The Elites And Their Immigration Fetish

The AP reports that  U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary injunction sought by the ACLU and immigrants rights groups against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security blocking them from making widespread immigration arrests in the nation’s capital without warrants or probable cause that the person is an imminent flight risk. The ACLU argued that the DHS has a policy of "patrolling and setting up checkpoints in Washington, D.C., neighborhoods with large numbers of Latino immigrants and then stopping and arresting people indiscriminately."

    In addition to blocking the policy, she ordered any agent who conducts a warrantless civil immigration arrest in Washington to document “the specific, particularized facts that supported the agent’s pre-arrest probable cause to believe that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.”

    Howell also required the government to submit that documentation to plaintiffs’ attorneys. 

Which brings me to this piece from Quotulatiousness: "The elites will continue pushing high immigration despite the obvious social costs it imposes." He begins:

One of the very tip-top luxury beliefs is that massive immigration is always and under all circumstances a good thing. A great thing, even. One of the things about the holders of luxury beliefs is that they are almost always completely insulated from any of the consequences of their beliefs, and this is especially true in this case. As Lorenzo Warby points out, the elites’ devotion to this cause contributes to collapsing levels of trust in the society absorbing all those immigrants and deeply undermines confidence that the leadership have anyone else’s but their own best interests at heart[.] 

And to condense Warby's explanation of why elites want lots of immigration, it basically comes down to what Peter Turchin termed the "wealth pump"--mass immigration makes the elites wealthier not just because the total GDP is going up, but they can drive down wages, meaning that they don't have to share that increased GDP with the suckers who work for a living. And damn the consequences to the common people of bringing in alien populations. Or, as Warby points out:

    ... Immigration does not only import workers—nor even just increase mutual-gain transactions — it imports people, so potentially affects all aspects of the receiving society. This means, of course, that there are a much wider range of possible concerns about immigration that “yes, but more gains from trade” is not an adequate response to.

    Efficiency and number of transactions are not the only issues for a social order, particularly not a flourishing social order. There are also issues of social cohesion; social resilience; connections and social capital; the distribution of GDP gains; effects on relative prices; congestion costs; how well institutions are managing the influx; effects on local communities; cultural differences; social coordination issues and the ability to manage collective action problems; increased competition for positional goods — goods that cannot, or are blocked from, responding to increased demand.

    These are all legitimate grounds for concern that are not answered by “yes, but more gains from trade“. How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with mass rape and sexual exploitation of young women and girls as a cost of culturally divergent immigration (and its systematic mismanagement)? How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with violent disturbance, even civil war, as a potential cost of immigration, even though we have historical examples of precisely that?

    If, on one hand, the respectable people insist “yes, but more gains from trade” is an adequate response, and that other concerns are not legitimate, this will almost certainly be taken as the contemptuous dismissal it is. Not only will it not be persuasive, it will (and does) generate anger and resentment.

    If people have concerns that the “reasonable”, “liberal-minded” folk will not deal with — or, worse, are dismissive of such concerns even being raised — then people will turn to unreasonable and illiberal folk, if they are the only people who will respond to their concerns. Significant gaps in political markets will be filled by political entrepreneurs.