The sensationalist view that human smugglers do nothing but “prey” upon migrants is plainly overblown. After all, millions of people successfully reach their destination with smugglers’ help. This couldn’t happen if smugglers consistently defrauded their customers.
I found this quote interesting "Indeed, reading Achilli’s work makes me want to unleash this ethnographer on the restaurant or construction industry. I predict that he’ll discover an even stronger role for what he calls “morality” there."
Could you expand on the role of psychologically-sophisticated reputational model in the restaurant and construction industry? This sounds interesting, but I don't fully grasp the implication that you're hinting at here...
(I'm a former landlord, had extensive experiences with contractors and always found them suprisingly challenging).
Yes, politicians, mainly from the right, in national parliaments and the European Parliament often say such things that "we need stronger borders and actions against smuggler in order to protect people". But "strong borders" are dangerous and actions against smugglers remind of actions as during the global war on drugs and security teater regarding terrorism = actions against human rights.
Lori Loughlin paid human smugglers ~$500k to smuggle her daughters into UCLA. The university system imprisoned her.
Should we praise Loughlin and the human smugglers that tried to help her family? Should we condemn the universities for draconian evil of incarcerating such well intentioned people?
You seriously don't see the difference between defrauding a university with false evidence of what your daughter has to offer them, and bypassing government prohibition of your free association with employers and landlords?
What is the difference between defrauding a nations state with false evidence to circumvent admission restrictions versus defrauding a university with false evidence to circumvent admission restrictions? What is the difference between government prohibition on free movement and free association versus university prohibition on free movement and free association?
It's outrageous that this crowd boasts about flouting laws, committing fraud, and cries foul about draconian efforts to enforce laws and punish fraud. Yet with a slightly rhetorical twist, suddenly this crowd reverses everything and condemns attempts at freedom of association.
Is it not freedom of association for Lori Loughlin to pay tuition for her daughters to walk over to the the publicly funded UCLA campus and participate in the standard social life and job training courses for people of her age group? Clearly, no one's private property rights are being violated.
The university is deciding who *the university* is admitting.
The government is deciding who *other people* will be allowed to hire, rent to, buy from, sell to, etc.
An accurate analogy for immigration would be if one university wanted to accept Loughlin's daughter, but other universities threatened to shoot her if she tried to get onto the first university's campus.
In your analogy, universities have broad morals right to deny admission to the Loughlin daughters or anyone that they choose for any reason, but they don't have moral right to stop other universities from admitting them. The direct nation analogy would be that nations have broad moral rights to deny admission to non-members for any reason, but they don't have moral right to stop other nations that choose to admit them from doing so. That's not the open borders argument at all.
Caplan draws a distinction with private property: a homeowner has the right to exclude strangers from his own home. A private company has the right to deny employment at their discretion. But Caplan argues that incumbent citizens don't have group rights to nation states, and even when majorities vote strongly in favor of restricting immigration, they don't have legitimate moral rights to enforce that. The universities are not private property, even nominally private universities like Harvard, in the past was a different story, but in the present, they are basically public government institutions.
With Caplan's open borders principles, universities don't have the right to exclude others. I've read Caplan endorse the right of universities to exclude whomever they want, which seems to be against his own chosen principles. But to a large extent Caplan just ignores this argument rather than debate it.
If so, I am not convinced. Staying in Syria is NOT worse than having your entire family fried in a slow cooker.
Admittedly, generalization to the entire industry from one incident is sensationalism, but the idea that smugglers are careless with human life still holds water to me.
I was involved in helping Ukrainians find homes and it was a big problem.
There are indeed bad actors who use chaos and lawlessness to prey on the weak. There are few, but they are highly organised through the darkweb and give each other tips how to get their hands on women and children.
I do agree with your conclusion 100% that permissive legal immigration / open borders would be the solution - but I suspect right now bad actors can indeed use the smuggler networks to their advantage and we likely don't have good data on it.
In early settling of America, there was open immigration and yet many came as indentured servants. The history of civilization is individuals always deal with a "middleman". The middleman is going to be a government, family members or "entrepreneurs". None are guaranteed to be nice.
Being poor and without beneficent family especially invites exploitation. Protecting people from exploitation will always be a challenge, even if the law itself is more permissive.
I understand where your prior is coming from - but it's wrong in this case. It's entirely appropriate in this context to call it "prey on the weak".
I worked with a friend who worked for 20+ years in the NGO sector, and he has no illusions about it. He worked in contexts of Syria, Greece, Iraq and has seen it happen over and over again.
It's only a small group of people, but these are total predators.
a) I agree the language on preying the weak is overblown. I agree with you that many activists and journalists lie
b) I agree with Bryan's solution on more permissive immigration
That doesn't mean preying on the weak never happens. That doesn't mean journalists always lie in 100% of the cases.
Maybe it happens in 1% of the cases you hear about - learn the facts and adjust your priors accordingly, otherwise you fall prey to confirmation bias (i.e rejecting evidence disconfirming your prior beliefs).
What if we lowered the demand for migration? Why can we not make it more desirable to live in Africa or in Central America? Colonialism has been labeled a great evil but what the irony! The US, Britain and France stopped colonializing the world and now the world is coming to them.
The primary reason Africa and Central America are poor is because of the lack of a stable economic system. Any invasion would make this worse. The US colonized Afghanistan for over 20 years, yet its more than trillion dollar natural resources were never exploited by the private sector. Even McDonalds never operated in Afghanistan.
Good point. I appreciate how the histories of Japan and China allowed those cultures to achieve a higher social order. Given what I know of European history, I am kind of surprised Europe reached an elevated status. Theirs was centuries of war, feudalism and political and religious oppression. And yet they had the Renaissance and embraced the arts, sciences and law and from that shaped the modern world.
European genes weren't as prepared for modernity at the dawn of the medieval age. It actually took 1000 year or so of natural selection to get to the point where they could create an industrial revolution. Christianity played an important role (end of cousin marriage, state execution of violent offenders, values that enabled responsible farmers/merchants to out reproduce).
It's both correct to assert Europe was a backwater in the 10th century and that the Europe that conquered the world was an entirely different people selected for over a millennia.
They are poor because their average societal IQ is too low to be first world countries. Lack of a stable economic system is just one of the many outcomes that comes with being low national IQ.
I agree that invading them would be a mistake. The US never colonized Afghanistan. It set up a corrupt puppet government that tweeted out rainbow flags. But even the best run real colonial government in the world would not be worth the trouble.
What is a better way for Elon Musk to spend his time. Building electric cars in America or being Viceroy of South Africa desperately trying to figure out some way to keep the locals from shooting each other.
The only successful invasions we've had were Japan and Germany (and perhaps South Korea). But these were successful high IQ first world countries before we invaded them. In those cases, all you needed to do was remove the autocratic leaders that had gotten them into that mess in the first place. Essentially resetting things to before they went wrong in the 1930s.
It's rich countries that produce a high IQ population, not the other way around. Male height in many African countries is 5'6, so obviously IQ is going to be stunted too.
Also do you think that the Afghans are too dumb to operate a McDonalds? That's crazy, and you should pick up some critical thinking. Nobody is going to sink significant capital into a business if there is even a chance of a regime change in the near future.
"Also do you think that the Afghans are too dumb to operate a McDonalds?"
Yes. They are that dumb.
Dumb societies have their ups and downs. They reach middle income status, then they go full retard and have some crisis, then they pick themselves up, they screw it up again. Whenever they get a surplus of any kind they consume it.
But fundamentally, just too dumb to add anything to civilization. If they didn't have stuff we could dig up out of the ground, we wouldn't have anything to do with them. Either we will fix their genes at some point or they will have to premaritally be separated from those that advance existence.
McDonalds has 72 locations in Pakistan for 242 million people. Or one per 3.3M people.
The US has 14k locations for 330 million people. Or one per 23.5k people.
That's a ratio of 143:1, so I guess they are 143 times worse off then us.
Look, here's my model of most of the third world:
1) There are a bunch of useless people who can't do anything valuable. Nothing can change this, it's genetic.
2) Those useless people sit on top natural resources that are valuable.
3) The leaders of these countries invite in westerners who through their technology and expertise help them dig up or otherwise convert their natural resources into something the west can use.
4) The money they make selling those resources allow a tiny group at the top to import western goods and services. So you can have a McDonalds in the capitol, but most people in the country still can't afford it.
Saying that having a McDonalds in the capital makes a country rich is like saying that the Tsar having lots of faberge eggs made Russia prosperous. What makes the west special is that it has a productive middle class, every society in history has had a tiny elite with lots of nice stuff.
While colonialism would indeed improve the lives of the colonized, it's not worth it to the colonizer. Colonies were a net resource sink done for prestige and because some elites were enriched by it (usually the expense of the rest of the host country). I don't think trying to rule these countries is the best use of the kind of talent that could pull it off.
The White Man's Burden had its chance and has been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Anyway, for Hive Mind genetic reasons, the third world can never be made into a decent place to live.
It's not clear they can even work in China Style Factories. The Chinese have an average IQ of 105. There is a reason China took off and not say India.
The US Army cutoff for allowing someone to enlist is 83. Below that you're so useless you can't even add value by digging a ditch or catching a bullet. That's a huge swath of the third world. In an example used above, Pakistan, its say half the population. And it's not like being 85 or 88 IQ is a vast improvement. Its subsistence farming for these peope. There is no potential to unlock.
I agree that "helping them over there" is a vast improvement over bringing them here. Providing basic services to them over there costs a tiny % of what it does to do so once they are hooked up to our welfare states. Also they can't vote in our elections over there.
But really I just think that people should focus on advancing the advanced civilizations. That's how things trickle down. Even the global poor get to benefit from antibiotics and the rest. If you keep trying to grow the economy and solve problems it will eventually benefit everyone. Perhaps one day in the future the first world will even fix their deficient genetics.
The worst thing that could happen to the global poor is that they immigrate here, wreck the first world, the entire global economy and scientific progress collapse, and their fate along with it.
I found this quote interesting "Indeed, reading Achilli’s work makes me want to unleash this ethnographer on the restaurant or construction industry. I predict that he’ll discover an even stronger role for what he calls “morality” there."
Could you expand on the role of psychologically-sophisticated reputational model in the restaurant and construction industry? This sounds interesting, but I don't fully grasp the implication that you're hinting at here...
(I'm a former landlord, had extensive experiences with contractors and always found them suprisingly challenging).
Yes, politicians, mainly from the right, in national parliaments and the European Parliament often say such things that "we need stronger borders and actions against smuggler in order to protect people". But "strong borders" are dangerous and actions against smugglers remind of actions as during the global war on drugs and security teater regarding terrorism = actions against human rights.
https://www.ilapi.org/article-content.php?id=167&t=EU%27s+Serious+Lack+of+Human+Security+%7C+Vladan+Lausevic
Lori Loughlin paid human smugglers ~$500k to smuggle her daughters into UCLA. The university system imprisoned her.
Should we praise Loughlin and the human smugglers that tried to help her family? Should we condemn the universities for draconian evil of incarcerating such well intentioned people?
@Niko Davor:
You seriously don't see the difference between defrauding a university with false evidence of what your daughter has to offer them, and bypassing government prohibition of your free association with employers and landlords?
What is the difference between defrauding a nations state with false evidence to circumvent admission restrictions versus defrauding a university with false evidence to circumvent admission restrictions? What is the difference between government prohibition on free movement and free association versus university prohibition on free movement and free association?
It's outrageous that this crowd boasts about flouting laws, committing fraud, and cries foul about draconian efforts to enforce laws and punish fraud. Yet with a slightly rhetorical twist, suddenly this crowd reverses everything and condemns attempts at freedom of association.
Is it not freedom of association for Lori Loughlin to pay tuition for her daughters to walk over to the the publicly funded UCLA campus and participate in the standard social life and job training courses for people of her age group? Clearly, no one's private property rights are being violated.
Here's the difference:
The university is deciding who *the university* is admitting.
The government is deciding who *other people* will be allowed to hire, rent to, buy from, sell to, etc.
An accurate analogy for immigration would be if one university wanted to accept Loughlin's daughter, but other universities threatened to shoot her if she tried to get onto the first university's campus.
In your analogy, universities have broad morals right to deny admission to the Loughlin daughters or anyone that they choose for any reason, but they don't have moral right to stop other universities from admitting them. The direct nation analogy would be that nations have broad moral rights to deny admission to non-members for any reason, but they don't have moral right to stop other nations that choose to admit them from doing so. That's not the open borders argument at all.
Caplan draws a distinction with private property: a homeowner has the right to exclude strangers from his own home. A private company has the right to deny employment at their discretion. But Caplan argues that incumbent citizens don't have group rights to nation states, and even when majorities vote strongly in favor of restricting immigration, they don't have legitimate moral rights to enforce that. The universities are not private property, even nominally private universities like Harvard, in the past was a different story, but in the present, they are basically public government institutions.
With Caplan's open borders principles, universities don't have the right to exclude others. I've read Caplan endorse the right of universities to exclude whomever they want, which seems to be against his own chosen principles. But to a large extent Caplan just ignores this argument rather than debate it.
You aren't responding to stories like this, are you? https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiTWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNubi5jb20vMjAyMi8wNi8yOS91cy9zYW4tYW50b25pby1taWdyYW50LXRydWNrLWRlYXRocy9pbmRleC5odG1s0gFRaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuY25uLmNvbS9jbm4vMjAyMi8wNi8yOS91cy9zYW4tYW50b25pby1taWdyYW50LXRydWNrLWRlYXRocy9pbmRleC5odG1s?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
If so, I am not convinced. Staying in Syria is NOT worse than having your entire family fried in a slow cooker.
Admittedly, generalization to the entire industry from one incident is sensationalism, but the idea that smugglers are careless with human life still holds water to me.
Does he talk about human trafficking?
I was involved in helping Ukrainians find homes and it was a big problem.
There are indeed bad actors who use chaos and lawlessness to prey on the weak. There are few, but they are highly organised through the darkweb and give each other tips how to get their hands on women and children.
I do agree with your conclusion 100% that permissive legal immigration / open borders would be the solution - but I suspect right now bad actors can indeed use the smuggler networks to their advantage and we likely don't have good data on it.
In early settling of America, there was open immigration and yet many came as indentured servants. The history of civilization is individuals always deal with a "middleman". The middleman is going to be a government, family members or "entrepreneurs". None are guaranteed to be nice.
Being poor and without beneficent family especially invites exploitation. Protecting people from exploitation will always be a challenge, even if the law itself is more permissive.
I understand where your prior is coming from - but it's wrong in this case. It's entirely appropriate in this context to call it "prey on the weak".
I worked with a friend who worked for 20+ years in the NGO sector, and he has no illusions about it. He worked in contexts of Syria, Greece, Iraq and has seen it happen over and over again.
It's only a small group of people, but these are total predators.
Well, if you read what I say it's that
a) I agree the language on preying the weak is overblown. I agree with you that many activists and journalists lie
b) I agree with Bryan's solution on more permissive immigration
That doesn't mean preying on the weak never happens. That doesn't mean journalists always lie in 100% of the cases.
Maybe it happens in 1% of the cases you hear about - learn the facts and adjust your priors accordingly, otherwise you fall prey to confirmation bias (i.e rejecting evidence disconfirming your prior beliefs).
What if we lowered the demand for migration? Why can we not make it more desirable to live in Africa or in Central America? Colonialism has been labeled a great evil but what the irony! The US, Britain and France stopped colonializing the world and now the world is coming to them.
The primary reason Africa and Central America are poor is because of the lack of a stable economic system. Any invasion would make this worse. The US colonized Afghanistan for over 20 years, yet its more than trillion dollar natural resources were never exploited by the private sector. Even McDonalds never operated in Afghanistan.
Good point. I appreciate how the histories of Japan and China allowed those cultures to achieve a higher social order. Given what I know of European history, I am kind of surprised Europe reached an elevated status. Theirs was centuries of war, feudalism and political and religious oppression. And yet they had the Renaissance and embraced the arts, sciences and law and from that shaped the modern world.
European genes weren't as prepared for modernity at the dawn of the medieval age. It actually took 1000 year or so of natural selection to get to the point where they could create an industrial revolution. Christianity played an important role (end of cousin marriage, state execution of violent offenders, values that enabled responsible farmers/merchants to out reproduce).
It's both correct to assert Europe was a backwater in the 10th century and that the Europe that conquered the world was an entirely different people selected for over a millennia.
They are poor because their average societal IQ is too low to be first world countries. Lack of a stable economic system is just one of the many outcomes that comes with being low national IQ.
I agree that invading them would be a mistake. The US never colonized Afghanistan. It set up a corrupt puppet government that tweeted out rainbow flags. But even the best run real colonial government in the world would not be worth the trouble.
What is a better way for Elon Musk to spend his time. Building electric cars in America or being Viceroy of South Africa desperately trying to figure out some way to keep the locals from shooting each other.
The only successful invasions we've had were Japan and Germany (and perhaps South Korea). But these were successful high IQ first world countries before we invaded them. In those cases, all you needed to do was remove the autocratic leaders that had gotten them into that mess in the first place. Essentially resetting things to before they went wrong in the 1930s.
It's rich countries that produce a high IQ population, not the other way around. Male height in many African countries is 5'6, so obviously IQ is going to be stunted too.
Also do you think that the Afghans are too dumb to operate a McDonalds? That's crazy, and you should pick up some critical thinking. Nobody is going to sink significant capital into a business if there is even a chance of a regime change in the near future.
"Also do you think that the Afghans are too dumb to operate a McDonalds?"
Yes. They are that dumb.
Dumb societies have their ups and downs. They reach middle income status, then they go full retard and have some crisis, then they pick themselves up, they screw it up again. Whenever they get a surplus of any kind they consume it.
But fundamentally, just too dumb to add anything to civilization. If they didn't have stuff we could dig up out of the ground, we wouldn't have anything to do with them. Either we will fix their genes at some point or they will have to premaritally be separated from those that advance existence.
Are you trolling me? How the hell would you explain McDonalds in Pakistan?
Let's see.
McDonalds has 72 locations in Pakistan for 242 million people. Or one per 3.3M people.
The US has 14k locations for 330 million people. Or one per 23.5k people.
That's a ratio of 143:1, so I guess they are 143 times worse off then us.
Look, here's my model of most of the third world:
1) There are a bunch of useless people who can't do anything valuable. Nothing can change this, it's genetic.
2) Those useless people sit on top natural resources that are valuable.
3) The leaders of these countries invite in westerners who through their technology and expertise help them dig up or otherwise convert their natural resources into something the west can use.
4) The money they make selling those resources allow a tiny group at the top to import western goods and services. So you can have a McDonalds in the capitol, but most people in the country still can't afford it.
Saying that having a McDonalds in the capital makes a country rich is like saying that the Tsar having lots of faberge eggs made Russia prosperous. What makes the west special is that it has a productive middle class, every society in history has had a tiny elite with lots of nice stuff.
While colonialism would indeed improve the lives of the colonized, it's not worth it to the colonizer. Colonies were a net resource sink done for prestige and because some elites were enriched by it (usually the expense of the rest of the host country). I don't think trying to rule these countries is the best use of the kind of talent that could pull it off.
The White Man's Burden had its chance and has been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Anyway, for Hive Mind genetic reasons, the third world can never be made into a decent place to live.
It's not clear they can even work in China Style Factories. The Chinese have an average IQ of 105. There is a reason China took off and not say India.
The US Army cutoff for allowing someone to enlist is 83. Below that you're so useless you can't even add value by digging a ditch or catching a bullet. That's a huge swath of the third world. In an example used above, Pakistan, its say half the population. And it's not like being 85 or 88 IQ is a vast improvement. Its subsistence farming for these peope. There is no potential to unlock.
I agree that "helping them over there" is a vast improvement over bringing them here. Providing basic services to them over there costs a tiny % of what it does to do so once they are hooked up to our welfare states. Also they can't vote in our elections over there.
But really I just think that people should focus on advancing the advanced civilizations. That's how things trickle down. Even the global poor get to benefit from antibiotics and the rest. If you keep trying to grow the economy and solve problems it will eventually benefit everyone. Perhaps one day in the future the first world will even fix their deficient genetics.
The worst thing that could happen to the global poor is that they immigrate here, wreck the first world, the entire global economy and scientific progress collapse, and their fate along with it.