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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home

There's a very straightforward way to resolve the humanitarian concern here.

Even if we gave everyone citizenship, there would still be downward pressure from wages. The majority of immigrants are in low-skilled jobs. If we maintained immigration so that the same proportion of upper-, middle-, and lower-class people immigrated as US citizens, then there would not be distortion. Even with removing illegality from the equation, immigration creates a distortion to the labor market exerting downward pressure.

This is in addition to the cultural concerns of having 16% of people in America "foreign born" and the increased difficulty of passing along US values to immigrants as the proportion of native-born Americans goes down. Does American culture matter? Yes! It created the prosperity and freedom that Americans enjoy - the very reason why the world wants to come here. Don't kill the Golden Goose. Don't tear down Chesterton's fence.

Even if we gave everyone citizenship, there would still be downward pressure from wages.

Leaving aside the issues with this argument*, then why bring up the humanitarian concern if it's not a serious priority?

This is in addition to the cultural concerns of having 16% of people in America "foreign born" and the increased difficulty of passing along US values to immigrants as the proportion of native-born Americans goes down.

This is not a novel problem, nor much evidence that it's actually a problem in itself (as opposed to generating backlash from nativists). The US has a history of absorbing staggeringly large waves of immigration, and we've gone through this song and dance before with the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Poles... Somehow none of these destroyed America.

In particular, it's remarkable how anti-Hispanic sentiments echo anti-Irish sentiments: they're lazy and parasitic (but also too willing to work long hours at hard labor for low wages), they're criminals, they're undemocratic, they'll overwhelm us with their numbers and fecundity, they're not assimilating, etc. About the only prominent difference I observe is that there isn't very much overt anti-Catholicism nowadays.

Of course, nowadays, the Irish are at least as American as the English.

It created the prosperity and freedom that Americans enjoy

Do you not think the tens of millions of immigrants who helped build America (somehow without destroying society) had anything to do with it? Xenophobia in the US is generally correlated with the least free and least prosperous parts of the country.

*it's pretty questionable that reducing the labor supply is generally welfare enhancing.

The humanitarian concern that I need to address first is that our own lower class is dying deaths of despair, keeping unemployment down but also decreasing the life expectancy. I wasn't listing out things I want you to be concerned with, when I was talking about how exploitable the labor is. I was listing out several reasons why that labor is distortionary.

We have NEVER had over 16% of the US population foriegn-born since we became a country, and every time we approached this number we put hard breaks on to reduce immigration, usually to the benefit of the economy and rising labor standards.

Leaving the spigot on will quickly dilute American civic values. If it is so easy for someone from another country to maintain American values without being surrounded by native-born Americans, then why do they not just turn their countries into America? If they are already American's at heart, why does the world not have the same Bill of Rights, expectations surrounding civil duties, trust, and friendliness?

Instead, we have programs in place to inculcate legal immigrants on the path to citizenship into our civic values and ensure their loyalty to our nation over their former ones. Illegal immigrants and people here on temporary Visas don't have that.

The inculcation is made much easier when 90% of your neighbors, co-workers, shop keepers, etc are also already part of the American culture. If only 50% of the people surrounding a new immigrant are from their previous country, then obviously they will be very slow to adopt American norms, if they ever do. Look at the Enshittification of California for an example.