be really easy to do better if there's of long-run alignment of interests.

Countries already regulate who moves in, but that puts e.g. San Francisco in the position of contributing to the decision on who can move to rural Georgia, Poland in the position of affecting who gets to live in France, which leads to some obvious problems. Regulating who can own or rent a home seems much more tractable than regulating who can visit. It requires some bureaucracy to monitor things, but towns that don't like foreigners can probably handle figuring out whether any foreigners are living in town without involving a national police state. Anyone who's lived in a co-op has experience living in this sort of system; it's really not that dystopian.

It's really surprising to me that strong citizenship tests would seem dystopian or like they'd require a police state, I don't understand the objection enough to respond.

Hereditary citizenship only is something that many European countries have in practice right now to varying degrees. The EU undermines this a lot, which is probably part of why it's so unpopular among people who don't like foreigners, but rolling shared governance back to, say, 1995 levels doesn't seem all that terrible, and seems fairly likely to happen anyhow.

I'm tempted to say its because the rule of law in Italy sucks and its politics are a corrupt, non-accountable nightmare, but I think that was equally true before 1990 and institutionalism as an explanation for economic failure is often wrong. But obviously I don't pretend to know and maybe no one really knows why Italy has failed so much recently.

... obviously irrelevant if citizenship were more like a property interest that could be passed to children.

Now that sounds dystopian. It's a right, not a property.

Are there differences between support for legal immigration and illegal immigration? Europe seems very harsh on illegal immigrants, but many Europeans seem almost as unhappy about legal immigrants.

I have the impression that this is one of those things polls are meaningless about. In America it seems like only the most racist 10 percent of the population thinks we need to scale back on legal immigration, but every Republican and some Democrats thinks that legal immigration is great and illegal immigration is a big problem we should do something about. This combination of preferences makes little sense as a rational statement of beliefs and a lot of sense as paying lip service to being welcoming as a cover or excuse for xenophobia.

How strong is the support in Europe for open borders?... How strong is the support in Europe for the "no you don't have to assimilate" position?

These both seem too glib to be helpful. Not accusing you of anything, I'm just pointing out a problem with discussing this. "Open borders" could mean anything from hippy-dippy "we are all one" post-nation-state thinking (which I might support in a vague ethical sense, but wouldn't vote for as a policy any time soon) to making tourism slightly easier. "You should assimilate" could mean anything from "in practical terms, your daily life and earning power will be better if you do" (which I think is just a statement of fact) to "we should have an official language and religion."

By this point it's not actually credible that "the left" is culpable for not proposing solutions to these problems. There were concerted, violent government campaigns in many Western countries against people trying to organize to fix these problems, and political / info environments are systematically biased against people proposing actual solutions to problems, so this doesn't really seem like a feature of "the left."

I just disagree that the only question here is whether the borders of nation-states as currently constituted should be open or closed.

53: What exactly is the right you're referring to?

Countries already regulate who moves in, but that puts e.g. San Francisco in the position of contributing to the decision on who can move to rural Georgia...

If the majority of voters want to curtail immigration to the United States, that's something they can vote for. If done without obvious religious tests, it's not against the Constitution. I'll oppose it, but you lose some fights. But allowing rural Georgia to move in a labor force that wouldn't be allowed to leave rural Georgia and wouldn't be subject to rules created by the rest of the U.S. has a very obvious, very horrible precedent in U.S. history.

52: I suspect this is exaggerated. If we use comparatively concrete metrics like life expectancy at birth, instead of bullshit metrics like GDP, Italy's been getting better year-over-year consistently, which is better than we can say for the US.

Of course, birth rates are probably also a measure of health and freedom in some circumstances, but there are too many confounding factors there, and they're not an unambiguously *positive* measurement between countries.

56:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

51:

Special cities for immigrants/refugees, operated along the lines of the charter cities proposal, but maybe within the country's borders.

Requires internal policing of which legal residents of a country are allowed to be in what locations. Controlled internal borders and passports. Bringing up apartheid isn't meant to be inflammatory, as just identifying what the logistics of keeping some people in their permitted areas looks like.

Increased local authority to regulate who moves in, so that towns that like foreigners can welcome them without forcing towns that dislike them to do the same.

Same thing, logistically.

Aggressively proactive acculturation programs.

This is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but a lot of the obvious ones are, IMO, kind of dystopian. Regulations prohibiting usage of foreign languages? Prohibitions on culturally associated modes of dress or grooming? I'm not sure what you're thinking of along these lines that wouldn't be grim.

Hereditary citizenship only, so that allowing a lot of foreigners in doesn't mean consenting to be ruled by them.

Having a hereditary underclass, along these lines, is fairly common worldwide. I think it's a ghastly idea -- I don't want to share a country with people who are set up to be permanently disaffected and alienated from it -- but I'll agree that it's not precisely dystopian or police-state-requiring like your other ideas.

I don't think there's anything like a serious movement towards open borders anywhere in Europe or the US. In Europe and the US the furthest-left position on border control is something like the US in 1970 -- less cruel, but not nonexistent border control, readily available asylum based on a credible showing of fear of persecution, permissible family reunification, decent number but far from unlimited visas issued abroad, clear path to full citizenship once legal immigration is complete, lots of opportunities for high-human-capital immigrants (student visas, etc), birthright citizenship for children born in the new country. That's a very long way from an open border, but also a long way towards a more humane/cosmopolitan one.

57: It seems to me that if I were making a list of the top ten things wrong with the importation of slaves, "represents too liberal an immigration policy" would not make the list. Your argument would also imply, if taken seriously, that the United States should not set its own immigration policy.

There's nothing I said that matches "the United States should not set its own immigration policy." I'm saying we need to either let people in with a path toward citizenship or keep them out. I'm worried about what LB is talking about in 60.last. The idea strikes me as pure poison to a free society.

62: Anything that creates a class of people to be used for labor with limited legal rights is problematic in a way that is on a continuum with slavery (depending on the specifics, maybe quite far away from it, but it's a very reasonable connection to draw). Someone who has to work for a limited set of employers because they don't have a right to live anywhere but in a limited area? If they leave that area looking for work, the police will bring them back and punish them for it? That's a police state.

60: Refugee camps already exist in Western Europe. A proposal to govern them on a permanent basis shouldn't be compared with the alternative in which they don't exist and there's freedom of movement, it should be compared with the status quo.

I've lived in a co-op. It wasn't like living in a police state. I have friends who've lived in areas of the US where they technically had freedom of movement the police took advantage of discretionary authority to make it very, very clear that they were unwelcome. This sounded to me much more like living in a police state.

To clarify w/r/t acculturation, I mean something like, if you apply for permanent residency, you're effectively applying to citizenship school, with courses you could pass or not pass. This one doesn't seem especially workable to me for most nations, but it does seem like a conceivable middle ground between unconditionally kicking people out and unconditionally allowing them to stay.

There's also a neat feature, where you've got a class of 'foreigners' with limited legal rights, where you've now made it more practical for any bully out there to identify someone who they think is likely to be a foreigner and demand that they prove their citizenship. In the US, that sort of thing would be awfully hard on lots of people who are citizens now.

Of course, school itself is sort of a dystopian nightmare, but we do that to children, probably we should be more concerned with that.

Oh for fuck's sake.

63:

allowing rural Georgia to move in a labor force that wouldn't be allowed to leave rural Georgia and wouldn't be subject to rules created by the rest of the U.S. has a very obvious, very horrible precedent in U.S. history.

Allowing the U.S. to move in a labor force that wouldn't be allowed to leave the U.S. has a very obvious, very horrible precedent in U.S. history.

Having a hereditary underclass, along these lines, is fairly common worldwide. I think it's a ghastly idea -- I don't want to share a country with people who are set up to be permanently disaffected and alienated from it -- but I'll agree that it's not precisely dystopian or police-state-requiring like your other ideas.

Indeed, come and live in my part of the world. I still find it shocking though all too common to meet many people who were born and raised here, speak the language fluently, and even share the same religion and general ethnicity, yet are not citizens. And they never will be.

I don't think the left is responsible for the situation, that wasn't what I meant. I have in mind a future-focused culpability. Calling for more cosmopolitanism just isn't going to work. There are a lot of weird foreigners headed West, and even liberal voters are going to get nervous very quickly. Violent, racist opposition is part of what needs to be addressed; you can't just outvote it 51-49 and think it'll be fine.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the actual points of disagreement are.

69: And where are their kids going to go if they were born here but aren't citizens?

I've lived in a co-op. It wasn't like living in a police state.

And I used to own goldfish. IOW, what?

Why have an interesting conversation about the real world when we can spend our time shooting down wild implausible half-baked thought experiments? The internet, that's why.

In general it seems to me like if a country prevents people from leaving, that's one of the things that might justify a war of aggression against that country, in a saner world than this one. Preventing people from leaving is not something that's been proposed here.

Of course, it could be that no other country permits them to enter. But there's never been a mechanism for preventing that, as the events of the mid 20th Century showed. Such a mechanism would be desirable, but again, it's sketchy to compare policy proposals with an imagined better world, and not consider a comparison with the status quo.

A hereditary legally defined underclass not permitted to travel freely within the US isn't the status quo here.

72: People born in the US already have that problem!

The status quo is everybody born in the United States is a U.S. citizen. That's what I'm comparing it to. There certainly are stateless people in the world, but they aren't stateless people born in the United States.

76: We're already not permitted to travel freely. You have to show your papers to get on a plane, and if you're on a no-fly list generated by a secret, unaccountable process, too bad. You have to be licensed by the state to take most forms of convenient travel any substantial distance. This isn't just the underclass, this is everyone.

72: People born in the US already have that problem!

What do you mean?

63. Agree. It is partly the gaps between law, day-to-day practice, and rhetoric that makes the current situation nuts. A question is how does Mobyism handle illegal immigrants? What does "keep them out" or "let them in" mean in a practical sense? Limited but possibly generous legal immigration, but deportation of illegals? Amnesty for illegals already here? One can't "keep them out" without enforcement of some sort.

64. People with H1B visas are almost exactly people who have to "work for a limited set of employers" and if they are hired by someone else or quit "the police will bring them back and punish them for it" by having them deported.

78: In practice there's a lot of hypocrisy about what the rights of a citizen are. In principle there's legal remedy, but the state (or wealthy people) can make that very expensive.

You have to be licensed by the state to take most forms of convenient travel any substantial distance.

Do you mean you have to have a license to drive a car? You don't need one to ride in a car, or on a bus, or on a train.

Generally, if you're making expansive statements thinking "The very fact that this is going to confuse the people I'm talking to is proof that they haven't thought about the issue as deeply as I have?" That's not a productive way to interact with anyone.

73: A co-op is basically a neighborhood (often within the same physical structure) that's permitted to decide (with some difficult-to-enforce legal limitations) who gets to move in.

79 is exactly the kind of ratchet of diminishing rights that I want to stop by avoiding a pool of permanent guest workers (or whatever you want to call it).

And 82 doesn't actually contain any information or argument.

64. People with H1B visas are almost exactly people who have to "work for a limited set of employers" and if they are hired by someone else or quit "the police will bring them back and punish them for it" by having them deported.

And that is, in fact, fucked up. I am not defending the status quo in detail, I am pointing out that Benquo is trying to make the things that are bad about it worse.

83: I've been asked for a Government-issued photo ID when traveling by train within US borders.

84: No it's not, it's a private residence.

A condominium is a co-op that gives birth to live young instead of laying eggs.

88: A lot of people lived in my co-op who weren't me or part of my family or my flatmates. That doesn't seem like the commonsense meaning of a private residence to me.

But, what's important about the distinction?

87: That's an unanswerable argument given that there's no information about what you're talking about specifically -- who asked you, why they asked, what would have happened if you said no, and so on. We live in a police state now, nothing could be worsened about it.

On the other hand, I've ridden trains and buses interstate and no one's ever asked me for government ID.

91: Because public amenities, and employers, and places of business, are not located within private residences and unavailable to people who are excluded from them. In other words, are you high?

83, 86. People who get on no-fly lists can get off of them. Sometimes it's not easy, and it can obviously be discriminatory. If you were on the list incorrectly, you get what is called a "redress number" that you include when you book a flight.

Moby's "ratchet of diminishing rights" is a good phrase and I don't think having to show an id to get on a plane is very many teeth along that ratchet, annoying as the whole taking-a-plane process can be.

Yes. I'm not suggesting we need to stop screening before flying. I'm also not suggesting today's screening is the best we can do in terms of either fairness or efficacy.

And again, you can travel without taking a plane and without showing ID, unless you're being tailed by Inspector Javert like Benquo.

71 - first, you don't have any choice but for cosmopolitans to win elections if you want cosmopolitanism. Will they have to do this by building coalitions and running not exclusively in cosmopolitanism? Sure, but of course that's already true of every single rainbow-coalition left or center-left political party in the West.

I also strongly disagree that there is necessarily a giant new scary wave of foreign weirdos coming to Europe (or any place else). In the US, immigration has been down substantially in recent years, especially from Mexico; in Europe, the same would likely be true but not for the Syrian/Libya war. Ona global scale world inequality (ie differences between rich and poir countries, ie the incentive to move from the latter to the former) is massively less than it's been for 150 years. It's hard to see that there's necessarily a great wave of scary foreign weirdos headed for the West in some new unprecedented way that hasn't been true for at least 50 years now.

True, there could be other immigration shocks -- new wars, global warming, etc. And Europe is more proximate to Africa, which is not converging in the same way Asia is (though the same is true for most of Latin America, and in any case even Africa is not less convergent with Europe now than it was 50 years ago). There's no inevitable law of decreasing migration to Europe and the US, but there's certainly no law of inevitable increase, either.

We used to drive like that when I was a kid, because 7 airplane tickets are hugely expensive. My dad could drive 16 hours in a day with only a half hour nap and some stops for coffee.

92: It's an Amtrak requirement last time I checked. They mention that passengers need an ID to ride pretty much every time I get on a train, though they don't check every time.

I was never asked for an ID on Amtrak. I haven't taken it since 2010 though, and the border patrol and secret police would certainly like to ask everyone for ID on Amtrak, so maybe they've started now.

I took Amtrak clear to Nebraska. I would probably do it again, but I'm going to wait until they stop running into things.

I think the "show ID to get on a plane" thing is a bit of a red herring wrt the discussion about citizenship and rights. I was watching an old movie the other night and was struck by how casual the whole buy a ticket (with cash!) and board the plane process was. It got restrictive not as part of some principled decision to limit the rights of citizens to travel but because people got worried about terrorists trying to hijack or blow up the planes.

95. No argument there, but showing an ID is just about the least onerous part of the process. I suspect, from what I read in the tech press, that screening is going to become much less onerous but likely more dystopian as technology enables you and your luggage to be recognized, scanned, reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned as you walk down the approach to the airplane. This will be far more efficacious, and possibly more fair (fewer TSA types having a bad day, at least), but it will still be dystopian.

On the other hand the panopticon is as close as your phone these days.

93: I specifically talked about allowing local areas to regulate who gets to move in - who gets to reside there - not who gets to use public amenities or work there. Those are different things, and if you're being attentive to the distinction, you should really notice when someone says one thing vs the other!

I'd be surprised if at least one person in my co-op didn't do business out of their home in some way. I've also visited gated communities that had their own members-only roads and "clubhouse," these seem de facto legal in the US as well. I think you specifically mean public amenities, which really are a different thing.

97 seems basically right.

It's absurd to compare a building or complex of buildings to a municipality. I realize that at the extremes of the distributions, they overlap in terms of population, but the former are constituted under the rules of the latter. They aren't analogs.

You can probably travel by train without showing an ID as long as you remain within your private residence.

Confirmed - photo ID checks are official Amtrak policy.

They little rooms on trains are the best. I never tried to use the shower because you can't without getting the toilet wet.

99: On checking, apparently is -- rarely checked in practice, but they say they might. But unpleasant as the requests for ID are (and I'd favor much less of that), the idea of using them to enforce excluding legal residents of the US from public places depending on locality is an entirely new idea, and a dystopian one. It's happened in the past -- sundown towns and so on -- but that's something that we should be bitterly ashamed of as a country.

102. The "show ID" thing in this thread arose partly because if (as under Mobyism) you make the choice to limit immigration there will have to be enforcement against violators. What level of enforcement is acceptable? Is requiring and checking an ID acceptable?

But, what's important about the distinction?

Privately-owned spaces versus public spaces is for many purposes an important distinction. If not most.

111: At the borders, sure.

104. There used to be lots of places that used to be able to regulate who got to reside in them. Some of the nicest neighborhoods in (e.g.) the DC area had "covenants" that prohibited African-Americans, Jews, and "even" Catholics from living in them.

106: The specific comparison I was trying to make there was between cases where there was explicit authority to collectively regulate who gets to live in an area, and cases where there's not supposed to be authority to do so but the locals collude to do so covertly - both of which actually exist at some level within the US. It seems to me like the latter is actually worse, because among other things it's corrosive to the norm that your formal legal rights are real and binding on others.

I don't think that co-ops are the same as whole towns regulating who moves in. There will obviously be a difference in scope!

I specifically talked about allowing local areas to regulate who gets to move in - who gets to reside there - not who gets to use public amenities or work there.

So, the latter would seem wrong to you? It would be dystopian and insane to keep immigrants from working in a locality, or from being in public places or patronizing businesses in a locality, but it would be fine to prevent them from living there? What about hotels? Would there be a maximum length of stay?

114: Right! And it's not legal now and we're ashamed that it was ever legal.

cases where there's not supposed to be authority to do so but the locals collude to do so covertly - both of which actually exist at some level within the US. It seems to me like the latter is actually worse, because among other things it's corrosive to the norm that your formal legal rights are real and binding on others.

So, you're saying that because real estate agents sometimes steer people toward or away neighborhoods, that it would be less dishonest to create a legal underclass? That's a guess -- I don't actually understand what you think you're talking about at all.

Under the guise of "family only" they keep the more undesirable (South Asian and Filipino) migrant workers out of some malls. Of course, I, a single white male, would be able to walk around freely there. This is not a healthy society.

Flying to Europe last month, I was asked for the first time to show id to government officials getting on a plane in MSP. They talked to non-citizens about how long they'd been in the US, etc.

I don't have a problem with showing ID for safety related purposes on planes and trains. I don't think cross-checking immigration status is called for. I also think we ought to re-impose the Fourth Amendment at the borders; the idea that the state can examine my cell phone there, but not at some other point, just because I'm crossing is imo wrong. But, I'm not going to be the one to litigate this!

120.last: Especially when "the borders" is defined so broadly as to include areas where a significant percentage (if not an outright majority) live.

115: The informal ways are worse, because people outlawed wholes bunches of formal, legal ways to restrict who can live in an area. If those laws weren't there, the formal ways would be much worse. We know this because it was within living memory that these laws were changed and it's not some hypothetical.

Unrelated to the coolly considered pros and cons of creating bantustans -- I'm noticing more people on the left (including center-left) observing it is contrary to our principles to paper-check people just going about their lives, residing/working/getting services. CA has now basically banned workplaces from letting ICE into non-public areas without a warrant, for example. I'm not sure of the fate of systems like E-Verify.

I think this is correct, but if it becomes established, then it becomes unclear how we comprehensively enforce even the "common-sense" immigration reforms such as the Senate could currently pass. Which is not a bad thing! It basically means that we could come around to open-borders, but on civil liberties grounds rather than on the economic grounds usually touted. (Alternatively, we could decide to sacrifice the free flow of tourists, but that's less likely.)

116: Limits on max hotel stays don't seem worse than things towns do now to exclude outsiders, they seem better than a lot of the covert methods currently used.

A lot of things about the existing system already seem dystopian and insane to me. If we constrain ourselves to proposals that don't seem (considered in absolute rather than marginal terms) dystopian and insane to me, then we're talking about proposals that will definitely not be enacted by the US Congress or major European governments in the next 50 years.

If you're actually interested in talking about radical visions for reordering society, I might be, but that's a very different discussion from the question of whether - in the context of a particular policy dispute in countries with dystopian and insane policies - there exists an intermediate solution that doesn't make things worse on net.

Again, if all you mean to say is that there's an element of this that legitimates and expands aspects of the police state and is therefore bad, then I agree! If you think that that's bad enough, then that's one reason that restricted immigration might actually be preferable to any achievable alternative. (Guest-worker visas might not actually be worth eroding local standards of fair treatment of employees, for instance.) I'm genuinely unsure on this.

119: I'm glad with both agree that a healthy society would keep white men out of the mall.

Guest-worker visas might not actually be worth eroding local standards of fair treatment of employees, for instance.

I would argue they are absolutely not worth it.

120:

But, I'm not going to be the one to litigate this!

This seems really important. How costly it is to stand up for your "rights" seems like an important component of how real they are.

Canada's population is around 22% foreign born. In Toronto, that number is above 50%. The top 5 countries of birth of recent immigrants are the Philippines, India, China, Iran, and Pakistan, so it's not as if our immigrants are all white Christians, either. Despite this, Canada has (largely, though of course not entirely) avoided a significant nativist backlash. It's true that Kellie Leitch recently ran for the Conservative leadership on an anti-immigrant platform, but it's also true that she got crushed. Canada is full of racist assholes who hate immigrants, but this does not filter into policy in meaningful ways; instead, Canada has pretty immigrant-friendly policies. (Whereas making the lives of Indigenous people miserable is baked into official government policy at every level.) When Justin Trudeau wants to avoid bad press for being a smarmy and entitled trust fund kid, he gets his picture taken hugging refugees.

This is all precarious in various ways, and could come crashing down around our ears, but I'm tempted to say "there's your model." Canada's social welfare state is not nearly as extensive or generous as Scandinavia's are, so it's not as if you need complete social democracy to get there, either.

Benquo --

Are you actually positively arguing for any of this nonsense, or are you just trying to blow our minds with how horrifying current society already is?

If it's the latter, you're going to get lots of people agreeing with you. If it's the former, then pointing out that there are things that suck now, and you're not rioting in the streets about it, hypocrites, doesn't constitute as a positive argument for anything.

When Justin Trudeau wants to avoid bad press for being a smarmy and entitled trust fund kid, he gets his picture taken hugging refugees.

I think we've all been there.

If we don't keep allowing in new refugees, the only ones we'll have left walk away whenever I have my arms extended.

130:
hugger or huggee?

The link in 28 is really interesting. Among other things, the maps show clearly that despite the major increase in immigration since 1970, it's the Trumpiest parts of the country that have the lowest percentages of foreign-born residents.

131 to 132.

129: I think there might be some sort of political tradeoff between locals being allowed to overtly exclude me from some places, and intrusive Federal oversight of day-to-day life. Depending on the details of the tradeoff, I can easily imagine being happy accepting the former over the latter, as applied to me. I am in fact regularly hassled, mostly indirectly by other large institutions trying to avoid liability, by the national regulatory state, and perceive it as a much more salient impediment to living a good life than being banned from neighborhoods full of people who'd be persistently resentful if I were allowed to moved in.

I think that the specific case of African-Americans is different, since they're owed some sort of reparations and I don't think it's plausible that enough has been done to fix things. There are a couple other major specific cases that seem roughly analogous, and a just solution has to take that into account.

More generally, the ambient level of dishonesty about what the policy actually is makes my life quite a bit worse and makes me feel like I don't actually have protection under the stated laws OR an effective way to find out what my actual rights are, if any, and I'd generally prefer moves towards a system that honestly acknowledges whatever the current arrangement is.

It's bad enough to have my movements restricted and need papers to travel large distances conveniently, without in addition being regularly lied to about this fact. The first step towards rectifying a problem is to make the complaints of victims legible. We already live in a world where for the most part people aren't full citizens with citizens' rights, I'd like us to at least stop lying about this.

I have no idea why you think that creating an underclass of people with fewer rights will make anyone else freer. Can you point to any example where you think that worked?

I also don't know what, concretely, you mean by 'the ambient level of dishonesty' and 'for the most part people aren't full citizens with citizen's rights'?

I mean, your movements aren't restricted by needing to show ID on trains (it's bullshit, and I'm opposed to it, but that doesn't mean your movements are restricted). You're entitled to a state ID (unless you're undocumented? I hadn't thought you were.)

If you have a principled objection to carrying ID, I guess you're limited to buses and private cars. But that's, um, idiosyncratic and not comparable to the level of legal disadvantage you're contemplating imposing on other people.

I tend to feel that the national regulatory state protects me from far more hassles than it subjects me to. For example, I have to deal with various hassles and expenses to ensure my car doesn't pollute too much. On the other hand, I live down-wind from a coke oven so I don't think I'm going to come ahead if pollution regulations get weaker.

The real outrage is being required to show an ID to purchase alcohol. As long as 18 year olds are forced to buy fake IDs, we'll never truly be free.

I think we should let 18 year olds buy alcohol, but only if they are holding a gun.

IANBenquo, but I have the impression he's saying that all things being equal he'd prefer overt impositions on his liberty, imposed all at once with an honest debate about their intent and effects, to the alternatives of covert and peacemeal impositions with bullshit arguments.

If anyone actually said that the Fourth Amendment shouldn't apply within 90 miles of the border or coast, chances are they'd be laughed out of polite society. If the Constitution was amended to say as much, it would suck but at least we'd know for sure. But no one ever actually said that, that jurisprudence just kind of accrued after decades of security-state laws and rulings, so there's no one anti-Fourth-amendment person to mock or be horrified by.

Not sure how relevant that is to the OP, though.

If they're holding a gun they can probably get the alcohol without paying for it.

136: My life and my friends' lives already satisfy the definition of what you're calling an underclass of people with fewer rights. And I'm damn sure we're not the worst off among US citizens in this regard - I'm pretty privileged as far as these things go, and so are most of my friends.

Here's what I mean by the ambient level of dishonesty. You keep talking about the US as though proposing that people be allowed to enter but have their movements restricted by police were proposing something that didn't apply to existing US citizens. This is false, even though there is lots of dishonest propaganda to that effect. There are lots of other things like that.

In addition to restrictions on movement, there are blatantly unconstitutional asset forfeiture laws, search and seizure without due process is common, it's government policy to unaccountably assassinate citizens if they're deemed terrorists, and information about what our country's military is doing in our name (including spying on all of us) is mostly available from people who were either imprisoned for doing this, or had to flee the country. A commonsense reading of the foundational law of this country would plainly imply that none of these things would be allowed. Schoolchildren are still taught in civics class that that Constitution is the foundational law of the land.

If I'm cheated by someone substantially wealthier than me for a large sum of money, or harmed in some other substantial way, I don't have effective recourse without paying a member of a state-backed monopoly to make arguments on my behalf, and depending on the circumstances, the other party may be able to use a variety of legal maneuvers to run out my ability to pay for representation long before a court makes a final decision on the merits. Unless, of course, I have some other powerful patron who wants to affect the national system by backing my case.

I think this is a substantial departure from having clear and meaningful rights as an individual citizen. It is not a complete departure - there are still some circumstances and contexts in which I can meaningfully assert rights, or at least expect that they will be asserted for me - but it sure seems important.

They're supposed to be the good guys with gun and shoot anybody holding up the liquor store.

137: Voter ID laws are substantial restrictions on who can vote, even though many people are able to satisfy the conditions.

WHY CAN'T I FULLY UNDERSTAND ALL LEGAL RULES THAT APPLY TO ME AT ANY TIME?!? PLEASE NOTE - I DO NOT WISH TO SPEND ANY TIME LEARNING WHAT ANY APPLICABLE RULES ARE. ALSO I ASSUME THAT A LEGAL SYSTEM CAN BE RUN BASED ON A SET OF RULES I CAN CARRY AROUND IN MY HEAD. IF THAT IS NOT TRUE DO WE REALLY HAVE ANY RIGHTS AT ALL?!??

ALL I AM SAYING IS THAT AT LEAST IF WE MAKE BANUTSTANS I'LL UNDERSTAND THAT WE REALLY HAVE MADE BANTUSTANS INSTEAD OF VAGUE MISAPPREHENSIONS I CARRY AROUND IN MY HEAD WHICH ARE THE WORST BECAUSE WHO KNOWS WHAT I KNOW OR DON'T KNOW SO BANTUSTANS IT IS. ALSO I AM A SMART PERSON WHO IS DEFINITELY ADDING VALUE TO COMMENTING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT PEOPLE'S RIGHTS.

And, it's totally the case that if you have the wrong social circle or the wrong name you can be put on the no-fly list for that, even if there's also an onerous process for getting off the list and merely being subject to additional "random" search.

141 is an accurate representation of my point of view here.

97: world inequality (ie differences between rich and poir countries, ie the incentive to move from the latter to the former) is massively less than it's been for 150 years.
True, but this doesn't automatically make for reduced migration: migrants aren't the poorest people in their home countries, they're the people with sufficient resources to move. Global convergence (and rising inequality in poorer countries) increases the pool of potential migrants.

My life and my friends' lives already satisfy the definition of what you're calling an underclass of people with fewer rights.

Fewer than whom?

146: Yes, I do in fact think that if an ordinary citizen isn't likely to know the details of what their enforceable legal rights are, or the ability to enforce those rights is prohibitively expensive, then those rights are in some important sense not meaningfully real. This is the rationale for civics classes!

No one who has been paying attention to Standing Rock is actually confused about this. There were proper procedures the locals didn't bother to participate in, but there were also proper procedures Arthur Dent didn't bother to participate in, that doesn't put the Vogons or DAPL in the clear.

149 - I'd respond, but we've now moved on to the all-important task of dealing with an idiot.

What the fuck do you think they teach in civics class? At least the one I had was pretty explicit about there still being lots of injustice, even sometimes after whatever recourse you might have.

And the barriers on movement with the TSA are a world away from a system where a group can't leave a given area. Driving is inconvenient, not impossible.

148: I mean, you have to add in the belief that apartheid for immigrants will lead to libertarian Utopia for citizens.

141: It's not directly relevant to the OP, it's relevant to why it seems to me like "but that would create a class of people without full citizens' rights!" is a bad-faith objection. If someone thinks it would make things worse as a matter of degree, fine, but they should actually say that and not imply that things were otherwise fine (unless they believe that and are willing to back it up).

It's worth noting that LizardBreath was actually wrong on the facts about restrictions of movement. Assurances about what rights I have pretty regularly include items that either (a) are formally true but prohibitively expensive or very risky to enforce or count on, or (b) are formally false but usually you can get away with breaking the rule. Regularly receiving false assurances does not exactly inspire confidence that people are trying to get to the truth.

155.1: Not just worse as a matter of degree, but categorically worse.

155.2: Citation needed.

141: It's not directly relevant to the OP, it's relevant to why it seems to me like "but that would create a class of people without full citizens' rights!" is a bad-faith objection

That objection is I think fully answered by my 150. You may be unhappy about the rights American citizens now have, and the degrees to which they're circumscribed, and I'd agree with you about some of that depending on the specifics. You're still not a member of a legal underclass -- you're on the same footing with all the rest of us.

Are there individual injustices? Of course. But they aren't likely to be remedied by instituting broadbased legally disadvantaged classes of people.

Holy shit are you a moron! And now, it's time to try to exercise newfound maturity and to avoid dealing with morons. The end.

I have discovered a totally novel maturity act.

99 and 108 to 156.2

157: I'm not on the same footing as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, or Peter Thiel. Or any ordinary municipal police officer. I could apply to a police department, but they don't like my kind of people.

I feel like there is an obvious scandal in the intelligence-testing industry.

I'm not on the same footing as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, or Peter Thiel.

I'm just going to sit there and look at that one for a bit.

I'm with Halford on this now.

And unauthorized residents already aren't even on the same footing as I am.

I bet Trump would also have a hard time getting hired as a cop.

They don't like to see dodgy credit.

165: That would be true under any regime short of fully open borders -- you can't point to that as an injustice in general (as opposed to objecting to specifics of treatment of undocumented immigrants as inhumane or unjust) unless your alternative is to eliminate the category of 'unauthorized resident'.

If someone thinks it would make things worse as a matter of degree, fine, but they should actually say that and not imply that things were otherwise fine

I'm genuinely curious: Have you had a brain injury or something? You've been a commenter around here a long time, and I don't think you've always been this silly, but this is the second time in my recent memory that you've suffered a massive failure of basic reading comprehension.

To put it on the record: Nobody has implied that things are otherwise fine, and there have been numerous explicit acknowledgments of existing problems. See 86, 110, 129, 137, 153, for example.

Truly high IQ people would be able to manipulate the test results to appear low IQ.

Nobody has implied that things are otherwise fine,

To be fair to Benquo, I was genuinely incredulous that Amtrak checks IDs. In the face of that lack of knowledge of how internal freedom of movement has been restricted for American citizens, my arguments are discredited and the necessity for apartheid is established.

98: My father (aka, the World's Cheapest Man) used to travel for work, and he would cash in his plane ticket, put it in the gas tank and combine work travel with family vacations.

Political football comment 41 and 45 are on point. politics that does something is inspirational. people are inspired by the fight for 15 in a way that they are not for I'll try to raise the minimum wage to $12. similarly with I'll try to make College affordable verses free college for everyone. Donald Trump knows this he made lots of crazy promises. whether you consider the people who are interested in that stuff idiots or not you still need to appeal to them if you want to win elections.

Cosmopolitanism might work in a slightly less aggreived and crazy US, since most immigrants here are either educated or from Latin America and so assimilate about as quickly as their predecessors.

I don't know about good policy for Europe. Lots of places there have succesfully supported east asians (that is, Chinese or Vietnamese) living there for decades. That's to claims of monoculture, which I think have at best limited validity. But people coming now from Syria and Eritrea are a) coming pretty quickly b) are often desperate and need a fair amount of time and outreach to fit in.

173: I think we should promise some pot in every chicken.

165: I'm saying that the objection, "but then there would have to be intrusive immigration enforcement if the law were to be fully enforced," is not pointing to a feature that would distinguish this in kind from the status quo.

169: I see people verbally acknowledge the existence of such problems, but then go back to implying that in various respects things were otherwise fine, and that I was suggesting creating a new class of problems. That's ... not actually better than being honestly mistaken.

171: I think there's a pretty important difference between on the one hand, showing up somewhere, subjugating the locals, and establishing a caste society where you're on top, and on the other hand, permitting foreigners to come live in certain places within your borders but not to participate fully in your society.

I'm not gonna claim that there's no injustice baked into the latter arrangement - colonialism etc. - but if you don't agree that there's a pretty substantial difference, then I'm confused.

I'm saying that the objection, "but then there would have to be intrusive immigration enforcement if the law were to be fully enforced," is not pointing to a feature that would distinguish this in kind from the status quo.

You don't see a difference between being asked for an ID which you are legally entitled to have as a citizen, and which not having means that you can't ride the mode of transportation you prefer, and not being permitted to live in certain areas because of your legal status? That is a difference in kind.

(Also, it's still not clear to me -- does it seem wrong to you for localities to regulate the presence and employment of immigrants within their borders? If you're going to be advocating positions that are generally recognized as nuts, it's helpful to delineate them clearly, so people don't get confused about the borders of where your controversial positions lie.)

Dude, not responding to your high- IQ abstractions is different from saying everything's fine. Maybe people just aren't up to working on your level today.

then go back to implying that in various respects things were otherwise fine, and that I was suggesting creating a new class of problems.

Stating that you are suggesting creating a new class of problems has literally nothing to do with denying that there are problems that currently exist.

This educated constable is too brilliant for me to understand.

178: Some localities already do regulate the presence and employment of immigrants within their borders. Nations do this, and within the context of the arrangements permitted by the nation in which they're located, households do it. It doesn't seem to me inherently wrong or obviously inadvisable to devolve some of the nation's responsibility to localities of a size somewhere in the middle.

I'm already permitted to live in some areas, but not others, because of my legal status. Right now, that lines up with national borders. If people outside a country want to live there, but people in some parts of the country don't want them there, it makes sense to me to extend the immigrants' right to reside, to the places within that country where the locals are happy to have them.

It might be that this wouldn't be a workable compromise without massively increasing the police state. If so, I agree that's a strong consideration against it. But I'm not convinced that's the case!

One of the reasons for this is that local enforcement seems likely to be adequate. Another is that even if it required national enforcement, it's already the case that the US watches people within its borders pretty extensively.

I'm not convinced that's the case!

Have you tried thinking about the problem?

A household is still not a locality.

If people outside a country want to live there, but people in some parts of the country don't want them there, it makes sense to me to extend the immigrants' right to reside, to the places within that country where the locals are happy to have them.

And you continue to not commit to whether you think it's wrong for states/cities/towns/counties (given that you seem to want to equivocate over 'what's a locality', I'll spell it out for you) to exclude immigrants from being present in public places or being employed there. If so, there's your police state.

It would be a whole lot less intrusive, and everyone would know where they stood, if the immigrants wore a badge of some sort sewn on to the exterior of their clothing indicating whether they were a real person with full rights to be anywhere, or a half-person who could only be in certain localities. Stars are cool.

If people outside a country want to live there, but people in some parts of the country don't want them there, it makes sense to me to extend the immigrants' right to reside, to the places within that country where the locals are happy to have them.

Whatever its merits as substantive policy, this approach seems unlikely to address the political problem ogged brought up in the OP. At least in the US, support for Trump is strongest in the areas with the fewest immigrants. I don't know if a comparable pattern holds in Europe.

Which is to say, I guess, that an informal version of what Benquo is proposing already sort of exists in this country, and it doesn't work particularly well.

Good point.

187: Yes, but Benquo would like it better if it was formalized, because then he would have won the argument.

Except it doesn't exist. An immigrant might well decide that Juniata County isn't where she wants to be, but there's no legal difference between being there and Delaware County.

190: Hence "sort of."

Yeah, not so much that there's formal apartheid now, but that if the good effect Benquo's hoping for from instituting it is making people in places that dislike immigrants happier about immigration, they're already largely not dealing with having immigrants living there, and yet somehow they're still miserable about it.

comparable pattern holds in Europe

Germany overview. Marseille itself voted against Le Pen, but the surrounding region was slightly for her. Marseille seems pretty african. CZ and PL have very few Syrian or Afghan migrants, both strongly against them.

Speaking of which, did you folks watch season two of Marseille?

I'm waiting for perfect justice before I own an TV.

I stopped before the end of season one-- GD wasn't doing it for me in this one. Kind of enjoying Au Service de la France, a live action Archer. Also El Mar del Plastico.

Cosmopolitanism might work in a slightly less aggreived and crazy US,

It's worth pointing out that the non-aggrieved is a solid majority of the U.S. We have a structural problem in that the aggrieved minority is both more likely vote and given outsize representation in our electoral system. In that sense, solving gerrymandering and (in pony-land) the electoral college would be as important as an any immigration-specific policy (or welfare policies, as per the original post, that soften the erosion of status and increasing precarity of non-college whites in Western countries).

197. Hope so. Basically the people who have a codependency with Fox going strong need to change channels, especially the ones in the suburbs who do not have objective complaints about their lives.

The trend lines are pretty positive:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-18/anti-immigration-fervor-is-different-this-time

(I don't endorse much of the analysis in that article, but it does have a lot survey data about attitudes towards immigration).

[Pretending that 75% of this thread never happened]

One positive possibility is that, in the US at least, the antis are really exposing themselves as nasty xenophobes. Now, we've learned that nasty people aren't entirely self-discrediting--as we've discussed wrt Nazis, better that they're not in the open, because visibility draws some recruits--but it's still the case that it's bad for people with moderate positions to be tightly linked to radical ones, and right now basically all anti-immigrant politicians and voters are in a boat with slavering lunatics who want to deport children, including children born in America.

In a country that was still 80% white and an even higher percentage native born, there might not be enough backlash to actually defeat such proposals, once let loose. But I think the last 13 months have shown that there's a LOT of passion in defeating this stuff. The coming Democratic wave is going to be bolder, more leftist, and owe very, very little to people who aren't horrified by the current rightwing rhetoric (and policies) on immigration.

That doesn't solve the problem all on its own, but immigration is an issue that has always ebbed and flowed in America, and the two sides go back and forth on winning and then settling the issue for a generation or two. IOW, if Dems win big the next two elections, immigration will get settled on cosmopolitan terms, and I don't think that the nativists will have the political willpower and clout to relitigate in 2022 or whatever. It's never really worked that way before (and the saga of Obamacare sort of shows what happens when the reactionaries simply won't give up a fight they've recently lost: it doesn't go well for them).

As to "underlying issues", it's white supremacy all the way down. Stop buying the bullshit that Trump's median voter is an unemployed steelworker, because it's a rich white guy who's mad that he can't tell nigger jokes whenever he feels like it.

I don't know what it would mean to "defeat white supremacy", but that's the actual agenda. As long as 45% of the country is people who value white supremacy above all else, nothing in US politics can be fixed with any permanence.

I don't see any evidence that economic goodies can buy white supremacists off.

45% of the country is people who value white supremacy above all else

Source, plz?

I can think of one very good information source that suggests that around 46.1% of the voting population either values white supremacy highly or, at a bare minimum, is perfectly OK with white supremacy and having white supremacists as leading part of their political coalition.

"Above all else" is maybe a bit strong. For many, if you threatened to kill their children they might relax on white supremacy for an election.

Also, now let me respond to this from Mossy:

True, but this doesn't automatically make for reduced migration: migrants aren't the poorest people in their home countries, they're the people with sufficient resources to move. Global convergence (and rising inequality in poorer countries) increases the pool of potential migrants.

That's a very fair point, except (I think) it only holds if the effect of increased ability to migrate swamps the decreased incentive to migrate caused by global convergence. I don't really see that effect, largely because the numbers of people with sufficient resources to migrate was already huge, and remained so even pre-convergence. Much of the "developing" world was stuck, as of 1980, at (super roughly) the development level of Germany in the 1840s; but Germany in the 1840s could still send zillions of migrants to America. I don't see the convergence in standards beyond that in much of the world (China and India have now far surpassed 1840 Germany) creating an ease-of-migration effect to an extent that it swamps the decreased incentives to emigrate to the West. Again, that 100% does not create some iron law of decreased migration -- one war, one famine, could do it -- but it also doesn't suggest some iron law of increased migration.

That is a little handwavy, but relative to the thread I am a fucking genius, so there!

Are you smarter than a very stupid person? Read this thread to find out!

204: All I'm saying is we could try it.

Among the weirdnesses of our politics around these issues, black and Latino men are the only demographic group whose opinion of Trump has improved since the election:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-voters-abandoning-donald-trump/550247/

Among African Americans and Hispanics, reactions to Trump depend more on gender than age or education. In every age group, and at every level of education, about twice as many African American men as women gave Trump positive marks. In all, 23 percent of black men approved of Trump's performance versus 11 percent of black women. "The outlier here isn't [black] men ... it's [black] women, where you have near-universal disapproval of Trump," said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who studies African American voters. Still, black men are one of the few groups for which Trump's 2017 average approval rating significantly exceeds his 2016 vote share.

Among Hispanics, men were also much more likely than women to express positive views about Trump. Among Hispanic men older than 50, Trump's approval-- strikingly--exceeded 40 percent. But at least three-fifths of Hispanic women in every age group (including both those with and without a college degree) disapproved. Trump's 2017 approval rating slightly exceeded his 2016 vote share among Hispanic men, and was slightly below it among Hispanic women.

204: don't get hasty, halford. what if you just killed the daughters or something? or crippled the wife but the boobs were still fine?

208 - I'm pretty sure there's a takedown somewhere of that conclusion as a statistical anomaly/apples to oranges comparison, but I don't really feel like looking it up or figuring it out myself.

it's interesting to consider under what circumstances/level of economic development china itself might receive immigrants. china is so economically involved in africa; there must be some kenyans out there learning mandarin. chinese people tend (IMLimitedE) to be crazy racist against black people, though. and they'd be loath to accept muslim immigrants. and they already have a huge undocumented underclass to work as low-skilled laborers, and the ability to round everyone up and deport them from varying regions. I guess as usual china is all set up and needs nothing from anyone.

199 is interesting, but I'm a bit suspicious based on its y-axis scaling.

210: it's comparing Survey Monkey data to election exits, to your point.

I do think the decline in minority turnout for Democrats in 2016 explains a lot of the losses in the swing states, and I've seen nothing yet to suggest it's coming back in 2018 or 2020. The biggest swings in the off-year elections and primaries so far have been in white votes share.

"I've seen nothing yet" >> take that back since there was a very large black turnout for an off-year election in Alabama. But the white vote had to shift dramatically for Moore to win.

The Hispanic vote is waiting for the neoliberal Democratic Party to offer a REAL alternative and to not just be the party of "we for the most part don't want your family members put in due-process-free private prisons after ICE raids."

Snark aside, I worry about that too, though I suspect (and certainly very strongly hope) you will see higher Latino turnout in Texas in 2018 than we have seen for a while.

The coming Democratic wave is going to be bolder, more leftist
Hey, does anyone remember back in 2016 when you were all arguing about how big the blue wave on Clinton's coattails was going to be?

205: Comity. I'm just saying the economics doesn't necessarily reduce migration.

Canada is full of racist assholes who hate immigrants, but this does not filter into policy in meaningful ways; instead, Canada has pretty immigrant-friendly policies.
This is really worth exploring. What are the exact mechanics by which Canada's political system neuters racist sentiment while America's doesn't?

216: No? As I recall, the consensus, or at least my opinion, was that nobody would actually vote for the fascist clown but Clinton would be faced with a Republican legislature.

I exaggerate, it was some of you not all. But it definitely happened. My point is just that nothing is inevitable. Changes will come from organization and mobilization, not from demographic trends or Republican repugnance.

220: DSA pals and I got a syringe exchange program opened in my town. Does that count?

Yes. That work will presumably help in higher-level elections too.

I don't know if it will help in any elections, but it should help some of the people who need it.

I was pretty bullish on the Senate, given great candidates like Russ Feingold, the existence of Donald Trump, and the map with elections in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of course as it turned out the Senate candidates did substantially worse than Hillary.

220 - maybe a better but more boring way to put it is that demographic trends and Republican awfulness are clearly very helpful but non-sufficient ways to win elections in a closely divided country whose weird electoral structure deeply favors rural voters and the Republican Party. But demographics and Republican horribleness are doing much (most?) of the work.

221: I can't make an embroidery joke when you phrase it that way.

225: In what sense is the work getting done when Republicans control Congress, the presidency, and 32 state houses? "Non-sufficient" is true but I think really understates the situation.

226: Sorry, Mobes. My embroidery has been at standstill lately, but I can't really blame dirty needles. (The state would prefer we say "syringe access exchange program" and so I mostly tried to.)

it's interesting to consider under what circumstances/level of economic development china itself might receive immigrants

When I visited Taiwan in 2006, the small number of relatives I have there who are Catholic said a lot of their church members were from the Philippines. I wondered but never looked up - not even for this comment! - how much immigration there is there, and whether it's been increasing.

229:
2013 (XLS): 476,472
2018: 715,938
Just over 3% of current total.

227: Otherwise they'd have 50 state houses.

224. My sister in law thinks the weak Senate performance indicates changed votes.

Provided the Democrats run on a platform of "Free the Wu Tang Album," they will do fine in November.

230: Of which 91% from Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, or Thailand.

a class of people without full citizens' rights

This was the case in Germany (it may still be in Switzerland, I'm not sure.) The children of Gastarbeiter had right of residence but not citizenship. Then they made it (not very much) easier to get citizenship and accepted a massive number of refugees. Now the SPD is at its lowest level of electoral support since 1945 and the Nazis are the largest opposition party in the Bundestag (again).

I am not asserting any particular causation here

186: "At least in the US, support for Trump is strongest in the areas with the fewest immigrants. I don't know if a comparable pattern holds in Europe."

It holds in Germany.

Though with the substantial proviso that support for AfD (which we can take as a proxy for anti-immigrant/anti-establishment/I'm-getting-screwed-so-fuck-you-all voters) in the September 2017 national election is clearly much greater in the former East Germany than elsewhere. Eastern Germany has lower levels of immigrants in general (a weak economy will do that) but even so AfD did better in the east than in a similarly low-immigrant part of, say, Bavaria.

235: Easing the path to citizenship in Germany began in the late 1990s, under the Schroeder government. The one-time influx of refugees was in 2015. I think keeping the timing separate will lead to greater understanding.

The Schroeder government's moves came in response to an increasing number of people who were second- and third-generation residents of the country who were not eligible to become citizens. Germany rightly recognized that this was a serious problem for a democracy and -- having some considerable experience with non-democracy -- took steps to correct it.

201- Sure Trump's median voter is a white supremacist, but his marginal voter is not. There were people who voted for Obama twice who voted for Trump and Trump would have lost without them.

Further to 235: Why is the SPD at its lowest level of support since 1949?

An important part of it is history. In contrast to what has happened in other post-communist countries, Germany's formerly communist party has not metamorphosed into the main left-of-center party. The SPD, institutionally and individually, remembers the fervor with which the communists persecuted the social democrats. At least two SPD-Left governments at the state level have failed to come into power because in a secret ballot a crucial number of state legislators could not stomach going into coalition with the heirs of the communist party of East Germany.

One of the upshots of that is that notionally left-of-center voters are split nationally between two parties.

It will be interesting to see if the east can support two parties of regional identity, if the AfD builds on the areas where it had greatest success. (It's also too early to assume that AfD will avoid all the hazards that have felled far-right parties in the history of the Bundesrepublik. They've gone further than any other, but the factionalism, corruption and incompetence -- along with the assiduous efforts of the CDU/CSU to steal some of their issues -- that brought low the Republikaner, Schill-Party, NPD and DVU are still lurking.) The permanent presence of six parties in parliament -- assuming the FDP stays above 5%, another possibly iffy proposition -- would make coalition math difficult, and might eventually erode SPD unwillingness to work with the Left at the national level.

I honestly thought the Schulz show would be almost as much fun as the Gerd show was in 1998, and I am not quite sure why it fizzled. Part of that is surely the difficulty of running an opposition campaign as a member of the ruling coalition, but that can't be all. (That said, the largest single movement of voters in 2017 was SPD to CDU. Social Democratic voters rewarding Merkel for her refugee policy is definitely one way of reading that movement, and agrees with the anecdata I know.)

I don't know if a comparable pattern holds in Europe.

To the extent that you can use Brexit as a proxy for anti-immigration, it holds in England, with some reservations. London and most of the major cities were fairly strong Remain (Birmingham was an even split, Sheffield and Nottingham were 51% Leave), but some of the Northern cities which are pretty much economically defunct, plus ALL the rural areas outside the South East, went LEAVE. Scotland and NI are their own thing.

The high Leave vote in some of the dead cities and towns can be explained if not justified by the fact that many of them have been used as dumping grounds for immigrants and refugees without any infrastructure. The Rural vote, however, is a simple case of shooting themselves in the foot, because the agricultural industry is heavily dependent on EU citizens for seasonal labour that the Brits simply won't do. Crops will rot in the ground.

Still further to 235: As loathesome as AfD are, they are not actual Nazis. If they were, they would be banned. Individual AfD figures have flirted with the bounds of what German courts will allow to be said in public settings, and some of them may yet overstep their boundaries.

Post-communist countries in Europe have much weaker party affiliation than Western European countries (even allowing for how affiliation in the west has weakened in the post-1989 period). When you look at parties in Central and Eastern Europe, you see a fair number of them surging quickly, some winning enough to form a majority government for one term, and then collapsing.

AfD's strength is mainly in the eastern part of Germany. Their voters are not strongly attached to the party. We'll see if they stick around; I think they are likely to follow the next shiny object that appears.

As for being the largest opposition party, sure. If Labour and the Conservatives had to form a government in London, that might leave UKIP as the largest opposition party. Grand coalition has funny effects. AfD has 14 seats more than the FDP, which in turn has 16 more seats than the Left and 17 more than the Greens. The SPD has 59 seats more than AfD. In other words, the gap between SPD and AfD is nearly twice as large as the gap between the AfD and the smallest parliamentary party.

When you look at parties in Central and Eastern Europe, you see a fair number of them surging quickly, some winning enough to form a majority government for one term, and then collapsing.

What's their refractory period?

What's their refractory period?

For HZDS in Slovakia, they were very much up from 1992 to 1998, recurred in from 2006 to 2010 and have since withdrawn completely.

The National Movement Simeon II (Bulgaria) surged mightily in 2001, drooped by more than half in 2005 and never won another seat in the national parliament.

I'm sure that more examples are fairly close at hand.

I hadn't realized Tsar Simeon was still alive.

239 last: A small data point on that: my niece who lives in Nurnberg likes Merkel on immigration but had to hold her nose pretty hard to vote CSU to express that. Her husband stuck with the FDP, which is sort of a natural resting place for both of them.

Thanks for 236-43. Most of the reporting on the SPD here has been in full panic mode, when maybe mild panic mode is more appropriate. The point about party loyalty in Eastern Europe (and East Germany) of course makes sense, but I don't think I'd ever seen it put quite that way before.

218: What are the exact mechanics by which Canada's political system neuters racist sentiment while America's doesn't?

There are lots of factors that explain it, but here's a demographic one.
A much greater proportion of Canadians are immigrants (or the children of immigrants), and settlement patterns mean that many more Canadians (as a percentage) live around immigrants than in the US. 45% of the Canadian population live in the 6 largest cities. Immigrants move to the major cities, and so if the anti-immigrant effect is strongest in places with few immigrants, far fewer Canadians live in places with few immigrants. You can't form a government without winning lots and lots of seats in the largest cities.

That combines with another difference: while in Canada places with few immigrants have a disproportionate amount of political power in the Parliament, since seat distribution favours rural regions somewhat, that effect is relatively small as compared to the effect of Republican gerrymandering, the electoral college, and the massive distortions produced by the US Senate.

Also, I'm too slow to be a good unfogged commenter.

247: Good enough for me! Thanks. Does anyone know how Australia compares to Canada in this area? I think their population is even more concentrated in a handful of cities than Canada's.

230,234: Thanks. That's still a pretty small number, but not really surprisingly small, I guess.

246: Glad to help!

Almost nobody thinks of Germany as a post-communist country (and this includes a great many Germans, particular in the western parts of the country), but missing that means missing some really big things about its post-1989 nature.

I don't know how to put an image into a comment (or even if it's possible), but if you look at Google images of something like "afd 2017 results" East Germany pops right out at you.

Prescription for the SPD is a lot harder than analysis.

Kind of on topic: The Florida middle school teacher who was fired for having a white supremacists podcast in which she talked about taking a teaching job to be able to teach kids white supremacy is from the area surrounding Pittsburgh and an OSU alum.

"I'm a member of THE American Nazi Party."

That made me laugh, out loud even.

253 is excellent.

There was a good article in the Times a while back about Canada's resistance to right-wing nationalism.

I also strongly disagree that there is necessarily a giant new scary wave of foreign weirdos coming to Europe

Yeah, I expect the water is going to run out in a bunch of middle-eastern countries and there will be a wave of migration, but we'll see!

I keep thinking Californians are going to come here and try to take the water from the well in my basement.

Shorter 1-257: The population of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Northern Ontario is going to increase by 20,000% over the next hundred years.

258: Don't give Megan any ideas!

The NYT story in ogged's 256 hints at another point, which is Canada manages to be immigrant-friendly and resistant to backlash in part because there is arguably something structurally racist about the design of our immigration policies. 'Illegal immigration' is not part of Canada's political lexicon, because (thanks to 3 oceans and a US land border) we almost entirely choose who gets to come. And those choices are largely aimed at economic growth, which means we keep out the very neediest.

I'm part of a group that has sponsored a whole family of Syrian refugees. They live in our neighbourhood, we have frequent pot-lucks together, our kids are friends, and it's a lovely feel good story. But Syria is a unique case: if we'd wanted to sponsor a family from, say, the Central African Republic, it would have been much, much more difficult.

The Australia/Canada comparison on immigration is really interesting. I feel like Australia is way more racist but it's hard to know just why. Maybe dealing with the French Canadians led to a higher degree of tolerance, maybe the anglo-Canadians hope that immigrant waves will de-crazy the French, maybe proximity to the US matters, or who knows.

261 to 262. Though not an island, Canada is far away from all places where people might like to immigrate from. Though an island, Australians see themselves as surrounded by Asian people trying to move there, not to mention all the Pacific islands that will be underwater one of these years.

Was there a Canadian equivalent of the White Australia policy?

Or the Oriental Exclusion Acts?

I didn't know you had a well in your basement. Doesn't the subsidence crack your foundation?

264: The Great White North?

266: It just sounds better than calling it a sump and I figure if it runs all year, it's at least plausible.

Why would it cause subsidence?

264: Yes.
Canada had its own Chinese Exclusion Act (1924), and keeping immigration white was more of less official and explicit government policy until the 1960s.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chinese-immigration-act/

When you overpump the groundwater from your well, the aquifer contracts and the ground settles. Obviously.

I mean, it happens all the time.

I guess it's more of a spring than a well. I'm not pumping it out of the ground so much as collecting in it a pit and pumping it out of the basement.

You're talking crazy talk. How much do you sell it for?

If you bring a tanker, you can have it all.

No, like, to your local farmers. How much do you sell it to them for? $300-$400/af?

I'm not sure how many acre/feet I have. It's about like a tap running at half flow.

With an aerator?

Why would I put an aerator on a sump pump?

No, the tap you're comparing the flow to.

Then no.

My father-in-law thinks aerators are some kind of socialist plot. He also installs faucets for us without charging.

He also installs faucets for us without charging.

Sounds awfully socialist to me.

256: 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau faced a crisis amid the rise of French Canadian separatism in Quebec. His party was losing support, and his country seemed at risk of splitting in two.
Mr. Trudeau's solution was a policy of official multiculturalism and widespread immigration.
The equivalent US moment would be* WWI, and the response a hard WASP crackdown.
*Maybe? Stand to be corrected.

The Rural vote, however, is a simple case of shooting themselves in the foot, because the agricultural industry is heavily dependent on EU citizens for seasonal labour that the Brits simply won't do. Crops will rot in the ground.

Not to mention direct EU subsidies that the government is likely to pare back after a few years if it's still in power.

256, 262, 283: A lot of that article about Canada applies to Australia too, except for the bit about the intent behind the combo of high levels of immigration and an official policy of multiculturalism being to dilute Anglophone-Francophone tensions. Australia has an even higher proportion of its population being born overseas than Canada (over 25% as opposed to roughly 20%) but people are largely okay with it. About a quarter of that quarter migrated from Britain and New Zealand, but immigrants born in various countries in Asia amount to about as many.

I think part of why it works (not perfectly - there were some highly publicised attacks on Indian students in Melbourne a while ago) is that there isn't the widespread feeling of economic precarity that you get in the US. Social services are good, there hasn't been a recession since the early 90s (not even during the GFC) and there's maybe less status anxiety than elsewhere. But then why is it different from Europe, which has good social services and yet has mass support for anti-immigrant parties? One answer (cf. Halford at 31): barriers to meaningful participation in public culture and politics are in some way lower in the New World style Anglosphere countries than in European ethno-states. Less than perfect acculturation within the dominant culture, is good enough to allow you to be employed and engage politically. And maybe the fact that Anglo culture is so globally dominant makes it seem less important to avoid diluting it.

What makes all this a less impressive trick to pull off than it might otherwise seem is that there are strict controls over who gets to immigrate, so that most immigrants are well educated, or well off, or family of the former. So none of the ethnic communities has an 'underclass' look about it. As a result neither the "they'll take our jobs" nor the "gangbangers and rapists" narratives gets traction. On the other hand, there are very punitive policies towards asylum-seekers who arrive in any unauthorised fashion - they're deemed to have 'jumped the queue' and are kept in squalid detention camps offshore for years on end. Apparently it's the price Australians pay to avoid being swamped by the many, who are deterred from trying their luck by the treatment of these few. Any parallels to Omelas are left as an exercise for the reader.

Somewhat related: Hungarian government is too racist for Facebook.

The American president is so racist he has to stick to Twitter.

269: Thanks. Following that, how big a thing were color bars in employment, and anti-miscegenation laws? In SA and AFAIK in the US, white identity was largely created by poor whites defining themselves (and being defined) as separate from and better than POC who competed for the same jobs and frequently intermarried with them. I'm guessing that wasn't such a big factor in Canada (or Australia) without substantial non-white populations.

Given the link in 269, similar processes presumably played out. I'm thinking maybe the identity politics are less virulent when the opposed non-white others are a tiny minority rather than a large one, or a majority. Relations with Aboriginals/First Nations/Métis are maybe more relevant than with non-white immigrants, given the latter were thoroughly excluded.

When you say 'without substantial non-white populations', it depends on what you mean by 'non-white'. In the Australian case, there are visible and substantial East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian and Middle-eastern communities in the major cities, some with significant working-class components. (The numbers I quoted were just for people literally born overseas, which undercounts ancestry.) But the differences with Anglo-Celtic Australians tend to be perceived in a non-threatening My Big Fat Greek Wedding sort of way, i.e. in a continuum with the differences between Anglo-Celtics (whose ancestors were around in 19th century), and the working-class white ethnic communities that derive from a wave of post-war Greek and Italian immigration (before the end of the White Australia policy).

The result is more or less as you're saying, though. If working-class Anglo-Celtics wanted to define an Us vs a Them, it would be difficult to include Greeks and Italians as Us while excluding the Lebanese and Indians whose social structures are so similar to those of white ethnics. To the extent that there is a working-class Anglo-Celtic ('bogan') identity politics, it's a vestige of an old self-definition against ethnics of various sorts ('wogs'), white and non-white, rather than something more precisely racial. And even there, a Protestant vs Catholic sectarianism traditionally divided Celtics against Anglos and connected them to e.g. Italians and Maltese.

Also in keeping with 289, yes, the most straightforwardly racist Australian attitudes would probably be those directed towards Aboriginal Australians, but because Aboriginals are so relatively few they're more ignored than perceived as a threat.

290: I wrote carelessly. I meant no substantial non-white populations at the time white identity as we know it crystallized: late 19th-early 20th century.

Ah, then I read carelessly. I see what you meant now.

(And I think that's largely right in relation to Australia - though, to be pedantic, there were significant numbers of Chinese men who were drawn to Australia by the gold rush of the mid-19th century, amounting to maybe one tenth of the men in the country at the time. They were subject to virulent hostility, culminating in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, and did constitute some sort of Other for white male identity, even if not one as central to that identity as differentiation from African-Americans was in the US.)

292: That's not pedantic. I'd been dimly aware of anti-Chinese riots in the goldfields but had no idea there were so many Chinese migrants. Segregation policies in Africa formed in around the same period in similar conditions (boomtowns of various kinds sucking in African labor).

Whereas (extrapolating heroically from my very limited knowledge) in European (and northern US?) countries there were similar concerns about the new urban underclass, also resulting in among other things eugenics programs; but there the upshot was integration of the underclass by mass education and eventually franchise and labor rights, and consolidation of identity based on nation, rather than race.