I'd be all for trying open immigratin per the classic libertarian model. But I'm also pragmatic enough that maybe we try it in one polity. Let's say we pick a 1st world country surrounded by 3rd world countries, I don't know, in the Middle East or something. Have them try open borders. Let Israe let in millions of vibrant sub-saharan africans and arabs, help them further diversify their country, show the comparative advantage gains, etc. After 10 years of open borders Israel, then we have a look and see if we want to emulate the example in the West.
This seems like not a great setting for an experiment, Israel's impressive body count presumably has biased their neighbours against them. Not to say I would be opposed to it, but as far as science goes I don't think it's a great candidate.
> That was an issue in the 19th century; opponents of immigration argued that large numbers of Catholic immigrants, initially mostly Irish, would corrupt the culture and leave America under the control of the Pope.
This argument could be seen as Russian Roulette where you can be fairly certain that MOST rounds are not live and every time such round is fired you get some economic benefit. But what you don't know is if there is any live round at all, a live round basically ends in your death.
Whatever one does, there is a positive probability that it will result in a great disaster. But usually this does not count as “playing Russian roulette,” because that positive probability is very small, and there is a much greater probability of a good result. It seems to me that that is the case here, regarding the adoption of an extremely liberal regime of immigration.
I think it is clear from the Swedish experience that a liberal immigration regime for the wrong source countries can have highly negative effects. In 2019, Sweden's immigration-fueled crime wave had gotten so bad that Denmark introduced passport controls on the border for the first time since the introduction of passport-free travel between the two countries in the 1950s.
And the Catholic Church was far too powerful in America pushing its traditional statism. The Irish immigrants were partially responsible. Now, we flood the country with those who have no respect for what little is left of the Constitution. Stalinist DEMs are confident the "migrants" will vote for Statism (their democracy).
> we flood the country with those who have no respect for what little is left of the Constitution
I don't think there is any clear evidence for such a claim. If one can actually articulate what "respect for constitution" that is. If anything the overwhelming evidence suggests that immigration (both legal and illegal) undermines things like government control of businesses, licensing requirements, minimum wages, gun control, workers unions, government interference in hiring/firing etc. leading to in my opinion a better upholding of US constitutional values.
Also, US constitution is not some god given document that can't change or needs to remain static in order for USA to be a better society. It is also possible for US constitution to change and be a better society because of immigration.
BTW: I have no problem with open borders in a laissez-faire situation. Yeah, I know how Statist America already is. Immigration (they pretend it is migration due to climate change) is sponsored by world statists of the World Economic Forum explicity united with the UN, etc.
You are closing your eyes. The UN and State Department are FINANCING the migration in the interests of World Government. The ruling class is clearly trying to eliminate Constitutional liberty in the name of saving the planet.
>Possibly the most interesting comment, economically speaking:
Thank you for that kind remark.
>>… 1) If you have open borders, then people will inevitably keep arriving into your country until it is as bad as the countries that they are coming from (as perceived by those immigrants taking all costs and benefits into consideration)….
>The conclusion is still wrong, for two reasons. One is that the same opportunity, whether to migrate or to take a job, is worth more to some than to others. The marginal immigrant neither gains nor loses by immigrating but the average immigrant gains.
Perhaps I am missing something. How does this refute the conclusion to 1?
>The second reason is that the argument implicitly assumes that there is some fixed resource being divided among more and more people so that increasing the number reduces the amount available to each.
No such assumption is intended, implicit, or need be made. One of the main implicit assumptions (there are various others that brevity precluded from making explicit) is that people will arrive in such large numbers and so fast that the economy cannot adjust before disaster ensues. Some of the evidence is at Gallup.com. For instance:
When enough people arrive fast enough, then they will simply “homestead” all the most desirable “public” places and squat in many private places too. Policing them will not be practical. And there will be immediate increases in crime, disease, and the use of utilities that is far beyond what can be economically adjusted to at an optimal rate.
>All of this assumes immigration into a laissez-faire United States. …
You cannot have anything like “a laissez-faire United States” until the state (government) first distributes all state property to the existing populace (in some libertarian-enough way) and abolishes all state-imposed regulations concerning private property.
Our host writes: <i> Arguably the explanation is that the cost of immigration, not merely the travel cost but the cost of leaving the world you knew for a strange world where people spoke a language you didn’t know, had different customs than you had grown up with, were strangers, was high enough, for those who did not come, to more than balance the advantages. </i>
To me this completely affirms that there are also high costs to the destination culture of accepting, accommodating, assimilating ... people from a strange world speaking an unknown language with different customs, et cetera. At a time when the destination culture was comparatively harsh in treatment (and MIS-treatment) of new arrivals, the joint costs to both new and old residents was imposed largely on the newcomers. At present, by law and the modern philosophy of "celebrating diversity" the shares of the burdens of mutual costs have completely shifted. Argue, maybe, that the rich oldtimers can better afford their share than the newcomers can; and that fairness "dictates" (what happened to voting on such an issue?) the abilities of the richer established citizens be put in service of the needs of the poorer migrants -- itinerants who may or may not ever complete the process of becoming citizens. But let's recognize the burdens exist. And one may "fairly" wonder if this particular burden will prove more fruitful in the long term than, say, caring for military veterans (for the right) or paying off huge student loans (for the left). [ assuming everybody can have everything is fun, but not particularly well suited to an economics discussion. ]
I don't think "celebrating diversity" is a problem. Welfare transfers, minimum wage laws, professional licensing and the like are.
If government isn't involved, almost all interaction is by mutual assent, so the immigrants don't impose costs. If you don't want to interact with a foreign gardener, tree trimmer, or physician because it is hard to understand his English, don't want to go to an Iranian restaurant because the food is strange, you don't.
Nearly every OECD country has around 50% of gdp as government spending. How is this supposed to work?
I spent two years in covid hell because the net tax paying Asian immigrants that make up a lot of my county liked it that way and imposed their culture on me in schools and government ordinances.
The thesis I argued in the post is not that open borders are a good idea for a welfare state but that they are a good idea for a laissez-faire state. I further argued that the right position for a libertarian qua libertarian, for instance for the Libertarian Party, was to argue for the shift away from the welfare state, in part because it would make open borders more practical.
For your particular case, there was a cost, but it could as easily have been a benefit, depending on whether immigrants sufficiently integrated into the society to affect such things have better or worse attitudes than those already there. Note that my proposal includes not letting new immigrants vote.
The figure for the US is about 36%, still too much.
What actually existing OECD country do you think this proposal works for?
We tried prop 187 in California and it failed.
being able to vote? Do you really think America could have tens or hundreds of millions of disenfranchised individuals roaming around? You know the very first thing everyone is going to think of? Apartheid and Jim Crow.
Look, immigration was fine and all when it was white people immigrating to 19th century America. But that’s a whole different world.
Realistic Current open borders basically asks if you want unlimited mostly low iqs from non-white cultures becoming citizens in the OECD. That sounds like a total disaster with the potential to end the civilized world.
I just don’t see how you can come to that conclusion.
The largest immigrant groups in America are Hispanics and in Europe arab/muslims. Both of these ethnicities have lower genetic iq then whites (especially the Arabs). Both groups seem to perform around the level you would expect in the west based on their iq (I.e. their earnings are in line with their iq).
The last remaining source of high iq immigration is Asia. But the richer Asia gets, the less they want to immigrate. Few people like to immigrate from rich countries to rich countries. It’s basically poor to rich that presents enough incentive to be worth it. China is temporarily poor thanks to mao, but that won’t last forever. Eventually they will be as rich as Japan and we don’t get many Japanese immigrants these days.
And anyway, while law abiding and productive, I wouldn’t call Asian’s libertarian. Most support a level of government control and social conformity libertarians would find off putting. It’s telling that most Asian countries are highly immigration restrictionist.
What about all of the immigrants (from various countries) protesting (sometimes violently) about the problem du jour from back home? We were all told that it is a fact that concerns about this sort of thing happening was simple-minded, racist, etc. Well, now we know that it is not us who are simple minded, but those who tell these just so stories.
That kind of does an end run around the point: people were told this would not happen, and also that the thinking underlying that this incorrect prediction is the proper way to think. To me, both of these seem like a very big deal, particularly the second one: what else lies in our future as a consequence of false rationality?
Semantically, a cost or a burden or a problem are related concepts. We've -- you've - established there IS a burden to changing cultures. I'm merely saying our environment has gone from demanding old-timers TOLERATE the burdens associated with the new and unfamiliar to a demand that old-times CELEBRATE the burden; taking on the majority share.
How long does (should) a "migrant" have to enjoy residency in a nation before establishing permanent citizenship?
Long enough so that he has interests largely in common with the country's population. Democracy never works very well, but it works better when the population has interests largely in common.
I'm not sure in what sense our culture demands that residents take on the burden. Very few inhabitants of California, where I live, feel obliged to learn Spanish or Mandarin in order to communicate with immigrants, and those who do learn the immigrant language mostly do it because they expect some benefit from doing so. I had one student who knew Vietnamese — because he had been a (Mormon) missionary to Vietnamese immigrants in Los Angeles.
The h1b system is pretty controversial as it is. Many people resent working side by side with a right less co workers.
Anyway, if Wikipedia is any guide, there are only 583,000 h1b total in the country today. There are 65 million Hispanics. Estimates of illegal immigrants top 10million.
So a tiny portion of our immigration system is for skilled net tax paying workers from Asia, and it’s still a controversy. If you tried to scale that up to slave caste levels to import the whole third world we all know it wouldn’t work.
H1B visa recipients are mostly from India and work primarily in Silicon Valley or Microsoft. Is it a coincidence the CEO of google and Microsoft were born in India
I imagine most immigration fears come from the long debunked malthusian thinking that resources are scarce and more people means more mouths to feed (without also considering that it also means more hands to work).
An argument I find more persuasive, tho not one I often hear anyone bring up, is that an influx of people with foreign cultures coming into a place quickly can lead to a lot of social problems as cultures clash and people of various cultures not ending up acculturating to the local culture. The implication is that perhaps there's somewhat of a "maximum flow" of immigrants beyond which these problems start happening in significant amounts. Its been put forward to me that New York is particularly good at absorbing immigrants, and good at acculturating them (with their gruff intollerance of un-New-York behavior).
I do see that in the Bay Area (CA) for example, driving is significantly more chaotic, and it seems to be in part people coming in from various places around the country and around the world with very different driving cultures and driving skills. Without many common unspoken rules of driving, the roads are extra messy.
The limited resource is smart fraction individuals. They drive all human value. Adding more mouths basically divides up the value that group can produce, and to the extent extra mouths get in the way of useful smart fraction systems they can cause O-ring problems.
There is only so much comparative advantage things lower skill people can do that can come close to their externality cost. Mid skill people are a little better off but most the worlds potential immigrants are low skill.
This is basically the thesis behind Garret Jones writings.
I find it highly unlikely that a small fraction of people drive "all human value". At very least, more "mouths" means cheaper labor, which means that the smart fraction can do more with their limited resources.
The smart fraction theory seems to rely on the idea that humans are incapable of being trained to have higher skill (something that's clearly false), which is the only real way that O-ring problems would be a fundamental problem, and not instead a problem of undertraining people in the "O".
> I imagine most immigration fears come from the long debunked malthusian thinking that resources are scarce and more people means more mouths to feed (without also considering that it also means more hands to work).
Different cultures often have different norms when it comes to the voluntary paying of taxes....in an honour system based country it can be very easy to exploit the system.
Sorry to be coming in late, but I wanted to respond to your statement: "I don't think the Christian nature of our culture is critical. What matters is respect for property rights, honesty, and the like."
There's wide variation in respect for property rights, honesty, women's equality, etc. among cultures on the planet. I worry that bringing in people from cultures that have communal or clan-based ethics will damage the trust level of our society. Someone raised to believe that anyone outside his clan may be robbed, assaulted, or raped without guilt is someone I don't want in my country.
Your advocacy of immigrants has a built in assumption that they'll all be honest and hard working. While I've met many like that, the evidence shows that's not true for all of them.
“The US is a Christian nation”—hm. Europe is still nominally Christian, but many of its people are now non-religious (as I am) or inactive Christians (as my wife is): they will say they’re Christian if asked, but don’t actually do anything about it. Genuinely religious Christians have become a minority in at least some European countries, and I think the USA is heading in the same direction, although more slowly.
I'd be all for trying open immigratin per the classic libertarian model. But I'm also pragmatic enough that maybe we try it in one polity. Let's say we pick a 1st world country surrounded by 3rd world countries, I don't know, in the Middle East or something. Have them try open borders. Let Israe let in millions of vibrant sub-saharan africans and arabs, help them further diversify their country, show the comparative advantage gains, etc. After 10 years of open borders Israel, then we have a look and see if we want to emulate the example in the West.
This seems like not a great setting for an experiment, Israel's impressive body count presumably has biased their neighbours against them. Not to say I would be opposed to it, but as far as science goes I don't think it's a great candidate.
10 years is a long time. One year is sufficient
> That was an issue in the 19th century; opponents of immigration argued that large numbers of Catholic immigrants, initially mostly Irish, would corrupt the culture and leave America under the control of the Pope.
This argument could be seen as Russian Roulette where you can be fairly certain that MOST rounds are not live and every time such round is fired you get some economic benefit. But what you don't know is if there is any live round at all, a live round basically ends in your death.
Whatever one does, there is a positive probability that it will result in a great disaster. But usually this does not count as “playing Russian roulette,” because that positive probability is very small, and there is a much greater probability of a good result. It seems to me that that is the case here, regarding the adoption of an extremely liberal regime of immigration.
I think it is clear from the Swedish experience that a liberal immigration regime for the wrong source countries can have highly negative effects. In 2019, Sweden's immigration-fueled crime wave had gotten so bad that Denmark introduced passport controls on the border for the first time since the introduction of passport-free travel between the two countries in the 1950s.
And the Catholic Church was far too powerful in America pushing its traditional statism. The Irish immigrants were partially responsible. Now, we flood the country with those who have no respect for what little is left of the Constitution. Stalinist DEMs are confident the "migrants" will vote for Statism (their democracy).
> we flood the country with those who have no respect for what little is left of the Constitution
I don't think there is any clear evidence for such a claim. If one can actually articulate what "respect for constitution" that is. If anything the overwhelming evidence suggests that immigration (both legal and illegal) undermines things like government control of businesses, licensing requirements, minimum wages, gun control, workers unions, government interference in hiring/firing etc. leading to in my opinion a better upholding of US constitutional values.
Also, US constitution is not some god given document that can't change or needs to remain static in order for USA to be a better society. It is also possible for US constitution to change and be a better society because of immigration.
BTW: I have no problem with open borders in a laissez-faire situation. Yeah, I know how Statist America already is. Immigration (they pretend it is migration due to climate change) is sponsored by world statists of the World Economic Forum explicity united with the UN, etc.
You are closing your eyes. The UN and State Department are FINANCING the migration in the interests of World Government. The ruling class is clearly trying to eliminate Constitutional liberty in the name of saving the planet.
Wow! My comment was featured in a post by THE David Friedman! I am truly honoured! 🤩🤩🤩
Moi aussi.
The David D. Friedman replied to my comment. 😊
>Possibly the most interesting comment, economically speaking:
Thank you for that kind remark.
>>… 1) If you have open borders, then people will inevitably keep arriving into your country until it is as bad as the countries that they are coming from (as perceived by those immigrants taking all costs and benefits into consideration)….
>The conclusion is still wrong, for two reasons. One is that the same opportunity, whether to migrate or to take a job, is worth more to some than to others. The marginal immigrant neither gains nor loses by immigrating but the average immigrant gains.
Perhaps I am missing something. How does this refute the conclusion to 1?
>The second reason is that the argument implicitly assumes that there is some fixed resource being divided among more and more people so that increasing the number reduces the amount available to each.
No such assumption is intended, implicit, or need be made. One of the main implicit assumptions (there are various others that brevity precluded from making explicit) is that people will arrive in such large numbers and so fast that the economy cannot adjust before disaster ensues. Some of the evidence is at Gallup.com. For instance:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=NEWSFEED&g_campaign=item_&g_content=More%2520Than%2520750%2520Million%2520Worldwide%2520Would%2520Migrate%2520If%2520They%2520Could
>The obvious candidate is land. …
When enough people arrive fast enough, then they will simply “homestead” all the most desirable “public” places and squat in many private places too. Policing them will not be practical. And there will be immediate increases in crime, disease, and the use of utilities that is far beyond what can be economically adjusted to at an optimal rate.
>All of this assumes immigration into a laissez-faire United States. …
You cannot have anything like “a laissez-faire United States” until the state (government) first distributes all state property to the existing populace (in some libertarian-enough way) and abolishes all state-imposed regulations concerning private property.
Our host writes: <i> Arguably the explanation is that the cost of immigration, not merely the travel cost but the cost of leaving the world you knew for a strange world where people spoke a language you didn’t know, had different customs than you had grown up with, were strangers, was high enough, for those who did not come, to more than balance the advantages. </i>
To me this completely affirms that there are also high costs to the destination culture of accepting, accommodating, assimilating ... people from a strange world speaking an unknown language with different customs, et cetera. At a time when the destination culture was comparatively harsh in treatment (and MIS-treatment) of new arrivals, the joint costs to both new and old residents was imposed largely on the newcomers. At present, by law and the modern philosophy of "celebrating diversity" the shares of the burdens of mutual costs have completely shifted. Argue, maybe, that the rich oldtimers can better afford their share than the newcomers can; and that fairness "dictates" (what happened to voting on such an issue?) the abilities of the richer established citizens be put in service of the needs of the poorer migrants -- itinerants who may or may not ever complete the process of becoming citizens. But let's recognize the burdens exist. And one may "fairly" wonder if this particular burden will prove more fruitful in the long term than, say, caring for military veterans (for the right) or paying off huge student loans (for the left). [ assuming everybody can have everything is fun, but not particularly well suited to an economics discussion. ]
I don't think "celebrating diversity" is a problem. Welfare transfers, minimum wage laws, professional licensing and the like are.
If government isn't involved, almost all interaction is by mutual assent, so the immigrants don't impose costs. If you don't want to interact with a foreign gardener, tree trimmer, or physician because it is hard to understand his English, don't want to go to an Iranian restaurant because the food is strange, you don't.
“If government isn’t involved”
Nearly every OECD country has around 50% of gdp as government spending. How is this supposed to work?
I spent two years in covid hell because the net tax paying Asian immigrants that make up a lot of my county liked it that way and imposed their culture on me in schools and government ordinances.
The thesis I argued in the post is not that open borders are a good idea for a welfare state but that they are a good idea for a laissez-faire state. I further argued that the right position for a libertarian qua libertarian, for instance for the Libertarian Party, was to argue for the shift away from the welfare state, in part because it would make open borders more practical.
For your particular case, there was a cost, but it could as easily have been a benefit, depending on whether immigrants sufficiently integrated into the society to affect such things have better or worse attitudes than those already there. Note that my proposal includes not letting new immigrants vote.
The figure for the US is about 36%, still too much.
What actually existing OECD country do you think this proposal works for?
We tried prop 187 in California and it failed.
being able to vote? Do you really think America could have tens or hundreds of millions of disenfranchised individuals roaming around? You know the very first thing everyone is going to think of? Apartheid and Jim Crow.
Look, immigration was fine and all when it was white people immigrating to 19th century America. But that’s a whole different world.
Realistic Current open borders basically asks if you want unlimited mostly low iqs from non-white cultures becoming citizens in the OECD. That sounds like a total disaster with the potential to end the civilized world.
It was also Asians immigrating.
I don't think immigrants are likely to be mostly low iq's.
I just don’t see how you can come to that conclusion.
The largest immigrant groups in America are Hispanics and in Europe arab/muslims. Both of these ethnicities have lower genetic iq then whites (especially the Arabs). Both groups seem to perform around the level you would expect in the west based on their iq (I.e. their earnings are in line with their iq).
The last remaining source of high iq immigration is Asia. But the richer Asia gets, the less they want to immigrate. Few people like to immigrate from rich countries to rich countries. It’s basically poor to rich that presents enough incentive to be worth it. China is temporarily poor thanks to mao, but that won’t last forever. Eventually they will be as rich as Japan and we don’t get many Japanese immigrants these days.
And anyway, while law abiding and productive, I wouldn’t call Asian’s libertarian. Most support a level of government control and social conformity libertarians would find off putting. It’s telling that most Asian countries are highly immigration restrictionist.
What about all of the immigrants (from various countries) protesting (sometimes violently) about the problem du jour from back home? We were all told that it is a fact that concerns about this sort of thing happening was simple-minded, racist, etc. Well, now we know that it is not us who are simple minded, but those who tell these just so stories.
People who demonstrate violently should be punished for the violence — whether immigrants or not.
That kind of does an end run around the point: people were told this would not happen, and also that the thinking underlying that this incorrect prediction is the proper way to think. To me, both of these seem like a very big deal, particularly the second one: what else lies in our future as a consequence of false rationality?
Semantically, a cost or a burden or a problem are related concepts. We've -- you've - established there IS a burden to changing cultures. I'm merely saying our environment has gone from demanding old-timers TOLERATE the burdens associated with the new and unfamiliar to a demand that old-times CELEBRATE the burden; taking on the majority share.
How long does (should) a "migrant" have to enjoy residency in a nation before establishing permanent citizenship?
Long enough so that he has interests largely in common with the country's population. Democracy never works very well, but it works better when the population has interests largely in common.
I'm not sure in what sense our culture demands that residents take on the burden. Very few inhabitants of California, where I live, feel obliged to learn Spanish or Mandarin in order to communicate with immigrants, and those who do learn the immigrant language mostly do it because they expect some benefit from doing so. I had one student who knew Vietnamese — because he had been a (Mormon) missionary to Vietnamese immigrants in Los Angeles.
The h1b system is pretty controversial as it is. Many people resent working side by side with a right less co workers.
Anyway, if Wikipedia is any guide, there are only 583,000 h1b total in the country today. There are 65 million Hispanics. Estimates of illegal immigrants top 10million.
So a tiny portion of our immigration system is for skilled net tax paying workers from Asia, and it’s still a controversy. If you tried to scale that up to slave caste levels to import the whole third world we all know it wouldn’t work.
H1B visa recipients are mostly from India and work primarily in Silicon Valley or Microsoft. Is it a coincidence the CEO of google and Microsoft were born in India
I imagine most immigration fears come from the long debunked malthusian thinking that resources are scarce and more people means more mouths to feed (without also considering that it also means more hands to work).
An argument I find more persuasive, tho not one I often hear anyone bring up, is that an influx of people with foreign cultures coming into a place quickly can lead to a lot of social problems as cultures clash and people of various cultures not ending up acculturating to the local culture. The implication is that perhaps there's somewhat of a "maximum flow" of immigrants beyond which these problems start happening in significant amounts. Its been put forward to me that New York is particularly good at absorbing immigrants, and good at acculturating them (with their gruff intollerance of un-New-York behavior).
I do see that in the Bay Area (CA) for example, driving is significantly more chaotic, and it seems to be in part people coming in from various places around the country and around the world with very different driving cultures and driving skills. Without many common unspoken rules of driving, the roads are extra messy.
The limited resource is smart fraction individuals. They drive all human value. Adding more mouths basically divides up the value that group can produce, and to the extent extra mouths get in the way of useful smart fraction systems they can cause O-ring problems.
There is only so much comparative advantage things lower skill people can do that can come close to their externality cost. Mid skill people are a little better off but most the worlds potential immigrants are low skill.
This is basically the thesis behind Garret Jones writings.
I find it highly unlikely that a small fraction of people drive "all human value". At very least, more "mouths" means cheaper labor, which means that the smart fraction can do more with their limited resources.
The smart fraction theory seems to rely on the idea that humans are incapable of being trained to have higher skill (something that's clearly false), which is the only real way that O-ring problems would be a fundamental problem, and not instead a problem of undertraining people in the "O".
Look at Minnesota since refugees from Somalia settled there in the 1990s
> I imagine most immigration fears come from the long debunked malthusian thinking that resources are scarce and more people means more mouths to feed (without also considering that it also means more hands to work).
Different cultures often have different norms when it comes to the voluntary paying of taxes....in an honour system based country it can be very easy to exploit the system.
Migration is now a UN plan on its march to world government.
Sorry to be coming in late, but I wanted to respond to your statement: "I don't think the Christian nature of our culture is critical. What matters is respect for property rights, honesty, and the like."
There's wide variation in respect for property rights, honesty, women's equality, etc. among cultures on the planet. I worry that bringing in people from cultures that have communal or clan-based ethics will damage the trust level of our society. Someone raised to believe that anyone outside his clan may be robbed, assaulted, or raped without guilt is someone I don't want in my country.
Your advocacy of immigrants has a built in assumption that they'll all be honest and hard working. While I've met many like that, the evidence shows that's not true for all of them.
It's time to privatize immigration
Getting into America should be almost as easy as getting into Disneyland.
It's a pipe dream, like so many libertarian solutions to government-created economic and social problems, but why not sell tickets to AmericaLand?
https://clips.substack.com/p/its-time-to-privatize-immigration
“The US is a Christian nation”—hm. Europe is still nominally Christian, but many of its people are now non-religious (as I am) or inactive Christians (as my wife is): they will say they’re Christian if asked, but don’t actually do anything about it. Genuinely religious Christians have become a minority in at least some European countries, and I think the USA is heading in the same direction, although more slowly.