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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
In exceptionally simplistic terms, the people on the left who are against ICE and pro Somali or whoever immigration don’t love Somalis, they just hate their fellow countrymen.
If a country is a home and all citizens are roommates, the left is the roommate that insists any stranger or bum off the street can live in the house regardless of what the other paying roommates want.
It’s important to realize that as an American you don’t have to justify why Somalis, Mexicans, Romanians, or any other foreigners should not live in the US. You can just not want them here and that’s ok. This is your home. You have that right and the majority of Americans agree with you.
The Bangladeshi can be a world class physicist, innovative neurosurgeon, or the greatest writer in the world. It doesn’t matter. You have the right to not want him in your house, in your land, in your space. That’s sovereignty.
I react differently to this kind of statement, as myself an expatriate (immigrant) living in Japan as a permanent resident. I sympathize with those here (in Japan) who grumble generally about foreigners, though I realize many of them are grumbling specifically about non-Japanese inability or failure to grasp basic politeness, cultural norms of quietude, humility, cleanliness, or language, etc. It's not that they despise anyone not-Japanese, it's that they're growing frustrated with the ever-increasing number of foreigners noisily crowding the bus, or smoking in the street, or spreading their giant suitcases all over the train aisle, or whatever. To say nothing of the occasional foreigner criminal.
What I am less sympathetic to is the straightforward contempt for anything that isn't 100% Japanese (forget that defining what qualifies as such is likely impossible) and the occasional stated desire to kick out all the foreigners. The 尊王攘夷 (sonno jooi)/"Revere the emperor, expel the foreigners!" type racism of late Edo. This is simply an unworkable, even bizarrely emotionally immature way of perceiving the world.
Copypaste this into America and say it's sovereignty; that's odd to me. I may be misunderstanding you.
Not OP but for most it's not a hatred of anything foreign/unamerican (though that can play a role). It's the idea that the citizens of a country have absolute authority over who is or is not allowed to live in a country, regardless of the individual merits (or lack thereof) someone who wants to come live here may have. We may want to allow in talented doctors and engineers etc., but just because you are a talented doctor or engineer doesn't give you any sort of moral right to come here. We can choose exactly how many (or how few) doctors and engineers we want to bring in here, and we can decide we'd prefer more British, French, and Japanese doctors over Zimbabwean, Saudi, and Pakistani doctors or whatever arbitrary distinctions we want to make (more hot women and fewer men, or more tall men fewer short kings, etc.).
The big divide between the right and the left here is that the left is effectively saying we cannot choose who to allow or not allow into our country. Sometimes this is done under specious arguments, i.e. "all of those young Syrian men on the rafts are totally doctors and lawyers and engineers coming to enrich our country and therefore it is wrong to prevent them from coming here" and sometimes it's even more baldfaced (see all of the proactive attempts to protect criminal illegal aliens who have been convicted of heinous crimes like murder and rape from deportation). It's a fundamental mismatch of values, and I don't see it resolved any way other than one side giving up on their values, or one side conquering the other.
I think there are two separate value disagreements at work, one of which is susceptible to factual resolution. There is certainly a Left-wing position that freedom of movement is a human right in itself, and that there is simply no moral legitimacy to wanting to keep anyone out of the country, whatever the circumstances.
But this maximal open-borders-ism seems less common than the humanitarian argument - the one that goes: sure, in an ideal world where everyone's basic needs were seen to, countries would be entitled to setting whatever immigration policies they like - but there is a moral duty to help those in need which trumps this right. You normally have the right to decide who comes onboard your boat, but that does not apply if you sail past a drowning child and refuse to fish him out. America is ludicrously wealthier and safer than the Third World, therefore ~any immigrant is a de facto refugee who would have a substantially lower life expectancy if we didn't let them in. There's nothing wrong with restricting immigration from Canada or Germany, but restricting Somali immigration is tantamount to murder by inaction, so faced with the dilemma, any halfway-decent person would take their preferences and stuff them in favor of doing the right thing. And you are a halfway-decent person, aren't you? You do have a heart, right? Right?
This second framing seems much more widespread among left-wing pro-immigration normies than open-borders radicalism for the sake of it - see the focus on "refugees". Nor I do I think so lowly of the average right-winger as to think that this boils down to a "fundamental mismatch of values" where they disagree with the principle that if you want to call yourself a good person, you should let the drowning child onboard your boat whether or not you'd be prepared to say that anyone in the world can use your boat if they feel like it. (Though there are certainly a few people like that; indeed I think they tend to be disproportionately represented on forums like this one.) This position is simply one that is fundamentally naive about the facts - about the feasibility of alleviating all the world's suffering without destroying the wealth and security which gives us the power to alleviate some of it in the first place.
For my money, the primary divide is that left-wingers and right-wingers have opposite intuitions about how much inertia there is to work with. Partly, this is because the obvious fact that we cannot feed every pauper in the world is simply too grim to contemplate, so people stick their heads in the sand. But I suspect there's also a form of the overfitted absurdity heuristic familiar to x-risk advocates at play: progress and abundance are so taken for granted that right-wing doomsday prophets' ravings about economic, demographic, and/or civilizational collapse feel too melodramatic to be remotely believable; they seem so absurd that they feel as cartoonish, and as readily dismissed, as aliens, killer robots, and the Rapture.
And frankly, I also think that in recent years, excessive bullet-biting from the right about fundamental value differences has worsened this divide. Because they don't see right-wingers saying "Obviously we should help everyone in the world if we had infinite money and housing to gift to them; but we don't, and trying would only ruin us" nearly as often as "Well whoever said we had to be kind to people anyway? whoever said charity was better than selfishness? whoever said good was better than evil? fucking bleeding hearts", of course they think that the Right is simply made up of selfish, privileged assholes who won't spare a coin for Tiny Tim, and that this is the only reason why anyone would ever oppose immigration. It's an easier story to believe than the bitter pill of the dream simply not being achievable at that kind of scale.
It isn’t just absence is taken for granted but the left don’t really have a model for why different jdx have different levels of wealth outside of colonialism/ racism which doesn’t really explain much after examination.
So the right believes culture / genes matter. The left doesn’t.
That's also true, but I still don't think it's a deciding factor in the differing attitudes towards immigration. Right-wingers, IMV, aren't wrong to view left-wing rhetoric about "skilled immigration" as broadly disingenuous. The average leftist would certainly recoil from a positive claim that immigrants are on average less efficient economic actors than natural-born citizens - but their support for immigration is not downstream of an earnest belief that immigrants are good for the economy.
Arguing that immigrants will turn into valuable workers is not germane to the left-wing worldview, but rather, an attempt to speak the Right's language. Having formed a model of right-wing voters as totally unmoved by moral arguments, they resort to claims that immigration is in the nation's economic self-interest. Those claims might be more or less strained, and more or less sincere, depending on the particulars, but they are never the ultimate root of pro-immigration sentiment; at best, for people who earnestly believe them, they are simply a sign of the moral order of the universe ("helping immigrants is the right thing to do and it pays for itself besides, so there's really no reason not to do it short of sheer wickedness").
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I also observe quite a lot of 1 but with a racial tint: the only possible reason not to want to have open borders is a dislike of foreigners, and therefore anything short of open borders is racist. And any rational non-racist argument against non-maximally-open-borders is just a covers for the racist argument (not always wrong!).
Which is why the way to dismantle that is to publicly disavow that the "racist argument" has any meaning whatsoever (re: Fuentes/Morgan, though Trump is the best modern example). That's partially why he, uniquely among English-speaking nations, can still pull the Boomer vote (typically confused as "obligatorily right-wing" by the people who call themselves the left), since the other places are more reflexively fighting the racist bogeymen of 70 years ago.
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