I have a pretty, probably, novel take on closed borders libertarians.
They argument of restricting immigration says that there’s a huge “public goods” infrastructure in the USA which needs to be protected, and this is just because it’s our “private property”. I get the argument. The biggest flaw here is very subtle, but when you understand it, it overrides everything:
America is dead, dudes, give it up.
There’s this notion that there’s a liberal, “civilized” American culture – the sort of Christian Leave-It-To-Beaver families out there. I suppose the thought is that restricting immigration from welfare seeking, socialist culture parasites will protect America’s wonderful “civil society”.
Weed. Tinder. Facebook. Jay-Z. Asian labor. Asian intellectual labor. The military, and the price of justice owed to America. Opioids. Meth. Obesity and Walmart. Healthcare and Social Security as it is. The Debt. There’s no path back to the 1950s. We’re never going back to the 80s family sitcoms, either.
Okay, so there’s a conventional argument for immigration – that immigrants actually do assimilate over the long run (this is very reliable, and its related to socio-linguistics, and in history you see a panic where the current generations never are able to envision the total assimilation down the road). That we can certainly “afford” immigration.
Even so, I feel as if certain libertarians believe that some portion of American culture can actually go backwards, and leaning on 1776, somehow restore liberalism through America’s tradition of liberalism.
Fat chance. Take your head out of the sand.
The battle for liberalism will be ugly, and long, and sad. Stop making life hard for poor Mexicans.
If no more Mexicans came into America from now on, 80% of white Christian mid-America will be smoking weed, tri-racial, probably socialist, and certainly not Christian in about two and half generations. And, at the moment, most of mid-America – the “liberal” (freedumb) ones – love love love war.
Closed borders libertarianism is the ultimate “boomer libertarian” position. Baby boomers – that culture which feels deeply self-entitled, self-congratulatory, all thanks to merely being American. America is crap, there’s no liberal culture here.
Frankly, “blood and soil”, subsidiarity, a political order grounded on “volkische” traditions – there’s a reason this stuff is bunk. No, it’s not because of “Caricature Hitler”. In contrast to the “simple old ways of village and family”, Capitalism is dynamic and, frankly, disruptive. It’s socially disruptive. It works.
Somewhere in Hitler is this sort of sincere, almost innocent appeal to an anti-capitalist tranquility. A swimmer in rough seas climbing onto the beach to take a rest. This sort of romanticism is thrice-ways false.
First, backwardswise, the past was never ideal. Second, presently, the price of static tranquility is total societal violence. Thirdly, the future will be better in ways that you haven’t imagined yet, and so its gains exist without any source of reference.
1950s America were moral fiends, who killed millions in war, who couldn’t be bothered to learn about the world except through soundbites, who exercised moral liberalism by blindly following a politician into the world’s worst war. Well, these people were called the “greatest”. The good guys, who questioned the New Deal’s bully politics, who doubted the utility of national violence, were a distinct minority at the best of times.
Today, white middle America is garbage. Vain, entitled, attention-seeking, can’t be bothered to know on the map where their own family members are going to die and kill, paying a half million dollars to spend four years in a haze of thrill and high seeking, more concerning with proximate social competition, then taking advantage of history’s greatest opportunity to devote full-time labor to learning all about the world.
Comedians ask women to watch them masturbate. Yuck. But the punishment for this? According to many leading, white, cultural voices – life in poverty, no due process, no forgiveness.
You think Mexican people are going to make this worse? They’re going to come here, and learn to dye their hair purple and put rings in their noses that make them look like beasts of burden. If you want to keep migrants out – get ready for mass surveillance, national IDs, border walls, paranoia, more cops, and so forth. It’s not a simple thing of assenting to closed borders.
And the future? Well, it’s not going to be in a ranch-style home with little billy and rover exploring the crick or sandlot. Even so, liberal democracy and the public commons of America isn’t going to be what saves the world from stupid, entitlement politics. Greedy renegade businessmen will do the actual work.
I don’t expect the church to survive one way or another, so come to terms with that.
Then remember that Jesus would probably have a certain opinion about how to treat the downtrodden, and foreign outsiders.
For what it’s worth, if rich liberals ever see their wealth or comfort (or convenience) threatened by migration – believe me, the migration will stop.
For what it’s worth, socialist Venezuela still exists only because of the gift the CIA has given every two-bit Latin dictator: a plausible scapegoat. Thanks 1950s America. Great liberalism you have there.
Yeah, I get it. There’s an “ideal” of responsible, hard-working, fair, freedom loving Americans who take care of themselves, their families, and communities. Many such communities still kind of exist. But by God people – you’re the minority. Stop projecting your existential dread on other people who have little to do with it.
I used to be conservative once, and what made me libertarian was “reality”. There are great ideas and ideals, but the existence of an idea does not equate to the manifestation of the idea in reality.
In the end, I think there’s one libertarian position on immigration in reality. It has nothing to do with what the smartest position on immigration or whatever is. It’s all about how we should inherently be against IDs, walls, cops, detention, fines and so forth. It’s not about Mexicans or Somalis. It’s about that. What’s so complicated?
