Immigration

Eric S. Raymond: How elites are blind about immigration

One of the major forces currently poisoning our politics is a breakdown in trust between people like you and me – the cognitive elites – and the rest of America. Deplorables. Flyover country. Brexit, and Trump’s election, slapped me upside the head. I’ve been forced to confront some uncomfortable truths.

They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.

They have a point. I’m seeing that now.

I mean, I might still think free trade is a good idea and have lots of arguments for it. But my arguments don’t mean [f***]-all to a Rust-Belt steelworker who’s watched his livelihood get exported and the community around him wither and has nothing left but a cheap high on opioids. Nor to an unskilled black or legal-immigrant urbanite who can’t get a job because the restaurants can hire illegals for cheaper.

We owe these people more than we have given them. What we owe can’t mainly be paid in money. It’s compassion; a fair hearing. Respect. Not dismissing them as trash or troglodytes because they don’t love the brave new globalized world that gives us options but – too often – closes off theirs.

Like esr, I would normally be for open immigration, but we don’t live in normal times. Before more open immigration becomes practical, we need to dial back government welfare and get rid of so-called “multiculturalism”, which is really just anti-Americanism. Our country could tolerate a lot of immigration when there was an expectation that the immigrants would work hard and try to assimilate to our values, but with so many high-prestige institutions trying to prevent assimilation too much immigration will lead to balkanization and ethnic strife.