Warning: WH seeks to limit/deport immigrants using ACA and other gov. services

[Campitor]

@RealPerson

Wouldn't this cause a rise in employment rates and salaries? The middle class wasn't so gutted when job competition couldn't be globalized. I'm not favoring the policy but only pointing out that it could be used as a means to manipulate numbers (low unemployment) in the short term while doing serious harm in the long term (not enough qualified workers which suppresses innovation and competitiveness) .

[7Wannabe5]

It seems to me that there are a lot of "ghost" jobs out there these days. Like employers are just inventing descriptions combining 5 skill-sets that are highly unlikely to be found in the general population, and then setting the salary bar way too low to attract the rare unicorn they seek. Almost directly analogous to the way some people attempt and then complain about the results of online dating. Both of these trends may be due to the ease of setting rigid filters in the virtual world conflicting with the difficulties and downfalls of doing the same in the real world.

[jacob]

In Haidt's moral foundations theory the distinction between R and D is that Ds are only concerned with the care and fairness dimensions, whereas R adds the dimensions of loyalty, authority, and purity. If we further split R into moderate republicans and conservative republicans, it also fits the data that the latter (RCons) would care more about things like loyalty, purity, and authority valuing those above concerns about economic benefits.

(Conversely, the further left you go, the more people exclusively care about "care" with fairness being dropped. Just take what you need from the rich...)

It is of primary concern to nativists that the US stays "American" (loyalty) which to them basically means "white and English-speaking" (purity). Authority enters in the sense that RCons think authority for the sake of authority (hierarchy) is actually a good thing (unlike D) ... and this is also why RCons are more okay with walls and family separations.

However, the constitution and the legal system says you can not (or at least no longer, not like back in 1950 when America was "great" ) discriminate based on race or English-speaking ability (per se), thus they focus on immigration instead. Because the administration is legally hobbled (no comprehensive immigration reform seems to be forthcoming --- too many people benefiting from the current limbo on both sides, especially D voting patterns and RMod business interests). The WH therefore has to pursue two different policies.

1) Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt to scare away those with limited resources---those who can't afford very good lawyers. It's working too. However, while illegal immigration has declined, so has legal immigration and tourism. Granting of citizenship and permanent status has declined since 2016. Foreign university student enrollment has declined (except from China and India) with students going to other English speaking countries instead.

However, voters that value authority and purity over economic effects don't care that the FUD-method of reducing illegal immigration costs billions of dollars(*) in collateral damage in the form lost tourist/student/business income (or just meat packing in general) as well as losses of US soft power.

(*) Significantly more than the cost of a big beautiful wall. But that's a problem for another future president to deal with.

2) Discretionary hypocrisy in which, in practice, different rules apply to different people. We and they all know (but conveniently forgot) that both Steven Miller's and Trump's grandparents were immigrants. We also know that Melania Trump violated her visa conditions (something that could get you deported and permanently banned from re-entry) and yet later managed to obtain another visa and subsequently US citizenship---one that was used to bring in her family (chain-migration), one of which is a former member of the Communist Party (also a big no-no for regular folks).

Again, voters that care more about loyalty and authority than fairness would be okay with the fact that rich and well-connected people get special treatment. They're okay with hierarchies as long as they have a theoretical possibility of getting to the top themselves.

TL;DR - The people promoting these policies don't care as much about the economic consequences of these policies as they do about the ethno-nativist consequences. They're willing to vote against their own personal economic interests in order to promote demographic interests. This is something that's really hard for Ds to wrap their minds around.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Because what good is it if you can afford a big dining room in which to celebrate Thanksgiving, if you aren't allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving anymore? This is one of the reasons why people tend towards becoming more conservative as they become older. People find comfort in traditions, and older people feel like they are running out of time to create new traditions. So, the tofurkey with side of something unrecognizable and too spicy, which maybe signals "care for animals, and inclusiveness of other cultures" to the grand-daughter, signals "the world you once knew is disappearing, and you are becoming increasingly alienated" to Grandpa.

[IlliniDave]

I enjoy Jonathan Haidt, he was one of the earliest voices speaking against intolerance and disdain that I encountered from the 21st century left.

For those unfamiliar with him here's a good brief primer on his Moral Foundations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc

Regarding the prevalence of "nativists" on the US political right, I think the recent demonstration in Washington is illustrative. I think a horde of approximately 21 white nationalists descended on the capitol where they were outnumbered ~100:1 by "anti-hate" protestors (one would have to judge for themselves how hateless the anti-hate factions were). Of course it's an election year and againsters need something to be against, and either side too readily accepts a boogeyman when it is expedient.

There's also an interesting irony that people whose morality/psychology includes authority as a moral principle are those most politically dedicated to limiting central government scope and power, and their counterparts in that regard tend to favor more centralized, powerful, governance. There's more to that one than meets the eye and I haven't quite worked it all out in a way that makes sense to me.

I tend to agree with guys like Haidt who come to the conclusion that an integrated mix of conservatism and liberalism is necessary for a stable, forward-moving society. The further the mass from the fulcrum, the harder it is to balance.

I don't know anyone who supports something believing it is not in their economic best interest (which almost always depends on the individual's starting point). I don't doubt they exist, just that they drive the system. It's not hard to see why US workers just emerging from a decade-long period of high unemployment in their cohorts might have a different personal economic assessment of an increase in legal immigration than someone like me who is at a stage where ongoing growth of the economy writ large is most important to my future personal economically.

I would also suggest it might be beneficial to understand purity more in the sense of continuity (e.g., how the US Constitution is understood) if one truly wants to understand people who tend to vote from center rightward and why they do.

[7Wannabe5]

The Haidt talk was quite interesting. However, I found it a bit confusing that he mentioned the moral purity of the left in reference to food perhaps being as rigid as that of the right in reference to sexuality, but then the results of the survey were overall contradictory to this point.

There's also an interesting irony that people whose morality/psychology includes authority as a moral principle are those most politically dedicated to limiting central government scope and power, and their counterparts in that regard tend to favor more centralized, powerful, governance. There's more to that one than meets the eye and I haven't quite worked it all out in a way that makes sense to me.

I think there may be levels to this beyond the scope of the current political divide. Due in good part to my high natural degree of openness(lol), I went through a period of experimentation and research into Dominance/submission, which is as closely related to issues of Moral Authority, as our mammalian heritage is to issues of Moral Care, and I highly doubt that anyone does not possess core concern with this issue, although, as you noted, it might not be manifested at a level that would be revealed in decisions or opinions that can be expressed at the voting poll.

Circling back to the immigration issue, in my neck of the woods, I have heard both individuals who strongly identify as Left and individuals who strongly identify as Right, express fear about the growing Muslim population. Those on the right fret about welfare fraud and national security issues, and those on the left fret about strict religious-authoritarian-sexist-hierarchy culture taking over, with significant overlap on complaints having to do with increased traffic and pot-holes.

[7Wannabe5]

@Kriegsspiel:

I don't think people are very consistent. For instance, I know people who voted for Trump, but would jump at a chance for an MMF threesome. This is why I have become as cynical as Diogenes (sigh.)

[prognastat]

I don't know anyone who supports something believing it is not in their economic best interest (which almost always depends on the individual's starting point). I don't doubt they exist, just that they drive the system. It's not hard to see why US workers just emerging from a decade-long period of high unemployment in their cohorts might have a different personal economic assessment of an increase in legal immigration than someone like me who is at a stage where ongoing growth of the economy writ large is most important to my future personal economically.

I would say illegal immigration is an economical detriment to the lower/working classes whereas legal immigration is often negative economically for the middle/lower upper classes.

Illegal immigrants are often unskilled labour and depress wages for the lower and working classes, this is a detriment to those classes, but a boon to the other classes as it means lower costs for products and services provided by those classes.

However due to the requirements for legal immigrants they are often going to be competing for jobs held by the middle and lower upper classes. Immigration here is often great for the higher end of the upper class as more of there expenses come from products and services provided by those classes.

[jacob]

I did not intended to focus exclusively on the cost-benefit of immigration. I think that concern is too nuanced given how small it is in most people's lives.

What I meant with how RCons give low priority to economic concerns compared to cultural (purity/authority) concerns. Basically, RCons predominantly vote according to "cultural class" whereas Ds (and especially DSocialsts) predominantly vote according to "socioeconomic class".

Examples of cultural class issues:
Immigration/Speaking English
Guns/Constitution (all regular folks ever seem to talk about is the A2 and A1. I bet most voters can't name the others.)
Abortion/Christianity
Strong defense
Free market/Capitalism (not socialism)
"The American Way of Life"

Examples of socioeconomic class issues:
Universal health care
Social security/Medicare
Minimum wage
Equal pay for women
Progressive taxation
Climate change

DMods and RMods (many of whom in these times increasingly refer to themselves as Independents) have more eclectic preferences, perhaps choosing mostly from one side with a few exceptions from the other side, etc.

All these dimensions are diametrically opposed (only reason they're political issues in the first place). It's therefore impossible to have both sides of any of them. However, there could certainly be different political parties where the matrix was more mixed thus representing a true Independent Party.

Because there are only two real party choices beyond wasted protest-votes, there are many voters who hurt themselves socioeconomically because they care more about cultural issues. Similarly, there are people who hurt themselves culturally because they care more about socioeconomic issues.

I really doubt most voters sit down and do a weighted value analysis of these first-order factors though.

[prognastat]

@Jacob

Well most just don't vote so don't think about it much at all, except for maybe a minority that is engaged, but doesn't vote for ideological reasons. And I'm sure of those who vote for many there isn't much beyond which side is my side and on my side which guy do I like best based on the superficial information made available through public appearances, social media and debates.

[IlliniDave]

The Haidt talk was quite interesting. However, I found it a bit confusing that he mentioned the moral purity of the left in reference to food perhaps being as rigid as that of the right in reference to sexuality, but then the results of the survey were overall contradictory to this point.

I don't know that rigidity and relative importance in a value hierarchy are necessarily contradictory. I think the main thing he was illustrating is that humans tend to live by codes of conduct and associate based on them, regardless if it's a matter of life/death like religion can be, or a dedication to pet rescue or certain environmental issues. Its at the root, I believe, of the high levels of intolerance in several aspects of the overall conversation today, and bi-directional. I'd like to hear him give a version of that talk now, 10 years later. I wonder if there hasn't been a shift in a cohort that would self-identify as among the "politcal left" regarding purity--that it could be a telltale symptom of movement away from the more traditional understandings of conservative vs liberal.

ETA, here's some of his more recent thoughts I found where he compares religion and elements on the left (start at about 40:00 to get right to it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe6-QSnQTdg

[IlliniDave]

jacob, okay, got it. I took your use of economic too literally. You seem to be suggesting "wealth redistribution" vs any other value.

[7Wannabe5]

@IlliniDave:

I thought Haidt's remark along the lines of the "other" being defined as "white, male, cis-gender, Christian, ...but sometimes Jewish, and sometimes Atheist" was rather amusing or revealing. Still, I don't quite get why this round of student activism is essentially any different than, for instance, the student activism pre-WW2 portrayed in the early scenes of "The Way We Were." Why was the American Golden Boy, as portrayed by Robert Redford, better able to evince nobility in the face of the chip-on-shoulder, insecure flailing of Poor Lumpen Jewish Outsider Girl, as portrayed by Barbara Streisand, than the current batch seems to be?

[IlliniDave]

7Wb5, I couldn't say because those cultural references mean nothing to me. I think when you look like at guys like Haidt, B Weinstein, and certain Canadian guys, they are primarily concerned with what's happening now at universities and why. In much of it they seem to see the behavior of students as a secondary effect with the causal issue being a corruption in their institutions that is gradually flowing outwards. If there was an "illiberal left" (Haidt's term, not mine) movement in the US in the past I'm sure they'd be aware of it. What their concern seems to be centered on is ideological fundamentalism (not dissimilar to purity), with parallels to young earther Christian fundamentalism (Haidt's comparison, not mine), that even increasingly rejects evolutionary and biological scientific evidence (Haidt's and Weinstein's assertions, among others, not mine) when it contradicts the narrative.

Here's a guess. Haidt talked about the differences he sees in the 1960s and now (I think in the second link) and there were clear and present dangers, so to speak, at that time (draft + Viet Nam War and Segregation/Jim Crow). When those were ended the demonstrations ended with them. It's trickier now because it's the liberal democratic, capitalistic system (and cisgendered hetero white males) that are cast as the existential threat. Can't sign a treaty and pass legislation to eliminate those. You'd have to examine the literary things you asked about to see where the most valid comparisons lie.

Haidt is pessimistic about politics going forward but lately seems optimistic about "the academy's" future, and noted that so far the academic phenomenon seems restricted to the Anglosphere.

I heard a talk with Haidt and a Canadian professor who once helped him get a position at Harvard. On the subject of immigration Haidt said that if a person can't simultaneously admit that there are legitimately positive aspects to immigration as well as legitimately negative aspects to immigration then they are probably immersed in ideology, specifically if any discussions about limiting/controlling immigration is met with charges of racism.

[7Wannabe5]

@IlliniDave:

I only referenced a very popular movie made in 1973 that looks back to the 1930s, to make the point of "so soon we forget." I am not trying to make any direct analogy with today's political divide. Just noting that campus politics have been quite inflamed in the past, and both the individuals involved and the world moves on in ways not always expected.

The Campus Speech Scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7oNy-Tceew


The Bar Scene (5 Years Later?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGgv3Gg4GLs

The Bed Scene (note the irony of the YouTube clip description and comments)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zup4NcpYwcw

[IlliniDave]

7Wb5, well at least based on the portrayal of those scenes of that movie, it's hard to see how things could be more different now than then. The point these people (the various profs) are trying to make is not that there are students on a campuses with left-leaning sympathies/activism. There was probably no time in the 20th or 21st century when that was not true, and I don't think anyone has forgotten that. The differences to me seem beyond obvious, and it's primarily not about the students even though they grab more of the headlines. Links to numerous in-depth discussions by eye witnesses with strong track records of scientific rigor in relevant disciplines have been linked in this thread and several others. If in your view there's nothing more to see beyond a few starry-eyed romance-intoxicated youngsters at play same as always, well, that's an interesting interpretation that I'll hope proves true!

If you are truly interested, you could probably pursue it at the organization Haidt founded:

https://heterodoxacademy.org

[Riggerjack]

Haidt had some interesting things to say, but whenever someone starts citing him, I run into crap like this:
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/201 ... l-mutants/
with ridiculous conclusions like:

And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.

But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

Haidt seems to understand the nuances of his research, but rarely does anyone citing him.

From the comments to the same blog post:

Paperclip Minimizersaid:July 24, 2018 at 4:10 pm
[Cross-posted from my blog] [Wrote as an answer to Conservatives As Moral Mutants (just like last time, part of me feels like the link is self-trigger-warning, but I guess I will just warn you that this is not a clever attention-grabbing title, the link means exactly what it says and argues it at some length)]
[Everyone: please, please, please stay on the meta-level and do not take anything written here as endorsing or criticizing any political position.]
I am in favor in moral foundations theory, at least on even-numbered days, so I may correct some of your (hopefully honest) misconceptions.
Here is a table from Mapping the Moral Domain. It’s the one which show that liberals and conservatives have different moral foundations. It also put the lie to your article in more than one way.
This table show that the average liberal does value Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. In fact, very few liberals have zero scores at those. Using an handy normal distribution calculator, about 7% of liberals have a zero score on Purity/Sanctity while practically none (a few hundredths of a percent) have zero scores on Ingroup/Loyalty or Authority/Respect. The political psychology claims of moral foundations theory are merely about the averages. This make trying to eliminate these values a dubious endeavor, even from a point of view of pure endarkened self-interest.
Now, this is not to be confused with the point you’re talking about there:

While these are two common ways moral foundations are arranged, many people have their own unusual arrangements. Some liberals still use loyalty, purity, and authority foundations but care about them less than the primary liberal foundations. In addition, some conservatives only have the “liberal” moral foundations, and some liberals use the “conservative” moral foundations: for example, liberal opposition to GMOs is likely rooted in a purity foundation. However, I am happy to declare that the relevant conservatives are on My Side, and that the people who hate GMOs are not.

The vast majority of liberals value Purity/Sanctity, and everyone value Ingroup/Loyalty and Authority/Respect. The “some” in “some liberals use” is “every”. (The “some” in “some conservatives only have” is “no”, and no liberal only have the “liberal” moral foundations either.) I mean, look at this graph: even extremely liberal people have average Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity scores that are between 3 and 4. You aren’t acknowledging this. Now, this isn’t necessarily fatal to your argument. You could postulate that, yes, liberals and conservatives both value Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity, but they still value it differently, so ideological total war with destruction of the enemy as a goal is justified anyway. But then the solution move from a troglodyte first-square-of-the-glowing-brain-meme level “shame any valuing of Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, or Purity/Sanctity” to something more complicated like “don’t shame any valuing of Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, or Purity/Sanctity but shame valuing of it above a certain level”, which quickly sound less tractable.
But even this would be an erroneous viewpoint. This bring me to my second point. Moral foundations isn’t bimodal. There isn’t on one hand the liberal-typical moral foundations people and on the other hand the conservative-typical moral foundations people. This table show that moderates exist and have intermediate scores. Your post completely ignore them, even though 34% of Americans are moderates while only 25% are liberals, as would be expected from a normal distribution. And politics isn’t a liberal/moderate/conservative ternary. This graph divide even further, with the expected results. There is simply no way to divide people between liberal-typical moral foundations people and conservative-typical moral foundations people. You would need either an arbitrary cutoff or something like “liberal-typical moral foundations people are people who are more liberal-typical than the median American”, and the latter change when the moral foundations of the average American change, so if you’re trying to shame that, you’re simply going to shame more and more people until you shamed everyone to the right of you out of society, which means that being the rightmost, you will be the shamed person.
That was just one table. But I shouldn’t focus too much on this. I should instead focus on the fact that you claim to ground your post in Haidt’s moral foundations theory, but, to put it bluntly, and with all due respect, it stands in the same relation to actual moral foundations theory as The Earth Not a Globe Review to modern astronomy. That is, it may start with the same basic observations, but the conclusions are so radically opposite to each other that preceding what you believe about your political opponents with “ut my read of the psychological evidence is that” is a terminological inexactitude.
In The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism, Graham and Haidt divide moral foundations into four tenets.

Nativism: There is a “first draft” of the moral mind
Cultural learning: The first draft gets edited during development within a particular culture
Intuitionism: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second
Pluralism: There were many recurrent social challenges in our evolutionary history, so there are many moral foundations

Nativism and cultural learning aren’t interesting to us here, so I’ll stick to talking about social intuitionism and moral pluralism. Moral pluralism is the thing you seem to confuse moral foundations theory with, but you completely ignore (and in fact directly contradict) social intuitionism. This is rather troubling, because leading moral foundations theorists think social intuitionism is a very important part of moral foundations theory. For example, here is The Righteous Mind’s official website’s about page (emphasis mine):

The Righteous Mind is about one of the hottest topics in the sciences: morality. It’s about how we evolved to live in moral “matrices,” which bind us together around sacred values and then blind us to the truth. It’s about righteousness, moral diversity, politics and religion.

I have no idea if you have read The Righteous Mind. I can’t find any record of you saying that you did, so I guess not, but if you did, then you seem to have completely missed its point, because of the three parts of the book, only part II is about moral pluralism, while the other parts are about social intuitionism.
Social intuitionism is a model that proposes that moral positions and judgments are:

primarily intuitive (“intuitions come first”)
rationalized, justified, or otherwise explained after the fact
taken mainly to influence other people, and are
often influenced and sometimes changed by discussing such positions with others

Notice the second tenet: social intuitionism say that people rationalize their moral positions and judgments, meaning a person who value Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity will rationalize, justify, and explain these values after the fact as good values that further the goal of . This isn’t conflict theory. This is ~mistake theory~, plus it say that people have cognitive biases that make them rationalize their moral positions and judgements. Meanwhile, your model offer zero explanation of why conservatives think conservative policies are good for society and argue for this. In fact, it seem to deny this very basic fact in the “And yet, fundamentally…” paragraph.
And notice the fourth tenet, which is the most damning of all. Social intuitionism say that moral positions and judgments are often influenced and sometimes changed by discussing such positions with others. This position is also known as “mistake theory”, the view that recognize debate as essential instead of thinking of it as having a minor clarifying role at best. You can’t be more clear than that in explaining how moral foundations theory is a mistake-theoretic worldview.
Your post isn’t founded in moral foundations theory. Your post is a denial of social intuitionism, and therefore a denial of moral foundations theory, because conflict theory is a denial of social intuitionism, and therefore a denial of moral foundations theory. I try to be nice. I really do. But I will say it – your argument that conflict theory is correct because of moral foundations theory is unacceptably shoddy.
To end on a less argumentative note: Here is a pretty graph from The Righteous Mind which explain social intuitionism. Never let it be said that social psychology can’t be pretty.

and another:

The problem with moral foundations theory is that if you take it seriously, you have to classify most people on the left as partial conservatives and most people on the right as partial liberals.

For example, when some people on the left argue that you should automatically believe women, that is partly ingroup/loyalty and authority/respect. When some people on the right argue that their women will get sexually abused by (trans) men in the bathroom, that is partly harm/care. When people on the right get upset about taxation taking too much money from those who sacrifice their time/effort/etc, that is partly fairness/reciprocity. When people on the left get far more upset at misogyny than misandry, that is partly respect & sanctity,

Of course, for most issues, many ‘moral foundations’ play a role, so you can pretend that liberals only care about ‘their’ foundations (and the same for conservatives) by ignoring the explanations, statements and behaviors that don’t fit the model. However, such an approach seems inimical to proper understanding.

I think that a far more reasonable conclusion is that just about everyone has the same basic moral mechanisms, but that they apply them differently. Just about everyone has ingroups and outgroups, where people care less about bad things happening to the outgroup. It’s just that people differ in what groups they designate as the ingroup and outgroup (and fargroup). Scott gave an example of this in how many people where very angry at him being happy at the death of Bin Laden, while those same people gloated over the death of Thatcher.

Just about everyone has a concept of fairness/reciprocity, but conservatives tend to focus more on letting people face the consequences of their behavior, where they tend to undervalue inability/limitations, while liberals tend to go overboard in the other direction. Both the argument that people should face the consequences of their behavior and the argument that people shouldn’t suffer for their inabilities, are fairness/reciprocity arguments. Just about everyone believes in purity/sanctity, but for one racism is the most impure thing and for another, it is people disparaging the sacrifice of soldiers. Etc.

Seeing this requires an outside view that is quite hard for people to adopt. For example, there are a decent number of studies that define morality based on the moral views or beliefs of the researchers & which then invariably conclude that the outgroup is (much more) morally vacuous, impervious to facts, etc than the ingroup. IMO, such studies don’t serve any purpose beyond othering the outgroup, just like this article does (which is ironic, given that fairness is claimed to be a liberal value and ingroup a conservative one).

However, from my perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that actually matter in the world– justice, equality, happiness, an end to suffering

I see the same complaints about liberals, both those that are high quality and low quality. Speaking of the latter, in the comments of Breitbart and the like, you can find uncharitable explanations for liberal behavior, just like this is uncharitable:

– in order to suck up to unjust authority or help the wealthy and undeserving or keep people from having sex lives they think are gross.

Finally, I want to point out that wanting to eliminate people with other belief systems is a dangerous form of Utopianism. Goals like justice, equality, happiness and an end to suffering cannot be fully achieved without destroying what makes people human. Furthermore, reality is so complex that applying one approach maximally results in horrible outcomes. For example, letting people face the full consequences of their behavior results in people dying in the streets, while maximally doing the opposite results in a society where people are much less concerned about doing things for others and mostly demand things for themselves.

A world with only pure liberals (or conservatives) will not be paradise and it will not give liberals (or conservatives) what they want. It will remove checks and balances and thereby probably result in horrible spirals based on false belief. For example, if pure conservatives are fully in power, one can imagine that cutting taxes or regulation will be seen as a good solution to any economic problem, even if under-taxation and under-regulation actually makes things worse. When pure liberals are in power, you can get the opposite, where the solution to any economic problem is more taxes and more regulation, even if over-taxation and over-regulation makes things worse.

Rationalists may not be right more than others (per BRUTE), but their comments sections are better than anyone else's I have found.

[Riggerjack]

Also, for anyone who is actually interested in opinions about the border, and enforcement, rather than trying to shoehorn any opposing view into a monster mold, I recommend the comments here:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/20/o ... ent-640366

It's an open thread over at slate star codex, so it's just the regular run of commenters batting around any subject anyone wants to bring up. Some are pro wall, some are openly mocking it, but strangely, no monsters.

Personally, I have hired and worked with what I assume to be undocumented immigrants (i didn't ask), tried to help them get legitimate documents, and was surprised to find there IS NO PATH to legitimacy. At the same time, I have seen a trophy tree, and even though I live very close to the Canadian border, I am offended by the absolute clusterfuck on our southern border.

There needs to be a path for the otherwise unqualified, but fully ambitious immigrants to get here legally. There needs to be some form of amnesty for all the people we have lured here with employment prospects, then so thoroughly despised and abused, or allowed such abuse. Ambition cannot be filtered out as a worthwhile attribute of an immigrant. It is the defining characteristic of each wave of immigrants that lead to our current success.

At the same time, the war zone that is our southern border, and the cultural degradation it inspires, should be intolerable to all Americans. That's not hating brown people, that's expecting law, order, and society to function. Our nation has completely failed the people in our border states, and now shames them for complaining. This is simply dysfunctional.

I just believe comprehensive immigration reform, eliminating all agricultural exceptions to employment law, and cracking down on employers would be far more effective, and humane than "a monument to gullibility" that a wall would be. Cheaper, too.

Strangely enough, I think the chattering of the morons on each side, are bringing this to the point where such solutions are possible, if only because so many of us in the middle are tired of hearing the chatterers in such extreme tantrums over a subject they so clearly know so little about.

[Campitor]

There needs to be a path for the otherwise unqualified, but fully ambitious immigrants to get here legally.

There is a path to legal status. It requires returning to the country of origin and submitting the correct paperwork through the proper channels and waiting patiently.

If you provide a path to residency for those who arrive illegally then you're creating a strong incentive to bypass the legal mechanisms in place. Who would want to arrive here legally when they can arrive illegally, cut the line, and file residency paperwork later?

And how would you determine which illegal is coming to work hard versus coming to be a criminal? We need immigration reform, and I would agree with a 1 time exemption for those who are here and have no criminal record. But having a permanent path to residency for an illegal would defeat any immigration reforms put in place.

[Riggerjack]

There is a path to legal status. It requires returning to the country of origin and submitting the correct paperwork through the proper channels and waiting patiently.

I am no expert, but in looking, I could not find one.

If one has family here, there is a legal route to immigrate.

If one has specialized skills, there is a legal path to immigrate.

There are various ways to get here by visas.

But I could find no path for an ambitious, hard working poor person from another country to get a legal path to immigrate. Hell, I'm only qualified by birth and family, I am not qualified to immigrate.

This is an aberration from our history and culture. I believe, most opponents to "illegals" are as ignorant of the hurdles as I was. I believe, most such people, really don't understand how Ted Kennedy changed our immigration policy, for political purposes, and would be behind reform, if their real concerns were met.

I will post more in my journal, I don't want to further derail this thread.