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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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It's not their existence that is contentious, it is their location.

Yes, in theory, but In practice that's nearly identical. I find the distinction between existence/location to be marginal at best. Just in the same way I don't wish for all mice to be eradicated off the earth, I would kill all of them that are in my house, for the very same reason that I don't like their location.

if they choose to stay they can be forcibly removed

Exactly my point. Think about the practical implementation of these policies. Force them where and how? Tell them all to pack their bags? Send them to other nations that don't want them? What if these nations refuse to take them in? What if these minorities refuse under all circumstances? What about the large proportion of minorities that are second or third generation immigrants who do not have a place to go if displaced? What starts out simple in theory quickly becomes murderous in practice.

What starts out simple in theory quickly becomes murderous in practice.

The perpetual counterpoints I bring up to these sorts of points, and the equation of country breakup and ethnic sorting/relocation with "Balkanization":

  1. The post-WWII relocations of ethnic Germans

  2. The "Velvet Divorce" of Czechoslovakia

Think about the practical implementation of these policies. Force them where and how?

Probably back over the Mexican border, since the vast majority of them came in through that avenue. As for how, the same way the state does everything else: with the threat of uniformed men with guns.

Tell them all to pack their bags?

That would be first, and easiest, solution and was actually proposed by a Republican candidate for President in my lifetime. He referred to it as self-deportation.

Send them to other nations that don't want them?

Yes, exactly.

What if these nations refuse to take them in?

We lean on them, the same way we do to get our way all the way around the world in a thousand different ways. Starting with sanctions, probably, or withholding of aid. Or we simply move the people across the border and present it as a fait accompli.

What about the large proportion of minorities that are second or third generation immigrants who do not have a place to go if displaced?

It depends on how intermixed they are, first of all, but anyone who has been ethnically distinct for three generations in America gets little sympathy from me and can be deported to where their grandfathers came from.

You keep raising these logistical issues as if they are the moral issues but they simply aren't. Removing them is a logistical issue, and it can be resolved using all of the regular tools we already have, once the decision has been made to do so.

I don't get the reticence. How has any state gotten anything accomplished at any time in history? By deciding to do it and marshalling their resources to the task. This is no different.

Your example is specific to a certain type of Mexican immigration in the United States. Whether you're looking at something logistically or morally are completely different issues. There are 10.5 million Mexicans currently in the United States, which is 5x larger than the largest standing army in the world. How would you do that logistically without causing an all out civil conflict? Once again I'm arguing that whatever way you think that will play out in theory will not play out that way in practice. Even if you want to pretend that it's not a moral position, it absolutely is, and you will have to morally justify that to a large portion of the United States population that will not be in favour of such drastic policies and will risk losing a large portion of your support to the immigrants you are attempting to displace.

I'm not even American btw, my thoughts on this are based on Canada where I live who don't have such easily displacable immigrants. How would we get rid of millions of immigrants from places like China and India? Send them down to the United States border? Have a centralized agency responsible for the displacement of all non-whites over a 10 million km radius?

Operation Wetback led to the departure of over a million Mexicans from the United States, using less than a thousand federal agents. Most of them weren't even arrested; hundreds of thousands simply fled the US to avoid arrest and formal deportation proceedings. And that was in an era with a much weaker state apparatus and no significant tracking capabilities, at least none comparable to what we have now, let alone the means and ability to punish domestic sponsors of illegal migrants. Modern Western states are vastly powerful in ways most people cannot even imagine; what cripples them is democratic restrictions on exercising their powers. I don't think the illegals hanging around outside Lowe's are going to take up arms against the government if they hear that the US is deporting all Mexicans or Central Americans - like their forebears, the odds are that they'll simply pack up and leave, or they'll hang around hoping they're lucky enough to avoid getting swept up. "Civil conflict" is an absolutely minor and irrelevant possibility. It's not a question of logistical ability - it's a question of political will.

you will have to morally justify that to a large portion of the United States population that will not be in favour of such drastic policies and will risk losing a large portion of your support to the immigrants you are attempting to displace.

Yes, ultimately this is the only real obstacle to effective border security and demographic policies, which is why I have little sympathy for liberals who wring their hands over the election of right-wing anti-immigration politicians in Europe - if your position is that democracy is necessarily a racial suicide pact, you should not be surprised if people emerge who are not as beholden to democracy as you.

It depends on how intermixed they are, first of all, but anyone who has been ethnically distinct for three generations in America gets little sympathy from me and can be deported to where their grandfathers came from.

Not to tread old ground here, but I once again find myself curious about the tricky edge case of the old-stock American black.

(I'll take the former Georgia colonial territory circa the 1770s if you're offering it though.)

Not that the partition of India was clean and easy, but we're living in a world where such a partition happened last century. The model is there, so mostly what I'm bemoaning is a lack of imagination.

I'll take the former Georgia colonial territory

From the (Mississippi) river to the sea*?

*Ocean

Is that even an edge case? Seems like a pretty central example.

I just mean edge case in the sense of "statistically, most minority racial groups in the US do have a known country of origin to point to within three or four generations, but this one is not as simple as that."

Thinking about it again, there must also be some percentage of Mexican/Hispanic-identifying people in the western US who are descendants of people who were already living on the land that the US subsumed. I don't know what that percentage is - honestly I don't have a good grasp on the history of Central America in the 1600s-1900s, and I don't know when "Mexican" and later "Hispanic" as identity categories started eclipsing identification with the various indigenous people groups that the Mexican empire itself subsumed. I suppose it could be argued that any such person who identified as Mexican could still be sent back to Mexico, since Mexico still exists.

Of course then there's the case of all the other North American indigenous groups. I suppose you could forcibly rez everyone who's not already rezzed who meets a certain threshold of native ancestry and then demand all the reservations formally secede under threat of force, and then have a bunch of independent, very poor landlocked micronations dotted around your country's interior full of people who you don't like who don't have a very favorable opinion of you now either. That doesn't seem like the kind of simple logistical solution that this expulsion plan is supposed to be able to provide though.

Maybe you can airdrop them all into the Canadian wilderness and just say hey, close enough, take it or leave it.

In all seriousness, though, the problem I'm pointing at is that the population of the US can't be cleanly divided into "people who white nationalists want to share their country with" and "people who you can send back to where their grandfather was from".

At some point you do run into "well, okay, yes, your people have been here as long as my people have or even longer, but we still would rather like you to go away if you don't mind."