“There’s a reason that Her Majesty’s government can now afford, politically speaking, to experiment with policies that are native to stratified east Asian states. It’s the very same reason why the Democratic Party here in the States can attempt to spend multiple trillions of dollars during just six months of unified government without any obvious public dismay. Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world — a world in which governments feel increasingly emboldened to attempt the previously unthinkable.”
– Cameron Hilditch, writing in National Review. Quick observation: there would, from a free market sort of view, be nothing necessarily wrong if an insurance company, for example, varies its premiums on clients who have proof that they, for example, keep fit, eat a healthy diet and so on. But that is a transaction freely entered into, and subject to the competition of a market place. Social credit systems on the Chinese model are not like this, however. There is no choice, no opportunity to opt out.
If I got a pound every time someone went on about Boris Johnson’s damned “libertarian instincts”, I’d be a resident of Monaco by now. We left the EU to get out of a form of creeping statism, and we get this. At least, I suppose, we can eventually vote the current government, led by this albino circus act, out of office, but for things to improve, there has be a shift in the culture in the UK – and elsewhere – of what is acceptable and and about the importance of liberty and autonomy.
I am 100% certain that importing more voters from the middle east and africa will make the UK as free, functional, prosperous, and dedicated to civil liberties as those places are. democracy works!
dougg, the move towards nannying and micro-managing the public has absolutely nothing to do with immigration, so you can keep your hobby horse in the cupboard. Long before the current immigrations, the move in the UK towards Big Government was under way. What we have today has a very distinctly 1940s feel about it, complete with pompous lectures and the rest of it.
I am not too sure anyway that many immigrants would want to be in a UK version of China, given how the latter treats foreigners. Mind you, the one saving grace of the UK is that any such system is bound to be such a shambles that it will die of mockery.
‘ At least, I suppose, we can eventually vote the current government, led by this albino circus act, out of office…’
And replace it with what, just a different act from the same circus? Politics is a closed shop, practically single Party politics based on hybrids of Socialism and Fascism in all so-called free democracies, and its members rotate on the Buggins’ Turn principle Voting is just a sham, a sop to the People.
The shift in culture is only likely to come when things get so bad, enough people will unite and take up arms. Power once given will not be relinquished voluntarily: it will be used, and its primary use will be to increase its scope and scale for those who have it. History shows that.
its bad enough that we have these state diktats but even the reasoning behind them is flawed. In trying to save the holy of holies (The NHS) this is the wrong tact, smokers, drinkers, the obese (plus many others) actually save the NHS money, they bring the spend forward to current treatment, but save a fortune by (forgive the phrase) dying early and saving in palliative care. Which will be the costs that cripple the current system as we all live longer but need care
What I’m having difficulty imagining is how the government is going to contest the next election based on it’s record. And that goes double for Australia whose NSW premier has put soldiers on the streets of one of the most peaceful and civilized cities on earth.
Johnathon Pearce wrote “…the one saving grace of the UK is that any such system is bound to be such a shambles that it will die of mockery.”
That’s the hallmark of British governments, isn’t it? They manage to combine authoritarianism and incompetence. Despite the government mandating strict lockdowns, which the police zealously enforced, Britain still had one of the highest Covid fatality rates in the world.
My guess is that they’ll campaign on “No matter how horrible we are, the opposition is twice as bad!” Convince the voters of that, and their own policies being foul and failed becomes a stronger reason to vote for them, by increasing the difference between bad (the government) and worse (the opposition).
Here in the States, this has been the long-time tactic of both the Democratic Party seeking the votes of blacks, and establishment GOP seeking the votes of the Tea Party/Deplorable/GOP base. “Vote for us, even though we’ve routinely betrayed you, because if That Other Party is elected, they will screw you twice as hard!”
Stories. We need great quality, popular stories that embed the ideas in children. Books, movies, new fangled things on YouTube etc. Every possible format. Every possible opportunity.
I do not believe that Mr Johnson has thought any of this up – but it does not matter at this point, as he is certainly doing nothing to stop it.
Simon – it is a bit late to write stories telling children that government power should be limited, as the idea that government is responsible for everything is already engrained in the culture. However, I agree with you – we need good stories (parables) to show people the value of liberty.
In the United States a lot of this sort of thing is being pushed via the banking system – the banks and the financial industry generally (and all the Corporations that depend on the funny money) depend, in the end, on the Federal Reserve – and that, and other government regulated entities are pushing this totalitarian agenda.
“Totalitarian is too strong a word” – it is not too strong a word, as a government that concerns itself with EVERYTHING (every aspect of life) is totalitarian by definition – it is the “total state” that Mussolini and so many others have dreamed of.
Deep Lurker – you know that is NOT what the Democrats say. What they, and the education system and the media (especially the entertainment media) say is much simpler than that.
What they say is “RACIST, RACIST, RACIST”. Vote for us or you are a racist – even if you are black, you “ain’t” really black.
They actually do this – and they get away with it.
There is an historical inaccuracy in the article – one I have seen elsewhere, many times.
Income tax was (not was not) abolished after the Napoleonic Wars.
It was abolished under Prime Minister Liverpool – under Lord Liverpool gold money was also restored, and the death penalty abolished for many crimes.
According to Disraeli, Lord Liverpool was a mediocrity – but Lord Liverpool had a solid record of achievement, I can not think of anything that Disraeli achieved for liberty (and I can think of much HARM he did).
And income tax?
It came back in the 1840s – as the price for Sir Robert Peel’s policy of free trade, although the idea was to phase out income tax after free trade was established – something that Gladstone (a follower of Sir Robert Peel) did try to do.
Gladstone almost abolished income tax – but he lost the 1874 election (to Disraeli) and it was down hill from there for liberty and the idea that government should be limited.
There is a lot of ruin in a great nation – 150 years worth in our case.
John Morley, once a famous British Liberal – but now almost forgotten, argued that the failure to get rid of income tax made the rise of statism inevitable – because it is such an easy way for the state to get money spend.
John Morley had a point (as he normally did) – but there is also Sir Robert Peel’s 1844 blunder to be considered.
The Banking Act of that year was supposed to control the bankers – but it just covered bank notes, not bank LOANS.
Whist the bankers (and other such) can lend out “money” that DOES NOT REALLY EXIST, boom-busts are inevitable – and each BUST is an opportunity for an orgy of statism, due to the poverty and unemployment that the bust brings.
Something like Covid 19 does not come along very often (unless the scientists at Wuhan work hard creating new diseases – thank you Dr Fauci), but an economic BUST caused by the lending out of “money” that DOES NOT REALLY EXIST, will come along every few years.
And if the government bails out the bankers (thank you Walter Bagehot and other ideologists of bailoutism) each new bust is worse than the one before it – as the bubble is bigger.
Ironically that object of hatred, the “loan shark” or “shylock”, does no great harm at all – they may harm a few unfortunate people (by breaking their legs when they do not pay back their loans), but “loan sharks” or “shylocks” can not create boom-busts (the can not create Great Depressions) because they lend out cash-money.
Only the respectable people in expensive suits have the legal power to create credit money from thin air.
The respectable banker will not break your legs when you do not pay back your loans – because the “money” he lent you never really existed in the first place.
If the money did exist, if the banker was lending out his own cash-money (and that of depositors who would NOT get bailed out if the loans were not repaid – and so would be out to lynch him from the nearest lamp post if the bank failed), the attitude of bankers would be very different. Getting a loan would be a matter of proving, beyond all reasonable doubt, that you could-and-would pay the money back – and if you did not pay the money back, things would go very badly for you indeed. As for social attitudes…
Bankers would not, for example, give a damn about “diversity and inclusion” and other Frankfurt School of Marxism concepts any more. That stuff is a luxury for people who are playing games with funny money. Not for people who, at best, are going to be sleeping in a cardboard box in the street if the bank fails – and might well be beaten to death (or lynched) by angry depositors (who, having lost their savings, would also be heading for a cardboard box on the street).
Still perhaps people would be kind and restrained – as they sometimes )sometimes) were in Victorian Britain.
When the Gotch Bank in Kettering (my home town) failed, the depositors lost their money (as they should – otherwise it is not a private business it is an extension-of-the-state, as modern banks are), but people had large families back then (different branches of a family would come to aid of a family member in distress) – and most people were members of churches and secular fraternal associations (which would also help members – with the own cash), so people actually on the street was avoided – and it was illegal to be a vagrant then anyway (as it is in modern China – “why are there so few homeless in China?” – because it is a crime, they lock you up for that).
As for the Gotch family themselves – they were out of banking for ever (good! as they did not have the flint hearts that being a real money lender, as opposed to a government backed Credit Bubble blower, needs) – but one son became an artist (Thomas Cooper Gotch – my favourite local artist) and another became an architect – Sir Alfred Gotch, known (ironically) enough for building banks.
It is often said (for example by me) that the “Iron Bank of Braavos” is a good guide for banking – because it lends out cash-money (gold – not credit bubbles) and it does everything it needs to do to get REPAID (again in cash-money – not Credit bubbles).
But there is a massive flaw in the “Iron Bank of Braavos” – it does not lend out money for productive investment (at least it is never shown doing so), it lends out money to would be rulers, for their wars.
As wars and government taxes (to pay back the loans) both reduce the productive capacity of the economy, the Iron Bank is part of a downward spiral. A world getting poorer and poorer.
To be fair to “Game of Thrones” – the world shown does seem to be getting poorer and poorer over time.
Paul. Do read the books written by D. Morier Evans in the mid-19th century (Facts, Failures and Frauds is one; another has a page or two on Gotch’s failure).
Jame Hargrave – thank you, that sounds like a good idea.
@Paul Marks Nothing wrong with a little mediocrity when it’s appropriate. If politicians would stop pretending to be heroes and the proles would stop wanting them to be, the world would be a better place.
I will not be having either the shite vax or the vax pass 1st step to CCP-style social credit tyranny. If enough like me refuse and enough business people refuse that is that for bogus Johnson–or his masters –plans. If they win life will be a misery. They are worse than the CCP in real terms. CCP are not nannying cunts. So long as you don’t do anything CCP feel threatened by etc they don’t care. Eat what u like + smoke a 1000 cigs a day–might even help you work harder and make more for CCP to steal. With UK fucks your life will never be your own. I’m not going to live that way and if matters have to end in physical confrontation so be it.
And UK fatality via con-vid is the same pack of lies as everywhere else using false pos tests and relabelled old/ill deaths. Not one of the highest at all. Just a bad winter flu lied to the skies as a powergrab.
If you read the studies being (quietly) released, your best bet might be to stick on a nicotine patch. Seems that there is a very significant decrease in Covid acquisition amongst smokers specifically because of the nicotine.
These studies stemmed from one early French study concerning why, in a society with a 25% smoking rate, smokers only made up about 5% of confirmed Covid cases.
So what, Johnathan. Did mass immigration slow that trend or accelerate it?
Has importing a horde of race or religious collectivists improved the living standards of the British public? It’s not as if we didn’t have enough home grown sectarian disputes, without
importingmore from the sub-continent or middle east.Let the ungrateful (actual) bastards rot on council estates we middle class have so gracefully provided for the ingrates. Let their bastard daughters get raped and murdered by the immigrants, who, after all, have brought much diversity to the UK and a middle class clot can now buy a vindaloo on nearly any street corner. Which is of course is an ample counter to the increased crime and fraud, Absolutely wonderful.
dougg is correct, there is little affinity among uneducated Africans or displaced Arabs, for the concepts of the enlightenment. Nor much education, so good bye all those engineers and doctors. In fact, there is an argument that the NHS might be quite a manageable expense, but for, for instance, the burden of immigrants, what with their cousin marriage and consequent 30x rate of birth defects and congenital disorders.
Interview an African newly arrived from France*, why does he want to come to the UK? Freedom ? No, free money is his driving concern, and free accommodation, free clean water, and free Healthcare, freedom to break the law, all at the expense of the hapless British tax payer, the ranks of which our new arrival will never ever join.
Honestly Johnathan, I’ve no particular argument with your affinity for immigrants, but I rather think it would be more Libertarian of you to accommodate as many as you choose to, at your own expense.
*Begging the question, why not stay in France?
Richard S Thomas: If politicians would stop pretending to be heroes and the proles would stop wanting them to be, the world would be a better place.
Candidate for Samizdata quote of the day.
APL: Did mass immigration slow that trend or accelerate it?
It is impossible to say. The arrival of some immigrants (Jews, Indians, Poles, etc) may have slowed the trend, given their enterprising spirt.
Much of the groundwork for the Nanny State in all its Fabian glory was set a century ago, when “hordes” of people whom you loathe were parts of the British Empire, run by people who – interestingly enough – were well disposed to socialism. The indigenous population of the UK has to own the problem of welfarism; blaming immigrants for it is beyond lazy.
“Ungrateful bastards”: what, you mean those Muslim immigrants and their successors who take in your dry-cleaning that others cannot be arsed to do, at least not for the same rate, jut to give one example? Go and calm down or go and post on some Far-Right site, where you will feel more at home.
As far as people arriving here and the costs of said, being the free market chap that I am, I would hope and expect that able-bodied ones (which appears to be nearly all of them) should work to earn their keep. If they don’t and treat the UK as a free hotel, they should be sent to their point of origin. No argument from me on that.
Begging the question, why not stay in France? Because the French labour market is even worse and more regulated than here, and people want to live in English-language nations. France is a beautiful place to look at, but by and large, the locals are unfriendly, even if migrants get jobs, and that fact gets known. So migrants brave the delights of the Channel to get to Blighty.
Absolute nonsense. For one thing, Critical Race theory couldn’t exist in this country if if were the same relatively homogenius population it was in, for example, the ’40s.
Graft and nepotism, you mistake for enterprise, wonderful additions to UK enterprise culture.
You need to keep you projection under control, Johnathan.
But it’s worth noting that neither Indians, nor Moslems wanted British people in the sub continent. Were they racist, Johnathan ?
No I mean the British working class, that are sneared at and ignored by people like you.
Ah that old trope, the dirty lazy British working class won’t do our washing, won’t run London transport for us, won’t fix the sewers, so we must bring in unskilled labour to do it instead of them. It was a lie in the fifties, and it’s a lie today.
Back in the fifties their kith and kin had just died for the country, the survivors had expectations to be treated with honor and equity, did they want to go back to the situation before the war? No. Had been offered better wages, would they would have done the work? I’d say, Yes.
I’m perfectly calm, Johnathan – although I admit, with your smug condecending self satisfaction, you could probably ignite a class war single handedly. And I’m not particually disposed to that sort of thing.
As to your usual slur “go and post on some Far-Right site”, demanding reasonable treatment for working class British people in their own country, is now considered racist. I really can’t express my contempt for your attitude, without breaking the rules of good manners.
Noted:
You don’t address the graft and fraud perpetrated by immigrants.
You don’t address the systametic rape, occassional murder of young British women, by immigrants.
You don’t address the corrosive effect of playing one racial group against another.
You don’t address the overhead of educating people who have recieved no formal education in their own language let alone English.
You don’t address the overhead of providing infrastructure and services to an increasing population, artificially inflated by immigration.
You do fall back to the ‘racist’ slur. Good for you, you’ve employed your best intellectual ( yet racist ) argument for immigration.
The normal state of human society is a powerful elite telling everyone else what to, do and a reasonably rigid class structure.
The west has only had democracy for a very short time and many places in the world have never had it.
Maybe the west is about to resume normal service after this short experiment with pretending that everyone is equal.
APL, let me try and get this across: I am not in the business of exhaustively explaining every last point of a view I have. You claim there are lots of areas I don’t discuss. But here goes:
You don’t address the graft and fraud perpetrated by immigrants.
Well that is because there is quite a bit of it from the home population. Could you provide evidence that it is worse, and sustainably so, among immigrants?
You don’t address the systametic rape, occassional murder of young British women, by immigrants.
I did not do so, and my not mentioning this in response to you wasn’t because it is a non-issue. Again, you need to show that this violence is much worse, and sustainably so, than among the indigenous population and over a period of time. (Again, that is not to dismiss the episodes such as Rotherham, etc, in case anyone brings that up.)
You don’t address the corrosive effect of playing one racial group against another.
No I don’t, for the simple reason that this is largely driven in my experience and reading by white middle-class intellectuals looking for a situation to exploit, rather than from the groups themselves. CRT is, arguably, a massive con-job.
You don’t address the overhead of educating people who have recieved no formal education in their own language let alone English.
Well, a lot of immigrant groups I have mentioned (Jewish, Hindu, East Europeans, North Asians) often outperform the domestic white population in ed terms. Again, problems of poor education and illiteracy are serious problems, but don’t justify your generally harsh language about immigrants in general.
You don’t address the overhead of providing infrastructure and services to an increasing population, artificially inflated by immigration.
You don’t address the fact that without immigration, given domestic birthrates being below replacement level, such demands would be lower. Further, as immigrants often tend to be younger, they add to the workforce overall. A fact that you don’t mention.
Other points:
For one thing, Critical Race theory couldn’t exist in this country if if were the same relatively homogenius population it was in, for example, the ’40s.
Never under-estimate the ability of intellectuals to look for reasons to set people apart. The whole gender diversity racket would still exist. And as immigrant groups often bring significant advantages, that weighs in the balance. There is nothing inevitable about the rise of CRT, which as I note, is largely an obsession of middle class intellectuals with too much time on their hands, and the result of poisonous intellectual developments that arose long before immigration of the sort you dislike came about.
You dismiss the achievements of many immigrants thus: Graft and nepotism, you mistake for enterprise, wonderful additions to UK enterprise culture.
Wow. So presumably only white, Anglo-Saxons create wealth in an honest, honourable way, do they? And you wonder why I consider you to be a bit of a bigot?
Ah that old trope, the dirty lazy British working class won’t do our washing, won’t run London transport for us, won’t fix the sewers, so we must bring in unskilled labour to do it instead of them. It was a lie in the fifties, and it’s a lie today.
Was it a lie? Are you buying the “lump of labour” idea that if immigrants do work, they “take” from others? The point I made was that many immigrants have done tough jobs, and that does rather undermine the idea that they are sneaky, work-shy “bastards” on the take.
As to your usual slur “go and post on some Far-Right site”, demanding reasonable treatment for working class British people in their own country, is now considered racist. I really can’t express my contempt for your attitude, without breaking the rules of good manners.
That is a bit rich. You wrote the following disgusting sentence: “Let the ungrateful (actual) bastards rot on council estates we middle class have so gracefully provided for the ingrates.”
Like I said, calm down. Your language is appalling, and I called you out on it. Take it like a man. Otherwise the editors here will show you the door, followed by a large bear.
Johnathan and APL, I think you are talking past each other.
Might we agree that the current crop of illegal immigrants, both here and in the US, are apt, statistically, to have very undesirable characteristics – and that rational discussion of this is routinely silenced by cries of ‘racist’ from the usual suspects. Despite their considerable efforts, it is well established that the average Leave voter was surprisingly aware of the Australian points system and wanted something like it (i.e. not some total ban, but vigorous defence against criminal immigrants).
The mere word ‘immigrants’, if wholly unqualified, covers both my Pictish ancestors arriving in (maybe) the early bronze age and some group of organised-middle-east-crime-sent illegals that were dumped on a south-coast beach last week, under an agreement to send back a multiple of the syndicate’s travel fee within the agreed time – an agreement they chose to make in the full knowledge that the ‘earning’ capacity of their wives’ and daughters’ back home was the syndicate’s foreclose-able collateral.
Yes, and I was referring to the attitude of the British middle class, to British working class, who are preyed upon by drug dealers and pimps.
Quite possibly, and I may well have been ‘triggered’ by Johnathan’s ‘drive by’ dismissal of a perfectly valid point raised in the first comment to this article.
It’s a reasonable point.
It could be just one of those things. Or perhaps snooping on this thread, Google put this story my way today.
Assuming the British justice system will release these criminals ( they are now officially criminals ) before they’ve done a third of their sentence and assuming too, it still costs the British tax payer £35,000 pa to accommodate an individuals at HMP.
These guys will cost us the best part of £2.5 million. I grieve for the lady concerned, but the society she thought she was going to contribute to, has long gone.
If this little vignette is anything to go by, then we now have a metric for the criminal to Doctors, engineers or lawyer ratio of 7:1. Well, 7:0 now.
Another interesting point, the media characterization of the ‘stray bullet’. It wasn’t a stray bullet, it was a bullet recklessly discharged during the prosecution of a crime.
Finally, the modern asylum industry, is little more than a cover for ‘people smuggling’ and ‘human trafficking’.
According to most articles I’ve seen, your ancestors were invaders, rather than immigrants. There is a distinction, and some modern immigrants behaving like invaders doesn’t help promote a positive perception.
APL, oh boy, how lame is this: Yes, and I was referring to the attitude of the British middle class, to British working class, who are preyed upon by drug dealers and pimps.
So when I referred to Jewish, East European, Indian and other immigrants, instead of dealing with immigration in the round, we get a reference to “ungrateful bastards”.
Niall: Might we agree that the current crop of illegal immigrants, both here and in the US, are apt, statistically, to have very undesirable characteristics – and that rational discussion of this is routinely silenced by cries of ‘racist’ from the usual suspects.
Unfortunately for the absurd APL, he refused to even go close to making that distinction. All of the folk whom he regarded as “ungrateful bastards” could and may have arrived in the UK legally, but in the view of this goblin, that did not help them one whit. Remember, I referred to all different types of immigrant, and this sack of shit made comments about how devious and dishonest they are.
Sometimes, even when there is so much “woke” nonsense about, it is necessary to confront the fact that genuine bigotry and hatred exists.
Maybe OT, but I dissent here, at least as to the illegals coming into the US.
The bulk of our illegal influx comes from Mexico. The gangsters get all the press – but the bulk of the people coming over the border have more in common with the people who settled this country than popular wisdom allows.
These are primarily people looking to escape a truly desperate economic situation in Mexico. When they come with their families, they’re looking for stability and work – the interim welfare isn’t spurned, of course, but these aren’t long-term takers. These are essentially conservative family-oriented people looking to improve their lot in life.
When they come in groups of single young men, they pack themselves into rental properties to save money and send the bulk of their income back to Mexico to support their extended families still there. I’ve dealt with these guys – in construction, reroofing crews, farm work, factory work – and I have nothing but admiration for people who will sneak into a foreign land, without language skills, and live a tenuous existence so that they can send money back to mom and dad and sibs.
They do skew the low-wage economics in this country – and that ought to concern those who advocate for the people already there – but long-term, I see them as a net positive for us. Heck, they’re already moving to Republicanism.
The legal Italian immigrants around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries did the same.
– Those in New York were much inconvenienced by ‘social reformer’ Jacob Riis, who never understood that they were family-oriented savers and so put much effort into ‘reforms’ that compelled them to live in better housing (‘for their own good’, of course, but at higher cost, thus cutting down what they could send their families). Riis also casually assumed they all needed their consciousness raised to his elite level – again ‘for their own good’, of course – so easily explained away to himself why they often opposed him and colluded with their former slum landlords to defeat his oh-so-wise measures.
– Meanwhile, a fellow Italian immigrant started the Bank Of Italy (later renamed the Bank of America) because he knew these apparently dirt-poor people were in fact eager savers, so would use a bank that accepted such outwardly-unprepossessing depositors and provided an efficient way of transferring money to Italy.
I need hardly remind you that these legal Italian immigrants brought the Mafia with them to the US. The US could have organised so as to have the one with considerably less of the other. (At least back then, the authorities at first had the excuse of ignorance.)
I agree the situation in Mexico is bad. All the more reason to guard against importing dangers far worse than the ChiComCold.
My prior comment characterised a current crop of British illegals. I would be very happy for you if the current crop of US illegals were to prove statistically as you suggest – more ready to contribute to the economy than loot it. It would mean that Biden and his handlers were mistaken – they are certainly not of intent importing Republicans – but I appreciate that “You must be wrong because otherwise Biden would be making a mistake” is not the most deadly rebuttal. 🙂 That granted, I retain my feeling that the US is not helped, any more than we, when flooded with people whose ability to arrive and woke-welcoming culture teaches them that its borders and laws are for treating with contempt.
.. lies and distorts what I had written.
<– full stop.
<– New paragarph.
( So, not Jewish, East European or Indian immigrant council estate dwellers or their daughters as Johnathan Peirce lied in an attempt to distort, but British families who’s daughters are even today subject to the attentions of immigrant rape gangs )
When Peirce made a reasonable error:
And I corrected him, because I thought he we were in the midst of a good faith if robust dispute.
He ignored the correction and persisted with his distortion and calumnies.
Johnathan Pearce has a low opinion of me, that’s fine. Likewise, I don’t particularly care for the opinion of a liar.
Johnathan Pearce, argues in bad faith. And in future, I will read each of his posts with that knowledge in mind.
No argument there. I strongly believe that a nation must maintain and control its own boundaries, and that our flood of illegals is bad for us – not because of who is coming in, but because we don’t deserve to call ourselves a nation if government can ignore our own laws. I would finish the wall.
But we can accomplish that necessary step without Othering the people who are taking advantage of our negligence for the purpose of improving their own lot, especially when we seem to far too easily fall into an incorrect anti-Mexican mindset. Our mistake is OUR mistake, and I cannot fault them for seeing and using it.
bobby b (August 7, 2021 at 11:22 pm), the million plus German soldiers who immigrated into France in 1940 and were then eager to immigrate into Britain were in a real sense also victims of Hitler – the 5000 (on average) German soldiers shot by their own side in each year of WWII were the sharpest end of a disciplinary iceberg that should be included – but included, not made the main explanation – in any account of how Germany held out till the bitter end. Likewise the many many thousands of Germans in Hamburg – Nazis, German patriots, some haters of the Hitler regime and at least a few, of statistical certainty, Jews hiding in cellars and Germans hiding them – whom the RAF and US airforce fire-stormed in 1943 were in various senses victims of the Nazi regime.
None of which alters the fact that a great many were also guilty of it and almost all were unable to avoid serving it, so we were right to do what we did. I’m not exactly disagreeing with your statements but, in today’s culture, I advise – about your desire to complete the wall, for example – keeping prominent Aragorn’s (Tolkien’s) wise remark:
That means fighting those who try to cross it. Either we are clear that ‘not othering them’ in no way prohibits that or else (shades of my “beware calling a true fact ‘racist’ – it would mean racism was true”), ‘othering them’ would be the right thing to do.
Illegal aliens can be simultaneously a commodity and complicit. Ayn Rand uses the useful categories of ‘moochers and looters’ but, although an illegal in today’s world will use the woke to present as the former in public if caught, the very determination with which certain all-male groups in channel camps seek to cross into Britain rather than stay in France speaks to commitments they made to get that far which ensure that many will be both.
While noting these important points, I also see that in the U.S., as you view the streets of Minneapolis, you have cause to reflect that the behaviour of certain locals keeps the illegals’ statistics from comparing too poorly. I recall watching the video of the BLMers who torched and looted what they then discovered was an immigrant muslim Somali’s store, and were very very very slightly embarrassed by that. That they felt any embarrassment at all, who felt none doing that to non-muslim non-immigrants, speaks to my original point – but it was only very very very slight embarrassment, and that speaks to your point.