It was my least favorite line, actually. It introduces the "you're a racist" insult without actually saying it, while avoiding the more difficult question of whether there are some cultural belief systems that make acceptance of the American Idea more unlikely. Which is a topic for "what immigration policy" should we have, not the topic Matt wrote about today.
"...the more difficult question of whether there are some cultural belief systems...."
Why is that a difficult question? Of course there are some belief systems that are incompatible with American ideals. We have fought those belief systems repeatedly over the centuries: slavery, fascism, communism, and others too.
But one of the American ideals is that belief-systems are not encoded in our genes. Your hair-color may be determined by your ancestors, but your cultural beliefs are not. Values are like languages: if you grow up among X-speakers, you will learn how to speak X. Anyone can come to share American values: America, at its best, is a machine for making Americans.
But perhaps I'm missing the source of your concerns.
Without going fully into the design of an immigration system, my concern -- not really concern, but observation -- is that if we were to increase immigration levels (as we should), we need some process to decide which people are allowed. Usually this is done by having limits by country-of-origin, as interviewing each individual who might apply anywhere in the world becomes unwieldy and impossible to administer.
Therefore, we have to choose levels, and making the choice on a "how far is that culture from the American Idea" is a rational decision. Not a racist one. But I think the racism angle makes the question difficult to debate.
I think "how far is that culture from the American Idea" is not inherently racist, but it tends to be employed in a way that homogenizes national cultures, which if not racist per se tends to betray a different set of preferences than the purely "cultural."
If you employ it on a case-by-case basis, I have no problem: there are plenty of Europeans who demonstrably hate American multiethnic democracy!
If we're going by a homogenized view of national culture, Kazakhstan is actually higher on the Democracy Index than Russia is (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu), so I would hope we would at least see more Kazakh immigration than Russian immigration. Several Latin American countries are also fairly high on the index (Brazil, Colombia) and a bunch of African countries are at least not bad. So let's turbocharge immigration from those places.
I agree that, as you have framed it, this is not a racist consideration. Case in point: we clearly have an interest in not admitting immigrants from a country with which we are at war, if we know that the immigrants intend to advance the hostilities of the opposing country. There was nothing racist about throttling down immigration from Germany during WWII if the immigrants continued to pledge allegiance to Nazism.
After that point of agreement, the issue of administration really does become difficult, and the history of previous attempts to use nationality or ethnicity as a proxy for cultural similarity are, alas, stained with overt racism.
But I agree that, in principle, it ought to be possible to discuss different systems without animus, whether racial animus or anti-racist animus.
I’ll take a quick try at the design aspect: people who someone wants to hire for a job (higher salaries would get priority since those people are on some definition in higher demand) or people who are seeking an education, particularly in advanced degrees judged to be in fields of economic value would be at the top of my list. That decentralizes the judgement of who can be an American to a bunch of random Americans who all have some stake in the future contributions of the people who immigrate.
Liberalism's commitment to the individual should preclude the use of any "group characteristics" to screen people.
If as Matt says we agree that "our heritage is liberal" and if we wish to preserve that liberal heritage then we have to accept the additional burden of individually screening people for their compatibility with liberalism even if they happen to come from a society that is illiberal. We should be able to use proxies like education level and other personality traits that characterize the individual and not necessarily the group. Of course exceptions can be made for societies we are currently at war with.
At the end of the day, if the rate of immigration is low enough, then the USA being a large society can absorb people of all kinds because immigrants will assimilate over time by being exposed to the liberalism around them. The only issue is what to do if we wish to have immigration at levels that can create local frictions and ghettoization. This can happen when there are spikes in migration due to calamities in other places under a reasonable asylum system. Then we need to put in place active measures to ensure frictionless dispersion of new arrivals but it will cost more money to do this well.
The problem with using culture as a litmus test is that young people adapt and change. If you're using culture to filter out 40+ year olds, that's a very different situation compared to deciding whether to issue a student visa to an 18 or 22 year old.
One of the problems with the current design is that there are per country limits for family based and employment based green cards but no such limits on visa approvals. That's why there are huge backlogs for some countries. I personally don't think there should be any annual quotas on these categories, particularly where people are already working while they are waiting for their green cards, and if people are concerned about "flooding", they can just raise the bar to limit the intake. The other option is to have consistent rules for both visa issuals and green cards. It wouldn't be my preferred solution but that would also work in reducing the green card backlogs.
> Usually this is done by having limits by country-of-origin, as interviewing each individual who might apply anywhere in the world becomes unwieldy and impossible to administer.
i dont understand how this solves the problem described. in the absence of per-country caps, green card recipients would be a lot more concentrated in certain specific countries like Mexico and India
Once upon a time immigration inherently filtered for people whose intent was to sever ties with the oppressive institutions of the theocratic/ethno-states of the old world. This filter definitely advantaged America. American exceptionalism is real and good. Unfortunately, for filtering purposes, geography is no longer the limitation it once was. Keeping sad blood and soil nationalists like Eric Schmitt on the other side of the pond was good immigration policy. I'm vaguely fine with the notion of trying to maintain that policy using new levers, but in reality it's a very, very loose filter. It's still true that most people who want to be American citizens are people we should want to immigrate here.
The irony is that there’s a substantial chance, as Matt alludes to, that Schmitt’s ancestors came from Germany because they supported liberal ideas in 1848 and couldn’t do that in Germany anymore.
What's creepy about Schmitt is that if you look at his background and early career, you would not recognize him. He's from the middle class St. Louis suburbs, went to the local Jesuit high school and university and his state legislative seat was in an old school moderate Republican constituency that went for Harris in 2024. His legislative achievement that I remember was a post-Michael Brown protest statute that put restrictions on municipalities relying on traffic ticket and fine revenues. After election to statewide office as attorney general he went full MAGA and was one of the AGs that sued over 2020 election results. I'm not sure whether it's worse that he is an opportunist or that he has sincerely converted to postliberal nationalism.
When I live in Texas and sometimes visited Fredericksburg, I had this cluster of thoughts. There are all sorts of memorials there to the founders of that town, who came as refugees of failed liberal uprisings in 1848, and were committed to things like public education and medical provision. A non-trivial fraction of their descendants still speak German! But Donald Trump won at least 73% of the vote in every precinct in that town in both 2020 and 2024, according to the nytimes voting results map: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/elections/2024-election-map-precinct-results.html
"Keeping sad blood and soil nationalists like Eric Schmitt on the other side of the pond was good immigration policy."
Agreed. By the country-of-origin logic (which, to be clear, I don't agree with), this would be a good case for keeping out Hungarians, Serbians, Slovaks, etc. Those are national cultures that, at least in their current instantiation, are pretty far from the American Idea.
If anything, people looking to flee oppressive nationalist regimes, of either the right wing or communist flavors, have made some of the best Americans.
No, I think it was a very good line. Noah Smith has a piece up about the difficulty/impossibility of defining a "Heritage American". The act of definition, by necessity, requires you to draw a boundary, to look somebody in the eye and say "you don't... you *can't*.... qualify". The coward's way out is to use a hypothetical person (a Kazakh-American) as your example.
(I mean, frankly, I think these "Heritage American" types *are* racists, but we're doing them the courtesy of allowing them to express their principles coherently in a non-racist way. Their continued failure to do so is telling).
To be clear, my example isn't a Kasakh-American, but a random selection from Kazakhstan versus a random selection from Mexico. I think the probability of the random Mexican adopting the American Ideals is higher.
Regardless, it is a small point and one that only modestly detracts from an otherwise perfect message.
A "random" Mexican vs a "random" Kazahk... possibly. Not all countries are culturally equidistant from the United States.
But we're not talking about randomly selected people, we're talking about people who choose to immigrate.
Since nobody is proposing "imposing the US Constitution on Kazakhstan", what is Schmidt talking about? What's he trying to say? Schmidt is implying "there is something innately wrong with those people, some defect that prevents them from being American. Wanting to immigrate here is not enough. Believing in our so-called ideals is not enough. They can never be American and neither can their kids"
I think there is little to no evidence you're correct here. There is no identifiable group of people who have arrived on these shores who have demonstrated a higher or lower propensity to become American.
The controlling culture is not the one left behind, it's the one you arrive to. Fundamental to our belief in equality and inalienable rights is that when presented with the opportunity to exercise those rights people will inevitably embrace them.
>I think the probability of the random Mexican adopting the American Ideals is higher.
immigrants aren't randomly selected, though, theyre people who want to leave their home countries. moving from kazakhstan to america seems a lot harder than moving from mexico, so id expect the average kazakh prospective immigrant to be a lot more interested in america, or at least a lot less attaches to their home, than the average prospective mexican immigrant
and, retaining ties to mexico seems a lot easier, especially multigenerationally. it's a lot easier to visit your family when they're only a drive or short flight away; a lot easier for your kids to learn spanish in school than kazakh; a lot easier to find co-nationals to hang out with, etc
Yes. My son wants to move to Kazakhstan. That would be tough on his parents since it is so hard to get to. There are no direct commercial flights between the US and Kazakhstan.
Also likelier than Mexicans IMO. The further from the US you are, and the fewer people from your background live in the US, the more you are seeking the US out, which is the best type of immigrant.
Except that, as has happened many times, America will get a bunch of immigrants from potentially problematic places that don’t think their country of origin was necessarily doing things the right way and are interested in adapting to a new environment.
Yep, the Vietnamese boat people weren't a random cross-section of that country, they were those people most opposed to remaining in that country as the Communists took power and cracked down.
And sometimes they were people who had already thrown in their lot with America by serving as translators to US troops.
Trump's betrayal of Afghani translators is a deep moral disgrace on our nation, as well as a senseless betrayal of future US soldiers in need. If you want to be able to gain the assistance of local people in a hostile country, it is very useful to be able to point to previous times when you kept your word and paid your debts.
But then, keeping your word and paying your debts is exactly what Trump has never done.
Geography is to a large extent our friend here... The two ocean most and essentially two country land borders (with large mostly functional countries are an asset. Bolt the African continent onto southern Mexico and we'd be in trouble.
I suppose, and I agree that there are some cultural belief systems that make acceptance of the American Idea more unlikely - among which the one promoted by Eric Schmitt.
Often those (not you, to be clear) who bring this up tend to, shall we say, fixate on the speck in others' eyes while ignoring the log in their own.
Yeah, to me, Schmitt and his ilk are far more of a threat to the American idea than anyone in Kazakhstan, or any other 'cultural belief system'. The threat of immigrants is massively overblown compared to the threat of conservatives.
It seems like the "America is a people / belief" champions are mostly people who already benefit from that belief. It's easy for people like Schmitt to find fault with a system when they're already viewing everything through a zero-sum lens, which is more often than not the dominant Republican point of view anymore.
The Schmitt view summarized is: people who came to American voluntarily before 1850s are good Americans; those who came after 1850 are not good Americans.
It's the national version of the NIMBYs: as soon as I was able to buy into my home, it's time to shut the door to newcomers lest we harm the character of the neighborhood.
A not-insignificant share of Americans fall somewhere in between Matt's and Schmitt's views and believe something like "America isn't a blood-and-soil project, and most immigration is good, but no Muslims."
I see a couple of problems with this attempt to delineate a "rational" and not racist version of the argument about how far certain cultural belief systems are from the American Idea. The first is that this idea is never, in practice, deployed in a non-racist way; people who make this kind of argument are always full of irrational and ahistorical prejudices. Which leads me to my next point: I don't think there's a rational way to tell how far one cultural belief system is from another. You can make arguments that SOUND rational, but at this point, so many people from so many different cultures have come to the US and integrated -- especially after a generation or two -- that all empirical evidence is that you can come from anywhere and integrate (which means "living in peace with one's fellow citizens and accepting the Republican form of government," not sharing all of their cultural and political ideas). The argument has also been made so many times with such great vehemence about so many groups who are now viewed unquestionably as Americans -- Italians, Poles, Catholics as a whole, Jews, Chinese people, etc. -- that I don't see why it's worth the effort to try to work out a more "rational" basis for it. Rather, since most people agree that there needs to be some limits on immigration, it would be better to work out another basis altogether. My personal view is that most people are actually very reluctant to leave their home country, and our efforts (and money) would be better spent trying to make the immigration and asylum processes more generous and orderly for those who want to make a go of it.
"whether there are some cultural belief systems that make acceptance of the American Idea more unlikely"
But this ignores the tendency of people coming from countries with those systems to have some reason to leave them, such as that they disagree with those belief systems and would like to live in a place that doesn't have them, like the United States. You'd think those people would have a relatively easy time adopting American ideals!
I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned that Schmitt chose a country which Americans mostly are familiar with due to Borat, which was a parody by a non-Kazakh Brit. That has to play a role in the intended cultural politics here.
Before Borat probably anyone only knew Kazakhstan as the country from Air Force One that was "basically Russia, but we need a new country the average American hasn't heard of before because we're trying to convert Russia to a liberal democracy while giving it repeated noogies."
I remember watching Tomorrow Never Dies the same year and thinking, "wow, it seems smart that the villain isn't a government agent" (because I was that kid) and then getting super sad about that same point a few years later.
It's one of those articles that I read, tried to think of something to add, and have come up with nothing. And that's a very good thing in a case like this.
It comes down to whose America is the real America. Because MAGA is quite explicit in saying that the way we define America (our laws, our institutions, even our founding documents) is simply wrong. So what they'd say is "Yes we hate *your* version of America, because your version of America is fake. The Real America (as Sarah Palin, the MAGA precursor called it) is the one we believe in, and we love that America, and you're the ones who actually hate America."
I would just say they reject actually lived and practiced America for a pathetic fiction wherein they just call themselves “special.” MAGA just want a participation trophy for just existing. They are too lazy to live up to the standards of what it takes to be an American.
"MAGA just want a participation trophy for just existing"
This is a great description - it's the same kind of mooching off the achievements of one's ancestors you find in cultures in decline.
"I've got a cemetery plot in Kentucky that's belonged to my ancestors since shortly after they got off the boat in 1849, and that's worth more than any kind of scientific or cultural contribution your second-generation ass is making today!"
It's worth noting that those Scotch-Irish that Schmitt noted and Vance touts as his ancestry had some of the highest percentages of Loyalists at the time of the American Revolution. They never really wanted to be Americans. That they then ended up providing the backbone of the Confederate Rebellion is neither coincidence nor insignificant as to their actual views on being "American".
Scotch-Irish were in no way the backbone of the Confederate rebellion. They were geographically concentrated in the Appalachians, which was the most Unionist part of the south. Witness the secession of West Virginia from Virginia, and the Unionist insurgencies in Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama. Colin Woodard makes the point in American Nations that Lincoln's 1861-1862 strategy was aimed at keeping the Appalachian "nation" on the Union side.
Of course they’re rarely achieved, that’s why they are ideals! But we hold those principals in high regard and they are supposed to shape our behavior as Americans
In my book, it’s better to have high ideals and fail to achieve them than to be like “we have no ideals, because they’re too hard to achieve, now who wants a bit of incremental progress on issue xyz?”
(edited for tone). This is an uninteresting criticism. As the person below said better than I would have, of course the ideals are not always achieved, that's why they're ideals.
And speaking of rigor, what does "rarely" mean? Are you suggesting that the United States is no better at assimilating immigrants than any other place? That strikes me as ... not correct.
There is a skunk in the garden party objection as to whether they were really the ideals of the founding generation. Thomas Jefferson believed in his inalienable right to repeatedly rape what he saw as his "property", and many folks who signed the Declaration of Independence or voted on the Constitution believed in and exercised that same "right".
But the actual great thing about America is later on when the rapists who founded us were dead, we took their rhetoric seriously and built a much better country than they would have, based on the ideals Matt so beautifully articulates.
I'm not sure what "as hominem" means in this case. I assume you mean "ad hominem", but I disagree with that. You seem to not want to have ideals at all and believe in surrendering to China. I'd rather pursue ideals. It is a fundamental disagreement about objectives and values.
This is arguably Matt's best post this year. He's abandoned stupid old economics to pen a ringing and inspirational endorsement of what makes America the indispensable country.
This is a stance I disagree with, strongly, but also one that feels weird coming from you. Aren’t you the guy who’s known around here for, well, ruthless pragmatism?
My stance here is pragmatic. It isn’t the document that made us, it’s the land, the natural resources, and the natural borders which have allowed creeky, Madisonian ideas to flourish
Spanish colonies also had abundant land and resources, but they had an ethnic caste system that reserved the greatest share for the peninsulares. We in the states took advantage of the continent’s natural resources with the help of millions of immigrants (who chose to come here for greater opportunity in much greater numbers than they chose to come to other American countries and colonies) and their descendants. So maybe the Madisonian ideals of equal opportunity weren’t creaky but actually essential to us coming out on top.
It's not the nation that's repugnant, it's the croppies who infest it that are the problem. But I read once a modest proposal that would solve that problem.
Senator Schmitt thinks foreign nationals and their children (like me) aren't smarter and more talented? That Real Red-Blooded Americans deserve our hard-earned prosperity, but are cheated out because they insist on a living wage for non-conformists? Well, besides the obvious horseshoe implications, I just wanna say to him and his: Come at me, bro! Cutthroat competition with Worthy Adversaries is what keeps the engine of capitalism going, and I'd love to have some real competition from the home team for once.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell the point was fleeing here from commie China if Team America doesn't want the help. Countless people from every nation are drawn to the Shining City On A Hill*, not just cause it's rich (but no shame in that either!), but because the idea's so damn beautiful. The creed of universal creeds, ethnogenesis without blood and soil, a maddening cacophony of diversity that somehow manages to coexist and even thrive anyway. E plurbius fucking unum! To reject that heritage is like the ultimate "had to destroy the village to save it". I saw the best political minds of my generation consumed by madness: starving, hysterical, naked...
*With even St. Reagan being cast out, the patriotism lane is wide open to drive a Big-Ass Truck on - but will liberals pick up the flag? Or just continue to self-flagellate like it's still 1619?
"... Countless people from every nation are drawn to the Shining City On A Hill*, not just cause it's rich (but no shame in that either!), but because the idea's so damn beautiful. ...."
The good thing is that China is big enough to disprove Schmitt’s statements—since we started chasing out Chinese immigrants in the first Trump term, China has been overtaking us in a lot of scientific domains even in ones where we tried hardest to kneecap them like AI (some VC said that 80% of new US AI applications are now being based on open-source Chinese AI). Meanwhile, China has moved beyond the madness and is expanding visa-free travel and skilled worker visas. The more cosmopolitan country will win in the end so cosmopolitans can take solace in that—if the US wants to become xenophobic, that will have the same effect on the US that the Ming Dynasty burning its ships did.
All of our "Heritage American" EHCs are already doing those H-1B jobs or better... We just don't have enough of them to fill the slots. They're just mad because the useless burnouts in Nowhere, Ohio aren't getting prestigious, well paying jobs that are beyond their talents and utility. To an extent that's their issue with the Ivies; they want to hand out elite collegiate participation prizes to LHCs like those chosen as the regime's diversity hires.
Nothing makes me *less* sympathetic to immigration than this kind of Hanania-esque elitist sneering at working-class native-born Americans.
At least Hanania—unlike the technocratic liberal types—has the courage of his Social Darwinist convictions and openly includes Black Americans among the dumb and lazy losers who should be replaced by superior immigrants.
It wouldn't surprise you that I am a Hannania fan... but one big reason I sneer at working-class native-born Americans is because I am one, and I see them everyday (I am also an elitist and don't pretend otherwise). Tradesmen are certainly worthy of respect because they're skilled and talented (which is to say, not low human capital), the rest of the stupid, lazy, entitled, and above all whiny hoi polloi just can't be arsed to be useful and instead they blame all their problems on foreigners.
Good thing I'm not a progressive so I don't have to indulge in niceties or blame everything on whiteness.
Thank you for your service. Would love to see Schmitt's new domestic army of glassy eyed white Gen z Internet influencers figuring out engineering plans for SpaceX or configuring AI to do protein topology in bio-labs, lol.
Along with this I wish some company would make patriotic swag but liberal.
In Washington’s letter to a Newport Congregation he has the line:
“ to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and that would look great in the old tyme font on the back of a truck with a Washington in profile.
I remember going to the DNC and hearing a lot of very patriotic rhetoric from Harris and many of the speakers. But was surprised that there wasn’t much merch worn or sold that had the same patriotic bent.
I think this is because among the professional class of Democrats that attend events like he DNC, outward, forceful affirmations of patriotism are still viewed as problematic/cringe, despite Kamala’s (smart) effort to drape herself in the flag.
It even came up during the No Kings protests where it seemed like wearing the American flag was more “ironic”/for the images, rather than because the wearers believed in the meaning of the image so much they’d wear it own their own time.
Also - Memes about how you can tell how racist a neighborhood is by how many American flags there are.
One thing about No Kings is that given the many events and diverse settings, there was probably a lot of difference between regions and types of communities—I saw at least one picture of a No Kings rally somewhere that was so festooned with flags the only way you could tell it wasn’t a Trump rally was a couple of prominent anti-Trump signs. I thought that was really wonderful and something we need to see more of.
I attended one of the Tesla Takedown protests earlier this year and I was impressed that several of my fellow protestors had American flags waving on large poles. An excellent image!
Yes, I know that. But I got the strong sense that these folks used the upside down flag because they felt too uncomfortable displaying the pure patriotism of the right side up flag.
The New Hampshire state tourism board has been whitewashing all their "live free or die" messaging to just "live free." Sadly it's time for the "or die" to make a comeback.
The American flag (and the Gadsden flag for that matter) are liberal icons. Don't let the leftists tarnish them by doing guilt-by-association with with white supremacy or imperialism or whatever.
Seven blue, five purpleish and one red state would actually be a decent way to get generally liberal policies while still having a meaningful check on the dumber parts of the far left.
> if a Kazakh moves to America and works hard and plays by the rules
Or, you know, even, slacks off a little bit.
Hard work is a virtue of course, and fosters competence and a sense of purpose. But if you want to spend some time reading Substack, it won't be held against you.
Thanks for invoking the Pledge of Allegiance. That's a good way to make clear how deeply un-American the Schmitts and Vances really are when they reject "ideas" in favor of blood and race. The Red, White and Blue stands for ideas.
The future of immigration is important, but the point can be made without it. Even if no new immigrant were ever to enter our nation again, we are already a nation of immigrants. To make it a nation founded on ethnic origin would require the establishment of a caste system, in which only those from Anglo origins were fully members of the country. In that country, the descendants of Asians would never be full citizens; the descendants of Brazil, Nigeria, Vietnam, Finland, would never be full citizens. Catholics, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims would never be full citizens. Looking to the future of immigration may make the point more vivid, but looking to our current composition already makes it clear: there's the America of the Declaration, or there's American Apartheid. They're both ideas, but one of them is better.
If I wanted to be a huge dick and get into a heritage-measuring contest, this Schmitt guy is, by his own terms, a pathetic parvenu compared to my English heritage I can trace to the founding of the state of Connecticut.
I can trace my heritage back on this continent to around 1630 which I do think is kinda cool but it's never occurred to me that would make me more American.
Yes! the most american thing to do is to have arrived in the country 5 minutes ago and already be engaged in some kind of capitalistic enterprise whilst griping about the new arrivals that arrived 3 minutes ago.
Asking if they are complaining about immigrants yet is my standard joke whenever one of my friends gets their US Citizenship.
For me, I have deliberately avoided learning anything about my supposed heritage; I see it as a key feature of the US that people can choose to forget those that came before and write their own stories. Mutts unite!
"... a pathetic parvenu compared to my English heritage...."
A kinder way to make the same point would be to invoke the fact that the English (and Scots) of the Founding generations were exactly the ones who favored Enlightenment universalist sentiments. This Kraut's idea of English heritage leaves out John Locke and David Hume, as well as Jefferson, Adams, and Washington.
What people like that believe is that ideas are not part of anyone's heritage. Heritage is by definition made up of more objective factors like genetics, religion, etc.
Washington Irving's family was Scots and English, but the Manhattan that he was born in was still heavily influenced by its Dutch founders, as was the New York in which he set his stories. There's a reason that "van Winkle" and "Knickerbocker" sound Dutch, and Wiki tells me that "Sleepy Hollow" was originally Slapershaven.
My mom's side of the family is Scotts/Irish. I don't feel the same racial allegiance to Scotts/Irish people that JD Vance does at all. My grandfather would have hated that kind of racial stuff.
In my preferred world, the MAGA Republicans get the votes of real Americans, as defined as those descending from the Mayflower, and the Democrats get everyone else.
You should run for public office, I’d vote for you! (Go easy on the dysphemisms tho, voters don’t like those. Throw in some euphemism once in a while!)
Thanks. I think many more people should get involved in elective office, at all levels. But personally, I am not cut out for a position of public trust. With the help of a lot of clown white (I recommend Ben Nye brand) I was able to make my face risible, but without it I look just repellent. I don't know-- I guess they elect dog-catchers, sometimes? I could run for dog-frightener?
Hey, don’t sell yourself short! Lincoln wasn’t good looking, and it didn’t stop him! He would make self-deprecating jokes about his appearance. During a debate he said, “My opponent calls me two-faced. I put it to the audience, if I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”
It's so hard to say. I have stared at those old photographs for minutes at a time, and sometimes I think he has one of the most beautiful faces I've ever seen.
And if we institute that Apartheid a whole lot of folks like Schmitt are going to be shocked to find they're less American than most Black Americans and even a whole lot of brown descendants of California and Texas.
They aren't but I think BZC has a very good point that it isn't really the argument that's been made lately, which is more of a pull the heart strings human interest kind of narrative with, at best, a vague hand wave about 'the economy.' A good faith immigration skeptic looks at this and says 'fair enough, I agree that many are sympathetic people, and of course growth is good, but surely in a world of billions, many of whom would love to be Americans, you can't operate without some limiting principles. What are yours?' And the answer of course has at best been 'none' or 'well someone has to pick fruit' or the worst of all, 'you are a racist.' And now we see where that has gotten us.
The argument needs to be 'this is the immigration that is good for you, American citizen, here is why it is good for you, and this is what we should allow and encourage and this is what we won't and if necessary will use force to put a stop to.'
You don’t even have to be an immigration skeptic really to say, “well, what’s the limiting principle?” You just have to be something other than an open borders maximalist. And while I imagine the SB comments section has a few such people—folks who believe that unrestricted immigration is the best possible immigration policy—I’d say they’re a rarer bird even than Kazakhstani Americans.
I am not sure that you're right about that, beyond in the most theoretical or abstract way. I'd bet, for example, if we said things like 'no one from a country currently involved in a war, international or civil, as defined by the state department' or 'no one without a college degree we would recognize, as determined by federally set criteria,' both of which would be perhaps overly broad and blunt but not irrational restrictions, and this place would blow up into a 'well actually' this or 'but what about' that. I'm not even saying all of them would be bad criticisms of that hypothetical policy. I'd probably agree with many of the counter points. But I am saying if you can never get to no on anything the non maximalist position becomes de facto the maximalist position.
Way too little way too late. I'm still voting Democrat of course but I think it's important to understand just how much of a failure the Biden administration was. It is very much 'you had one job' territory. If we do end up losing our democracy to Trump and MAGA and 'national conservatives' or whatever then Biden should be considered among the worst, if not the worst, president in history, second only to the dictator that will have succeeded him, should that come to pass.
It should be the same standard for when we decide a locally born person can’t independently participate in society any more and are institutionalized or become a permanent dependent.
I see that as a minimum baseline but it by itself would say that the vast majority of the billion plus people on the Indian subcontinent could hop on a plane and obtain admission to permanent status tomorrow, and thats not getting into the nearly 700 million people in our own hemisphere, not counting Canadians, that wouldn't even need to fly to get here. Now I'm not saying every single person who theoretically might want to would but I'd like to think that even the most optimistic assimilationists understand that taking tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of people in virtually overnight would present serious problems. Currently that problem is checked only by oceans and international travel/visa requirements acting as choke points. Choke points which would no longer apply if the only requirements are 'don't be a felon or clinically insane.'
It's weird to me that people even argue against this. A de facto open borders policy can cause serious problems for the destination country. We have an excellent example in the US itself: Texas. Unchecked immigration from the US to Mexican Texas ended with Texas rebelling, leaving Mexico, and joining the US.
People make the “good for American citizens” argument all the time. Like they argue immigrants do jobs Americans don’t want to do, to which conservatives respond with slavery comparisons that reveal that they don’t think coercion was the bad part of slavery. People also argue that it’s culturally good for America, like the backlash to the Trump campaign’s “taco trucks on every corner” threat. And they argue that immigrants found companies and make inventions, to which restrictionists suddenly turn into zero-sum blank slatists and argue that Americans would be doing that if immigrants weren’t around.
"[foreign nationals] are cheaper and more compliant, and therefore preferable in the eyes of too many business elites" is the least awful part of Schmitt's speech here, though I don't think Schmitt would ever actually do anything that inconvenienced the "business elites" he pretends to scorn here.
The jobs that illegal immigrants in particular are left to do are in fact quite bad and poorly paid, and the solution is higher compensation and job protections, which the presence of a large pool of labor with limited recourse to the law helps porevent. The fact that produce, meat, and landscaping are cheaper than they would otherwise be due to those sectors' reliance on illegal immigrants' labor is a *bad* thing. The solution is a higher level of legal immigration coupled with tighter laws around job safety, wage theft, etc., which clearly conservatives of today aren't interested in, but the status quo is not good here.
Actually, it's the most awful part of his speech. Because the way he wants to punish those greedy business elites is to seize and imprison/deport those workers.
Wake me when MAGA starts going after business owners and causing them real harm, like prosecutions and heavy fines.
Also, shouldn’t our argument about entrepreneurial and inventive immigrants be an argument for more selective immigration? Like increased academic exchange scholarships, increased o1 visas, revamping h1b from lottery to ranked (or tiered lottery) etc. I was gonna add another sentence dumping on the Biden immigration approach but I’ll assume we all agree it was terrible and should never be done again.
The ones making the cultural arguments are on the weakest footing, at least in terms of electoral politics. The majority of Americans have *already* rejected that, and getting beyond it is going to be a hard nut to crack. Even the argument that immigration is a net financial win for America doesn't often trump (no pun intended) the idea of many that "they're poisoning the blood of America". That's a powerful argument that many, many people take seriously.
I agree that strawman arguments or refusing to engage with the substance of immigration skepticism is bad, but so is the counter-strawman / refusal of engagement that BZC advanced. Seems hard to have good-faith discussion if everyone is suspicious of everyone's motives.
I strongly agree with this sentiment, but I interact with people that vindicate BZC's observation every day.
It may be a weakman, but it isn't a strawman: many activists aren't willing to argue for increasing immigration on the basis of the benefits for Americans, because the moral case for helping the immigrants themselves is the only thing that matters to them.
There is a current of Progressivism that would not argue for immigration being mutually beneficial to immigrant and non-immigrant alike becasue they are suspicious of any market transaction being mutually beneficial.
Immigration as a whole benefits Americans. Any individual tranche of immigrants isn't going to benefit Americans very much. So a lot of passionately pro-immigration voices are reluctant to emphasize the benefit to Americans because it seems to concede that it's no big deal to turn away any particular group of immigrants, including even, say, the passengers on the St. Louis. I think they should rethink that political calculation, but I understand what's driving it at least.
I do not see the contrast. Apart from the (I would claim) fact that a political refugee woud be more likely that the randomly elected potential immigrant to "add value," even if a given tranche of immigrants will not add MUCH value, non-zero is better than zero.
But in turn THAT does not preclude accepting that we actually have a set of (arguably pretty sub-optimal) immigration laws that we should expend some amount (not an infinite amount) of effort to enforce, something that Biden was not willing to do until it was too late.
I think if you pressed enough of them on the points on how positive sum immigration is for the material well being of American citizens, there would be very few left that would be nothing but dead end cosmopolitans.
Yeah it is both the case that immigration benefits immigrants (why else would they come here? It’s usually the anti-immigration people who argue that immigration is somehow bad for the immigrants themselves because they get exploited) but also clearly enriches America both economically and culturally. The parts of America with little immigration look boring, left-behind places that most of us wouldn’t want to live in, and even there a small number of immigrants are usually the ones providing essential services from medical care to construction because locally born people do not want to live there and move away if they have any ability.
this is a rather weak argument; of course immigrants don't want to live in places where nobody wants to live. the same factors pull immigrants and native born alike to cities. this doesnt show that immigrants cause the desirability of big cities
Where is the contrast? Recognizing that immigration is good for non-immigrants does not deny that it is good for immigrants. Does "cosmopolitan" imply that we should accept immigrants on the basis of benefits to them even if those immigrants did NOT benefit non-immigrants?
I halfway agree that said view is what got most expressed during Trump 1, that liberals were stacking for immigrants who were being treated cruelly. They were and we did as we should have. But that does not rule out that even the average illegally entering immigrant does not improve the welfare of non-immigrants, much less the graduate student who wants to stay or the H1b visa entrant. Unless they are realty unlucky and need expensive medical treatment or become vicious and commit crimes, even a low skilled immigrants that manages to obtain a job engages in economic transactions with non-immigrants that are _mutually beneficial_. Capitalism is not a zero sum game.
Immigration, with some exceptions, is beneficial for the same reasons that trade, with some exceptions, is beneficial.
That's an argument for a 700k or 1 million a year visa lottery. My guess for the reason so few on the left want that is it filters for those with the most resources and the most to gain. A Mexican university junior would start putting his name in every year. But he doesn't tug at the heart strings like those fleeing gang violence and sneaking across the border. He's not who the left feels for most.
This is an odd take as practically the visa lottery
1. Does not allow Mexicans to participate
2. Is viewed as a left wing addition to our immigration policy.
Until very recently asylum seekers were a rather insignificant portion of American immigrants. The Biden years changed that due to some oddities but I think even fairly left wing people don’t believe it should be the primary way to admitting people to this country.
I agree with BZC. However, at this point, we’re arguing on perceptions, for which, there is little chance for reconciliation. Here’s my attempt:
1. Replace Mexican in his analogy with Nigerian. There are much easier avenues for skilled Mexicans to immigrate
2. Does this point, even if true, matter? Bill Clinton-era left culture is very different from post-2016 left culture. What changed in the Biden years weren’t some oddities. It was post-2016 left coming into power with exactly the ideological tint that BZC mentions. If one was in favor of immigration for the benefit of Americans, one would more severely enforce asylum and intensely open legal avenues that can better select. Instead, the Biden administration put newer asylum arrivals ahead of legally immigrated people
This is exactly right, and I say that in a way that is totally agnostic from the fact that it is the position I think makes most sense on the merits. :)
Nigéria isn’t eligible for the diversity lottery either. The specific of programs actually matter so we should try to get details right when we discuss them.
I have no idea how you can say the Biden admin put asylum seekers ahead of legally immigrating people. The paths are parallel are largely unrelated. The h1-b lottery was not affected by the surge of migrants at the border. In fact the Biden admin implemented a wonderful technical change that penalized multiple H1-b lottery entries.
Now, how did Biden put new arrivals over existing immigrants?
First, the administration put newly arrived asylum seekers ahead of asylum seekers who had been in the process prior to his presidency and surge, creating a new expedited asylum docket for new arrivals, expanding timelines for those already waiting. This includes the coveted employment authorization.
This second argument is slightly weaker but the shift of uscis resources to handle the new docket and asylum surge also increased processing timelines for family-based immigration (this includes EAD timelines) (I have a family experience with this but won’t resort to anecdotes)
The processes for asylum vs h1b are parallel but h1b is not the only legal avenue for immigration.
Now, if we’re to actually discuss the substance of the conversation, BZC says the issue is a cultural one on the left of prioritizing immigration from the benefit perspective of the immigrant and not the American.
Thomas says that the majority of even illegal immigrants are a net good to the nation to which BZC then says, that means we should expand the lottery (maybe then Nigeria and Mexico would be included, lol) instead of just tolerating wanton unregulated immigration (the least likely to be beneficial to Americans but most likely to be beneficial to the immigrants; proportionally here) defending his point that consideration for immigrant welfare is the primary driver.
After you respond, I then make a similar point that if one did not have the ideological tint that BZC says, they would prioritize more selective immigration that may not let in more sympathetic, less wealthy individuals as much as more skilled and likely privileged immigrants.
I’m sure we agree that the upper limit to immigration into the US is not infinite so yeah, it’s kind of a zero-sum game with this one
I don’t do well with super long comments so I hope I make sense here
It's amazing how quickly in the last ten years so many Americans, who would likely consider themselves capitalists, decided that capitalism must be inherently zero-sum.
Something that's been forgotten from a lot of online discourse from 2015-2016 is that the "immigrants are hard-working, often high achieving, and benefit the economy" narrative got labeled as elitist.
Really? I think many people feel deeply for those fleeing desperate situations in their home country and that it's good for the US or not is not one of their considerations.
I mean, I think it's important to take in refugees, that it was good that the US took in my grandfather, and that it would have been better if it had also taken my great grandparents, and that the same logic applies now. But I also think that my family has been good for America and the same is true for today's refugees and asylum seekers. And I'm confident this is true for basically everyone who thinks we should take in more asylum seekers.
By that logic if it could be shown that a group of asylum seekers were a burden on America you'd oppose their entry. Because if you'd support either way it doesn't seem like it being beneficial is weighing on your decision making process.
I don't think that follows at all. Lots of things are good for multiple reasons, and caring about both reasons doesn't mean that one of them is somehow fake or that if you got rid of one of the reasons then that wouldn't matter. I like my job and I like getting paid, and if one of those reasons went away I would reconsider but both are genuine and important.
The political problem is that it doesn't matter what Democrats believe about this, but that many (perhaps most) prominent advocates don't appear to actually care whether immigrants are generally beneficial to the US.
It sounds like you're asking for opinion pieces or coverage of public officials speaking.
Imagine I wade through the sea of articles, news, and pronouncements on this topic. I could cherry-pick some examples and make them support nearly any claim. Then you could respond in kind - perhaps you'd find a few contrasting examples that call mine into question, or maybe you'd close-read some fragment in a way that undermines my case.
What would we actually learn from that? How would my answer move us in a constructive direction?
The most prominent advocates aren't people who write essays in the Atlantic or even comments on Substack: they're demonstrators carrying signs and quoted in news coverage. Google "pro immigration rallies" and look at the images. A lot of demonstrators aren't even interested in making a case, just demands. But others play for our hearts or appeal to ideals holding signs like "end family separation", "immigrant rights are human rights", "no person is illegal", "protection not deportation", "children don't belong in cages", and "stop the criminalization of poverty". To be fair, there are occasionally signs that say something like "Immigrants make America Great", but they're a distinct minority.
I think it's far more illuminating to look at policy demands. People that actually care about something condition their cooperation on it. That's why your response to BZC about liking your job and getting paid is irrelevant: you'd actually walk if your job were miserable.
Do you think it's accurate to say the Republicans care about women's health? They sometimes offer to add "life of the mother" exceptions to abortion bans. Do you think they even mean the same thing as Democrats do when they use the phrase "women's health"?
1. What I want is for you to evince some evidence for the claims you are making. Instead you have provided a lot of words about why you shouldn't have to.
2. You can't tell if most people who are pro-immigration are conditioning their support on it being beneficial since it is, in fact, beneficial.
I'm asking you to explain what you think counts as evidence before I waste part of my day.
You have a long history of imagining disagreements and ignoring what people are actually saying, so I'm going to insist on a little more clarity. If you don't think demonstration coverage counts as evidence, there's no point having a discussion with you.
Maybe that's true (although I'm skeptical). But when I go to Burger King, I don't really care that my purchase is beneficial for the Burger King franchise owner. That doesn't mean that it's in any way bad for them. It's good for them!
It's the disingenuousness that I think rankles people. On the right, it's pretending that they care about the semi-servitude nature of H1B visas rather than the economic and social impact of immigrants. On the left, it is pretending that they care whether or not immigrants have a positive economic impact on existing citizens.
One can CARE whether or not immigrants benefit non-immigrants because one is pretty sure that they are. If they are not "on welfare" they almost have to be. Policy has to work pretty hard to produce mutually prejudicial economic transactions or transactions that have the non-immigrant to favor the immigrant.
Okay - thought experiment: you are provided overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that immigrants are a net financial drain on the host country. Do you (1) change your support for immigration? Or (2) switch to a different reason for why you support immigration? If your answer is (1), then congratulations, you do care about it. If your answer is (2), then by definition you don't.
IDK that you actually disagree. Even if they come to the view that immigration is good for the US as a convenient corollary to the "main driver of their views" that immigration is good for immigrants, they still sincerely believe it's good for the US.
I don't think this makes a ton of sense. Anyone involved in the hiring of immigrants is pro immigrant for their own self interest.
Its kind of like how I don't think the majority of Dems like environmentalism because of respect for Mother Gaia. It's just that breathing pollution sucks
Can someone send this article to Tim Kaine please? In a time where we have to deal with genuinely dangerous shit bags like Schmitt and JD Vance, it sure would be nice if opposition Senators weren't acting baffled and appalled by the concept of natural rights, as though they've never read the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Serving up Ted Cruz with the biggest softball in the history of softballs for him to crush isn't helping anything.
Yeah, the very obvious angle here is that God and nature endow *all* people with human rights, not subject to the whims of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, President Biden or President Trump, and God doesn't love and care for you more whether your family comes from the backwoods of Kentucky or the hills of Ireland, the western coast of California or the eastern cost of India, the boroughs of New York or the tenements of Guangzhou.
I think it is important to remember that God doesn't do that, mainly because he doesn't exist but also no such rights are in any of the major religious cannons.
Rights might be useful and noble fictions but they don't exist outside of the minds of men in certain places and institutions. Especially in wars and dealing with mental health crises they often need to be abandoned because they no longer work.
Yes, and every political speech should remind the audience that we're all just collections of cells and atoms jammed together by millenia of evolutionary processes aimed at maximizing reproductive fitness, because that sort of rhetoric really sets a fire in the hearts of men and inspires productive change that betters peoples' lives.
Well that's the thing isn't it? If you're an actual communist, these rights are all totally fake. They don't exist from that worldview. I think Matt makes a compelling case his grandfather was a patriot for *serving America in WW2*, not agreeing with Jefferson that our creator gives us small-l liberal rights (Marx would not agree!) That suggests citizenship by service in war, like TR expounded, rather than just ethnicity or fealty to the Declaration, is a recurring element in American nationalism not entirely reflected in either.
But then what are Yglesias and Schmitt disagreeing on? They both agree the five words of the Declaration don't resolve all of this (hence Grandpa Yglesias is fine.) They both agree we're not Slovaks or Kazakhs, and you can't make those countries American overnight with a Declaration. They both agree American history should be seen as a positive story to build on (most of Schmitt's speech is how cool and heroic frontiersmen were for building things rather than just existing on their own, so like Yglesias's Anglo history and appeal to God-given rights rather than "we need to be British", it sounds fine albeit incomplete to me.) Schmitt and Yglesias insinuate their critics are going to make the country worse because they aren't loyal to some of the people who are actually here (rural white Missouri voters, various minority Democratic voters.) The whole exchange feels fake. What are they disagreeing on? Trump?
I think it is important to remember that American soldiers in WW2 were fighting for their comrades, homeland, democracy and against fascism rather than just because they believed in the Bill of Rights. It would be odd to see the Bill of Rights as the dominant or even most important issue at stake.
You misunderstand the concept of inalienable rights. The rights exist whether they are honored or violated. They cannot be taken or even sold, that's what inalienable means. They are inherent to being human.
But they aren't real. If a right becomes costly to allow society should and does remove that right.
Not even the craziest gun nut in the NRA believes in the right to private nukes, because everyone agrees the inalienable right to arms is in fact sometimes alienable.
Fuck this. I am an atheist too, but whether inalienable rights are something metaphysical or something logically derived from the fundamentals of human experience they are absolutely core to what America is about and are worth killing and dying for. States are only legitimate to the extent they exist to defend them and those states that fail at that core mission deserve to be revolutioned out of existence.
No. This is a failure to understand how other people think. It's not that their right to nukes is alienable, it's that their right to arms/self-defense does not extend to nukes.
I read up on Freddie and turns out he and I are both South central CT freaks. I read a lot of his other stuff and while he's very cranky on econ and politics he's super pro-human and very thoughtful on culture and the human experience so I am sure we'd get along. He's got a big heart. Big hearts come with big feelings. I genuinely hope he comes and if he does I bet we'll have a good time .
As a Person Experiencing Westernness, Connecticut is way too far away for me to attend, but I'm sure that Casey and others will be more than eager to share the details!
You can pick the statements of a particular person to make a case if you’d like, but the anti-mass illegal immigration case on the right is an old one, going back at least to the 80’s when Buckley was hosting Firing Line debates on the matter, with Ira Glasser on the pro-mass illegal immigration side. The case goes like this:
Immigrants must be assimilated into the broader American culture. When this is done immigration is good. When it is not, multiculturalism rather than just multi-ethnicity ensues, and this is bad. This leads to factionalism. If you doubt this look around our country and the world. The Kurds are persecuted in Iraq; the Armenians are cleansed by Azeris; China is brutalizing the Uyghurs; Japan is taking measures to make foreigners respect their culture; Christians are cleansed from the Middle East; Canada goes through spasms of secession threats; Sweden is developing political antibodies to the Muslim immigration; and all over Europe the “liberal” establishments are suppressing free political speech in order to put the lid on their servant-citizens for objecting to rape gangs and other wonderful effects of Muslim culture.
If a handful of Somalis move to America they will most likely become assimilated. But if tens of thousands move here and cluster together in Minnesota it will take a lot longer. And if robust immigration of that group continues, then assimilation will never happen. Eventually, you have to stop the immigration and assimilate them. That means language and political culture.
In America, we are lucky that the big majority of our immigrants are Christians, rather than the Muslims plaguing Europe. These are easily assimilable. But if you take massive amounts of these, which Biden was doing, they will cluster and take the form that they had in their native countries, which was cyclically socialist. And let’s be honest; this was the idea.
Undignified and conspiratorial. Liberals genuinely believe in mass migration as an end in itself -- we believe all human lives have moral worth and that immigration to America is good for immigrants and for America. The details of how to organize that, how much to do at once, how much to encourage assimilation, etc. are all debatable. But this right wing fever dream that its actually all a cynical ploy to import communist voters is totally ludicrous and without any evidence at all. And its so outdated! Immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela etc. have proven over many cycles that they are right wingers, not people trying to import communism to America
Sure, and I generally agree that assimilation is good. But it also begs the question of what assimilation means. America as a culture is far different after adding large numbers of German, Swedes, Poles, Irish, Italians, Mexicans, etc. than it was before they came here. I think we are *mostly* better for it, though I do question the Irish influence...
I'm going to point to Karl Rove's "natural conservatives"; religious conservatives that happen to be a bit more swarthy and speak Spanish would find an excellent home in the traditional values conservatives of Republicans if they didn't keep leaning harder into the racism. Hell, Muslims could even be slotted in there
It just so happens that Leftists can be stupid and think Muslims aren't right-wingers.
Easily, conservatism has fuck all to do with free market economics (which is a liberal tradition) and religious conservatism is about culture, not economics. Likewise the current Republican party isn't interested in the free market.
In any case a lot of Latinos are fleeing communism (especially Venezuelans, a group of particular interest these days). The ones that come here generally aren't Marxists. The people in this country that most identify with Marxism are "Heritage Americans".
“Liberal” is not the opposite of “conservative” except as we use it as a convenient label for left of center folks. Both political liberals and conservatives cherish parts of our liberal traditions. And some of those traditions are championed by the opposite party that championed them twenty years ago (or more).
Democrats were the champions of free speech twenty years ago, and Republicans were the champions of free trade. Hard to believe how that has changed. Republicans are slapping tariffs on everyone and Democrats are enforcing speech codes and even tried to establish a ministry of truth.
"If a handful of Somalis move to America they will most likely become assimilated. But if tens of thousands move here and cluster together in Minnesota it will take a lot longer. And if robust immigration of that group continues, then assimilation will never happen. Eventually, you have to stop the immigration and assimilate them. That means language and political culture.
In America, we are lucky that the big majority of our immigrants are Christians, rather than the Muslims plaguing Europe. These are easily assimilable. But if you take massive amounts of these, which Biden was doing, they will cluster and take the form that they had in their native countries, which was cyclically socialist. And let’s be honest; this was the idea."
This is the same panic that was around in the 1900s-1920s about the Italians and the poor Eastern European immigrants. They assimilated. The Muslims in Europe might even assimilate if those societies were to play fair with them and make it easier to work and take care.
I do think you're right about what is going on in Europe. But American conservatives don't seem to be any more sympathetic to Mexican or Central American immigrants than they are to Somali immigrants. People being anti-immigration across the board seems to have more explanatory power.
You're right. The social antibodies to malign immigration is illiberal and indiscriminate. Wouldn't it be great if we had not awakened it with absurd immigration policies?
"Immigrants must be assimilated into the broader American culture. When this is done immigration is good. When it is not, multiculturalism rather than just multi-ethnicity ensues, and this is bad. "
I understand what you're saying but I don't see any evidence of the monoculture that Heritage Americans talk about even among Americans who are not recent immigrants.
There are over 35 million people of Mexican origin in the U.S., many of whom live in large, concentrated communities where Spanish is widely spoken. By your description, they should never have assimilated or become 'true Americans.' But the evidence shows the opposite: within one or two generations, Mexican Americans overwhelmingly speak English, intermarry, and participate in civic life. While cultural identity persists they are virtually indistinguishable from other Americans in daily life and are broadly accepted as compatriots. This demonstrates that even large, sustained immigration can still lead to assimilation over time.
The only instances of where I can think of these communities persisting across generations are things like Orthodox Jewish communities, but that seems very specific to a particular culture of people that is very insular and not just letting in large groups of people that concentrate geographically.
If you let in a lot of Somalis I strongly suspect that their kids will be pretty regular Americans, and if not them then nearly certainly their grandkids.
That’s why I said we Americans are very lucky that most of the illegals pouring over our borders are Christians. They are much more assimilable. Europe is importing poison. And we should take care to avoid that poison.
It's funny, but alas it is also part of a long campaign to defame Grant and elevate Lee, as part of the Myth of the Lost Cause and the lie of Southern nobility.
Grant was a better man than Thurber's story makes him out to be, and Lee was a far, far worse one. The job of Reconstruction still remains to be done, as is evident from the number of Confederate dead-enders with whom we still contend.
A quick note that (as I learned from John Ganz), Schmitt's speech was basically plagiarized from Sam Francis's 90s-era essays (see also Rick Lowry, "America is not an idea," for a softer version of basically the same idea).
But anyway, yes, this is great. Personally, I am a big weirdo who doesn't feel affinity for national identity and finds the whole concept of nations as the fundamental touchpoint for identity bizarre, and have dedicated my career to trying to figure out why most people disagree with me and what the political consequences of that are. I think the explosion of academic interest in "populism" following Brexit and Trump I bear witness to that basic phenomenon amongst a lot of fellow academics who feel more or less the same. That impulse has been pretty thoroughly criticized - including by me, a lot of the literature was pretty sloppy attempts to pathologize nationalist electorates (e.g. racial resentment) - but like Jell-O there's always room for more of that in today's vibes.
But insofar as we have nations and borders, I am willing - at least some of the time - to kick my weirdness to the curb and stick up for a nationalist-framed defense of the liberal tradition.
Fellow weirdo here. I'm not patriotic, and I react to stirring defenses of the Shining City on the Hill much like I do to a rousing church service. I can appreciate the sentiment and even be moved by it vicariously, but it's someone else's sentiment, not mine. At the same time, I know I'm in the minority, and I'm not going to get in the way if others want to wave the flag for a good cause.
I mostly agree, but lately I've been reading a lot of medieval and early renaissance history. I can see how the sense of hundreds of years of blood and soil can become deeply engrained in a culture. Especially when I look up a random city like Calais -- site of a siege in 1346-1347 -- and see all the amazing old buildings there. Growing up there must provide an overwhelmingly sensory grounding of identity.
What I have often found baffling about the people who advocate for this "ethnic" definition of America is that they rarely fit their own definitions of "American".
I am descended from an old WASP family that has been in America since the early colonial periods, two of my ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. But I don't feel that I am more authentically American than the recently naturalized citizen, as the more typical American story is being descended from more recent immigrants.
My grandfather was one of the more racist exclusionary WASPs who was racist towards non-WASP white people like Schmitt. It is weird to see people like Schmitt espouse the same kind of bigotry that could just as easily be applied to him.
This is a dynamic you tragically see crop up a lot on /pol/. Many of the most fervent supporters of racial hierarchies turn out to be Latinos or Slavs, people who would not have faired well the last time racial hierarchies were attempted. I had an heartbreaking conversation with one such user who was upset his eyes were brown instead of blue (note: blue eyes are a genetic disadvantage if anything, predisposes one to sun damage for no apparent benefit).
My gut sense is that a lot of this stems from insecurity; a fear that should ethnic tensions flair up, they might find themselves in the out-group. So they take proactive measures. By making themself a key organ in the infidel-hunting machine, they'll gradually earn their way into the in-group. It's a nasty example of how fear of racism begets racism.
It’s less fear of ethnic tension than internalized white supremacy. White people have dominated the world for the last couple hundred of years and still form the image in most people’s heads of what a beautiful and powerful person looks like, who wouldn’t want to be one? You see this same attitude in foreign countries where there isn’t a fear of ethnic tension per se—for example there’s a common saying in China that even the moon is rounder in the West.
We also forget that part of the reason why a lot of German-Americans stopped embracing German-ness as part of their identity was specifically WWI and WWII. If not for that, German might still be a major second language in the US.
I've heard the point about the German language before, but never really got why people believe it. Immigrants lose the ancestral language by the third generation at the latest unless they're incredibly culturally insular (think the Amish or the Hasidim). German isn't special in this regard. We don't have significant French, Italian, Dutch, Gaelic, Swedish, or (non-Hasidic) Yiddish communities either, even though only one of those languages was spoken by a hostile country.
My understanding is that German was widely spoken well into the 19th-century (depending on the source, roughly until WWI), with decent circulation of German language newspapers.
Old order Amish communities still speak a dialect of German as a first language. Non-English speaking communities can persist for a long time in the absence of new migration.
Long time reader. First time poster. America’s military, economic, industrial might are secondary to its greatest power - we can bring people from any nation on earth and make them Americans.
It would help Democrats if Democrats like Tim Kaine did not act incredulous at the notion "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" and instead contend that all rights are granted by the goodwill of the government. Sure, plenty of Republicans believe that to one extent or another, but they don't say so during congressional committee meetings.
OK. I'm probably just thick, but why is that controversial in either direction? I'm sure there's a right answer based on legal or constitutional theory but it doesn't feel like a crazy thing for a politician to say in some random speech. Does that code Left or Right wing for some reason?
It states that you don't have any inalienable rights unless your government says you do. Which means that your government can also decide that you don't.
That is literally written in the Declaration of Independence: "...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
Rights aren't just enforced by the government. I can and will defend my rights myself. The DoI highlights that people come together to form governments so that those rights are better secured.
Most people believe there is such a thing as morality even when it isn’t enforced though and don’t consider that hairsplitting. Rights are the same way.
Thanks. I've never thunked about this too hard but it seems sort of obviously true. But I suppose there's no good reason for a Senator to say it out loud because it could too easily be implied as advocating or allowing for bad things.
The bigger issue is that he acted like it was some dangerous and shocking statement to say that rights are endowed by our Creator, which is a freakishly weird thing for a Senator from VA to say.
"The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”
And I think what he said also is weird since the notion that humans are born with certain rights that should not be violated, and that our Constitution (in addition to the DoI) says we will not violate (although if you believe in natural rights, of course we have) does not at all imply theocracy, as again someone from the state of VA should realize. Basically in his desire to dunk on Rubio and the nominee who quoted him, he said something incredibly stupid--politically and otherwise.
For instance, the founding documents of the US clearly establish a State in order to *protect the extant rights* held by people, sometimes by The People. Also what Kate said, in brief. It's actually a pretty wild thing to say in America, imo.
"...order to *protect the extant rights* held ...."
The 9A describes the relation between the Bill of Rights and the rights themselves: the Bill "enumerates" the rights, i.e. puts them into a numbered list. It no more creates those rights than a bird-watcher's life-list creates the birds.
By contrast, the Constitution explicitly says that it creates rather than enumerating the property-right in ideas, when it gives Congress the power to create copyright in order to "promote the progress of Science and useful Arts." You have no divine right of property in your patent -- that is strictly a legislatively-created right, grounded in utilitarian considerations.
Both of these claims -- that copyright is grounded in governmental acts and that free speech is not -- are and should be hugely controversial. Nothing in the Constitution shows that Bentham was wrong to say that "Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law." That disagreeement has to be settled elsewhere.
But the Constitution itself, and especially the 9A, show how its drafters thought of them.
Sigh. So basically one of the contrary traditions that goes back to the founding, to the religious freedom Matt articulates, is the false statement that God cares about the rights laws passed by some random species on some random planet.
That sort of phony invocation of God is a long tradition in America and it causes religious zealots and demagogue politicians to be very haughty about anyone who correctly says that rights are human inventions.
As a matter of rhetoric, it's much easier to say that God endowed each person with rights than to write an interminably long essay about how rights are grounded in human reason or whatever the hell. I see it as a metaphor -- "God" is being used as the fundamental ground of morality and human dignity. The actual ground of morality and human dignity is much more subject to debate and has been debated for many centuries.
When you're establishing a country, you want it short, punchy, and emotionally charged.
To expand on what Mariana Trench said, the appeal to god is the appeal to universal. Natural Rights/Natural Law is somewhat of a "noble lie" that is needed to have legitimacy. It's the same idea as rule of law vs rule of man. This is where I beat the dead horse again with the line from Madison about "government wouldn't be needed if men were angels." The value of the natural/god given rights is the "unalienable" part---they can't be taken away by government(even if they actually can). When you start saying that laws/rights are made by people, they become more arbitrary, lose their universal appeal and very much become subject to the whims of the current government/society and devolve into the rule of man. Liberal Democracy ironically requires an appeal to universal and at some level a protection against the "tyranny of the majority." John Stuart Mill would disagree with you and say the damage came from Jeremy Bentham dismissing natural rights/natural law. When law is based on the whims and the material needs of people vs something more abstract but more universal it becomes more corruptible and easier to say these "rights/laws are for me but not thee."
Not only do I not think that's actually true (plenty of governments full of nonbelievers respect rights, and plenty of theocracies don't), but it is also pernicious, because it undermines the very freedom of religion the founders claimed to believe in. If rights really did "come from God": then the religious conservatives would basically be right that government absolutely would need to tilt itself in favor of monotheism. Scalia used to make that point and while I disagree with 95% of what he said about government and religion, his point there was correct; he just drew the wrong conclusion from it.
Look, I accept it is what it is, but it was an evil, pernicious, terrible thing with terrible downstream effects to lie about an interventionist God who was the source of our rights, and generations of people have to deal with the horrible effects this lie had on the free exercise of religion.
Whether or not rights/laws come from god is less important than some type of principle that limits the ability for people to create a system laws/rights are contingent on history/culture/geography because you end up seeding ground to the Eric Schmitt’s of the world who can say the constitution was useful for its time and particular circumstances but because law is the province of people we can change it anytime we want and decide these laws/rights are only applicable to those we deem worthy.
I agree as someone who doesn’t really believe in god, but my thinking is what the alternative to god that is a universal that can actually can overcome human nature’s tribal instincts and self-destructive tendencies to reject differences even beyond different religions.
Well there's a UN charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights that says that everyone has these rights, and a lot of countries who don't come from Christian legal traditions signed on to it!
Yeah, I think this wherI settle on natural rights vs god given. By being born on this planet these rights are a virtue of your existence regardless of belief system and all other tangential factors.
Another point that allowed the Founding generation to distinguish itself from other countries, and for which liberals can and should be extremely proud is the renunciation of power, even by a class of slave owners. George Washington, Adams, Jefferson all assumed and passed personal power peacefully and without major crackdowns on their political opponents, setting the expectations for their successors. Lincoln perhaps could have cancelled the 1864 elections, but instead chose to select a Southerner as a running mate in order to win. The MAGA movement deeply betrays this tradition.
You can drop the mic, Mr. Yglesias, for this cannot be improved.
My favorite line: "Picking on Kazakhs offers the frisson of racialist politics without having to look anyone in the eye and really say what you mean."
It was my least favorite line, actually. It introduces the "you're a racist" insult without actually saying it, while avoiding the more difficult question of whether there are some cultural belief systems that make acceptance of the American Idea more unlikely. Which is a topic for "what immigration policy" should we have, not the topic Matt wrote about today.
"...the more difficult question of whether there are some cultural belief systems...."
Why is that a difficult question? Of course there are some belief systems that are incompatible with American ideals. We have fought those belief systems repeatedly over the centuries: slavery, fascism, communism, and others too.
But one of the American ideals is that belief-systems are not encoded in our genes. Your hair-color may be determined by your ancestors, but your cultural beliefs are not. Values are like languages: if you grow up among X-speakers, you will learn how to speak X. Anyone can come to share American values: America, at its best, is a machine for making Americans.
But perhaps I'm missing the source of your concerns.
Without going fully into the design of an immigration system, my concern -- not really concern, but observation -- is that if we were to increase immigration levels (as we should), we need some process to decide which people are allowed. Usually this is done by having limits by country-of-origin, as interviewing each individual who might apply anywhere in the world becomes unwieldy and impossible to administer.
Therefore, we have to choose levels, and making the choice on a "how far is that culture from the American Idea" is a rational decision. Not a racist one. But I think the racism angle makes the question difficult to debate.
I think "how far is that culture from the American Idea" is not inherently racist, but it tends to be employed in a way that homogenizes national cultures, which if not racist per se tends to betray a different set of preferences than the purely "cultural."
If you employ it on a case-by-case basis, I have no problem: there are plenty of Europeans who demonstrably hate American multiethnic democracy!
If we're going by a homogenized view of national culture, Kazakhstan is actually higher on the Democracy Index than Russia is (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu), so I would hope we would at least see more Kazakh immigration than Russian immigration. Several Latin American countries are also fairly high on the index (Brazil, Colombia) and a bunch of African countries are at least not bad. So let's turbocharge immigration from those places.
It would be interesting to know how many immigrants we get from Botswana, a solid and stable African democracy.
"... a rational decision. Not a racist one....."
I agree that, as you have framed it, this is not a racist consideration. Case in point: we clearly have an interest in not admitting immigrants from a country with which we are at war, if we know that the immigrants intend to advance the hostilities of the opposing country. There was nothing racist about throttling down immigration from Germany during WWII if the immigrants continued to pledge allegiance to Nazism.
After that point of agreement, the issue of administration really does become difficult, and the history of previous attempts to use nationality or ethnicity as a proxy for cultural similarity are, alas, stained with overt racism.
But I agree that, in principle, it ought to be possible to discuss different systems without animus, whether racial animus or anti-racist animus.
I’ll take a quick try at the design aspect: people who someone wants to hire for a job (higher salaries would get priority since those people are on some definition in higher demand) or people who are seeking an education, particularly in advanced degrees judged to be in fields of economic value would be at the top of my list. That decentralizes the judgement of who can be an American to a bunch of random Americans who all have some stake in the future contributions of the people who immigrate.
Liberalism's commitment to the individual should preclude the use of any "group characteristics" to screen people.
If as Matt says we agree that "our heritage is liberal" and if we wish to preserve that liberal heritage then we have to accept the additional burden of individually screening people for their compatibility with liberalism even if they happen to come from a society that is illiberal. We should be able to use proxies like education level and other personality traits that characterize the individual and not necessarily the group. Of course exceptions can be made for societies we are currently at war with.
At the end of the day, if the rate of immigration is low enough, then the USA being a large society can absorb people of all kinds because immigrants will assimilate over time by being exposed to the liberalism around them. The only issue is what to do if we wish to have immigration at levels that can create local frictions and ghettoization. This can happen when there are spikes in migration due to calamities in other places under a reasonable asylum system. Then we need to put in place active measures to ensure frictionless dispersion of new arrivals but it will cost more money to do this well.
The problem with using culture as a litmus test is that young people adapt and change. If you're using culture to filter out 40+ year olds, that's a very different situation compared to deciding whether to issue a student visa to an 18 or 22 year old.
One of the problems with the current design is that there are per country limits for family based and employment based green cards but no such limits on visa approvals. That's why there are huge backlogs for some countries. I personally don't think there should be any annual quotas on these categories, particularly where people are already working while they are waiting for their green cards, and if people are concerned about "flooding", they can just raise the bar to limit the intake. The other option is to have consistent rules for both visa issuals and green cards. It wouldn't be my preferred solution but that would also work in reducing the green card backlogs.
> Usually this is done by having limits by country-of-origin, as interviewing each individual who might apply anywhere in the world becomes unwieldy and impossible to administer.
i dont understand how this solves the problem described. in the absence of per-country caps, green card recipients would be a lot more concentrated in certain specific countries like Mexico and India
Once upon a time immigration inherently filtered for people whose intent was to sever ties with the oppressive institutions of the theocratic/ethno-states of the old world. This filter definitely advantaged America. American exceptionalism is real and good. Unfortunately, for filtering purposes, geography is no longer the limitation it once was. Keeping sad blood and soil nationalists like Eric Schmitt on the other side of the pond was good immigration policy. I'm vaguely fine with the notion of trying to maintain that policy using new levers, but in reality it's a very, very loose filter. It's still true that most people who want to be American citizens are people we should want to immigrate here.
The irony is that there’s a substantial chance, as Matt alludes to, that Schmitt’s ancestors came from Germany because they supported liberal ideas in 1848 and couldn’t do that in Germany anymore.
Yup, by the terms of his own ancestry worshipping bullshit he's a disgrace.
What's creepy about Schmitt is that if you look at his background and early career, you would not recognize him. He's from the middle class St. Louis suburbs, went to the local Jesuit high school and university and his state legislative seat was in an old school moderate Republican constituency that went for Harris in 2024. His legislative achievement that I remember was a post-Michael Brown protest statute that put restrictions on municipalities relying on traffic ticket and fine revenues. After election to statewide office as attorney general he went full MAGA and was one of the AGs that sued over 2020 election results. I'm not sure whether it's worse that he is an opportunist or that he has sincerely converted to postliberal nationalism.
When I live in Texas and sometimes visited Fredericksburg, I had this cluster of thoughts. There are all sorts of memorials there to the founders of that town, who came as refugees of failed liberal uprisings in 1848, and were committed to things like public education and medical provision. A non-trivial fraction of their descendants still speak German! But Donald Trump won at least 73% of the vote in every precinct in that town in both 2020 and 2024, according to the nytimes voting results map: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/elections/2024-election-map-precinct-results.html
"...who came as refugees of failed liberal uprisings in 1848...."
That is very likely the backstory of Professor Bhaer in "Little Women," though I don't think that Alcott ever makes it explicit.
Alcott *does* make it explicit that Bhaer does not resemble Gabriel Byrne or Louis Garrell. But, Hollywood....
‘48ers were a big part of why Missouri stayed for the Union in the Civil War.
"Keeping sad blood and soil nationalists like Eric Schmitt on the other side of the pond was good immigration policy."
Agreed. By the country-of-origin logic (which, to be clear, I don't agree with), this would be a good case for keeping out Hungarians, Serbians, Slovaks, etc. Those are national cultures that, at least in their current instantiation, are pretty far from the American Idea.
If anything, people looking to flee oppressive nationalist regimes, of either the right wing or communist flavors, have made some of the best Americans.
No, I think it was a very good line. Noah Smith has a piece up about the difficulty/impossibility of defining a "Heritage American". The act of definition, by necessity, requires you to draw a boundary, to look somebody in the eye and say "you don't... you *can't*.... qualify". The coward's way out is to use a hypothetical person (a Kazakh-American) as your example.
(I mean, frankly, I think these "Heritage American" types *are* racists, but we're doing them the courtesy of allowing them to express their principles coherently in a non-racist way. Their continued failure to do so is telling).
To be clear, my example isn't a Kasakh-American, but a random selection from Kazakhstan versus a random selection from Mexico. I think the probability of the random Mexican adopting the American Ideals is higher.
Regardless, it is a small point and one that only modestly detracts from an otherwise perfect message.
A "random" Mexican vs a "random" Kazahk... possibly. Not all countries are culturally equidistant from the United States.
But we're not talking about randomly selected people, we're talking about people who choose to immigrate.
Since nobody is proposing "imposing the US Constitution on Kazakhstan", what is Schmidt talking about? What's he trying to say? Schmidt is implying "there is something innately wrong with those people, some defect that prevents them from being American. Wanting to immigrate here is not enough. Believing in our so-called ideals is not enough. They can never be American and neither can their kids"
I think there is little to no evidence you're correct here. There is no identifiable group of people who have arrived on these shores who have demonstrated a higher or lower propensity to become American.
The controlling culture is not the one left behind, it's the one you arrive to. Fundamental to our belief in equality and inalienable rights is that when presented with the opportunity to exercise those rights people will inevitably embrace them.
>I think the probability of the random Mexican adopting the American Ideals is higher.
immigrants aren't randomly selected, though, theyre people who want to leave their home countries. moving from kazakhstan to america seems a lot harder than moving from mexico, so id expect the average kazakh prospective immigrant to be a lot more interested in america, or at least a lot less attaches to their home, than the average prospective mexican immigrant
and, retaining ties to mexico seems a lot easier, especially multigenerationally. it's a lot easier to visit your family when they're only a drive or short flight away; a lot easier for your kids to learn spanish in school than kazakh; a lot easier to find co-nationals to hang out with, etc
Yes. My son wants to move to Kazakhstan. That would be tough on his parents since it is so hard to get to. There are no direct commercial flights between the US and Kazakhstan.
A person immigrating here from Kazakhstan is likelier to be proud of the America idea more than, oh, 50% of native-born Americans.
Also likelier than Mexicans IMO. The further from the US you are, and the fewer people from your background live in the US, the more you are seeking the US out, which is the best type of immigrant.
Except that, as has happened many times, America will get a bunch of immigrants from potentially problematic places that don’t think their country of origin was necessarily doing things the right way and are interested in adapting to a new environment.
Yep, the Vietnamese boat people weren't a random cross-section of that country, they were those people most opposed to remaining in that country as the Communists took power and cracked down.
"...the Vietnamese boat people weren't ...."
And sometimes they were people who had already thrown in their lot with America by serving as translators to US troops.
Trump's betrayal of Afghani translators is a deep moral disgrace on our nation, as well as a senseless betrayal of future US soldiers in need. If you want to be able to gain the assistance of local people in a hostile country, it is very useful to be able to point to previous times when you kept your word and paid your debts.
But then, keeping your word and paying your debts is exactly what Trump has never done.
Exactly. I've known multiple Vietnamese-Americans born in the US whose parents or grandparents worked for the South Vietnamese government.
Agreed that historically, we've done a very good job of converting those people to americans eventually.
Although that assimilation process does take time usually a couple of generations
So it's important not to have immigration levels too high to interfere with that assimilation process
What we don't want is for immigration to work the same way it does in europe.
Geography is to a large extent our friend here... The two ocean most and essentially two country land borders (with large mostly functional countries are an asset. Bolt the African continent onto southern Mexico and we'd be in trouble.
I suppose, and I agree that there are some cultural belief systems that make acceptance of the American Idea more unlikely - among which the one promoted by Eric Schmitt.
Often those (not you, to be clear) who bring this up tend to, shall we say, fixate on the speck in others' eyes while ignoring the log in their own.
Yeah, to me, Schmitt and his ilk are far more of a threat to the American idea than anyone in Kazakhstan, or any other 'cultural belief system'. The threat of immigrants is massively overblown compared to the threat of conservatives.
It seems like the "America is a people / belief" champions are mostly people who already benefit from that belief. It's easy for people like Schmitt to find fault with a system when they're already viewing everything through a zero-sum lens, which is more often than not the dominant Republican point of view anymore.
The Schmitt view summarized is: people who came to American voluntarily before 1850s are good Americans; those who came after 1850 are not good Americans.
It's the national version of the NIMBYs: as soon as I was able to buy into my home, it's time to shut the door to newcomers lest we harm the character of the neighborhood.
It does? I think it challenges the claim that people from X cannot become real Americans, a claim for which there is so far no empirical evidence.
A not-insignificant share of Americans fall somewhere in between Matt's and Schmitt's views and believe something like "America isn't a blood-and-soil project, and most immigration is good, but no Muslims."
I see a couple of problems with this attempt to delineate a "rational" and not racist version of the argument about how far certain cultural belief systems are from the American Idea. The first is that this idea is never, in practice, deployed in a non-racist way; people who make this kind of argument are always full of irrational and ahistorical prejudices. Which leads me to my next point: I don't think there's a rational way to tell how far one cultural belief system is from another. You can make arguments that SOUND rational, but at this point, so many people from so many different cultures have come to the US and integrated -- especially after a generation or two -- that all empirical evidence is that you can come from anywhere and integrate (which means "living in peace with one's fellow citizens and accepting the Republican form of government," not sharing all of their cultural and political ideas). The argument has also been made so many times with such great vehemence about so many groups who are now viewed unquestionably as Americans -- Italians, Poles, Catholics as a whole, Jews, Chinese people, etc. -- that I don't see why it's worth the effort to try to work out a more "rational" basis for it. Rather, since most people agree that there needs to be some limits on immigration, it would be better to work out another basis altogether. My personal view is that most people are actually very reluctant to leave their home country, and our efforts (and money) would be better spent trying to make the immigration and asylum processes more generous and orderly for those who want to make a go of it.
"whether there are some cultural belief systems that make acceptance of the American Idea more unlikely"
But this ignores the tendency of people coming from countries with those systems to have some reason to leave them, such as that they disagree with those belief systems and would like to live in a place that doesn't have them, like the United States. You'd think those people would have a relatively easy time adopting American ideals!
They are racists.
The line is accurate.
I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned that Schmitt chose a country which Americans mostly are familiar with due to Borat, which was a parody by a non-Kazakh Brit. That has to play a role in the intended cultural politics here.
With a soupcon of anti semitism because Sasha Baron Cohen is Jewish.
Before Borat probably anyone only knew Kazakhstan as the country from Air Force One that was "basically Russia, but we need a new country the average American hasn't heard of before because we're trying to convert Russia to a liberal democracy while giving it repeated noogies."
I didn't even remember that plot point!
As an artifact of a particular geopolitical moment in time, it's the most 1997 thing that exists.
I remember watching Tomorrow Never Dies the same year and thinking, "wow, it seems smart that the villain isn't a government agent" (because I was that kid) and then getting super sad about that same point a few years later.
Me too. It rang home for me because my colleague is from Kazakhstan and is an exemplary American.
FWIW, I know a few Kazakhs.
It's one of those articles that I read, tried to think of something to add, and have come up with nothing. And that's a very good thing in a case like this.
I would say MAGA actually hates America. That is why their leadership is so unconcerned with the economic harms they inflict on this country.
Just a shame in that hatred they want to include turning America into something worse.
They share this with many degrowthers, yeah? Our suffering becomes proof of our purity.
It comes down to whose America is the real America. Because MAGA is quite explicit in saying that the way we define America (our laws, our institutions, even our founding documents) is simply wrong. So what they'd say is "Yes we hate *your* version of America, because your version of America is fake. The Real America (as Sarah Palin, the MAGA precursor called it) is the one we believe in, and we love that America, and you're the ones who actually hate America."
I would just say they reject actually lived and practiced America for a pathetic fiction wherein they just call themselves “special.” MAGA just want a participation trophy for just existing. They are too lazy to live up to the standards of what it takes to be an American.
"MAGA just want a participation trophy for just existing"
This is a great description - it's the same kind of mooching off the achievements of one's ancestors you find in cultures in decline.
"I've got a cemetery plot in Kentucky that's belonged to my ancestors since shortly after they got off the boat in 1849, and that's worth more than any kind of scientific or cultural contribution your second-generation ass is making today!"
The true anchor babies.
Also MAGA are a bunch of monarchists. That is their most Anti-American aspect.
Just a bunch faux-European Monarchists pretending that their brand is “American.”
It's worth noting that those Scotch-Irish that Schmitt noted and Vance touts as his ancestry had some of the highest percentages of Loyalists at the time of the American Revolution. They never really wanted to be Americans. That they then ended up providing the backbone of the Confederate Rebellion is neither coincidence nor insignificant as to their actual views on being "American".
Scotch-Irish were in no way the backbone of the Confederate rebellion. They were geographically concentrated in the Appalachians, which was the most Unionist part of the south. Witness the secession of West Virginia from Virginia, and the Unionist insurgencies in Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama. Colin Woodard makes the point in American Nations that Lincoln's 1861-1862 strategy was aimed at keeping the Appalachian "nation" on the Union side.
Dems need to shout it from the rooftops! (And the podcast studio as it were)
They are quite systematic in seeking to destroy every single thing that makes America great.
Pointing out that MAGAs are anti-American and just poor imitations of European nativists is such a burn.
Orban over Reagan
What an unbelievable piece by Matt that really crystalized for me what I hate so much about the MAGA movement - it is fundamentally UnAmerican.
This is arguably Matt’s worst post this year. He’s abandoned rigor to sing a paen to ideals we’ve rarely achieved.
Of course they’re rarely achieved, that’s why they are ideals! But we hold those principals in high regard and they are supposed to shape our behavior as Americans
In my book, it’s better to have high ideals and fail to achieve them than to be like “we have no ideals, because they’re too hard to achieve, now who wants a bit of incremental progress on issue xyz?”
I applaud this piece. It’s magnificent.
"ideals we’ve rarely achieved."
(edited for tone). This is an uninteresting criticism. As the person below said better than I would have, of course the ideals are not always achieved, that's why they're ideals.
And speaking of rigor, what does "rarely" mean? Are you suggesting that the United States is no better at assimilating immigrants than any other place? That strikes me as ... not correct.
There is a skunk in the garden party objection as to whether they were really the ideals of the founding generation. Thomas Jefferson believed in his inalienable right to repeatedly rape what he saw as his "property", and many folks who signed the Declaration of Independence or voted on the Constitution believed in and exercised that same "right".
But the actual great thing about America is later on when the rapists who founded us were dead, we took their rhetoric seriously and built a much better country than they would have, based on the ideals Matt so beautifully articulates.
This, in a nutshell, is why you have a problem interacting with others on this substack.
As hominem attacks demean your point.
I'm not sure what "as hominem" means in this case. I assume you mean "ad hominem", but I disagree with that. You seem to not want to have ideals at all and believe in surrendering to China. I'd rather pursue ideals. It is a fundamental disagreement about objectives and values.
This is arguably Matt's best post this year. He's abandoned stupid old economics to pen a ringing and inspirational endorsement of what makes America the indispensable country.
I feel like this is the tenor that underwrites a lot of why the left is unable or unwilling to embrace patriotism, to their own detriment.
By patriotism, it appears you equate, the bone spurs guy and the Romney Sons as patriots.
"One reads such a comment, and what can one say but... David Abbott!"
This is a stance I disagree with, strongly, but also one that feels weird coming from you. Aren’t you the guy who’s known around here for, well, ruthless pragmatism?
My stance here is pragmatic. It isn’t the document that made us, it’s the land, the natural resources, and the natural borders which have allowed creeky, Madisonian ideas to flourish
Spanish colonies also had abundant land and resources, but they had an ethnic caste system that reserved the greatest share for the peninsulares. We in the states took advantage of the continent’s natural resources with the help of millions of immigrants (who chose to come here for greater opportunity in much greater numbers than they chose to come to other American countries and colonies) and their descendants. So maybe the Madisonian ideals of equal opportunity weren’t creaky but actually essential to us coming out on top.
Yes, the world is full of countries with plenty of natural resources that squandered that opportunity.
"...full of countries with plenty ...."
With the wrong ideas in charge, the resources become "the resource curse."
You should see a cardiologist immediately. You appear to have no heart.
Three cheers! I loved the column, and love how it has touched a chord with y'all
Matt's excellent piece here reminded me of an old Irish adage:
"A patriot is someone who loves his country; a nationalist is somebody who hates everyone else."
I think a lot of the problem is that we have so few prominent patriots who are willing to say "I love my country" without adding a "but".
As Ned Stark used to say, nothing someone says before the word 'but' really counts
My father used to say "everything before the word "but" is a lie".
That may be true, but my favorite thing about the word "but" is that, for practical purposes, it means "and".
Also, for anyone who has trouble saying "I love my country" straight up, I recommend the construction "What I love about America is..."
I refuse to believe this pearl of wisdom came from a nation as repugnant as Ireland.
(Put your pitchforks down, it's a joke).
It's not the nation that's repugnant, it's the croppies who infest it that are the problem. But I read once a modest proposal that would solve that problem.
Senator Schmitt thinks foreign nationals and their children (like me) aren't smarter and more talented? That Real Red-Blooded Americans deserve our hard-earned prosperity, but are cheated out because they insist on a living wage for non-conformists? Well, besides the obvious horseshoe implications, I just wanna say to him and his: Come at me, bro! Cutthroat competition with Worthy Adversaries is what keeps the engine of capitalism going, and I'd love to have some real competition from the home team for once.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell the point was fleeing here from commie China if Team America doesn't want the help. Countless people from every nation are drawn to the Shining City On A Hill*, not just cause it's rich (but no shame in that either!), but because the idea's so damn beautiful. The creed of universal creeds, ethnogenesis without blood and soil, a maddening cacophony of diversity that somehow manages to coexist and even thrive anyway. E plurbius fucking unum! To reject that heritage is like the ultimate "had to destroy the village to save it". I saw the best political minds of my generation consumed by madness: starving, hysterical, naked...
*With even St. Reagan being cast out, the patriotism lane is wide open to drive a Big-Ass Truck on - but will liberals pick up the flag? Or just continue to self-flagellate like it's still 1619?
Love it.
I’m a naturalized US citizen, I agree with you, and Senator Schmitt can shove his Blood & Soil creed where the sun don’t shine!
"... Countless people from every nation are drawn to the Shining City On A Hill*, not just cause it's rich (but no shame in that either!), but because the idea's so damn beautiful. ...."
Thank you, well said!
"Senator Schmitt thinks foreign nationals and their children (like me) aren't smarter and more talented?"
Actually it's his (well-grounded) fear that people like you *are* smarter and more talented.
The good thing is that China is big enough to disprove Schmitt’s statements—since we started chasing out Chinese immigrants in the first Trump term, China has been overtaking us in a lot of scientific domains even in ones where we tried hardest to kneecap them like AI (some VC said that 80% of new US AI applications are now being based on open-source Chinese AI). Meanwhile, China has moved beyond the madness and is expanding visa-free travel and skilled worker visas. The more cosmopolitan country will win in the end so cosmopolitans can take solace in that—if the US wants to become xenophobic, that will have the same effect on the US that the Ming Dynasty burning its ships did.
All of our "Heritage American" EHCs are already doing those H-1B jobs or better... We just don't have enough of them to fill the slots. They're just mad because the useless burnouts in Nowhere, Ohio aren't getting prestigious, well paying jobs that are beyond their talents and utility. To an extent that's their issue with the Ivies; they want to hand out elite collegiate participation prizes to LHCs like those chosen as the regime's diversity hires.
Nothing makes me *less* sympathetic to immigration than this kind of Hanania-esque elitist sneering at working-class native-born Americans.
At least Hanania—unlike the technocratic liberal types—has the courage of his Social Darwinist convictions and openly includes Black Americans among the dumb and lazy losers who should be replaced by superior immigrants.
It wouldn't surprise you that I am a Hannania fan... but one big reason I sneer at working-class native-born Americans is because I am one, and I see them everyday (I am also an elitist and don't pretend otherwise). Tradesmen are certainly worthy of respect because they're skilled and talented (which is to say, not low human capital), the rest of the stupid, lazy, entitled, and above all whiny hoi polloi just can't be arsed to be useful and instead they blame all their problems on foreigners.
Good thing I'm not a progressive so I don't have to indulge in niceties or blame everything on whiteness.
Thank you for your service. Would love to see Schmitt's new domestic army of glassy eyed white Gen z Internet influencers figuring out engineering plans for SpaceX or configuring AI to do protein topology in bio-labs, lol.
Along with this I wish some company would make patriotic swag but liberal.
In Washington’s letter to a Newport Congregation he has the line:
“ to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and that would look great in the old tyme font on the back of a truck with a Washington in profile.
I remember going to the DNC and hearing a lot of very patriotic rhetoric from Harris and many of the speakers. But was surprised that there wasn’t much merch worn or sold that had the same patriotic bent.
I think this is because among the professional class of Democrats that attend events like he DNC, outward, forceful affirmations of patriotism are still viewed as problematic/cringe, despite Kamala’s (smart) effort to drape herself in the flag.
It even came up during the No Kings protests where it seemed like wearing the American flag was more “ironic”/for the images, rather than because the wearers believed in the meaning of the image so much they’d wear it own their own time.
Also - Memes about how you can tell how racist a neighborhood is by how many American flags there are.
One thing about No Kings is that given the many events and diverse settings, there was probably a lot of difference between regions and types of communities—I saw at least one picture of a No Kings rally somewhere that was so festooned with flags the only way you could tell it wasn’t a Trump rally was a couple of prominent anti-Trump signs. I thought that was really wonderful and something we need to see more of.
Meanwhile, Obama is the most successful liberal politician in recent history and we seem to find dumb reasons not to take up his mantle.
I attended one of the Tesla Takedown protests earlier this year and I was impressed that several of my fellow protestors had American flags waving on large poles. An excellent image!
Too many upside down flags at the No Kings protest.
The “correct“ meaning of an upside down flag is a distress call, not a repudiation of the flag. And a distress call is a quite appropriate message.
I’m not sure how many of the no protesters meant it that way though.
Yes, I know that. But I got the strong sense that these folks used the upside down flag because they felt too uncomfortable displaying the pure patriotism of the right side up flag.
Now now, Kings?
The War on Terror casts a long shadow...
It's called the American flag, the left should get more comfortable with it.
They seem to prefer the Palestinian flag…. and the hammer and sickle for some reason.
two things I would absolutely buy merch of:
"As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" on basically anything
"Down with the traitors, up with the stars." with a civil war era union flag on a shirt or something
The New Hampshire state tourism board has been whitewashing all their "live free or die" messaging to just "live free." Sadly it's time for the "or die" to make a comeback.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.”
The American flag (and the Gadsden flag for that matter) are liberal icons. Don't let the leftists tarnish them by doing guilt-by-association with with white supremacy or imperialism or whatever.
Massachusetts is considering a redo of their state flag and I think they should bring back the “appeal to heavens” tree flag.
The "Join, or die" cartoon would be very appropriate for Mass.
They should go for it, Maine really screwed up by not adopting the pine tree flag in the last election. There's an opening.
Some troll should suggest that people who want to grade Americanness should also agree to limit Senate membership to the original 13 states
Seven blue, five purpleish and one red state would actually be a decent way to get generally liberal policies while still having a meaningful check on the dumber parts of the far left.
Yep. Even my attempts at trolling end up leading to substantively sensible outcomes. Sad, really!
If you recall, the Camo Harris/Walz hats were popular and worked well to bait the right.
I'd slap this onto my blacked out Lincoln Aviator with pride.
> if a Kazakh moves to America and works hard and plays by the rules
Or, you know, even, slacks off a little bit.
Hard work is a virtue of course, and fosters competence and a sense of purpose. But if you want to spend some time reading Substack, it won't be held against you.
"...want to spend some time reading Substack...."
But if we ever catch you commenting, then that is grounds for deportation!
Thanks for invoking the Pledge of Allegiance. That's a good way to make clear how deeply un-American the Schmitts and Vances really are when they reject "ideas" in favor of blood and race. The Red, White and Blue stands for ideas.
The future of immigration is important, but the point can be made without it. Even if no new immigrant were ever to enter our nation again, we are already a nation of immigrants. To make it a nation founded on ethnic origin would require the establishment of a caste system, in which only those from Anglo origins were fully members of the country. In that country, the descendants of Asians would never be full citizens; the descendants of Brazil, Nigeria, Vietnam, Finland, would never be full citizens. Catholics, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims would never be full citizens. Looking to the future of immigration may make the point more vivid, but looking to our current composition already makes it clear: there's the America of the Declaration, or there's American Apartheid. They're both ideas, but one of them is better.
If I wanted to be a huge dick and get into a heritage-measuring contest, this Schmitt guy is, by his own terms, a pathetic parvenu compared to my English heritage I can trace to the founding of the state of Connecticut.
But I don't, because his terms are deeply stupid.
I can trace my heritage back on this continent to around 1630 which I do think is kinda cool but it's never occurred to me that would make me more American.
All of my grandparents came here, as adults, from Europe in pursuit of better lives. I feel that makes me *very* American.
(not that I think you or anyone else in this thread is saying otherwise!)
Yes! the most american thing to do is to have arrived in the country 5 minutes ago and already be engaged in some kind of capitalistic enterprise whilst griping about the new arrivals that arrived 3 minutes ago.
Asking if they are complaining about immigrants yet is my standard joke whenever one of my friends gets their US Citizenship.
For me, I have deliberately avoided learning anything about my supposed heritage; I see it as a key feature of the US that people can choose to forget those that came before and write their own stories. Mutts unite!
"... a pathetic parvenu compared to my English heritage...."
A kinder way to make the same point would be to invoke the fact that the English (and Scots) of the Founding generations were exactly the ones who favored Enlightenment universalist sentiments. This Kraut's idea of English heritage leaves out John Locke and David Hume, as well as Jefferson, Adams, and Washington.
Maybe he's implicitly referencing a more...German tradition of nationalist thinking?
Are you suggesting that "National Conservatism" looks suspiciously like "National Socialism"?
I'm saying he sounds like a fan of Friedrich Ratzel, at the very least.
What people like that believe is that ideas are not part of anyone's heritage. Heritage is by definition made up of more objective factors like genetics, religion, etc.
Why, if we allow in more of these Hessians, soon our fair New York hamlets will be overrun with all manner of decapitated equestrians!
Washington Irving's family was Scots and English, but the Manhattan that he was born in was still heavily influenced by its Dutch founders, as was the New York in which he set his stories. There's a reason that "van Winkle" and "Knickerbocker" sound Dutch, and Wiki tells me that "Sleepy Hollow" was originally Slapershaven.
To a non-Dutch speaker, "The Legend of Slapershaven" sets very different expectations.
I mean, just quote Benjamin Franklin's thoughts about the Germans. I think there's something by Jefferson that is similar too.
It includes their DNA, and that’s all that matters.
"... their DNA, and that’s all ...."
and even on that score he is wrong, wrong, wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True-Born_Englishman
As early as 1701, Defoe was pointing out that the English were mongrels:
"...Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began,
That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman:
In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot,
Betwixt a Painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend'ring Off-spring quickly learn'd to Bow,
And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough:
From whence a Mongrel half-Bred Race there came,
With neither Name, nor Nation, Speech or Fame.
In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran,
Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their Rank Daughters, to their Parents just,
Receiv'd all nations with promiscuous lust.
This Nauseous Brood directly did contain
The well extracted Blood of Englishmen...."
My dog’s American lineage is greater than Schmitt’s (since dog generations are shorter.)
"... dog generations are shorter...."
Wait till Drosophilist weighs in -- fruit-flies can proudly point to one hundred generations since last week.
"Since time immemorial!" thundered the goldfish, referring to five minutes ago.
I can say from personal experience that American mosquitoes are radical in their nativism.
I usually object to rhetoric about “parasites draining our life blood,” but when it’s a bear complaining about mosquitoes, I’ll let it pass.
Moment of pedantry: the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) life cycle is actually 10 days, so one year = 36 generations.
I have been in the US for 720 fruit fly generations!
Not quite “For over 1000 generations, the Jedi were guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic,” but getting there!
"Moment of pedantry...."
Thanks; I was hoping that you'd straighten out the facts for me. I found the Wiki page a bit confusing on this score.
And he draws the curtain back to reveal the deep research that goes into his droll, pleasantly throw away comments.
My mom's side of the family is Scotts/Irish. I don't feel the same racial allegiance to Scotts/Irish people that JD Vance does at all. My grandfather would have hated that kind of racial stuff.
Especially considering how that racial stuff was sometimes pointed AT the Scots/Irish ...
In my preferred world, the MAGA Republicans get the votes of real Americans, as defined as those descending from the Mayflower, and the Democrats get everyone else.
I have similar dark DAR thoughts when I listen to these morons.
You should run for public office, I’d vote for you! (Go easy on the dysphemisms tho, voters don’t like those. Throw in some euphemism once in a while!)
"...You should run for public office...."
Thanks. I think many more people should get involved in elective office, at all levels. But personally, I am not cut out for a position of public trust. With the help of a lot of clown white (I recommend Ben Nye brand) I was able to make my face risible, but without it I look just repellent. I don't know-- I guess they elect dog-catchers, sometimes? I could run for dog-frightener?
Hey, don’t sell yourself short! Lincoln wasn’t good looking, and it didn’t stop him! He would make self-deprecating jokes about his appearance. During a debate he said, “My opponent calls me two-faced. I put it to the audience, if I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”
My wife just told me this week she thinks Lincoln was one of the most handsome presidents and now I don't know how to feel
A hot take if ever there was one!
"... Lincoln wasn’t good looking...."
It's so hard to say. I have stared at those old photographs for minutes at a time, and sometimes I think he has one of the most beautiful faces I've ever seen.
There's no accounting for taste!
And if we institute that Apartheid a whole lot of folks like Schmitt are going to be shocked to find they're less American than most Black Americans and even a whole lot of brown descendants of California and Texas.
"Most Democrats sincerely and correctly believe that immigration is generally beneficial to the United States."
I disagree. I think they correctly believe that immigration is good for immigrants and that's the main driver of their views.
Well, they aren't mutually exclusive views.
They aren't but I think BZC has a very good point that it isn't really the argument that's been made lately, which is more of a pull the heart strings human interest kind of narrative with, at best, a vague hand wave about 'the economy.' A good faith immigration skeptic looks at this and says 'fair enough, I agree that many are sympathetic people, and of course growth is good, but surely in a world of billions, many of whom would love to be Americans, you can't operate without some limiting principles. What are yours?' And the answer of course has at best been 'none' or 'well someone has to pick fruit' or the worst of all, 'you are a racist.' And now we see where that has gotten us.
The argument needs to be 'this is the immigration that is good for you, American citizen, here is why it is good for you, and this is what we should allow and encourage and this is what we won't and if necessary will use force to put a stop to.'
You don’t even have to be an immigration skeptic really to say, “well, what’s the limiting principle?” You just have to be something other than an open borders maximalist. And while I imagine the SB comments section has a few such people—folks who believe that unrestricted immigration is the best possible immigration policy—I’d say they’re a rarer bird even than Kazakhstani Americans.
I am not sure that you're right about that, beyond in the most theoretical or abstract way. I'd bet, for example, if we said things like 'no one from a country currently involved in a war, international or civil, as defined by the state department' or 'no one without a college degree we would recognize, as determined by federally set criteria,' both of which would be perhaps overly broad and blunt but not irrational restrictions, and this place would blow up into a 'well actually' this or 'but what about' that. I'm not even saying all of them would be bad criticisms of that hypothetical policy. I'd probably agree with many of the counter points. But I am saying if you can never get to no on anything the non maximalist position becomes de facto the maximalist position.
Biden in July 2024 got to "no."
Way too little way too late. I'm still voting Democrat of course but I think it's important to understand just how much of a failure the Biden administration was. It is very much 'you had one job' territory. If we do end up losing our democracy to Trump and MAGA and 'national conservatives' or whatever then Biden should be considered among the worst, if not the worst, president in history, second only to the dictator that will have succeeded him, should that come to pass.
It should be the same standard for when we decide a locally born person can’t independently participate in society any more and are institutionalized or become a permanent dependent.
I see that as a minimum baseline but it by itself would say that the vast majority of the billion plus people on the Indian subcontinent could hop on a plane and obtain admission to permanent status tomorrow, and thats not getting into the nearly 700 million people in our own hemisphere, not counting Canadians, that wouldn't even need to fly to get here. Now I'm not saying every single person who theoretically might want to would but I'd like to think that even the most optimistic assimilationists understand that taking tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of people in virtually overnight would present serious problems. Currently that problem is checked only by oceans and international travel/visa requirements acting as choke points. Choke points which would no longer apply if the only requirements are 'don't be a felon or clinically insane.'
It's weird to me that people even argue against this. A de facto open borders policy can cause serious problems for the destination country. We have an excellent example in the US itself: Texas. Unchecked immigration from the US to Mexican Texas ended with Texas rebelling, leaving Mexico, and joining the US.
People make the “good for American citizens” argument all the time. Like they argue immigrants do jobs Americans don’t want to do, to which conservatives respond with slavery comparisons that reveal that they don’t think coercion was the bad part of slavery. People also argue that it’s culturally good for America, like the backlash to the Trump campaign’s “taco trucks on every corner” threat. And they argue that immigrants found companies and make inventions, to which restrictionists suddenly turn into zero-sum blank slatists and argue that Americans would be doing that if immigrants weren’t around.
"[foreign nationals] are cheaper and more compliant, and therefore preferable in the eyes of too many business elites" is the least awful part of Schmitt's speech here, though I don't think Schmitt would ever actually do anything that inconvenienced the "business elites" he pretends to scorn here.
The jobs that illegal immigrants in particular are left to do are in fact quite bad and poorly paid, and the solution is higher compensation and job protections, which the presence of a large pool of labor with limited recourse to the law helps porevent. The fact that produce, meat, and landscaping are cheaper than they would otherwise be due to those sectors' reliance on illegal immigrants' labor is a *bad* thing. The solution is a higher level of legal immigration coupled with tighter laws around job safety, wage theft, etc., which clearly conservatives of today aren't interested in, but the status quo is not good here.
Actually, it's the most awful part of his speech. Because the way he wants to punish those greedy business elites is to seize and imprison/deport those workers.
Wake me when MAGA starts going after business owners and causing them real harm, like prosecutions and heavy fines.
“to which conservatives respond with slavery comparisons that reveal that they don’t think coercion was the bad part of slavery”
Straw man after straw man after straw man
Spend some time on Twitter, restrictionists make this slavery comparison all the time.
The straw man comes where you say:
“reveal that they don’t think coercion was the bad part of slavery”
First, “the bad part” isn’t real. There were many bad things about slavery. The existence of one bad part doesn’t negate the existence of others
Second, no, it doesn’t reveal any such thing. We should be able to engage critically with people’s beliefs if we want to be pragmatic.
The slavery idea is a rhetorical device, similar to the way a progressive may criticize a corporation for paying “slave wages”
Also, shouldn’t our argument about entrepreneurial and inventive immigrants be an argument for more selective immigration? Like increased academic exchange scholarships, increased o1 visas, revamping h1b from lottery to ranked (or tiered lottery) etc. I was gonna add another sentence dumping on the Biden immigration approach but I’ll assume we all agree it was terrible and should never be done again.
The ones making the cultural arguments are on the weakest footing, at least in terms of electoral politics. The majority of Americans have *already* rejected that, and getting beyond it is going to be a hard nut to crack. Even the argument that immigration is a net financial win for America doesn't often trump (no pun intended) the idea of many that "they're poisoning the blood of America". That's a powerful argument that many, many people take seriously.
I agree that strawman arguments or refusing to engage with the substance of immigration skepticism is bad, but so is the counter-strawman / refusal of engagement that BZC advanced. Seems hard to have good-faith discussion if everyone is suspicious of everyone's motives.
I strongly agree with this sentiment, but I interact with people that vindicate BZC's observation every day.
It may be a weakman, but it isn't a strawman: many activists aren't willing to argue for increasing immigration on the basis of the benefits for Americans, because the moral case for helping the immigrants themselves is the only thing that matters to them.
There is a current of Progressivism that would not argue for immigration being mutually beneficial to immigrant and non-immigrant alike becasue they are suspicious of any market transaction being mutually beneficial.
Immigration as a whole benefits Americans. Any individual tranche of immigrants isn't going to benefit Americans very much. So a lot of passionately pro-immigration voices are reluctant to emphasize the benefit to Americans because it seems to concede that it's no big deal to turn away any particular group of immigrants, including even, say, the passengers on the St. Louis. I think they should rethink that political calculation, but I understand what's driving it at least.
I do not see the contrast. Apart from the (I would claim) fact that a political refugee woud be more likely that the randomly elected potential immigrant to "add value," even if a given tranche of immigrants will not add MUCH value, non-zero is better than zero.
But in turn THAT does not preclude accepting that we actually have a set of (arguably pretty sub-optimal) immigration laws that we should expend some amount (not an infinite amount) of effort to enforce, something that Biden was not willing to do until it was too late.
In fact, they are necessarily consistent views if you believe, as Matt articulates, that immigrants turn into Americans.
I think if you pressed enough of them on the points on how positive sum immigration is for the material well being of American citizens, there would be very few left that would be nothing but dead end cosmopolitans.
Hey, some of us dead-end cosmopolitans can keep it under wraps from time to time for the sake of the normals.
"...some of us dead-end cosmopolitans...."
I'd say I'm rooting for you, except the treadmills have been accused of not having any.
Yeah it is both the case that immigration benefits immigrants (why else would they come here? It’s usually the anti-immigration people who argue that immigration is somehow bad for the immigrants themselves because they get exploited) but also clearly enriches America both economically and culturally. The parts of America with little immigration look boring, left-behind places that most of us wouldn’t want to live in, and even there a small number of immigrants are usually the ones providing essential services from medical care to construction because locally born people do not want to live there and move away if they have any ability.
this is a rather weak argument; of course immigrants don't want to live in places where nobody wants to live. the same factors pull immigrants and native born alike to cities. this doesnt show that immigrants cause the desirability of big cities
Immigrants are more likely to start businesses I believe? That does contribute to dynamism
Where is the contrast? Recognizing that immigration is good for non-immigrants does not deny that it is good for immigrants. Does "cosmopolitan" imply that we should accept immigrants on the basis of benefits to them even if those immigrants did NOT benefit non-immigrants?
I halfway agree that said view is what got most expressed during Trump 1, that liberals were stacking for immigrants who were being treated cruelly. They were and we did as we should have. But that does not rule out that even the average illegally entering immigrant does not improve the welfare of non-immigrants, much less the graduate student who wants to stay or the H1b visa entrant. Unless they are realty unlucky and need expensive medical treatment or become vicious and commit crimes, even a low skilled immigrants that manages to obtain a job engages in economic transactions with non-immigrants that are _mutually beneficial_. Capitalism is not a zero sum game.
Immigration, with some exceptions, is beneficial for the same reasons that trade, with some exceptions, is beneficial.
That's an argument for a 700k or 1 million a year visa lottery. My guess for the reason so few on the left want that is it filters for those with the most resources and the most to gain. A Mexican university junior would start putting his name in every year. But he doesn't tug at the heart strings like those fleeing gang violence and sneaking across the border. He's not who the left feels for most.
This is an odd take as practically the visa lottery
1. Does not allow Mexicans to participate
2. Is viewed as a left wing addition to our immigration policy.
Until very recently asylum seekers were a rather insignificant portion of American immigrants. The Biden years changed that due to some oddities but I think even fairly left wing people don’t believe it should be the primary way to admitting people to this country.
I agree with BZC. However, at this point, we’re arguing on perceptions, for which, there is little chance for reconciliation. Here’s my attempt:
1. Replace Mexican in his analogy with Nigerian. There are much easier avenues for skilled Mexicans to immigrate
2. Does this point, even if true, matter? Bill Clinton-era left culture is very different from post-2016 left culture. What changed in the Biden years weren’t some oddities. It was post-2016 left coming into power with exactly the ideological tint that BZC mentions. If one was in favor of immigration for the benefit of Americans, one would more severely enforce asylum and intensely open legal avenues that can better select. Instead, the Biden administration put newer asylum arrivals ahead of legally immigrated people
This is exactly right, and I say that in a way that is totally agnostic from the fact that it is the position I think makes most sense on the merits. :)
Nigéria isn’t eligible for the diversity lottery either. The specific of programs actually matter so we should try to get details right when we discuss them.
I have no idea how you can say the Biden admin put asylum seekers ahead of legally immigrating people. The paths are parallel are largely unrelated. The h1-b lottery was not affected by the surge of migrants at the border. In fact the Biden admin implemented a wonderful technical change that penalized multiple H1-b lottery entries.
Your first sentence on *Nigeria is correct: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Diversity-Visa/DV-Instructions-Translations/DV-2026-Instructions-Translations/DV%202026%20Plain%20Language%20Instructions%20and%20FAQs.pdf
But the point still stands.
Now, how did Biden put new arrivals over existing immigrants?
First, the administration put newly arrived asylum seekers ahead of asylum seekers who had been in the process prior to his presidency and surge, creating a new expedited asylum docket for new arrivals, expanding timelines for those already waiting. This includes the coveted employment authorization.
This second argument is slightly weaker but the shift of uscis resources to handle the new docket and asylum surge also increased processing timelines for family-based immigration (this includes EAD timelines) (I have a family experience with this but won’t resort to anecdotes)
The processes for asylum vs h1b are parallel but h1b is not the only legal avenue for immigration.
Now, if we’re to actually discuss the substance of the conversation, BZC says the issue is a cultural one on the left of prioritizing immigration from the benefit perspective of the immigrant and not the American.
Thomas says that the majority of even illegal immigrants are a net good to the nation to which BZC then says, that means we should expand the lottery (maybe then Nigeria and Mexico would be included, lol) instead of just tolerating wanton unregulated immigration (the least likely to be beneficial to Americans but most likely to be beneficial to the immigrants; proportionally here) defending his point that consideration for immigrant welfare is the primary driver.
After you respond, I then make a similar point that if one did not have the ideological tint that BZC says, they would prioritize more selective immigration that may not let in more sympathetic, less wealthy individuals as much as more skilled and likely privileged immigrants.
I’m sure we agree that the upper limit to immigration into the US is not infinite so yeah, it’s kind of a zero-sum game with this one
I don’t do well with super long comments so I hope I make sense here
I think it is more an argument for auctioning n*10^6 H1b-type visas maybe with some industry/geographic caps.
It's amazing how quickly in the last ten years so many Americans, who would likely consider themselves capitalists, decided that capitalism must be inherently zero-sum.
Maybe they were never capitalist at all just interested in preventing downward redistribution.
You're mistaken. 91% of Democrats believe immigration is good for the country.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx#:~:text=Democrats'%20belief%20that%20immigration%20is,deter%20or%20reverse%20illegal%20immigration.
Something that's been forgotten from a lot of online discourse from 2015-2016 is that the "immigrants are hard-working, often high achieving, and benefit the economy" narrative got labeled as elitist.
Pro-growth/non-zero sum views have always been elitist. Zero sum is the naïve view.
I don't think you can find more than 1 person who is (a) in favor of immigration and (b) doesn't believe it's beneficial to the US.
Really? I think many people feel deeply for those fleeing desperate situations in their home country and that it's good for the US or not is not one of their considerations.
I mean, I think it's important to take in refugees, that it was good that the US took in my grandfather, and that it would have been better if it had also taken my great grandparents, and that the same logic applies now. But I also think that my family has been good for America and the same is true for today's refugees and asylum seekers. And I'm confident this is true for basically everyone who thinks we should take in more asylum seekers.
By that logic if it could be shown that a group of asylum seekers were a burden on America you'd oppose their entry. Because if you'd support either way it doesn't seem like it being beneficial is weighing on your decision making process.
I don't think that follows at all. Lots of things are good for multiple reasons, and caring about both reasons doesn't mean that one of them is somehow fake or that if you got rid of one of the reasons then that wouldn't matter. I like my job and I like getting paid, and if one of those reasons went away I would reconsider but both are genuine and important.
The political problem is that it doesn't matter what Democrats believe about this, but that many (perhaps most) prominent advocates don't appear to actually care whether immigrants are generally beneficial to the US.
I don't think your claim is true at all -- which prominent advocates are you referring to?
It sounds like you're asking for opinion pieces or coverage of public officials speaking.
Imagine I wade through the sea of articles, news, and pronouncements on this topic. I could cherry-pick some examples and make them support nearly any claim. Then you could respond in kind - perhaps you'd find a few contrasting examples that call mine into question, or maybe you'd close-read some fragment in a way that undermines my case.
What would we actually learn from that? How would my answer move us in a constructive direction?
The most prominent advocates aren't people who write essays in the Atlantic or even comments on Substack: they're demonstrators carrying signs and quoted in news coverage. Google "pro immigration rallies" and look at the images. A lot of demonstrators aren't even interested in making a case, just demands. But others play for our hearts or appeal to ideals holding signs like "end family separation", "immigrant rights are human rights", "no person is illegal", "protection not deportation", "children don't belong in cages", and "stop the criminalization of poverty". To be fair, there are occasionally signs that say something like "Immigrants make America Great", but they're a distinct minority.
I think it's far more illuminating to look at policy demands. People that actually care about something condition their cooperation on it. That's why your response to BZC about liking your job and getting paid is irrelevant: you'd actually walk if your job were miserable.
Do you think it's accurate to say the Republicans care about women's health? They sometimes offer to add "life of the mother" exceptions to abortion bans. Do you think they even mean the same thing as Democrats do when they use the phrase "women's health"?
1. What I want is for you to evince some evidence for the claims you are making. Instead you have provided a lot of words about why you shouldn't have to.
2. You can't tell if most people who are pro-immigration are conditioning their support on it being beneficial since it is, in fact, beneficial.
I'm asking you to explain what you think counts as evidence before I waste part of my day.
You have a long history of imagining disagreements and ignoring what people are actually saying, so I'm going to insist on a little more clarity. If you don't think demonstration coverage counts as evidence, there's no point having a discussion with you.
I think his point is that they don't *care* if it is beneficial to the US, only if it is beneficial to the immigrant.
Maybe that's true (although I'm skeptical). But when I go to Burger King, I don't really care that my purchase is beneficial for the Burger King franchise owner. That doesn't mean that it's in any way bad for them. It's good for them!
It's the disingenuousness that I think rankles people. On the right, it's pretending that they care about the semi-servitude nature of H1B visas rather than the economic and social impact of immigrants. On the left, it is pretending that they care whether or not immigrants have a positive economic impact on existing citizens.
One can CARE whether or not immigrants benefit non-immigrants because one is pretty sure that they are. If they are not "on welfare" they almost have to be. Policy has to work pretty hard to produce mutually prejudicial economic transactions or transactions that have the non-immigrant to favor the immigrant.
Okay - thought experiment: you are provided overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that immigrants are a net financial drain on the host country. Do you (1) change your support for immigration? Or (2) switch to a different reason for why you support immigration? If your answer is (1), then congratulations, you do care about it. If your answer is (2), then by definition you don't.
Ask anyone at the Sierra Club. If you told them immigration was good for economic growth, they might stroke out.
Isn't that a weird thing for the Sierra Club to have strong feelings about though?
Presumably this is Everything Bagel stuff?
Came here to say this. Many of these “liberals” are also the degrowthers and them this is just about helping “the underprivileged”.
IDK that you actually disagree. Even if they come to the view that immigration is good for the US as a convenient corollary to the "main driver of their views" that immigration is good for immigrants, they still sincerely believe it's good for the US.
IMO this is a hair not worth splitting.
I don't think this makes a ton of sense. Anyone involved in the hiring of immigrants is pro immigrant for their own self interest.
Its kind of like how I don't think the majority of Dems like environmentalism because of respect for Mother Gaia. It's just that breathing pollution sucks
"Anyone involved in the hiring of immigrants is pro immigrant for their own self interest."
They can be very anti-immigration - they just don't mean Jose.
Ah yes - let's double down on calling everything racism - I'm sure that's gonna work this time.
Can someone send this article to Tim Kaine please? In a time where we have to deal with genuinely dangerous shit bags like Schmitt and JD Vance, it sure would be nice if opposition Senators weren't acting baffled and appalled by the concept of natural rights, as though they've never read the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Serving up Ted Cruz with the biggest softball in the history of softballs for him to crush isn't helping anything.
Yeah, the very obvious angle here is that God and nature endow *all* people with human rights, not subject to the whims of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, President Biden or President Trump, and God doesn't love and care for you more whether your family comes from the backwoods of Kentucky or the hills of Ireland, the western coast of California or the eastern cost of India, the boroughs of New York or the tenements of Guangzhou.
I think it is important to remember that God doesn't do that, mainly because he doesn't exist but also no such rights are in any of the major religious cannons.
Rights might be useful and noble fictions but they don't exist outside of the minds of men in certain places and institutions. Especially in wars and dealing with mental health crises they often need to be abandoned because they no longer work.
Yes, and every political speech should remind the audience that we're all just collections of cells and atoms jammed together by millenia of evolutionary processes aimed at maximizing reproductive fitness, because that sort of rhetoric really sets a fire in the hearts of men and inspires productive change that betters peoples' lives.
Well that's the thing isn't it? If you're an actual communist, these rights are all totally fake. They don't exist from that worldview. I think Matt makes a compelling case his grandfather was a patriot for *serving America in WW2*, not agreeing with Jefferson that our creator gives us small-l liberal rights (Marx would not agree!) That suggests citizenship by service in war, like TR expounded, rather than just ethnicity or fealty to the Declaration, is a recurring element in American nationalism not entirely reflected in either.
But then what are Yglesias and Schmitt disagreeing on? They both agree the five words of the Declaration don't resolve all of this (hence Grandpa Yglesias is fine.) They both agree we're not Slovaks or Kazakhs, and you can't make those countries American overnight with a Declaration. They both agree American history should be seen as a positive story to build on (most of Schmitt's speech is how cool and heroic frontiersmen were for building things rather than just existing on their own, so like Yglesias's Anglo history and appeal to God-given rights rather than "we need to be British", it sounds fine albeit incomplete to me.) Schmitt and Yglesias insinuate their critics are going to make the country worse because they aren't loyal to some of the people who are actually here (rural white Missouri voters, various minority Democratic voters.) The whole exchange feels fake. What are they disagreeing on? Trump?
I think it is important to remember that American soldiers in WW2 were fighting for their comrades, homeland, democracy and against fascism rather than just because they believed in the Bill of Rights. It would be odd to see the Bill of Rights as the dominant or even most important issue at stake.
You misunderstand the concept of inalienable rights. The rights exist whether they are honored or violated. They cannot be taken or even sold, that's what inalienable means. They are inherent to being human.
But they aren't real. If a right becomes costly to allow society should and does remove that right.
Not even the craziest gun nut in the NRA believes in the right to private nukes, because everyone agrees the inalienable right to arms is in fact sometimes alienable.
Fuck this. I am an atheist too, but whether inalienable rights are something metaphysical or something logically derived from the fundamentals of human experience they are absolutely core to what America is about and are worth killing and dying for. States are only legitimate to the extent they exist to defend them and those states that fail at that core mission deserve to be revolutioned out of existence.
Countries only being legitimate if they accept your ideological preferences is never a good starting point.
No. This is a failure to understand how other people think. It's not that their right to nukes is alienable, it's that their right to arms/self-defense does not extend to nukes.
What did I miss?
https://youtu.be/C_4q55wy528?si=LhzzoIf3MrneoXXa
Edit: better link
I have nothing other to say than this absolutely cooks
and that CT SLOW BORERS SHOULD JOIN ME AT BAR IN NEW HAVEN ON MONDAY 9/15 STARTING AT 6PM FOR SLOW BORING AND STEADY HABITS HAPPY HOUR
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/slow-boring-steady-habits-tickets-1404469479019?aff=ebdsshother&utm_share_source=listing_android&sg=2d51e083ed2acd84e0c8a76fe72e3aa49ff02ce7459d350dfc59bf07c148ffd5226161c08f262aeacf6fa843ec25fd69224d152550a03e1b5755a6e5385b242f80c3afe26798fbb2eed2d5faa6
Monday the 15th, correct? And we all await with bated breath to see if Freddie will make that appearance.
If he does, please do comment the experience. I'll pin it to the top of the comment section.
I read up on Freddie and turns out he and I are both South central CT freaks. I read a lot of his other stuff and while he's very cranky on econ and politics he's super pro-human and very thoughtful on culture and the human experience so I am sure we'd get along. He's got a big heart. Big hearts come with big feelings. I genuinely hope he comes and if he does I bet we'll have a good time .
I bet he's perfectly pleasant in person.
As a Person Experiencing Westernness, Connecticut is way too far away for me to attend, but I'm sure that Casey and others will be more than eager to share the details!
Yes! And dammit I always typo the date, let me fix
Have a great time! 😊
You can pick the statements of a particular person to make a case if you’d like, but the anti-mass illegal immigration case on the right is an old one, going back at least to the 80’s when Buckley was hosting Firing Line debates on the matter, with Ira Glasser on the pro-mass illegal immigration side. The case goes like this:
Immigrants must be assimilated into the broader American culture. When this is done immigration is good. When it is not, multiculturalism rather than just multi-ethnicity ensues, and this is bad. This leads to factionalism. If you doubt this look around our country and the world. The Kurds are persecuted in Iraq; the Armenians are cleansed by Azeris; China is brutalizing the Uyghurs; Japan is taking measures to make foreigners respect their culture; Christians are cleansed from the Middle East; Canada goes through spasms of secession threats; Sweden is developing political antibodies to the Muslim immigration; and all over Europe the “liberal” establishments are suppressing free political speech in order to put the lid on their servant-citizens for objecting to rape gangs and other wonderful effects of Muslim culture.
If a handful of Somalis move to America they will most likely become assimilated. But if tens of thousands move here and cluster together in Minnesota it will take a lot longer. And if robust immigration of that group continues, then assimilation will never happen. Eventually, you have to stop the immigration and assimilate them. That means language and political culture.
In America, we are lucky that the big majority of our immigrants are Christians, rather than the Muslims plaguing Europe. These are easily assimilable. But if you take massive amounts of these, which Biden was doing, they will cluster and take the form that they had in their native countries, which was cyclically socialist. And let’s be honest; this was the idea.
>this was the idea
Undignified and conspiratorial. Liberals genuinely believe in mass migration as an end in itself -- we believe all human lives have moral worth and that immigration to America is good for immigrants and for America. The details of how to organize that, how much to do at once, how much to encourage assimilation, etc. are all debatable. But this right wing fever dream that its actually all a cynical ploy to import communist voters is totally ludicrous and without any evidence at all. And its so outdated! Immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela etc. have proven over many cycles that they are right wingers, not people trying to import communism to America
A majority of Latinos vote democrat. Not every pro immigration democrat is a cynical vote harvester, but it's a large factor.
If 55% of them voted Republican, would that substantively change your mind?
edit - fixed typo. Substack website is being weird this morning.
About Democrats motives? Yes. About the wisdom of unassimilated immigration? No.
The evidence, all around the world, is that multiculturalism leads to instability.
Sure, and I generally agree that assimilation is good. But it also begs the question of what assimilation means. America as a culture is far different after adding large numbers of German, Swedes, Poles, Irish, Italians, Mexicans, etc. than it was before they came here. I think we are *mostly* better for it, though I do question the Irish influence...
It might but I haven't necessarily seen Republicans to be super-friendly to Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan immigration.
I'm going to point to Karl Rove's "natural conservatives"; religious conservatives that happen to be a bit more swarthy and speak Spanish would find an excellent home in the traditional values conservatives of Republicans if they didn't keep leaning harder into the racism. Hell, Muslims could even be slotted in there
It just so happens that Leftists can be stupid and think Muslims aren't right-wingers.
But neither Rove nor you can explain why Latin America is beset with Marxism even while being chock full of “conservatives”.
Easily, conservatism has fuck all to do with free market economics (which is a liberal tradition) and religious conservatism is about culture, not economics. Likewise the current Republican party isn't interested in the free market.
In any case a lot of Latinos are fleeing communism (especially Venezuelans, a group of particular interest these days). The ones that come here generally aren't Marxists. The people in this country that most identify with Marxism are "Heritage Americans".
“Liberal” is not the opposite of “conservative” except as we use it as a convenient label for left of center folks. Both political liberals and conservatives cherish parts of our liberal traditions. And some of those traditions are championed by the opposite party that championed them twenty years ago (or more).
Democrats were the champions of free speech twenty years ago, and Republicans were the champions of free trade. Hard to believe how that has changed. Republicans are slapping tariffs on everyone and Democrats are enforcing speech codes and even tried to establish a ministry of truth.
It's a pretty slim majority at this point
"If a handful of Somalis move to America they will most likely become assimilated. But if tens of thousands move here and cluster together in Minnesota it will take a lot longer. And if robust immigration of that group continues, then assimilation will never happen. Eventually, you have to stop the immigration and assimilate them. That means language and political culture.
In America, we are lucky that the big majority of our immigrants are Christians, rather than the Muslims plaguing Europe. These are easily assimilable. But if you take massive amounts of these, which Biden was doing, they will cluster and take the form that they had in their native countries, which was cyclically socialist. And let’s be honest; this was the idea."
This is the same panic that was around in the 1900s-1920s about the Italians and the poor Eastern European immigrants. They assimilated. The Muslims in Europe might even assimilate if those societies were to play fair with them and make it easier to work and take care.
How many Italians came from 1924 to 1965? Eastern Europeans?
I do think you're right about what is going on in Europe. But American conservatives don't seem to be any more sympathetic to Mexican or Central American immigrants than they are to Somali immigrants. People being anti-immigration across the board seems to have more explanatory power.
You're right. The social antibodies to malign immigration is illiberal and indiscriminate. Wouldn't it be great if we had not awakened it with absurd immigration policies?
sympathetic is not a synonym for unlimited immigration though.
"Immigrants must be assimilated into the broader American culture. When this is done immigration is good. When it is not, multiculturalism rather than just multi-ethnicity ensues, and this is bad. "
This sums up my own views nicely.
I understand what you're saying but I don't see any evidence of the monoculture that Heritage Americans talk about even among Americans who are not recent immigrants.
There are over 35 million people of Mexican origin in the U.S., many of whom live in large, concentrated communities where Spanish is widely spoken. By your description, they should never have assimilated or become 'true Americans.' But the evidence shows the opposite: within one or two generations, Mexican Americans overwhelmingly speak English, intermarry, and participate in civic life. While cultural identity persists they are virtually indistinguishable from other Americans in daily life and are broadly accepted as compatriots. This demonstrates that even large, sustained immigration can still lead to assimilation over time.
The only instances of where I can think of these communities persisting across generations are things like Orthodox Jewish communities, but that seems very specific to a particular culture of people that is very insular and not just letting in large groups of people that concentrate geographically.
If you let in a lot of Somalis I strongly suspect that their kids will be pretty regular Americans, and if not them then nearly certainly their grandkids.
That’s why I said we Americans are very lucky that most of the illegals pouring over our borders are Christians. They are much more assimilable. Europe is importing poison. And we should take care to avoid that poison.
https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/we-are-all-americans-grant-lee-and-ely-parker-at-appomattox-court-house-2
A Native American saying “we are all Americans” at Appomattox goes incredibly hard.
Great story.
Remember also that Grant assigned the job of accepting the surrender to a former professor of logic and theology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Chamberlain#Appomattox
I can't let any mention of Grant at Appomattox pass without invoking James Thurber.
https://emergingcivilwar.com/2017/10/11/if-grant-had-been-drinking-at-appomattox-by-james-thurber/
"...invoking James Thurber...."
It's funny, but alas it is also part of a long campaign to defame Grant and elevate Lee, as part of the Myth of the Lost Cause and the lie of Southern nobility.
Grant was a better man than Thurber's story makes him out to be, and Lee was a far, far worse one. The job of Reconstruction still remains to be done, as is evident from the number of Confederate dead-enders with whom we still contend.
Well fine, if you're going to get all reality-based about everything.
"... get all reality-based...."
Yeah, sorry to be a buzzkill.
Thanks much for adding this to the mix. It’s a story well worth reading and sharing far and wide.
https://emergingcivilwar.com/2016/10/11/the-awkward-meeting-of-richard-taylor-edward-canby-and-peter-osterhaus/
A quick note that (as I learned from John Ganz), Schmitt's speech was basically plagiarized from Sam Francis's 90s-era essays (see also Rick Lowry, "America is not an idea," for a softer version of basically the same idea).
But anyway, yes, this is great. Personally, I am a big weirdo who doesn't feel affinity for national identity and finds the whole concept of nations as the fundamental touchpoint for identity bizarre, and have dedicated my career to trying to figure out why most people disagree with me and what the political consequences of that are. I think the explosion of academic interest in "populism" following Brexit and Trump I bear witness to that basic phenomenon amongst a lot of fellow academics who feel more or less the same. That impulse has been pretty thoroughly criticized - including by me, a lot of the literature was pretty sloppy attempts to pathologize nationalist electorates (e.g. racial resentment) - but like Jell-O there's always room for more of that in today's vibes.
But insofar as we have nations and borders, I am willing - at least some of the time - to kick my weirdness to the curb and stick up for a nationalist-framed defense of the liberal tradition.
Fellow weirdo here. I'm not patriotic, and I react to stirring defenses of the Shining City on the Hill much like I do to a rousing church service. I can appreciate the sentiment and even be moved by it vicariously, but it's someone else's sentiment, not mine. At the same time, I know I'm in the minority, and I'm not going to get in the way if others want to wave the flag for a good cause.
I mostly agree, but lately I've been reading a lot of medieval and early renaissance history. I can see how the sense of hundreds of years of blood and soil can become deeply engrained in a culture. Especially when I look up a random city like Calais -- site of a siege in 1346-1347 -- and see all the amazing old buildings there. Growing up there must provide an overwhelmingly sensory grounding of identity.
Sure. I get feeling proud of heritage - nothing wrong with that! I just don't personally feel *defined* by it.
What I have often found baffling about the people who advocate for this "ethnic" definition of America is that they rarely fit their own definitions of "American".
I am descended from an old WASP family that has been in America since the early colonial periods, two of my ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. But I don't feel that I am more authentically American than the recently naturalized citizen, as the more typical American story is being descended from more recent immigrants.
My grandfather was one of the more racist exclusionary WASPs who was racist towards non-WASP white people like Schmitt. It is weird to see people like Schmitt espouse the same kind of bigotry that could just as easily be applied to him.
This is a dynamic you tragically see crop up a lot on /pol/. Many of the most fervent supporters of racial hierarchies turn out to be Latinos or Slavs, people who would not have faired well the last time racial hierarchies were attempted. I had an heartbreaking conversation with one such user who was upset his eyes were brown instead of blue (note: blue eyes are a genetic disadvantage if anything, predisposes one to sun damage for no apparent benefit).
My gut sense is that a lot of this stems from insecurity; a fear that should ethnic tensions flair up, they might find themselves in the out-group. So they take proactive measures. By making themself a key organ in the infidel-hunting machine, they'll gradually earn their way into the in-group. It's a nasty example of how fear of racism begets racism.
It’s less fear of ethnic tension than internalized white supremacy. White people have dominated the world for the last couple hundred of years and still form the image in most people’s heads of what a beautiful and powerful person looks like, who wouldn’t want to be one? You see this same attitude in foreign countries where there isn’t a fear of ethnic tension per se—for example there’s a common saying in China that even the moon is rounder in the West.
We also forget that part of the reason why a lot of German-Americans stopped embracing German-ness as part of their identity was specifically WWI and WWII. If not for that, German might still be a major second language in the US.
I've heard the point about the German language before, but never really got why people believe it. Immigrants lose the ancestral language by the third generation at the latest unless they're incredibly culturally insular (think the Amish or the Hasidim). German isn't special in this regard. We don't have significant French, Italian, Dutch, Gaelic, Swedish, or (non-Hasidic) Yiddish communities either, even though only one of those languages was spoken by a hostile country.
My understanding is that German was widely spoken well into the 19th-century (depending on the source, roughly until WWI), with decent circulation of German language newspapers.
Sure, because new immigrants were still coming. But by 2025 they wouldn't be
Old order Amish communities still speak a dialect of German as a first language. Non-English speaking communities can persist for a long time in the absence of new migration.
Right but the regular Germany immigrants would not be like this. They were no different than the Dutch or Swedes.
Long time reader. First time poster. America’s military, economic, industrial might are secondary to its greatest power - we can bring people from any nation on earth and make them Americans.
It would help Democrats if Democrats like Tim Kaine did not act incredulous at the notion "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" and instead contend that all rights are granted by the goodwill of the government. Sure, plenty of Republicans believe that to one extent or another, but they don't say so during congressional committee meetings.
What is it that Tim Kaine did or said? He was incredulous that all men are created equal?
He said that rights come from the government.
OK. I'm probably just thick, but why is that controversial in either direction? I'm sure there's a right answer based on legal or constitutional theory but it doesn't feel like a crazy thing for a politician to say in some random speech. Does that code Left or Right wing for some reason?
It states that you don't have any inalienable rights unless your government says you do. Which means that your government can also decide that you don't.
That seems like some very "finer points of theology" hairsplitting. Rights are enforced by the government, but not of the government, okay sure.
That is literally written in the Declaration of Independence: "...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
Rights aren't just enforced by the government. I can and will defend my rights myself. The DoI highlights that people come together to form governments so that those rights are better secured.
Most people believe there is such a thing as morality even when it isn’t enforced though and don’t consider that hairsplitting. Rights are the same way.
Thanks. I've never thunked about this too hard but it seems sort of obviously true. But I suppose there's no good reason for a Senator to say it out loud because it could too easily be implied as advocating or allowing for bad things.
The Declaration of Independence says otherwise, and it seems like a bad political move to disagree with the Declaration of Independence.
The bigger issue is that he acted like it was some dangerous and shocking statement to say that rights are endowed by our Creator, which is a freakishly weird thing for a Senator from VA to say.
"The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”
And I think what he said also is weird since the notion that humans are born with certain rights that should not be violated, and that our Constitution (in addition to the DoI) says we will not violate (although if you believe in natural rights, of course we have) does not at all imply theocracy, as again someone from the state of VA should realize. Basically in his desire to dunk on Rubio and the nominee who quoted him, he said something incredibly stupid--politically and otherwise.
For instance, the founding documents of the US clearly establish a State in order to *protect the extant rights* held by people, sometimes by The People. Also what Kate said, in brief. It's actually a pretty wild thing to say in America, imo.
"...order to *protect the extant rights* held ...."
The 9A describes the relation between the Bill of Rights and the rights themselves: the Bill "enumerates" the rights, i.e. puts them into a numbered list. It no more creates those rights than a bird-watcher's life-list creates the birds.
By contrast, the Constitution explicitly says that it creates rather than enumerating the property-right in ideas, when it gives Congress the power to create copyright in order to "promote the progress of Science and useful Arts." You have no divine right of property in your patent -- that is strictly a legislatively-created right, grounded in utilitarian considerations.
Both of these claims -- that copyright is grounded in governmental acts and that free speech is not -- are and should be hugely controversial. Nothing in the Constitution shows that Bentham was wrong to say that "Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law." That disagreeement has to be settled elsewhere.
But the Constitution itself, and especially the 9A, show how its drafters thought of them.
Sigh. So basically one of the contrary traditions that goes back to the founding, to the religious freedom Matt articulates, is the false statement that God cares about the rights laws passed by some random species on some random planet.
That sort of phony invocation of God is a long tradition in America and it causes religious zealots and demagogue politicians to be very haughty about anyone who correctly says that rights are human inventions.
As a matter of rhetoric, it's much easier to say that God endowed each person with rights than to write an interminably long essay about how rights are grounded in human reason or whatever the hell. I see it as a metaphor -- "God" is being used as the fundamental ground of morality and human dignity. The actual ground of morality and human dignity is much more subject to debate and has been debated for many centuries.
When you're establishing a country, you want it short, punchy, and emotionally charged.
I know. And that is what was going on.
But it actually did a fair amount of damage.
To expand on what Mariana Trench said, the appeal to god is the appeal to universal. Natural Rights/Natural Law is somewhat of a "noble lie" that is needed to have legitimacy. It's the same idea as rule of law vs rule of man. This is where I beat the dead horse again with the line from Madison about "government wouldn't be needed if men were angels." The value of the natural/god given rights is the "unalienable" part---they can't be taken away by government(even if they actually can). When you start saying that laws/rights are made by people, they become more arbitrary, lose their universal appeal and very much become subject to the whims of the current government/society and devolve into the rule of man. Liberal Democracy ironically requires an appeal to universal and at some level a protection against the "tyranny of the majority." John Stuart Mill would disagree with you and say the damage came from Jeremy Bentham dismissing natural rights/natural law. When law is based on the whims and the material needs of people vs something more abstract but more universal it becomes more corruptible and easier to say these "rights/laws are for me but not thee."
Not only do I not think that's actually true (plenty of governments full of nonbelievers respect rights, and plenty of theocracies don't), but it is also pernicious, because it undermines the very freedom of religion the founders claimed to believe in. If rights really did "come from God": then the religious conservatives would basically be right that government absolutely would need to tilt itself in favor of monotheism. Scalia used to make that point and while I disagree with 95% of what he said about government and religion, his point there was correct; he just drew the wrong conclusion from it.
Look, I accept it is what it is, but it was an evil, pernicious, terrible thing with terrible downstream effects to lie about an interventionist God who was the source of our rights, and generations of people have to deal with the horrible effects this lie had on the free exercise of religion.
Whether or not rights/laws come from god is less important than some type of principle that limits the ability for people to create a system laws/rights are contingent on history/culture/geography because you end up seeding ground to the Eric Schmitt’s of the world who can say the constitution was useful for its time and particular circumstances but because law is the province of people we can change it anytime we want and decide these laws/rights are only applicable to those we deem worthy.
I agree as someone who doesn’t really believe in god, but my thinking is what the alternative to god that is a universal that can actually can overcome human nature’s tribal instincts and self-destructive tendencies to reject differences even beyond different religions.
Well there's a UN charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights that says that everyone has these rights, and a lot of countries who don't come from Christian legal traditions signed on to it!
Yeah, I think this wherI settle on natural rights vs god given. By being born on this planet these rights are a virtue of your existence regardless of belief system and all other tangential factors.
Another point that allowed the Founding generation to distinguish itself from other countries, and for which liberals can and should be extremely proud is the renunciation of power, even by a class of slave owners. George Washington, Adams, Jefferson all assumed and passed personal power peacefully and without major crackdowns on their political opponents, setting the expectations for their successors. Lincoln perhaps could have cancelled the 1864 elections, but instead chose to select a Southerner as a running mate in order to win. The MAGA movement deeply betrays this tradition.