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So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?
Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.
I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.
Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?
I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.
But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?
Europe is seeing an increased support for anti-immigration policies. Not only is there a desire to limit future migration and increase requirements for applicants, a significant amount of people want to kick out people who managed to achieve citizenship without assimilating, alongside descendants who also did not assimilate. As I understand it, this kicking out of citizens who should not have gotten citizenship in the first place is the goal of AfD and similar parties on the continent.
This makes sense to me on some level; If you hate all of western society and want to rebuild the caliphate, then you have no business here. The middle east can have you back for all I care.
On the other hand, this seems like a slippery slope that draws into question what citizenship even is. Making it possible to kick out people recognized as citizens seems like a dangerous Chesterton's fence to tear down. For one, it gives the government the ultimate power to kick out citizens it dislikes. This seems like a real danger to a democracy where people are supposed to have disagreements and come to agreements through dialogue. It also draws into question what it even means to be German in the first place. Would anyone be safe if such a law was allowed? Is there any amount of generations that a family can live in Germany after which it becomes German? Or will everyone have to watch what they say in fear that their opinions may one day be recognized as against the national interest?
It makes sense then, that the existing conservative parties would be concerned about a newcomer which wants to make such radical changes. At the same time though, I don't understand why they seem so disinterested in at least limiting future immigration. There is a real concern here from a substantial proportion of the population, and political parties are supposed to represent their constituents. If the established parties would take on the more reasonable parts of AfD policies (limiting immigration and increasing requirements for applicants), that would probably net them a lot of voters and weaken AfD, without having to concede to the more extremist demands of kicking out legal citizens.
One of the major problems is the enormous amounts of immigration fraud. Likely a majority of naturalized citizens and legal residents in recent years have lied on their applications and interviews and such. There is practically an industry in helping them lie, and the government has been tacitly endorsing that. This is quite aside from the other issue that governments have been granting more and more citizenship and legal statuses despite the fairly clear will of the democratic polity for decades. There is a very real way in which the whole process of naturalization, asylum, and immigration in general has been rendered illegitimate in the eyes of the public. The system has been abused, defrauded, and twisted into a mockery of what it was intended. It's like a charity that has begun enslaving its old donors when they start to object to its practices.
The fence was already torn down from the other side. The damage has already been done.
I hope the slope is slippery, or else we'll never get where we need to be. In the meantime, I will accuse anyone who objects to this of the slippery slope fallacy. Is this a risky move in danger of going to far? Yes, obviously.
You can't go handing out citizenship like candy and also claim that it should be treated like some sacred rite that cannot be undone--that is merely a strategy to undermine borders and should be regarded as enemy action (because it is).
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You do not have to pose this as some theoretical thing. There are precedents, including my own motherland where I was born: Czechoslovakia. After the war in 1945 then president Edvard Beneš promulgated decrees that did as follows:
And just to remind you, this was exiled allied antifascist democratic government prior to 1948 communist coup. This was all done in the middle of ethnic cleansing and remigration of over 3 million Germans and 100,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovakia (around 20% of the population), many families lived in these lands 500 years+. To this day these decrees are nonegotiable pillars of Slovak and Czech law including Amnesty law 115/1946, which established that any atrocities or crimes during expulsion were pardoned. All of them were reaffirmed by Czech and Slovak judiciary and parliamentary powers as late as 2000s as untouchable. Both countries still exist, they are part of EU and NATO although these decrees were in contention by Austria, Hungary and Germany during admission process. And EU obliged and put their legal experts on it and declared that nations have sovereignity over citizenship and that basically bygones should remain bygones for political expediency. Maybe you may have visited Prague and stayed in expropriated house from some unfortunate German family, while some nice local Czech tour guide gave you lecture on history of Czechs and their famous beer introduced by Bavarian brewmasters who are now long ethnically cleansed from the country. The End of story.
I think remigration and denaturalization can be done no problem even if it seems insane now. In fact, the blueprint is there from COVID era - all it takes is for a country to declare sufficiently supported state of emergency and universal human rights, civil rights, constitutional protections, international law and everything else stops mattering. I am not saying that it is likely or something like that, but in current day and age I do not think it is outside of realm of possibilities. For instance you have countries like South Africa who do the same but in silent mode - expropriating property, open racial and ethnic discrimination and you barely read about it. Apparently South Africa is upstanding member of UN, WTO and international community. Another tolerated genocide and ethnic cleansing is that of Serbs from Croatia during allied supported 1995 Operation Storm in context of Yugoslav wars despite Geneva Conventions, international law, human rights and all the rest.
Having something like that is not a totally outlandish thing to imagine. And it does not necessarily have to have any domino effect even 80 years later down the road.
There would be a civil war if we tried this. They're not going to just let themselves be expelled.
Except for South Africa all your examples are in times of war, and South Africa isn't quite expelling anyone just yet, just trying to bully them out.
Putting aside for a moment that parts of the natives might resist this as well, what exactly do you think are they going to do? They don't run any infrastructure, they don't produce their own food at scale, they don't control or form a significant portion of European militaries. In short, they aren't a serious strategic threat, and are very unlikely to become one even if the numbers shift further in their favor.
Sure, they might riot in their districts or cities and kill a few thousand natives who are stupid or unlucky enough to be nearby, but then they'd just starve to death because there is no migrant-run agro-logistics industrial complex that can feed them, no migrant-run defense industry to arm them, and no non-European electrical grid that can power their daily lives. The fact that the average quality of the migrants Europe has accumulated is so low also means that they just aren't that relevant to the basic military prowess and industrial prosperity of their host countries.
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South Africa does not want its white population to leave- they want the white cash cow to stay in place and tolerate being shaken down and scapegoated.
If they think white people are a cash cow, they are not doing a good job optimizing milk production.
Sure, maybe some of the smarter ones realize how things work. But the modal South African actually believes the scapegoating. They really think that white people are the problem. It's not a serious country.
African history is full of examples where they expel or genocide their market dominant minority and then immediately things go to shit. Zimbabwe and Uganda come to mind immediately. The Zanzibar genocide might be in the same category too. I'm sure it would be easy to find a lot more examples.
I didn’t say they were economically literate! But they grasp the concept of wanting the people you take shit from around- not enough to keep from killing thé goose that lays the golden egg, but enough not to outright expel them.
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Well, that's the thing: if they were any good at farming, they wouldn't need the white people.
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If we done it now, at worst it would be riots, not civil war. They don't have the infrastructure for sustained resistance. If we wait until we're a minority than yeah, which is why some of us are trying to raise the issue now, rather than wait.
It was after times of war, but if you want something better fitting, Estonia stripped all ethnic Russians of citizenship after it left the USSR.
Wasn't it only the Russians who moved in after the annexation into the USSR (which very well could have been most of them, I guess)?
Oh, you got me there. I read the factoid from a book written by their first post-soviet PM, I don't think be mentioned that, but I read it ages ago.
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Having blood ties to the area from before 1969 (that includes marriage). Simple definition. Minor exception for people that actually assimilated. Any son of Mustafa that is named Gunter, baptized into Christianity, wears Lederhosen and eats pork bratwurst with a lot of mustard and prodigious amounts of beer should have way to stay.
Also there a lot of people in Germany that are not citizens anyway.
Agreed, but try to turn that into legalese!
Simple, you do it step by step. Step one outlaw NGOs. Step two start dismantling the law infrastructure imposed after WW2 with all the rights to this and that, then start outlawing religions and practices. If they don't like it they should be forced to pretend or choose violence.
People will bend the rules, like a shady cash-only store with the same recurring customers, and a “Church” that interprets Christian rules and customs very creatively (you know, which both already exist). Any clarification will be worked around, and ideologically-aligned judges will accept the workarounds.
Moreover, the state will need mass surveillance to enforce the more intricate laws, which is primed for abuse outside its original goals (and while most nations are already walking into a panopticon, we should all be walking out).
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That's two rights from the First Amendment you've overturned there. Want to go whole hog and kill the rights to free speech, free press, and petition too?
Freedom of association died with civil rights and freedom of speech died with woke. Might as well get some benefit from their passing.
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What benefit is derived from believing in ghosts?
Alternatively: "no, you see, the Europeans just have a different understanding of Free Speech."
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That's a bit of a nonsequitur.
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Some variation of the Swiss system, where (simplifying a bit) local residents have to approve citizenship requests, seems like it would do an okay job of this. Or at least it would as long as the local residents aren’t all of an “import the world” mindset.
Perhaps there could be something less like a vote of approval and more like the Turing Test - you get citizenship if, after some extended conversation with you, X citizens can't tell you apart from an nth-generation citizen. (Of course, this only works if you start with a population that's not already saturated with non-assimilated nth-generation immigrants.) The testers' answers are recorded, and weighted against or discounted outright if they are found to spam "citizen" come hell or high water.
This will result in disparate impact, and since the process of deciding what questions to ask is opaque, can't be legally justified.
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Call it The Shibboleth Test.
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It's always fun to hypothesise about all the things you could build after cutting down a (Schelling/Chesterton) fence, but the thing with a fence is that it holds back people on both sides. Do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that will blow once "strip citizenship from someone on the enemy team" is on the political menu?
More generally, I find it kind of fascinating to see this enthusiasm, time and time again, of oppressed political fringe groups that briefly get within swinging range of power to make their first move be "empower the state to move against my opponents in unprecedented ways"; when the tide recedes, it always winds up being used against them, to much pikachu-facing and gnashing of teeth.
The fence has not held back people on the other side. But it's okay, because when we have successfully done whatever we consider necessary, if the other side tries to do things back in response, you will definitely deploy this argument against them, and it will definitely work, right?
I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to keep mentioning it because it seems inescapably necessary: For more than a decade, I have seen moderates deploy arguments in the form of "you shouldn't do this thing, because if you do, how will the other side respond?", have that advice ignored, and then when my side side moves to respond, the moderates tell them "you shouldn't do this thing, because if you do, how will the other side respond?".
It seems to me that such arguments are fundamentally self-defeating. If you are going to argue that the other side should get protections of a principle that it has clearly violated, then either you are willing to do the same for my side, in which case your arguments can be safely ignored, or you are not willing to do the same for my side, in which case you are my enemy. In neither case does this moderate argument hold water. Even in the first round, before the results were known, this flaw should have been clearly anticipated. Now, after repeated iterations, there is no excuse.
You appear to be claiming that there is a causal link here, that the oppressed political fringe groups are in a worse situation specifically because they attempted to use political power to secure their interests. I think it is self-evident that using political power to secure one's interests can in fact result in bad consequences in at least some cases. I do not think it is a supportable argument that using political power inevitably does so, or that using political power in this way is obviously or necessarily a worse alternative to the status quo.
In particular, I would like to see how this analysis applies to the civil rights era, which has entirely consisted of "oppressed" political fringe groups getting within swinging range of power, empowering the state to move against their opponents in unprecedented ways, and then reaping massive economic, political and social benefits from this exercise for multiple generations running with essentially zero negative consequences of any kind, with the clear expectation even from the moderate center that this is totally fine and should be maintained indefinitely.
With a track record like that, why should I and mine not emulate their model, adapted as necessary to our own circumstances?
And if that doesn't work, there are always further escalations available. After all, haven't you heard? Political violence is solely the responsibility of the individuals committing it, it's not like broad movements are in any way accountable for the actions of their partisan fringes.
...Speaking as plainly as possible, you should consider the idea that the situation is sufficiently fucked that these sorts of arguments don't really work any more.
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Except, quite clearly in reality, it doesn't. Horribly asymmetric, incredible first-mover effect.
"They can let in millions of people all at once; you have to remove them one at a time and they get near-infinite appeal opportunity. They get to commit endless fraud and lie through their teeth; you have a nigh-insurmountable standard of evidence to do anything about that."
Pretending the fence holds back both sides is naive, unilateral disarmament.
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For many on the right, demographics is existential. There comes a point (and maybe we’ve already past it) where the cake is baked and there is no way to reverse and as a result the country is gone.
Worrying about tit for tat makes sense in a somewhat stable democracy.
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There is difference in citizenship by blood and by fiat. And in a way it doesn't matter - Islam is existential threat.
There are only 7 high quality* Muslim majority countries - Bosnia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Malaysia. 6 of them are white, the 7th is ruled by the Chinese. There are no high quality black majority countries. And the subcontinent remains awfully underdeveloped. And this is the people that Europe is accepting in droves.
So it is existential because they just don't know how to build or maintain a country once they get in power. What germany will look like when they are a majority - you just have to look at their countries - they are inhabited and ruled by people like them.
*If we are generous.
As a quibble, Bermuda is 52% black per the local census (and about 60% black if you follow the American rule and count black-other mixes as black). It's definitely high quality, although you can argue about whether it should count as a country - it's a British colony where the elected local government has de facto full control of everything except foreign and defence policy.
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The interesting thing about the subcontinent is that they built nuclear bombs, run high end-intelligence programs, and Pakistan has a heck of an Air Force. These are very hard problems, and subcontinentals achieve them- there don't seem to be Chinese ‘advisers’ doing the maintenance on their jets. So clearly they can do them, they’re just ok with living in badly dysfunctional societies for some reason.
Your list of Muslim countries is pretty secular of a list(gulf Arabs use white tech reps to maintain their industrial civilization), it must be pointed out.
I don't know about Pakistan, but Indians aren't really an ethnic group. 3000 years of caste-segregated breeding means you essentially have a country with thousands of ethnic groups, some of which are very smart. It's as if India was 5% Ashkenazi, 10% Chinese, 15% Polish, 20% Algerian and 50% Somali. Their smart fraction is providing half the CEOs to Silicon Valley while 20% of the country can't read.
I mean the other thing is simply India's sheer population size- if you have a billion people, you're bound to come up with the human capital to build a nuclear bomb or maintain jets, assuming that's where your priorities lie, even if your true population average is 80 or so.
Yes that's part of it, but there are 1.3 billion people in Subsaharan Africa, and that subcontinent isn't producing nearly as many smart fraction people. Nor are any Subsaharan countries doing the kind of O-ring stuff that India is managing.
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Nuclear weapons are easy. The delivery is the moderately challenging part - and so far we haven't seen that they can deliver.
Don't throw me ready lines about Indian and Pakistani intelligence ... programs. I have spent enough time in E9 in Islamabad. More than I would like honestly. They were ... ok. Aside from the 24/7 blasting anti India propaganda. But it is easy to have good air force if you are willing to spend money on it. Which is true for almost everywhere in the third world - if the top guy or the hunta wants something they usually get it. Getting everything to work ok in a country seems to be beyond their reach. Back in 2022 I was amazed how frequently there were short blackouts. Which I didn't experience in Burkina Faso or Togo.
Feel free to amend the Muslim countries list. I left out the Gulf states because they really go overboard with the whole exploiting the indentured servants thing. Probably Oman could turn into nice place to live eventually - they seem a bit more mellow.
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A lot of people got blackpilled during Covid / Summer of Floyd when it was clear that laws don't actually protect anyone given sufficient public hysteria.
Punching the bully in the nose is sometimes better than playing dead and taking his blows. Not always of course. But the advice of "don't antagonize the bully" has mixed results at best.
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Which rightward parties entertain the idea of removing citizenship from their domestic, coethnic political opposition? If political opposition is along racial lines then this is a nonissue, it’s just standard remigration targeting. Otherwise, in the worst case scenario, it is certainly preferable to the status quo of endless foreign invasion.
The original question that drove this thread is "are AfD far-right?"
You can argue whether "remove citizenship from natural-born citizens and deport them on the basis of ethnicity" is a good idea or not, but I think it is clearly a far-right policy.
If that's what is driving the thread, than it has gone completely off the rails. Here's their position on remigration, I have admittedly only scanned it very quickly, but I am not seeing "remove citizenship from natural-born citizens and deport them on the basis of ethnicity" anywhere in there.
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The fence is down. If we can grant citizenship to infinity foreigners, then the blowing wind is sending them back.
I don't believe any law or norm or principle or logical consistency would stop the extremists on the other side from trying to denaturalize me if they thought they could get away with it.
Of course, but if you successfully denaturalize their allies, surely they will be more likely to think that they can get away with denaturalizing you.
Your argumentation is one of many that roughly has the shape of "the other party has already escalated maximally, there is nothing to lose from escalating back". I see this deployed left and right in internal culture wars, and even in real some-holds-barred wars like Ukraine/Russia. Yet, in each of those, it always turns out the other side did actually have more to escalate back with, and the cycle continues. Do you actually think/feel that you have nothing to lose, in your current situation?
The issue I have with this is the Chesterton Fence you propose has not historically existed. Remigration has happened many times in history. It’s often happened more often during war times but it has happened a lot in history. The Reconquista of Spain occurred. Haiti did it. Israel is basically doing it today. It was debated as a solution posts civil war. White Flight in America was basically forced migration.
Usually populations combining are fairly rare and only happen during conquests. Mass migration has only really happened to western civilizations over the last 30 years. Every other mass migration like Spanish to Americas or Normans to England happened during war times.
Well okay, by the same standard extermination has happened many times in history too. Ancient Rome did it, Russia did it, Germany did it.
Why not just take all the leftists into a room somewhere and shoot them in the back of the head? Why not just go full Sulla on anyone who stands against your political objectives?
Pinochet is one of my favorite politicians so I have no fundamental issue with doing that when necessary, though in a way that limits life losts. It’s a reasonable response to present things like communism.
Which I will remind you was backed by the US and the government was being ran by the University of Chicago at the time.
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Sorry, there's a big fence here called "natural born citizen". They would have to be crazy to think about tearing it down.
It's not an escalation. It's an undoing of a previous escalation. A deescalation, even.
No, I think I have everything to lose. Which is why I want to win.
And again, beating this same drum for the thousandth time, this sort of argument only ever goes one way. No one even bothers trying this sort of argumentation on leftists because everyone knows they don't give a fuck. Mainstream, high level elected Democrats support open borders, mass replacement migration, packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the filibuster and their more extreme flanks are talking about abolishing the Senate.
It is an absurdity to look at that and then tut-tut about conservatives wanting to send back ethno-narcissists and communists who got a piece of paper two years ago.
It's literally just colonialism.
Just as orders from some distant capital give the white man power to displace the Indian, now that same distant capital give the Indian power to displace the white man.
We do this with the excuse, both times, that we're civilizing the wastes. The natives are
NaziracistsSavages; their ways of life must be destroyed to make way for ours.So we'll stoke the blood feud, and pretend that the native is the Savage. We will send him to residential schools to educate him in our way. We will take his children away if he refuses to adopt our religion (Safety is our goddess- there's no Creator, no afterlife). And though there was a mechanism for us to get along, we will destroy it simply by making it illegal to enforce the law against its destruction.
We do this because we don't want to bother getting the fuck along. They are Savages, we (and they) believe we will win any war, and so they shall accept this eventual death or face immediate death.
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I will point out that those who were raised Blue were raised to give a fuck. "We on the left do not blacklist," etc.
(There is a perspective that might say: "It is those who were raised as, what we were raised to consider, 'whackadoo fundies,' who left 'fundieism' and identified as joining the left, who went on to apply the attitudes learned by being raised as 'fundies,' toward their new political positions. And since their, often 'Quiverfull,' parents had way more kids than our parents (who had never even heard of 'Quiverfull' and we only learned about it from adults 'joining us' who had been raised that way), their numbers totally swamped ours and the 'left' that we were raised in is no more.")
(Which kind of...illustrates cultural shift as a result of uncontrolled migration. Even though it had been welcomed by the "victims" because "we need all the numbers we can get.")
Meanwhile I grew up during a time this kind of thing was happening to Unitarian Universalists where I lived. "We're losing numbers, let's welcome all those 'Bridget Loves Bernie,' and similar Catholic-Protestant, marriages etc....wait what's happening to our religion..."
Could summarize as, the UUs (I endorse this) and "the left" (maybe also) thought they were getting new full members who wanted to assimilate and would take direction, and then were stunned to find that the new members...well...just didn't. To grab a metaphor from my long-gone geeky adolescence, I guess you could say the UUs (and "the left"?) thought they were offering "free as in speech" (:wince: or...software) and the new members thought, or acted as if, they were being offered "free as in beer." (Newcomers interpreted certain things as the "pure licentiousness" their cultures of origin had perceived them as, but that was never what was meant by the original adherents; but with the newcomers' numbers so great, that turned out not to matter.)
Sure they do. Do you think any of those good decent Blues would fund a film by Mel Gibson? They just won't blacklist communists, aka traitors trying to sell us out to an omnicidal tyranny.
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They are crazy, and they will if they can. The attempt to flood the country with unwanted paper citizens is an attempt to do exactly this, in fact. The insistence that Mahmood who broke into the country a few years ago is EXACTLY as German as you is an attempt to dilute the concept out of existence. Equating blood citizenship and paper citizenship serves only to devalue the former.
Moreover, though, yes I don't think deporting their pets would cause any noticeable change in their plans.
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Stripping citizenship is equivalent to criminal punishment: it takes away someone's rights, and has secondary consequences (loss of suffrage, property, community, in some cases effectively a death sentence).
Which means it should be fine if someone is tried in a legal system and could otherwise be sentenced to death, i.e. have demonstrated they can't follow the bare minimum, repeatedly breaking rules with no excuse. But if they're not tried at all or deported for a vague reason like "not assimilating" (where assimilation is defined beyond laws, or clearly defined but selectively enforced) - imagine if such process instead led to their fine, imprisonment, or execution.
For the last year or two, when people argued over "due process," many restrictionists here (like myself) said deportation is not a punishment. I understand you talk here of "stripping citizenship," not deportation per se. But, it seems related to me, and it seems I could construct a similar line of argument.
Is stripping citizenship really a punishment? I mean, if the country imprisons you but decides you can't own property or vote, that's one thing. If it is relinquishing its control, obligations, etc; over you and banishes you, that seems a little less bad to me.
I suppose the key distinction is: if a country is doing this to its own natural-born citizens, it creates a "stateless person" but this is very different than telling foreigners to go back to their home country. Blurring that distinction is uh, well, shall we say a soldier in a political argument.
Stripping recently-granted citizenship is different, almost equivalent to revoking a green card, and maybe doesn’t need to go through the same justice system. Although if someone has been a citizen for a long time (say, around a decade), at that point they may have more ties in their host country: in extreme cases, if they moved as a child with no relatives, their birth country would be like a truly foreign country to them.
An immigration system should only grant citizenship to someone after they’ve stayed in the country for a long time, so every case of removing it should be the latter. But if a party grants citizenship to visa holders who’ve in some cases only stayed months (which may have already happened), the next party should be able to revoke it almost as easily as they could revoke the visas.
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A polite fiction, at this point. At least paper citizenship is. It means nothing. It's worth nothing. It's been given away so freely to so many that should never have had it. It's like degree devaluation, but worse.
Only those with alternative citizenships. Which is completely fair; paper citizens should always be at risk of removal, to keep them in line. Ideally there would be a way of preventing them from renouncing alternative citizenships before we can revoke their granted ones. (Well, ideally, they should never have been invited in in the first place, and I will still never understand the impulse to economic and social self mutilation that did so.)
Well, no, not if their concern is towards the actual people of the country. If they have loyalty to paper citizens over blood ones, then they shouldn't be anywhere near power anyway and should be roundly disregarded on all concerns.
They don't actually care who they rule over, so long as they rule. Germans or Bomalians, it's all the same to them. They just want to rule over the most people possible. The Bomalians are maybe considered slightly easier to rule over due to being less disposed towards intelligence due to... alternative breeding strategies. This is however, under the assumption that they can be deprived of their violently backwards religions and ideologies by the civilising light of western culture (which they cannot.)
If by bathroom sink is overflowing due to someone leaving the taps on 100% flow for ages, if my floors are getting soaked and everything is getting water damaged, simply turning the taps some of the way off doesn't fix anything. If your ship is sinking, covering up some of the hole and refusing to bail water because it would be "mean" to displace it, doesn't fix anything. The damage from mass migration is cumulative, it is the stock, not the flow that matters.
For these reasons and more as an American I support eventually barring dual citizenship, or at the very least barring those who hold dual citizenship from holding office or voting until they formally renounce their other citizenship.
I think as a long term goal it’s one of only a handful of things that will be absolutely required to preserve the American dēmos and citizenship that actually has any meaning.
Do we…not?
I actually thought we required renouncing other citizenships before letting someone naturalize. This was based on an in-law who elected not to do so.
Turns out that might have been a requirement by the German side? They changed their laws in 2024 to allow Americans to become dual citizens, but I can’t find anything about the other direction.
Anyway, it seems like a reasonable requirement. Would probably have some knock-on effects against the people who pursue dual citizenship while staying in the home country; not sure how common they are, or how much they pay in taxes…
I think there are some words to that effect that you have to recite when getting the citizenship, but no, they're dead letter, and the U.S. is perfectly happy with dual citizenships, as far as I know.
Part of that is the lack of peer conflicts.
When I was reading up on this for an immigration thread, a lot of the citizenship cases were about the rights and obligations of dual citizens when at war with the second country. It was particularly contentious in the Civil War, since we initially flip-flopped on rebellion vs. war.
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Yeah, US is weird. The oath is as follows:
But legally, the US does not force you to give up your previous citizenship:
it's 100% fine to keep it, and indeed, as I understand it, you have to file formal paperwork and pay a fee to your prior country to de-citizen yourself there, after you've become a US citizen, if you so desire.
Most countries are actually fairly chill about this, and said fee is the usual price of pushing through the paperwork that you have to pay to get literally anything done. Ironically it's the US that's rather strict about it, and hits you with pretty heavy exit taxes, though more countries are starting to talk about implementing something similar.
Yeah -- I didn't mean to imply it was a significant fee, merely an added bit of inertia against denouncing citizenship.
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Add barring ownership by dual citizens directly or indirectly of critical industries like semiconductors and military manufacturing, at a minimum. Same if their spouses or children are dual citizens. Compared to a few votes which wouldn't make a difference in many elections.
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Flows definitely DO matter, a lot of the difference between a well ordered system and disordered one is the rate. When the rate is low enough for assimilation to be easy and for the population of immigrants not to be rapidly growing over time it works fine.
The reason remigration is needed is that the rates have been so high that reverse flow is needed to get things at a steady state.
Stock and Flow do matter.
As far as I can tell Mexico has a largely unified Mexican Culture and assimilation of their ethnic groups has occurred. By global standards it’s a fairly wealthy country helped by closeness to the US. It’s also a low-trusts society. It’s a very common story to be robbed by the police in Mexico which does not happen anywhere else that has their level of wealth. Most of the US black population is unassimilated. Brazil has a culture but the stock still leads to dysfunctional politics.
Flow arguments do matter at times like with the Italians who eventually assimilated, but stock arguments also matter when assimilation between different ethnic groups is impossible.
Unified Mexican culture is largely ‘me and my brother against my cousin’. They’re fractious, identify as members of a particular state, region, or hometown, snooty about race, and they still have their own unassimilated minorities. There’s commonalities, yeah, but the noroeste/south/coastal/DF divide is huge. And Mexico’s high GDP is mostly driven by the Noroeste and DF which look down on the rest of the country- and the Noroeste is noticeably more America-like in comparison.
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Implicitly perhaps, but since there is no legal way to do that, they cannot officially hold this position.
Once in power I assume they would work to create such a way. I think this is what many of their supporters are hoping for too. National laws can be changed. EU laws too if they have enough support, and in the extreme case they could work to leave the EU in order to restore sovereignty. I don't think any of these options would be out of the question for AfD and their like.
Power isn't a binary. Even if they were part of the federal government, even if they had an absolute majority, they would still need to contend with the resistence of the entire political and buerocratic establishment, with establishment media and "civil society". Yes in some imaginary scenario in which they somehow had all the popular support and no opposition, they could just trash the constitution and replace all the current buerocrats, but that's not going to happen. Ever. Because the demos has already been replaced to a large extent, and the larger part of the leftovers are staunchly and zealously anti-AfD. The same goes for the EU.
Maybe some voters let their imaginations go wild to the point where they convince themselves it might happen, but it won't.
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