Also, I agree with Wookie on this, and I've harangued others recently about similar posts. You can make this argument without putting words in people's mouths. I'm sure you see it as just a succinct way of trying to make a point (and so did the others I warned), but I don't think it's very helpful, and this conversation is already pretty charged. Please try to avoid doing this.

Oh, I'm sure it's just an innocent accident.

MLK is also a fan of gathering facts and delivering hard truths.

Oh, but if we talk divisively about kids being held in cages, nothing will ever change!

I mean, I get it. I support abortion too. But the part where we justify it as something other than taking another human life is all self-rationalizing bull**** we tell ourselves to sleep better at night. I've seen ultrasounds and I know what my eyes are telling me. And no talk about bodily autonomy or legalese about the definition of murder is going to change what I know my eyes are telling me.

I mean, you guys are all intelligent people. It is literally insane to me that you can't even conceptualize stepping outside the fever dream for even a second and trying to look at it from the outside and see how absurd it all really is, especially the self righteous moralizing part.

Indeed. He was a great man.


That's just a straw man.

On the quote from MLK you posted, I have no quarrel at all.

I change my posts a lot right after posting them. So do you. I don't even know which post you are referring to, on my end or yours, so I am pretty confident from my end that whatever happened was unintentional.

kelhus: if I'm understanding you properly, you've already said in this thread you think what's happening is bad and ought to be changed (you said something about some change being infinitely better). Right? So I expect you've pivoted to arguing about leftist moralizing in part because that's what you disagree with. Is that also right?

If so, and your disagreements are really not about immigration at all, then to me that seems like another reason to move this particular conversation to one of the other threads.

More or less yes. But I was enjoying that Cat Stevens song and found you deleting it mid-listen kind of rude.

What about the lack of moral outrage over the hundreds or thousands (whatever the actual number, it’s a big number) of Americans murdered by illegal immigrants? Not saying you’re doing it, but there’s plenty of politics-driven hypocrisy coming from both sides.

If you don't know what the number is, why do you think it's big? It's certainly not hundreds of thousands. I doubt it's even in the thousands. There is no indication of any crime problem linked specifically to immigrants.

I think I said something to this effect earlier in the thread, but there are at least a couple reasons I'm paying more attention to this situation right now than some others. One is that it's happening right now, and another is that it's a problem with a single responsible entity that can address much of the problems more or less immediately if it chooses. Most other social problems (crime, homelessness, etc.) aren't like that. It's the sense that this is completely unnecessary and avoidable which contributes to the sense of outrage and urgency.

My sincerest apologies. I don't want to move any posts right now, but I could move some in the morning. But can we just move the conversation about divisiveness to the identity politics thread then?

I said “hundreds or thousands” not “hundreds of thousands.” But with 10M illegal immigrants in the country and even with a real low murder rate of 2 per 100K, we’re still talking about a couple hundred murders per year, which adds up to thousands of Americans murdered by illegal immigrants. So yeah, it’s a really big number. Certainly big enough that people of all political stripes ought to express at least some moral outrage over that issue especially since it's intrinsically tied to this issue.

is the 2/100k just more made up stats? or do you have a cite for any of these claims that you are making in bad faith?


is the point of your whataboutism that murder is bad? i think everyone agrees that murder of human beings is bad.

Going to be provocative and say murder is bad

Are those murderers dealt with unjustly? Should innocent people be disallowed from moving here when the murder rate of immigrants is lower than the native population but admittedly nonzero?

Sorry, I missed this post first time around. A lot of my "moral outrage" is sarcastic and a (probably misguided) attempt to bring some perspective to the issue by using the moralizers own rhetorical techniques against them. In addition, I am sure I have some sensitivity towards the authoritarian left due to my own life circumstances (basically living in the extreme leftist California bubble my whole life, and perceiving a real threat to my liberty from the authoritarian left).

As far as the second point, I doubt I would be overtly critical of anyone that I perceive as being self aware and "honest" about their own moral philosophy, or the moral philosophy of others. Most of my criticism is directed at people who I perceive as having no self awareness at all, and see everything black and white good vs evil (the fact they are always the good and I am always the evil probably has a lot to do with my criticism also).

I meant to type more, but tired and going to bed. But I think the broad strokes are there.

Derp. my bad. It's past my bedtime.

I'm still concerned that you're just making up numbers here, but I also don't really follow the logic in relation to this thread, regardless of the numbers. Even in the hypothetical where there were some crime problem related to immigration, that does not justify detaining immigrants and asylum seekers in inhumane conditions, and it doesn't invalidate my concern about it either.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no reason to believe that either illegal immigrants or asylum seekers commit crimes at rates any greater than the native population, so in the larger context of immigration I don't see a reason for policy to be driven by concern about crime, but I also think the rest of my prior response addresses something relevant to your comment, at least insofar as explaining why I think the detainment issue is particularly outrageous.

Talking about illegal immigrants committing murders in this context seems inflammatory to me without actually having any more of a point than asking about why I'm not also worried about native-born arsonists, to pick a random example. It's not really relevant to the topic of the thread and it's not as if being concerned about the conditions in detainment facilities precludes being concerned about other social problems as well.

Well, Japan seems to have solved this problem by ensuring the effective murder rate for undocumented immigrants is 0, by not allowing any and aggressively enforcing this policy. From a utilitarian perspective, hard to argue with those results.

Actually, Jared Diamond talked about this a little bit in his recent podcast with Harris. I am paraphrasing, but Diamond made the pragmatic point that for every nation the effective immigration policy has to be one that the majority of the population buys into.

The Canadian policy is very similar to ours, and is actually more restrictive in some ways, but the majority of the population supports it, so it is seen as a good policy.

Despite being similar to the Canadian policy, the US policy is widely not supported, so ergo it is a bad policy.

Japan's policy is farther right than Jared Taylor's wettest dream for how an ethnostate should be run, and is widely supported, so it is a good policy. And good luck trying to convince any Japanese person otherwise based on your own moral code.

Illegal immigrants are already disallowed. But to answer what I think you’re asking, I’d say most people understand there’s a risk factor with legal immigration and we’ll never be able to completely stop illegal immigration. In other words, even though we know that some Americans will become victims of violent crime who would not have sans immigration just due to the reality of the situation and I think most are okay with that in a general sense. But a lot of people, probably a majority of the population, think we need to be doing more to mitigate that risk.

sometimes im jealous that i dont get to be on the side that is allowed to make up numbers and say things like "the majority of the population believe..."

ftr im not just talking about here, but in political debate itself.

I’m not just making the numbers up; I stated my reasoning. Anyway, here’s the first result I found that somewhat agrees with me:

Did Lettuce Kill More People in the U.S. in 2018 Than Undocumented Immigrants Did?
The author of the report stipulated that, “The conviction and arrest rates for the entire period of January 1, 2011, through November 15, 2017, are nearly identical to those of 2015, so the choice of year makes little difference.” Assuming that there was no sudden and drastic change in the figures between 2011-2017 and 2018, the findings for 2015 are a reasonable proxy for homicides perpetrated by undocumented immigrants in 2018.

Further, we know that an estimated 10.7 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2016. If the rate of homicide conviction seen in Texas was the same as the nationwide rate, this would work out to be around 278 homicide convictions of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States in 2016, and a similar number in 2018.

You didn’t think Kelhus’s analogy with abortion was apt because it contained a non-ubiquitous moral claim; I provided a whataboutism one that wasn’t.

so we've went from hundreds and thousands of murders to 46 "homicide" convictions in 2015, which include negligent deaths, good to know.

murder is still bad, mkay.

Actually, because of its low birthrate and low immigration rate, Japan has a labor shortage and so is starting a new five-year worker program to bring in 345K low-skill workers over the next five years.

This illustrates a problem with the relativism towards immigration you suggest here. While acceptance by a majority of citizens is part of a good immigration policy, it is not sufficient. A country's immigration policy has real effects on that country's social, economic, and political outcomes, regardless of how popular it is. Japan's restrictive immigration policy has led to population decline and an aging population, meaning they have a labor shortage which can lead to higher deadweight loss, thus putting pressure on its leaders to accept more workers from outside the country.

… in Texas.

But whatever the actual number just due to the population of illegal immigrants unless you believe they’re extraordinarily virtuous there are probably more people killed every year by illegal immigrants than by haters with assault rifles, just to put the respective moral outrage into perspective. But that’s really beside my point. My point is that moral outrage or the lack thereof correlates much more strongly with political partisanship than the underlying moral offence with a lot of these issues.