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This whole debate between Elon and the rest of the right hinges upon what people understand the purpose of a state to be.
Is it an ideological organization like the Comintern, the Ummah or Christendom (or e/acc aerospace/digital foom)? Is it a commercial area, devoted to making the green line go up? Alternately, is the state a suit of political power-armour for a nation, devoted to advancing their national, ethnic interests?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871978282289082585
Elon is in with the neocons, the fundamentalists and the woke on this one, he lacks a national concept for the state.
At the end of the day, I believe in the nation-state as the fundamental unit. Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China' - maybe some other wars. Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation as the US has experienced and is experiencing. And it corrodes the necessary spirit of sacrifice. People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes. If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone, they'll likely make the logical decision to leave when the going gets tough. On a collective level, logical individual decisions are no good. It makes more sense to evade duty and responsibility - but then you end up living in a poor, unsafe and weak state, you're worse off than before.
The US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough. They were bigger and better than everyone in their region and enjoyed allies who did most of the hard fighting in the big wars. Even then, there have been significant political problems in America due to a lack of ethnic homogeneity. There can't be any race riots if there's only one race present.
Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.
The idea of filling up your elite with people who left their home land for a better economic deal that isn't even that much better is absurd. The US is filling the upper class who would ditch their culture, homeland, family and friends for 2-3x salary increase. The US elite is going to drift far from the general population if it largely consists of rich arabs, Vietnamese computer nerds, wealth Chinese business people, eastern European jews and other groups who find Milwaukee as relevant as a white guy in Singapore finds Bhutan. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the US is deeply divided when the elite view the country as a vehicle for their own personal success and have no real ties to it.
That’s literally the entire concept of America, we’re a country of people who had the resolve to cross oceans to seek a better life. Every single one of us apart from the Native Americans and those descended from slaves meets that description.
Now we’re suddenly going to rewrite it?
It's a nice story but the world has changed. Oceans have shrunk, they're now about three podcasts - or a good-sized audiobook on double speed - wide. On top of that, people have way more access to their original society than in the past. This works for America, in terms of how many people are Americanized, but it doesn't just work for America.
The world is smaller, more nations are willing to cater to expats looking for a low tax rate.
America is still the best deal on the table and shows every indication of remaining so (so they're net importers of the Sunaks and Scheers of the world) but there are substantial differences from whatever idealized sort of migration or migrants from the good old days you're appealing to.
It still takes something to uproot your life and move to a new country and culture 1000s of miles away from everything you’ve known.
It’s a big part of the reason why immigrants so often outperform native stock of Americans economically. They’re the people who were willing to dive in and risk charting a new course.
The common counterpoint to this is that they mostly just come here because even an illegally-low wage is still more than they can earn busting their butts back home. I wonder if "we shouldn't pay the cost for other countries being poorly-run" would be a strong counterargument to immigration.
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