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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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You'd need to reach extremes of harshness of enforcement of the anti-flow position to counteract the powerful flow incentives of being pro-stock. I'm talking about shooting illegal border crossers, or at least long prison sentences, because if the message is that "once you get there you are almost guaranteed to have a pathway to citizenship", why wouldn't all of latin america try? After all, all they have to lose is the right to visit the US legally as tourists, which most of them probably never would do anyway.

I have a longer reply here that I think would be of interest to you but I think the gist is that pro-stock moves can be counterintuitively "pro-outflow" moves. We want to be pro-stock, but we want to keep the stock small by being anti-inflow and pro-outflow, with inflow here meaning people who want to come and stay. People who want to come then want to leave, we should encourage and make it easy for people to do so. All the anti-inflow measures are fine (even though we don't do all of them, for example punish the employers), it's just it should also be coupled with "pro-outflow" moves as well.

I think the "pro-outflow" effect of a pathway to citizenship is likely a drop in a bucket compared to the "pro-inflow" incentive ("All I have to do it to move there, have a kid, avoid ICE for 15 years and then I've secured a statistically better life for all my decendants for generations?"). It's not like the countries illegal immigrants come from overtook the west when it comes to economic prospects in those 15 years. They might outflow on vacation to go visit their family members who didn't immigrate illegally, but they will come back.

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