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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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No, it's concern trolling laundered through a "moral, compassionate" lens.

See my analogy elsewhere in the thread to pro-choicers who insist that pro-lifers can't possibly be sincerely concerned about the lives of fetuses, and have to be using it as an excuse to oppress women. No! You can disagree with the principles, or you can say (as I do) that this is an impractical way to implement those principles, but your opponents genuinely, sincerely hold those principles! Honest!

Your gloss on human trafficking vs. illegal immigration misses the mark completely due to this baffling refusal to believe that pro-immigration advocates care about immigrants' welfare as human beings, as an end unto itself. "Immigrants" aren't a means to some other end. Liberals approve of "illegal immigrants" because they think of them as individuals trying to act on their own desires whose freedom US border services are unfairly restricting; and they disapprove of "human trafficking" because they think of victims of human trafficking as slaves and abductees whose freedom is being unfairly restricted by the traffickers. This is entirely consistent, and incredibly obvious. If you do not grasp this, then your theory-of-mind of anyone to your left fails completely.

Your gloss on human trafficking vs. illegal immigration misses the mark completely due to this baffling refusal to believe that pro-immigration advocates care about immigrants' welfare as human beings, as an end unto itself.

Those may be their feelings, but closer examination of the actual facts of migration policy reveal this to be, at best, Mrs. Jellyby-ism. So much undocumented immigration is facilitated by truly horrific cartels/people-smugglers that the U.S. government has long balked from designating the cartels as what they are - para-state criminal enterprises fully deserving of the foreign terrorist organization label just like the Haqqani network, Hezbollah, etc. - out of fear that it would open many illegal immigrants to criminal liability for materially-assisting an FTO.

Oh, I agree.

Please don't just post "I agree" posts.

I think "I agree" posts serve an important purpose in situations like this one, where A says something, B replies to A, and then A says "I agree". In that circumstance, specifically A's opinion of what B said is highly relevant, and an upvote wouldn't give B that relevant information because upvotes are anonymous.

I think posts stating agreement and little else are just a natural part of conversation. Obviously they're not very valuable, but I for one always feel like making them because that's just what you do when someone says something you agree with. Not a big deal either way.

There is much to what you say. It is also true that various leftists have, in unguarded moments, given much much more cynical arguments for immigration. For example, in the Blairite government in the UK:

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the "major shift" in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

(Emphasis mine)

The Left support for immigration is a confusing mixture of:

  1. compassion towards immigrants
  2. cultural xenophilia and a desire for local non-native cultural enrichment
  3. economic beliefs that high immigration improves GDP and living standards
  4. a political belief that immigrants will support the leftists who are their allies
  5. discomfort with preventing immigrants getting what they want
  6. dislike of common reasons given by the right for opposing immigration - nationalism, anti-xenophilia, crime, religious differences
  7. discomfort following chains of thoughts that might lead to 5 or 6, and concern for the social consequences of doing so where their friends can hear it
  8. mistaken beliefs about the costs of immigration resulting from an ability to externalise them (e.g. the anger when immigrants were bussed to Martha's Vineyard and New York, the fact that lots of immigrants either work in the service industry or in warehouses)

I think it's important to point out as you are doing that people genuinely believe 1-3, but it's also fair to point out that darker motives 4-8 also exist and are not invalidated by 1-3.

I'd add somewhere in your list a feeling of guilt towards historical wrongs and a feeling that sacrificing their own countrymen's welfare in favor of immigrants' is somehow helping make up for it.

True

I think most of it is just economic, to be honest. The two-party consensus is that large-scale immigration is necessary for economic reasons - more workers enable more economic growth, and it fills out the bottom of the population pyramid, which is declining due to demographic transition. (For non-conspiratorial reasons - no one's scheming to reduce the native birthrate, and in fact the birthrate decline is global.)

When asked, neither party usually says that's the reason, though if pressed they will usually mention it as one among others, but I think it's the core reason and most of the rest is rationalisation.

When asked, neither party usually says that's the reason

The Canadian government will just state that business lobbying drove the approvals for temporary foreign workers, and Carney is being admirably clear that it is reason the program cannot simply be stopped despite the widespread belief it was abused after COVID

“When I talk to businesses around the country their No. 1 issue is tariffs, and their No. 2 issue is access to temporary foreign workers,” Carney told reporters.

The debate didn't really get moralized like down south, presumably because the PM had all the tools he needed to achieve his ends without dipping into asylum seekers, who seem especially aggravating.

Maybe. The numbers show that the economics aren’t working in Europe, and various parties have turned against it. Even the Left wing in the UK is nominally against it though for various of the reasons stated it hasn’t actually done very much.

Whether this is downstream of the economics not working out or other factors is hard to say.

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