Morning Ed: Immigration {2018.08.27.M}
[Im1] Abe was cited by Matt Yglesias and a couple others as an example of what nationalistic policy would look like if the US weren’t so backwards. Well, okay, but do they even know Japan? VDare does
[Im2] An increasing number of immigrants coming from the southern border are… Indian?
[Im3] This is really interesting! I would have guessed that more Central America and South America countries would be on this list, but I guess most of them are too small and those that aren’t, Argentina and Brazil, have enough diversity within the country that they are less likely to need to come here.
[Im4] Tyler Cowen wonders if we shouldn’t rethink our entire asylum system.
[Im5] Corporate America makes a better case against H1-B visas than any border hawk, which kind of undermines their stated concerns. Remember when they had nothing to fear going into the 2016 election and were having Americans train their visa replacements?
[Im7] Using science to deport people with an almost Trumpian zeal.
[Im8] An interesting look at “humanitarian corridors“… a possible non-government response to refugee crises.
[Im9] The population in Africa is growing quickly and more are looking to leave. This could have ramifications for us.
[Dv1] Annalee Newitz looks at the mark that the caste system left on Indian genomes.
Im1: What Yglesias meant was that the Japanese government while very far right when it comes to immigration, tends to spend a lot more on other programs than the American government. The Japanese government invests a lot more in transit than American conservatives do. They also have a national healthcare policy rather than total opposition to it from the right.
Im2: This really isn’t that surprising. People seeking asylum generally have problems getting visas and coming through an air port. There isn’t even a visa for asylum seekers. They generally have to attempt to get a tourist or student visa through some middle person and apply for asylum once they get here. For asylum seekers that can not get a visa, the generally really on a human smuggler. The most popular entry point is through the southern border because getting into Canada is harder than Central America.
Im3: For all their corruption problems, Argentina and Brazil are also a lot more stable than most of the rest of Latin America.
Im4: The only thing that this demonstrates is that Tyler Cowen has no idea how the American asylum system works. Asylum law has nothing to do with the standard of living in a country or whether the individual asylum seekers was wealthy or not. One popular technique of Trial Attorneys, the lawyer from DHS in asylum hearings, was to argue that an asylum seeker is really an economic migrant because they are doing better in the United States than they did in their home country materially. What the asylum system asks theoretically is whether an immigrant has a well-founded fear of persecution on one of the five enumerated grounds. It does not matter how wealthy that country is or the alien’s socio-economic status back home.
Im8: This is a non-state solution in terms of private citizens taking over the responsibility of acculturating refugees that have legal permission to be in a country from the government. People who flee without legal permission to resettle anywhere else are still going to end up in a fight for legal status with a government somewhere. The private groups can not grant legal status to refugees. That is something only a government can do.
There are also humanitarian corridors in the United States. Private individuals leaving water for food for immigrants along the southern border and where likely smuggling groups are. The Trump administration has been prosecuting people engaged in these activities as alien smugglers.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/volunteer-arrested-after-giving-food-water-undocumented-immigrants-arizona-n840386Report
[Im6] Gotta say comparisons to Australia leave something to be desired in this case:
Emphasis mine.
I’m not sure Cowan’s wrong about what we should do, but his argument as a whole is kind of dubious. It seems plausible that an ideal asylum policy would have us taking more people from geographically close nations, because other refugees would be seeking asylum in countries closer to them. This is one subject where I think it’s particularly misguided to view US policy in isolation from that of other countries.Report
The entire point of asylum is that your supposed to be able to leave your country, show up at another, and request asylum. It’s kind of like sanctuary.Report
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What I take from Japan is a case where some on the American left look enviously at Japan’s level of social welfare and infrastructure spending and some on the American right look enviously at Japan’s restrictive immigration policies and obsession with Japanese identity and neither of these groups bother to look at Japan in its totality or to recognize the link between the parts that they like and the parts that they don’t like.
This is something that we are very good at in American politics, cherry picking examples from other countries, stripping them of all context, and imposing our domestic political concerns onto situations where they don’t really fit.Report
I’d never heard anybody on the American liberal side of politics say anything good about Japanese politics as a model for the United States. Yglesias specifically stated that Abe’s politics is what ethnic-nationalist politics would look like in the United States if the American right didn’t have its’ small government bugbears. He was making the same points you were.Report
The Yglesias Tweet that I’m looking at says:
I don’t want to go back and forth about whether this is him saying “anything good,” but the point stands that Yglesias is plucking out the parts of Japanese populism that deliver what he wants (more spending) and ignoring the larger ethno-nationalist context.Report
Ed Note: Im6 was included by mistake. The links here were pulled from a larger set of links filed under “Diversity” (a broader category that would include things like castes) and though I filtered out the other non-immigration ones I missed that one. Nothing is meant or implied about Indians in its inclusion. So I am changing the numbering and moving it to the end.Report
Im3 is interesting factually, but doesn’t make for a good map.Report
Im1 – So, I had not heard of “VDare” until now. Would that I could return to this blissful state. Seriously what did I just read there?Report
Linking to Vdare is Will letting his inner edgelord out.
I had thought the events of the past couple years taught us (all of us, me included) to now keep the edgelord bottled up where no one else could see.Report
I didn’t actually mean to link to them. It was supposed to be to a google result showing all of the times they talk about Abe. The purpose was actually to show that groups like VDare like Abe a lot. I suppose the same edgelord questions would apply, but they wouldn’t get the clicks and people could decide for themselves whether to click through. But I apparently put in the wrong link!Report
That’s fair. I don’t think one should never link to e.g. vdare, unz, taki, but I do think one should only link to them with a full contextual setup (and almost always, to specifically criticize)Report
Even when I did link to Uncle Steve or Taki, it was usually not on the subject that made them infamous. I’ve mostly decided to stop anyway, for multiple reasons, though I have something in the tank from a while back about chronic pain that was unfortunately run in Taki that I am deciding what to do with.
Unz Report and some of the others (Razib Khan) are slightly more complicated cases. Not sure I ever linked to VDare until today.Report
Oh no worries – I certainly don’t suspect you of promoting what you linked to there.
I just had not heard of that site before. One more red flag to be aware of I guess, if I find someone enthusiastically quoting them…Report
groups like VDare like Abe a lot.
It’s why they all wear onions in their belts.Report
A bit off topic, but:
We now have a president, backed by a solid majority of his party, who demands a minimum wage for autoworkers as part of a new trade agreement; This same party has passed a budget which foresees exploding levels of debt for the foreseeable future.
What is interesting of course, is that this adventure in centralized command and control economy is brought to us by the Republican Party.
What makes this sort of on topic, is the conclusion that there isn’t a Republican economic policy to speak of. The voting base doesn’t care one bit about deficits, free markets, regulation, or any other issue, except one above all else.
And that one issue is immigration/ identity politics.Report
Yup, as the famous Voter Study Group shows – There Are No Libertarians
https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/uploads/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_e4aabc39aab12644609701bbacdff252.pngReport
Of course there are libertarians. They’re the ones who consistently favor State’s Rights.Report