If the alternative is more people being killed in a poor country, then it's not necessarily a bad thing.
In other words, do you prefer that 3 Mexicans are murdered or 1 American? If you value Americans and Mexicans equally, then it is "great" that two fewer people die.
This is a completely nonsensical way of thinking. This exact thinking is what leads to people spending money trying to save as many shrimp as they can instead of actual people they see suffering every day.
What part doesn't make sense to you? Does it help to number statements so you can just consider one thought at a time.
1. Criminals will commit crimes regardless of where they are. (Unless you believe there's something particular about the US that encourages crime, that seems hard to argue with. )
2. Therefore, moving criminals from one place to another just changes where crimes are committed.
3. Therefore, moving criminals around is only beneficial if you care where crimes are committed.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't support criminal deportation though. If you believe that it's better that crimes be committed elsewhere, it's entirely reasonable to support deportation. Or if you have some abstract sense that countries have a responsibility to deal with the criminals they produce. (But you don't extend the same logic to subnational administrations - someone born in New York but committing crimes in Chicago is not sent to New York)
This isn't a particularly unusual way of thinking. My city had a program that provided bus tickets out of town to homeless people. In theory it was for them to reunite with support out of state, but in practice it was just making them California's problem. Since my city's government is meant to serve city residents and not Californians, seems reasonable enough to me.
1) No, the proclivity to commit crimes doesn't change, but the opportunity is different in different environments. People in low trust societies find more opportunities for crime in high trust societies.
2) So, no not necessarily. It only changes where those with criminal proclivity are located.
3) Most people care were crimes are committed based on the distance from their persons. Even so-called altruists. The big difference between living in a safe area and a crime-ridden area is the psychological mindset. Going from a high trust area where safety is a given, to one where you need to be constantly on alert is a shock for most people.
>Because the United States is better at deterring and incapacitating criminals than a typical sender country
If you don't believe that, then it makes sense to reject the argument.
That seems to be the point of disagreement you have with the article. It'd be best to start off by supporting the idea that people are more likely to commit crime in the US than places like Honduras.
The author supports the opposite view (that someone is more likely to commit crime in sender countries) by comparing crime rates.
That's difficult to believe given that El Salvador was able to dramatically decrease crime by increasing incarceration. In the US, law enforcement is very efficient, but the criminal justice system is very inefficient and requires enormous resources with only moderate effectiveness, and we have not even touched on that subject. I find the author's particular theory, to put it mildly, an intelletual flight of fancy rather than a serious crime reduction idea. The devil is in the details. We could greatly reduce crime by executing every 3X felony repeat offender. In theory, this is logically valid and supported by the data on repeat offenders, but like the author's idea, it is an oversimplistic and unworkable solution in and of itself. However, of these two impractical ideas, mine would solicit more public support.
The ultimate issue is that people incapable of committing horrible crimes cannot enter the mind of those who can.
They would find a completely alien world, filled with terrifying ideas and observations, totally ignorant of the world the “straight” person exists in literally 100% of the time. They cannot imagine a world where they themselves would benefit from or benefit society from being behind bars for decades. But they are unaware that many people go through life more or less on the edge of catastrophic violence 24/7. Those living on the edge terrorize those around them relentlessly until physically prevented from doing so.
Look at the El Salvador statistics for before and after. You also need to make sure you are measuring the same thing - the crime definitions and the reporting rate. The author is saying that we should import criminals because we are better at catching them. Bukele did it in El Salvador by locking up his own criminals. You also don't define "people". Do Hondurans, Venezuelans, or Salvadorans PER CAPITA commit more crimes here or in their native countries. You can't just look at the crime rate in the US in its entirety and make that claim. It's not evenly spread between different people and locations. As to your finding it difficult to believe, no one, including me, cares what your beliefs are. I suggest not using that term when making an argument. Look at the data yourself.
The entire premise of the scenario is false. Laughably. The first "switch" that was pulled was the decision to import a Mexican murderer to kill an American. The illustration ignores this and pretends the only choice was the subsequent one to prevent him from coming here costing Mexican lives rather than the first choice that cost American lives.
It is all just nihilistic "view from nowhere" horse crap. Because the converse is not true. I'll prove it:
Rare earth minerals, cobalt, and gold are much more useful in America where we have high tech industries and hospitals where advanced medical equipment can be put to good use. With the same amount of cobalt, we can make machines that will preserve the lives of 100 Americans whereas in African countries where cobalt is mined it could hardly be used to save one African. Therefore, the most good will result if we required Africa to give all its minerals used it technology to America.
If you don't agree with that--and you shouldn't--then you can't agree with the same logic that says Americans have to consent to being murdered by foreigners because foreigners aren't capable of keeping their own people from committing more murders than Americans are.
There is no first switch. The state doesn't "import" Mexican murderers. They come to the US because of market incentives. The question is whether the state should interfere with free market outcomes and in so doing get several people killed on net who wouldn't otherwise. I think the answer is obvious.
Also, I totally think we should allow the free trade of African minerals. Don't you?
Crime seeking a soft victim isn't "free market". That's obvious. And since you agree with me that we shouldn't do what I (expressly) sarcastically suggested about Africa, then you agree that Africa has a right to the benefit of its labor and resources of its own minerals. If others want them, they need to provide a benefit for them that Africa has a right to demand out of its own valid self-interest. It doesn't matter how many more Americans might benefit if they were given up for free.
Why isn't America entitled to the same basic self-interest as Africa? Why aren't we allowed to demand that, if you want access to our markets, you can't murder us? Basic free market contracts 101: not getting murdered is implied in the deal. That's also obvious.
This hyper modernism of yours is worse than nihilism. It's nihilism for Americans but total group self interest for everyone else.
The state effectively imports Mexicans by not enforcing immigration laws. If the Mexicans didn't enforce their immigration laws, the "market incentives" would mean that 10% of their population would be from South America, at least. As of right now they are ~98% Mexican.
Talking about the free market in 2026 is too rich for my blood. Like talking about democracy or the Constitution. We are trapped in a LARP of the early 19th century, seemingly forever.
I certainly don't value their lives *more*. Yes, I would rather have them killing strangers in their home country than my family members, neighbors or countrymen. Because I'm not a self-immolating lunatic.
What would it do to the United States’ ability to deter crimes if there was a substantial increase in criminality? Is the United States prepared, for example, to fight the drug cartels on its own soil in the same manner that the Mexican Army and Federal Police do now if we allowed many many cartel members to emigrate to the US? How much collateral damage is acceptable in enforcing our laws under this model?
Yes it’s incredibly easy. This is our country, they live in theirs. If they’re going to rob, rape, and kill, it is better they do it to their own people than to us. This is pretty basic shit if you’re not a complete fucking moron.
On what basis would “they” be any different than “us” if the only thing differentiating the categories is the entirely unchosen luck of birth? There is only one people: humanity. There is no possible justified basis for people being permanently stuck in a caste of ANY kind solely because of the location of birth or the unearned status of their parents.
The only thing preventing “them” from being a part of “us” is your entirely unjustifiable hoarding of the privilege of residency or citizenship for nothing other than your own luck of birth.
Utterly absurd. Which aspect of that could possibly have been earned or chosen? If you did not choose or earn those things then they literally are unchosen and unearned. And whether you consider the universe ordered or random doesn’t somehow address the salient aspect, which is that the specific quality of citizenship is entirely unearned.
You are in no way magically granted responsibility or choice for something you did not do, and nobody chooses their parents.
You most certainly are “granted responsibility” for things you didn’t choose. That’s been the story of humanity for millennia. It starts at the micro level—children are under an obligation to obey their parents, regardless of having no choice in being born. It then expands outward. You’re a part of something larger than yourself, whether you want to be or not. Protecting that collective entity is quite often as important as protecting your own person. Whether something is “earned” or “chosen” couldn’t possibly be less relevant in this scenario.
No. There is one collective: all of humanity, and you have no right or responsibility besides equality with every human alive, each of whom are fully entitled to an equal share of the collective material inheritance of all mankind rather than the nobility or caste of birth that you seem to desire
But, as you mention in the opening, immigrant crime (or at least the perception thereof) causes people to vote to dismantle the Constitution and fuck up the economy (and further restrict immigration). This is a big externality of crime that's bigger in the US then elsewhere because the quality of our institutions is so important to the world! (I still favor open immigration despite this, but I think a system where it is paired with zero tolerance for violent/property crime is the only way to make it politically feasible in the long run)
Part of the problem is that it appears no level of crime by immigrants is low enough because, due to in-group parochialism and out-group dehumanization, immigrants are solely treated as part of the crime numerator but never the aggregate human denominator. The benefit to the lives of millions of immigrants seems to add up to zero in the minds of nativists.
It is a concept that I still can’t actually wrap my head around, precisely because dehumanizing or othering people solely because of the unchosen and unearned accident of birth is so repulsive as to be unthinkable. Yet it appears a plurality or majority really do think it.
This is the most braindead piece I’ve read on this platform. Immigrants committing crime in their own 3rd world country is a whole lot different than committing crime in a 1st world country. Why should the 1st world country pay large sums of money, time, and effort to prosecute and incarcerate 3rd world immigrants that commit crimes? Makes no sense at all.
At least the deterrent of committing crime in their own country might be a stronger sentence or death penalty or whathaveyou.
If this is satire then… well done. Because I could see this being a legitimate talking point.
It doesn't but why should we not act in our own interests?
Your logic extends to straight up communism, why shouldn't people give away their money, as after all they have it due to mostly genetic factors like IQ etc - communism isn't practical.
Regardless the migrant communities are going to maintain their tribalism - why shouldn't we, no need to accept asymmetric warfare.
Furthermore our countries progress civilisation - let's keep them functional so humans can advance - importing ethnic tension doesn't benefit us.
There is no “our own interest” as the only “our” is all humanity. I do think that “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is the only defensible meta ethical outcome, and don’t see any real ethical opposition that stands up at any point.
Whatever level of iniquity is required to keep humanity from collapsing at the hands of the greediest and most tribal portions of our population is an amount that perhaps may be grudgingly tolerated but with the constant knowledge that it is wholly unjust and sentences equally real human lives to penury and suffering for nothing but the unearned chance of birth.
“The only defensible meta ethical outcome,” that’s a pretty bold claim, especially considering that I’m pretty sure you used “meta ethics” incorrectly. Have you even taken a serious look at other ethical frameworks? or did you just attach yourself to the one that sounded the kindest on its face?
You are a victim of half-logic. It's fun to imagine a world in which everyone is selfless and virtuistic, but when you start theorizing policy on the assumption that everyone actually is, then you commit suicide. The half of the logic that says, "I'm not special, I'm just part of the whole world, so what right do I have to protect myself against the harms everyone else lives with" is not shared by the other half of the planet. If they did, then they would be saying, "I'm not special, what right do I have to send my problems overseas for other people to deal with." No, they are looking out for themselves and they don't care about your asinine "view from nowhere" philosophy is. Plenty of people you open yourself up to will just treat you as an easy victim.
In other words, you are entitled to protect yourself, no matter where you were born. That should have been easy.
On what basis would they have a responsibility to suffer? There is an enormous asymmetry in resources and infrastructure and social development that they need. The marginal utility at stake here is wildly asymmetric and so your claim does not hold up at all.
Nope, it's an inherent part of human nature and must be managed, not fought. Ensuring a common sense of identity and avoiding hostile ethnocentrism in your county is of paramount importance.
If you truly want it crushed start by not importing tribal cultures and ethnic groups
In Glenn's post, he praises the US for strong law enforcement relative to Latin American countries.
Why does the US have better law enforcement than Latin American countries? Why are Americans willing to pay to enforce the law in the United States, but not in Honduras?
Maybe it's because of American tribalism. Maybe if you get rid of tribalism, you get Honduras all over the globe. Every person for themselves. No sense of civic cooperation or seeking to build something together.
People already struggle to provision public goods at the nation level. There are many Honduras-like countries where nothing works. Police and politicians are corrupt and care nothing for their country, only for themselves. If you eliminate national pride everywhere, I don't think that necessarily leads to global flourishing. I think it might just lead to anarchy and dysfunction everywhere.
The number of people who *actually* care impartially about all of humanity across the globe is small. They are a scarce and valuable resource to allocate with care, not a huge bulwark you can rest on.
Another way of thinking about it is, supposing you're going to crush tribalism. Alright. What force is going to do this vicious crushing, exactly? In practice, when this happens, it always seems to be another tribe that claims they are doing this, which is worse than the tribe it replaces.
Your point of “entirely unearned accident of birth” seems profound and insightful until further investigation.
For centuries, nations have been establishing themselves and the people within those nations have been codifying laws, trying to improve their lives, and give their children a better life than they had themselves. Your sleight of hand is the notion that: “being entitled to structure of stability and justice” is a universal and not a localized right. I didn’t choose to be born in England anymore than someone chose to be born in North Korea. And yet my ancestors fought and bled and philosophized and legalized and died for the stability and justice you mention. In North Korea, such a claim cannot be made.
It is therefore self-evident that: I would not want to commit crime in my own country because I respect its values, customs, law, traditions, and justice systems - that took centuries to build out and maintain. However, it is ok for a new immigrant to come and commit atrocities that would otherwise have not been committed if they didn’t immigrate? That makes very little sense.
Your entitlement is one of mental and physical privilege. You can’t fathom the painstaking lengths it took to create structure and stability and justice that you take for granted, therefore it is ok for you to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Immigration as a concept is entirely dependent on a person moving from one nation that for whatever reason they dislike enough, to a nation that will better suit their needs. The question then remains: why would an immigrant committing a crime in the ‘better’ country make sense for the native inhabitants of that country? Does it make that country safer or more prosperous or more inviting to other immigrants who won’t commit crimes?
Surely you can see the point I’m making, knowing full well that your claim is vacuous and a thought experiment gone awry?
?? This entire post seems to indicate that you are somehow entitled to something based on ancestry that others also are not? Ancestry is entirely unchosen luck. You are not entitled to a single inheritance of the global achievements and deficits of mankind that any other human alive could be. By what right or basis would that unearned luck of birth provide you with a superior life and stability and structure?
And by moving and making an effort the immigrant is, of their volition, actually far MORE entitled. They actually did something to earn and choose it while you did nothing.
And what is it about the “nation” that you are meaning. Surely not some blood and soil absurdity... There is one single humanity and one global ancestry that stretches back at least to the evolutionary divergence of humanity. There is no arbitrary chance of “locality” that can possibly accrue more to you than any human alive.
So, in the end, what precisely is it about the fact that some fraction of immigrants will be criminals that somehow means that the protection of the laws or global reduction in crime are more deservingly appropriated to you? Is also the incredible material wealth and privilege of this place your just inheritance too? Despite inheritance being the most perfectly unearned concept imaginable?
Ok so let me ask you: if your parents built a successful company/business and wanted to pass it and all its wealth on to you - would you reject it since “you’re not entitled to anything based on ancestry”?
You would obviously accept their good graces & gift to you as their child. So now extrapolate that to a nation state and peoplehood.
Also - you don’t know that I’m actually an immigrant and have benefited the nations that I’ve immigrated to.
And lastly - the “we are all one humanity!” argument is cute but comical in its lack of geopolitical insight. Yes evolutionarily we are ‘all one’ and stem from the same species. Yet the amount of diversity between peoples and nations is vast and to claim that we all share the same values and ethics is a complete misnomer and lacks any worldliness or knowledge about the world, different societies and cultures. Do you share the same values as feet binding for women in rural China? Or how about female genital mutilation in Ghana or Nigeria? Or how about the regularity spousal cheating of Colombia? Or the work-drinking culture of Japan?
No I reject all inheritance as unjust, as only a collective inheritance is warranted, and would direct any and all inheritance I receive, absent unforeseen poverty that is not alleviated by underfunded social programs, to the most effective charities.
Ideally, however, enormous tax transfers across nations would allow people to iteratively and permanently benefit from the global inheritance of wealth without having to leave their homes and society, friends and family, unless they desired to.
Surely parenting is massively unjust. You give all your focus to the small beings related to you - and almost nothing to your neighbor's kids. Not even 1/100.000th as much.
Some parts of human life seem to be structurally "unjust". Would this then cause one to call into question one's concept of justice? For me personally it would.
It’s not an unearned accident of birth. I’m an intentional creation of my ancestors who are bequeathing to me a specific inheritance and way of life. Maybe it sucks to live in a 3rd world country, but it’s up to them to fix their problems
You did not earn or choose your ancestors and can provide literally zero basis on which you would be entitled to more and others less because of the entirely unchosen and unearned (BY YOU) status of your parents or the soul of your birth.
How is it unchosen? Do you not believe that souls choose their point of entry into the world? From what I have read of accounts of near death experience, all these things are indeed chosen by souls prior to incarnation.
It has nothing to do with what anyone is “entitled to.” People do and should act in their own interest. This is a glaring example of the stupidity that can result when one forgets that fact.
Often we do not, altruism is real and we can and should value others lives equal to our own, but especially when a mere small cost to us causes enormous benefit to others. And the only “us” is all of humanity.
Yeah, but you cannot model this as a linear system. Argument may hold true at the margin, but that's irrelevant. Add too many a Mexican (murderer) and at some tipping point, you'll have critical mass, that they'll mexicanize the United States and form local cartel branches, coopt the political process and the American state/culture loses its monopoly on violence, that ensures the current low crime rate. Crime rates are a function of the sociological environment. Import the people, they'll bring that with them.
If American institutions are so great that to function they don't actually require Americans, you'd just export them to places that lack them. You've tried that before with nationbuilding in the Middle East and it did not work.
You should be advocating for Mexican immigration to a country like Japan, which has a 30x lower homicide rate. Also Japanese people are older and poorer than Americans, so their deaths are less costly.
I agree! though I wonder whether there might not be some broader knock on effects that might balance the scales a little more. e.g. lowering Social trust, or, say, getting people to vote for someone like Trump.
If this is intended seriously, it's naive. Nobody's a utilitarian when push comes to shove. Taken to its logical extreme it requires the dissolution of kinship. (do you really value a child on the other side of the world as much as your own child? No, of course you do not).
Is this a troll post? Or is this just what EA people do? I sincerely cannot tell.
The worry expressed in the first two objections is entirely mischaracterized here. Your response to the first objection — that we have special obligations to citizens that we don't have to non-citizens, and so, ceteris paribus, ought to prefer for crimes to happen outside it rather than inside it (even if the total volume of crimes is fewer if they happen inside a developed host nation) — treats it as concern for harm reduction simpliciter. But that's not it at all. An asymmetric concern for reducing harms to one's fellow citizens v. non-citizens can be completely justified if you think that harms to one's citizens undermine your prospects for the continued social cooperation necessary to sustain a flourishing country to which people from the less-developed world would like to migrate. Only the most dyed-in-the-wool cosmopolitans would think otherwise — and people rightly reject these kind of cosmopolitan worldviews as not just naive, but wrong.
The raw appeal to intuitions here is just silly — most people just don't have well-worked-out views about _why_ it's worse for the very same crime to be committed in your community than one to which you don't have binding ties of social cooperation. Even if you showed me polling data saying "crime is bad because it’s bad for the people who experience it" in ways that were completely neutral over the relationship between you, the crime, and your community that wouldn't make those views actually correct. Ethics isn't a polling practice. People can be wrong all the time.
Which is why your response to the second objection also entirely misses the point. The objection about social costs isn't to be understood as some autistic little summation of individual costs quantified in terms of a silly policy concept that really only makes sense in limited medical contexts — as if this were the only way to meaningfully represent social costs. No, the social costs are worse in the host nation than in the sending nation precisely because in these cases we're worried about, the host nation has more accumulated social capital — quantified in terms of the maturity of their political, educational, welfare, and economic institutions. The very differences which explain the direction of migration are the differences in value which threaten to be undermined by importing disorder — even if importing that disorder were to lower the global level of disorder. _That's_ the social cost with which the objection is concerned.
Ultimately though, what leaves me so baffled about this post is just how quickly and carelessly you deal with these objections. Like, in what world do they deserve anything less than 3000 word treatment? If it is a troll post then well done, you wasted twenty minutes of my saturday. If not, maybe spend some time with Joseph Heath's _Cooperation and Social Justice_ and get back to us with a deeper treatment?
Just because there are second-order arguments against immigration ("prospects for the continued social cooperation necessary to sustain a flourishing country") doesn't mean it's not important to point out that many people's first-order arguments against immigration are badly calculated due to ignoring one whole side of the equation. You need to understand first-order effects correctly before you can talk productively about second-order effects, and even if the second order effects run counter to the first-order effects they are not necessarily more important than the first-order effects.
I'm not a cosmopolitan so I don't agree with the moral premise here. But I used to be and I know the argument made sense from a cosmopolitan premise.
I'm not sure what you mean by first and second-order effects here. There are just effects and their impact. Can you maybe say more about why we ought to privilege one set over the other in our thinking?
A first-order impact would be the direct harm of the immigrant's crime. A second-order impact would be that when the immigrant commits a crime, it undermines the social cooperation necessary for flourishing, like natives start voting for the far right and so on, and that eventually leads to more suffering.
We should privilege the first set because the second set depends on the first set, and is impossible to talk accurately about the second set without first being accurate about the first set. For instance, after recognizing that immigrants would still be committing crimes anyway even if they couldn't migrate, we will recognize that immigrants would still be undermining social cooperation in their home countries even if they couldn't migrate.
Second, even without privileging one set of effects over the other, it just may be the case that a given first order impact happens to be bigger than a given second order impact. Like maybe it's worth undermining social cooperation if it means there is less crime! Maybe? Therefore, do not shut down discussion of the first-order impacts by saying that it is trolling or a waste of time. Respect the argument, but then give the counterargument.
Good that’s much clearer. Appreciate you taking the time to make that explicit — makes it easier to isolate disagreement.
I don’t think you can hold first order harms fixed when considering the same crime committed domestically v internationally. It is rational to care more about preventing the murder of your family member/neighbor/countryman than the murder of someone with whom you bear no political relations. The former just is more harmful to you (victim aside). Idk, maybe you consider that a second-order effect, but the harms to the families of crime victims seem quite relevant to evaluating the counterfactuals?
I also just kind of reject the premise that we can safely assume the criminal immigrant would be just as likely to commit a crime in their country of origin. It just seems plainly intuitive that conditions in the host country could be such that they raise a person’s criminal propensity. Obviously we should want to be better at accommodation so this doesn’t happen — but the ghetto-fication of African immigrant communities in Europe seems to kind of raise the stakes for this point? If economic and social life in the host country turns out to actually be harder than it is in the origin country (or if the barrier to entry for crime in the origin country is higher because it’s cornered by extremely militant cartels) then we should expect criminal propensities to also differ across the counterfactual cases.
It’s those kind of arguments that Inwould have liked to see addressed. I am certainly not trying to shut down discussion — if anything, my continued engagement here should be evidence I want to deepen it. But I also do not have much respect for Glenn’s argument. That may be a problem for people’s willingness to further engage in discussion, but if so that’s a vice with which I have to contend.
thanks. not that I disagree overall but I think it's just kind of crazy to do the analysis without acknowledging both sides of the ocean. And I can think of like 2 people who have ever written about it this way, namely, the OP and me.
It is not in any way rational to prefer that any human alive suffer one iota more than you would accept for yourself or your friends or the people who by random chance live within geographic proximity…
Hey Kristin, I think you'll find that most EA folks will be comfortable granting that we have some special obligations to family, neighbors, and countrymen that we don't have to people in general. They have a hard time grounding that in consequentialist terms, but there are very few who bite the bullet and say we don't — those are wildly unintuitive views I think most people would rightly interpret as reductio's of EA.
The claim is just that these special obligations are rational, and that they can ground rationally asymmetric preferences, cares, etc. It's really worth thinking critically about the geographic point. I know those who are Singer-brained find it hard to believe after reading about kids drowning in ponds, but I think if you reflect on it for a while you'll understand that we actually do have these special obligations to those with whom we're in political and geographic community.
You can believe all that and still believe that all humans have equal dignity and worth, and that none deserve to suffer more than any other (ceteris paribus). It doesn't follow from that that all moral relationships are fungible in the way that Singer and some consequentialist egalitarians need for their views to work. If you're interested, you might have a look at Hilary Greaves' concessions on this score. There aren't many professional philosophers who take EA seriously (which should tell you something), but Hilary is one of the few who does it seriously with the rigor it demands. And even she concedes that we have these special obligations and that it's rational to have some partiality towards those you're close to. Ofc, pure consequentialism can't account for this — and that's one of the many reasons why folks think it's wrong.
Anyway, you're right to push for clarity here and I appreciate your curiosity. Keep it up.
I mean I genuinely don’t understand how we have any different obligations of even one molecule to any human alive than to our parents or best friends. I do find the Singer view entirely intuitive for the exact same reason that I don’t take the side of friends in disputes where there is even a modest indication that they were in the wrong when dealing with a stranger or opponent.
Of course I also called myself out at second base playing softball when the ump missed a call and said I was safe, so admittedly I clearly struggle with some aspects of in group preference that deeply deeply trouble me now.
Do you object to buying birthday or Christmas presents for your family members?
There are 8 billion humans on Earth. You can't buy a present for everyone. Best to not buy anything, so as to treat everyone equally?
How about paying for gas to go see your grandparent in the hospital if they are dying? You wouldn't pay for gas to visit a random homeless person on their deathbed. If the obligations are identical, you should insist on your grandparent dying alone, since you can't be with everyone when they are dying.
My view is: These reciprocal family/friend relationships are, by and large, mutually beneficial and allow both parties in the relationship to prosper to a greater extent than they would otherwise. Your friend lets you crash on their couch when you are broke; you do the same when they are broke. We have built-in bio-hardware for forming such close relationships, which we can leverage for mutual prosperity. Increased prosperity means we have more resources to help distant strangers. So we can reconstruct the case for close family/friend relationships from first principles, even for a hypothetical impartial altruist. No person is an island.
You are talking about convenience or scale of outcomes. I don't see why having an impartial altruistic obligation to all people somehow denies pareto-optimality when it comes to personal relationships. Nor why buying presents for friends and family would somehow subvert an equal or greater obligation to donate to effective charities or to support high global transfers of wealth...
You're not being very clear. How, exactly, is buying presents for family and friends consistent with a belief that your obligations to family and friends don't differ by "even one molecule" from your obligations to a random person in Africa?
The random person in Africa calls you on the phone, says "Hey Kristin, where is my present? You bought a present for your sister. Why not for me?" What do you say in response?
If you're not careful, I'll be in your DMs soon, demanding that you send *me* free stuff, in accordance with your professed philosophy 😉 I could use some free stuff!
It doesn't make sense to me anymore to care about other people if those people don't likewise care about me. If the Middle East was a rich safe place while America was screwed up and full of criminals, they would not be allowing us to immigrate there.
I don’t think that adopting the ethics of one’s interlocutors, especially if that ethical position inevitably degrades into the prisoner’s dilemma, works. Especially not when it comes to making individual human lives subject to an inverted hypothetical. Do you want the ethos of your conceptual opponents to govern your world?
I think it is especially dangerous, and dark, to apply this to the very persons likely to flee such a country. Who are in many cases precisely the people who aren’t even welcomed or safe in their nation of birth.
Whether utilitarianism or virtue modeling or an honest application of the veil of ignorance or deontological values about the value of each life, I really don’t see how one can escape cosmopolitanism without sacrificing one’s very core.
There's a famous tweet that goes: "My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying."
If you are invariably super nice to everyone, regardless of how nasty they are, you're feeding resources to nasty people the same way the neighbor is feeding cats to the local coyotes.
If you want people to be nice, you have to provide incentives for them to be nice. In game theory terms, being a CooperateBot just feeds resources to DefectBots, which leaves us collectively worse off, since the DefectBots now have more resources.
Glenn's post is premised on the idea that the US has effective law enforcement, i.e. we're willing to punish DefectBots with reasonable swiftness and certainty. That's essential for peace and prosperity. From a game-theoretic point of view, in the prisoner's dilemma, the most altruistic strategy is actually tit-for-tat with forgiveness, not CooperateBot.
This is a great argument for reestablishing colonial rule. It's a win-win! Americans get to rebuild a high trust society, and the third world gets first world governance and organization.
In Europe we find that young male migrants are more likely to commit crime in the more tolerant west. Poorer countries can easily manage criminals in 2026 it's not really a matter of money. El Salvador isn't rich and significantly reduced crime. The USA as a more liberal country needs to be especially careful in regards to who they admit
>The correct position on immigrant crime is that it’s a good thing, or at least plausibly a good thing compared to the alternative, which is immigrants committing crimes in their home countries.
The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, "A good thing for whom?"
Allegedly solving the world's problems in the abstract all at other people's expense -entitled liberal
Does this article really categorically call every American rich to justify this slop? Please, how many dumb liberals in this comment section would go to bat for poor Americans and their socioeconomic factors the instant the framework isn't this terrible article?
Spineless, this article is a meme that is a wall of text. Judge Dred style law and order is more sane than this anarcho tyranny slop.
The problem with the trolley analogy is that it’s static. People in the real world respond and adapt as the game repeats.
In round one, a criminal who would have offended in Honduras now offends in Houston instead, where he’s more likely to be caught and jailed. Global crime falls.
But it doesn’t end in round one. There are many more rounds to follow. As crimes mount, people notice. If Americans voted to “dismantle the Constitution” over immigrant crime in 2024, as the author says, what happens when it doubles or triples? More police, surveillance, and profiling. Less trust and freedom.
The exchange rate between “a death in the U.S.” and “three deaths in Mexico” isn’t a constant. The ratio shrinks every time the trolley makes its run and our institutions - rule of law, trust - erode, and we eventually become Mexico.
You’re arguing to decrease 3rd world crime by increasing 1st world crime. That’s not how crime works dumbass. This is like arguing to calm down Visigoths by inviting the Ostrogoths and Lombards into your country with no restrictions.
I’m arguing that we should pursue the policy that reduces crime in the aggregate. You haven’t explained what about that you think is insane and far left.
That’s not how you decrease crime “in the aggregate”. Your entire argument is leftist, what are you talking about?
It does not decrease “aggregate crime”. Crime isn’t some zero-sum math equation you just move around to dilute it. How can you even think like that. It’s a question of order and disorder. If you spread the entropy, it will only spread chaos and disorder. That’s exactly what’s happening, and what has always happened
It’s not about “spreading crime around.” US legal institutions are more effective at deterring and incapacitating criminals than the average sender country, so allowing more criminals to move from sender countries to the US reduces the total amount of crime they get away with.
Also, my argument is that states should stop interfering with free market processes that reduce the amount of crime in the world. What’s leftist about that?
They wouldn't be as effective if they were inundated with lots of new criminals, and would rapidly become as ineffective as they are in other countries. The US would then become like those places, which we as Americans do not want, and it is our government's sworn duty to prevent such a disastrous outcome.
This is either the dumbest article on Substack or an unbelievably good troll. There is no in-between.
That’s a problem with scale. You’d run into that problem at some point but it seems pretty clear that the US could still accept a lot more criminal migrants right now without anything like that happening.
No. Our criminal justice system is designed to administer justice in America. When you add 3rd world criminal networks, American law enforcement (especially in liberal cities still being defunded) cannot face the onslaught. In the end entropy wins….as it always has. Law and order is a very rare thing. You are treating it like it’s an easy thing.
No, that does not seem clear at all. The judicial and prison systems are already overwhelmed. Homelessness is a national crisis. State and municipal budgets are already stretched thin. Some crime always leads to more crime. Your ideas would impose immediate financial and social costs, which would grow rapidly with time.
This is some of the best satire of liberals I’ve ever read. Lmfao
What part do you disagree with, specifically? If it’s so absurd, it should be easy to say, right?
It’s great that immigrants go to rich countries and kill people, that’s awesome
If the alternative is more people being killed in a poor country, then it's not necessarily a bad thing.
In other words, do you prefer that 3 Mexicans are murdered or 1 American? If you value Americans and Mexicans equally, then it is "great" that two fewer people die.
This is a completely nonsensical way of thinking. This exact thinking is what leads to people spending money trying to save as many shrimp as they can instead of actual people they see suffering every day.
What part doesn't make sense to you? Does it help to number statements so you can just consider one thought at a time.
1. Criminals will commit crimes regardless of where they are. (Unless you believe there's something particular about the US that encourages crime, that seems hard to argue with. )
2. Therefore, moving criminals from one place to another just changes where crimes are committed.
3. Therefore, moving criminals around is only beneficial if you care where crimes are committed.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't support criminal deportation though. If you believe that it's better that crimes be committed elsewhere, it's entirely reasonable to support deportation. Or if you have some abstract sense that countries have a responsibility to deal with the criminals they produce. (But you don't extend the same logic to subnational administrations - someone born in New York but committing crimes in Chicago is not sent to New York)
This isn't a particularly unusual way of thinking. My city had a program that provided bus tickets out of town to homeless people. In theory it was for them to reunite with support out of state, but in practice it was just making them California's problem. Since my city's government is meant to serve city residents and not Californians, seems reasonable enough to me.
1) No, the proclivity to commit crimes doesn't change, but the opportunity is different in different environments. People in low trust societies find more opportunities for crime in high trust societies.
2) So, no not necessarily. It only changes where those with criminal proclivity are located.
3) Most people care were crimes are committed based on the distance from their persons. Even so-called altruists. The big difference between living in a safe area and a crime-ridden area is the psychological mindset. Going from a high trust area where safety is a given, to one where you need to be constantly on alert is a shock for most people.
The argument relies on the assumption that
>Because the United States is better at deterring and incapacitating criminals than a typical sender country
If you don't believe that, then it makes sense to reject the argument.
That seems to be the point of disagreement you have with the article. It'd be best to start off by supporting the idea that people are more likely to commit crime in the US than places like Honduras.
The author supports the opposite view (that someone is more likely to commit crime in sender countries) by comparing crime rates.
That's difficult to believe given that El Salvador was able to dramatically decrease crime by increasing incarceration. In the US, law enforcement is very efficient, but the criminal justice system is very inefficient and requires enormous resources with only moderate effectiveness, and we have not even touched on that subject. I find the author's particular theory, to put it mildly, an intelletual flight of fancy rather than a serious crime reduction idea. The devil is in the details. We could greatly reduce crime by executing every 3X felony repeat offender. In theory, this is logically valid and supported by the data on repeat offenders, but like the author's idea, it is an oversimplistic and unworkable solution in and of itself. However, of these two impractical ideas, mine would solicit more public support.
The ultimate issue is that people incapable of committing horrible crimes cannot enter the mind of those who can.
They would find a completely alien world, filled with terrifying ideas and observations, totally ignorant of the world the “straight” person exists in literally 100% of the time. They cannot imagine a world where they themselves would benefit from or benefit society from being behind bars for decades. But they are unaware that many people go through life more or less on the edge of catastrophic violence 24/7. Those living on the edge terrorize those around them relentlessly until physically prevented from doing so.
You find it difficult to believe that people are more likely to commit crime in the United States than places like Honduras or Mexico?
I don't see how El Salvador decreasing crime rates supports that belief.
Look at the El Salvador statistics for before and after. You also need to make sure you are measuring the same thing - the crime definitions and the reporting rate. The author is saying that we should import criminals because we are better at catching them. Bukele did it in El Salvador by locking up his own criminals. You also don't define "people". Do Hondurans, Venezuelans, or Salvadorans PER CAPITA commit more crimes here or in their native countries. You can't just look at the crime rate in the US in its entirety and make that claim. It's not evenly spread between different people and locations. As to your finding it difficult to believe, no one, including me, cares what your beliefs are. I suggest not using that term when making an argument. Look at the data yourself.
The entire premise of the scenario is false. Laughably. The first "switch" that was pulled was the decision to import a Mexican murderer to kill an American. The illustration ignores this and pretends the only choice was the subsequent one to prevent him from coming here costing Mexican lives rather than the first choice that cost American lives.
It is all just nihilistic "view from nowhere" horse crap. Because the converse is not true. I'll prove it:
Rare earth minerals, cobalt, and gold are much more useful in America where we have high tech industries and hospitals where advanced medical equipment can be put to good use. With the same amount of cobalt, we can make machines that will preserve the lives of 100 Americans whereas in African countries where cobalt is mined it could hardly be used to save one African. Therefore, the most good will result if we required Africa to give all its minerals used it technology to America.
If you don't agree with that--and you shouldn't--then you can't agree with the same logic that says Americans have to consent to being murdered by foreigners because foreigners aren't capable of keeping their own people from committing more murders than Americans are.
There is no first switch. The state doesn't "import" Mexican murderers. They come to the US because of market incentives. The question is whether the state should interfere with free market outcomes and in so doing get several people killed on net who wouldn't otherwise. I think the answer is obvious.
Also, I totally think we should allow the free trade of African minerals. Don't you?
Crime seeking a soft victim isn't "free market". That's obvious. And since you agree with me that we shouldn't do what I (expressly) sarcastically suggested about Africa, then you agree that Africa has a right to the benefit of its labor and resources of its own minerals. If others want them, they need to provide a benefit for them that Africa has a right to demand out of its own valid self-interest. It doesn't matter how many more Americans might benefit if they were given up for free.
Why isn't America entitled to the same basic self-interest as Africa? Why aren't we allowed to demand that, if you want access to our markets, you can't murder us? Basic free market contracts 101: not getting murdered is implied in the deal. That's also obvious.
This hyper modernism of yours is worse than nihilism. It's nihilism for Americans but total group self interest for everyone else.
The state effectively imports Mexicans by not enforcing immigration laws. If the Mexicans didn't enforce their immigration laws, the "market incentives" would mean that 10% of their population would be from South America, at least. As of right now they are ~98% Mexican.
Talking about the free market in 2026 is too rich for my blood. Like talking about democracy or the Constitution. We are trapped in a LARP of the early 19th century, seemingly forever.
Why should we care about the condition of all the poor countries? Id rather have them being antisocial somewhere else
If you value the lives of foreigners less, than the analysis here does not apply to you.
I certainly don't value their lives *more*. Yes, I would rather have them killing strangers in their home country than my family members, neighbors or countrymen. Because I'm not a self-immolating lunatic.
This article is very clear that it is written for people who would not choose to have three Mexicans die rather than one American.
If that's not you, then you're not the intended audience. Which is fine.
What would it do to the United States’ ability to deter crimes if there was a substantial increase in criminality? Is the United States prepared, for example, to fight the drug cartels on its own soil in the same manner that the Mexican Army and Federal Police do now if we allowed many many cartel members to emigrate to the US? How much collateral damage is acceptable in enforcing our laws under this model?
Yes it’s incredibly easy. This is our country, they live in theirs. If they’re going to rob, rape, and kill, it is better they do it to their own people than to us. This is pretty basic shit if you’re not a complete fucking moron.
On what basis would “they” be any different than “us” if the only thing differentiating the categories is the entirely unchosen luck of birth? There is only one people: humanity. There is no possible justified basis for people being permanently stuck in a caste of ANY kind solely because of the location of birth or the unearned status of their parents.
The only thing preventing “them” from being a part of “us” is your entirely unjustifiable hoarding of the privilege of residency or citizenship for nothing other than your own luck of birth.
There is no such thing as “unchosen luck of birth”. You aren’t born into an empty universe. You have parents, who have parents, etc.
Simply because you didn’t choose something, doesn’t mean it was random.
Wait until people find out about this thing called the nation state!
Utterly absurd. Which aspect of that could possibly have been earned or chosen? If you did not choose or earn those things then they literally are unchosen and unearned. And whether you consider the universe ordered or random doesn’t somehow address the salient aspect, which is that the specific quality of citizenship is entirely unearned.
You are in no way magically granted responsibility or choice for something you did not do, and nobody chooses their parents.
You most certainly are “granted responsibility” for things you didn’t choose. That’s been the story of humanity for millennia. It starts at the micro level—children are under an obligation to obey their parents, regardless of having no choice in being born. It then expands outward. You’re a part of something larger than yourself, whether you want to be or not. Protecting that collective entity is quite often as important as protecting your own person. Whether something is “earned” or “chosen” couldn’t possibly be less relevant in this scenario.
No. There is one collective: all of humanity, and you have no right or responsibility besides equality with every human alive, each of whom are fully entitled to an equal share of the collective material inheritance of all mankind rather than the nobility or caste of birth that you seem to desire
Well no, all of that is completely unsubstantiated horseshit and you’re retarded af for believing it.
I love that you didn't respond to his reply to this.
if it's so easy to defend your point, it should be easy to respond, right?
It’s not SATIRE. It’s INSANITY
But you knew that
This thread is now officially completely unusable lmfao I can’t find who is replying to what
But, as you mention in the opening, immigrant crime (or at least the perception thereof) causes people to vote to dismantle the Constitution and fuck up the economy (and further restrict immigration). This is a big externality of crime that's bigger in the US then elsewhere because the quality of our institutions is so important to the world! (I still favor open immigration despite this, but I think a system where it is paired with zero tolerance for violent/property crime is the only way to make it politically feasible in the long run)
Yes, if you’re accounting for political reality I agree. But as an anon blogger I have the luxury of not having to do that.
Part of the problem is that it appears no level of crime by immigrants is low enough because, due to in-group parochialism and out-group dehumanization, immigrants are solely treated as part of the crime numerator but never the aggregate human denominator. The benefit to the lives of millions of immigrants seems to add up to zero in the minds of nativists.
It is a concept that I still can’t actually wrap my head around, precisely because dehumanizing or othering people solely because of the unchosen and unearned accident of birth is so repulsive as to be unthinkable. Yet it appears a plurality or majority really do think it.
This is the most braindead piece I’ve read on this platform. Immigrants committing crime in their own 3rd world country is a whole lot different than committing crime in a 1st world country. Why should the 1st world country pay large sums of money, time, and effort to prosecute and incarcerate 3rd world immigrants that commit crimes? Makes no sense at all.
At least the deterrent of committing crime in their own country might be a stronger sentence or death penalty or whathaveyou.
If this is satire then… well done. Because I could see this being a legitimate talking point.
Why would the entirely unearned accident of birth make you more entitled to this structure of stability and justice than any other human alive?
It doesn't but why should we not act in our own interests?
Your logic extends to straight up communism, why shouldn't people give away their money, as after all they have it due to mostly genetic factors like IQ etc - communism isn't practical.
Regardless the migrant communities are going to maintain their tribalism - why shouldn't we, no need to accept asymmetric warfare.
Furthermore our countries progress civilisation - let's keep them functional so humans can advance - importing ethnic tension doesn't benefit us.
There is no “our own interest” as the only “our” is all humanity. I do think that “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is the only defensible meta ethical outcome, and don’t see any real ethical opposition that stands up at any point.
Whatever level of iniquity is required to keep humanity from collapsing at the hands of the greediest and most tribal portions of our population is an amount that perhaps may be grudgingly tolerated but with the constant knowledge that it is wholly unjust and sentences equally real human lives to penury and suffering for nothing but the unearned chance of birth.
“The only defensible meta ethical outcome,” that’s a pretty bold claim, especially considering that I’m pretty sure you used “meta ethics” incorrectly. Have you even taken a serious look at other ethical frameworks? or did you just attach yourself to the one that sounded the kindest on its face?
You are a victim of half-logic. It's fun to imagine a world in which everyone is selfless and virtuistic, but when you start theorizing policy on the assumption that everyone actually is, then you commit suicide. The half of the logic that says, "I'm not special, I'm just part of the whole world, so what right do I have to protect myself against the harms everyone else lives with" is not shared by the other half of the planet. If they did, then they would be saying, "I'm not special, what right do I have to send my problems overseas for other people to deal with." No, they are looking out for themselves and they don't care about your asinine "view from nowhere" philosophy is. Plenty of people you open yourself up to will just treat you as an easy victim.
In other words, you are entitled to protect yourself, no matter where you were born. That should have been easy.
On what basis would they have a responsibility to suffer? There is an enormous asymmetry in resources and infrastructure and social development that they need. The marginal utility at stake here is wildly asymmetric and so your claim does not hold up at all.
I’m pro localized nation state tribalism. Not sure how you read my post.
My reply was to kristin rather than your OP
🤝
Tribalism is the enemy of all humanity and inevitable leads to an endless and ever shrinking circular firing squad. It must be crushed viciously.
Nope, it's an inherent part of human nature and must be managed, not fought. Ensuring a common sense of identity and avoiding hostile ethnocentrism in your county is of paramount importance.
If you truly want it crushed start by not importing tribal cultures and ethnic groups
In Glenn's post, he praises the US for strong law enforcement relative to Latin American countries.
Why does the US have better law enforcement than Latin American countries? Why are Americans willing to pay to enforce the law in the United States, but not in Honduras?
Maybe it's because of American tribalism. Maybe if you get rid of tribalism, you get Honduras all over the globe. Every person for themselves. No sense of civic cooperation or seeking to build something together.
People already struggle to provision public goods at the nation level. There are many Honduras-like countries where nothing works. Police and politicians are corrupt and care nothing for their country, only for themselves. If you eliminate national pride everywhere, I don't think that necessarily leads to global flourishing. I think it might just lead to anarchy and dysfunction everywhere.
The number of people who *actually* care impartially about all of humanity across the globe is small. They are a scarce and valuable resource to allocate with care, not a huge bulwark you can rest on.
Another way of thinking about it is, supposing you're going to crush tribalism. Alright. What force is going to do this vicious crushing, exactly? In practice, when this happens, it always seems to be another tribe that claims they are doing this, which is worse than the tribe it replaces.
Good people aren't interested in "vicious crushing". The only people who will sign up for your "vicious crushing" crusade are moral narcissists: https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-age-of-moral-sadism
@Ser questrian So she is a dirty communist… Ding-Dong.
Your point of “entirely unearned accident of birth” seems profound and insightful until further investigation.
For centuries, nations have been establishing themselves and the people within those nations have been codifying laws, trying to improve their lives, and give their children a better life than they had themselves. Your sleight of hand is the notion that: “being entitled to structure of stability and justice” is a universal and not a localized right. I didn’t choose to be born in England anymore than someone chose to be born in North Korea. And yet my ancestors fought and bled and philosophized and legalized and died for the stability and justice you mention. In North Korea, such a claim cannot be made.
It is therefore self-evident that: I would not want to commit crime in my own country because I respect its values, customs, law, traditions, and justice systems - that took centuries to build out and maintain. However, it is ok for a new immigrant to come and commit atrocities that would otherwise have not been committed if they didn’t immigrate? That makes very little sense.
Your entitlement is one of mental and physical privilege. You can’t fathom the painstaking lengths it took to create structure and stability and justice that you take for granted, therefore it is ok for you to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Immigration as a concept is entirely dependent on a person moving from one nation that for whatever reason they dislike enough, to a nation that will better suit their needs. The question then remains: why would an immigrant committing a crime in the ‘better’ country make sense for the native inhabitants of that country? Does it make that country safer or more prosperous or more inviting to other immigrants who won’t commit crimes?
Surely you can see the point I’m making, knowing full well that your claim is vacuous and a thought experiment gone awry?
?? This entire post seems to indicate that you are somehow entitled to something based on ancestry that others also are not? Ancestry is entirely unchosen luck. You are not entitled to a single inheritance of the global achievements and deficits of mankind that any other human alive could be. By what right or basis would that unearned luck of birth provide you with a superior life and stability and structure?
And by moving and making an effort the immigrant is, of their volition, actually far MORE entitled. They actually did something to earn and choose it while you did nothing.
And what is it about the “nation” that you are meaning. Surely not some blood and soil absurdity... There is one single humanity and one global ancestry that stretches back at least to the evolutionary divergence of humanity. There is no arbitrary chance of “locality” that can possibly accrue more to you than any human alive.
So, in the end, what precisely is it about the fact that some fraction of immigrants will be criminals that somehow means that the protection of the laws or global reduction in crime are more deservingly appropriated to you? Is also the incredible material wealth and privilege of this place your just inheritance too? Despite inheritance being the most perfectly unearned concept imaginable?
Ok so let me ask you: if your parents built a successful company/business and wanted to pass it and all its wealth on to you - would you reject it since “you’re not entitled to anything based on ancestry”?
You would obviously accept their good graces & gift to you as their child. So now extrapolate that to a nation state and peoplehood.
Also - you don’t know that I’m actually an immigrant and have benefited the nations that I’ve immigrated to.
And lastly - the “we are all one humanity!” argument is cute but comical in its lack of geopolitical insight. Yes evolutionarily we are ‘all one’ and stem from the same species. Yet the amount of diversity between peoples and nations is vast and to claim that we all share the same values and ethics is a complete misnomer and lacks any worldliness or knowledge about the world, different societies and cultures. Do you share the same values as feet binding for women in rural China? Or how about female genital mutilation in Ghana or Nigeria? Or how about the regularity spousal cheating of Colombia? Or the work-drinking culture of Japan?
No I reject all inheritance as unjust, as only a collective inheritance is warranted, and would direct any and all inheritance I receive, absent unforeseen poverty that is not alleviated by underfunded social programs, to the most effective charities.
Ideally, however, enormous tax transfers across nations would allow people to iteratively and permanently benefit from the global inheritance of wealth without having to leave their homes and society, friends and family, unless they desired to.
Surely parenting is massively unjust. You give all your focus to the small beings related to you - and almost nothing to your neighbor's kids. Not even 1/100.000th as much.
Some parts of human life seem to be structurally "unjust". Would this then cause one to call into question one's concept of justice? For me personally it would.
"Ancestry is entirely unchosen luck."
There's a vast amount of unarticulated metaphysical assumptions underlying this statement. What do you base your metaphysics on?
What schema do you have for the allotment of souls? And why do you choose the framing of "luck"?
It’s not an unearned accident of birth. I’m an intentional creation of my ancestors who are bequeathing to me a specific inheritance and way of life. Maybe it sucks to live in a 3rd world country, but it’s up to them to fix their problems
You did not earn or choose your ancestors and can provide literally zero basis on which you would be entitled to more and others less because of the entirely unchosen and unearned (BY YOU) status of your parents or the soul of your birth.
How is it unchosen? Do you not believe that souls choose their point of entry into the world? From what I have read of accounts of near death experience, all these things are indeed chosen by souls prior to incarnation.
It has nothing to do with what anyone is “entitled to.” People do and should act in their own interest. This is a glaring example of the stupidity that can result when one forgets that fact.
Often we do not, altruism is real and we can and should value others lives equal to our own, but especially when a mere small cost to us causes enormous benefit to others. And the only “us” is all of humanity.
You put it a lot nicer than my first impression. Well done.
Ah, so the Harrison Bergeron-Handicapper General walks among us.
Yeah, but you cannot model this as a linear system. Argument may hold true at the margin, but that's irrelevant. Add too many a Mexican (murderer) and at some tipping point, you'll have critical mass, that they'll mexicanize the United States and form local cartel branches, coopt the political process and the American state/culture loses its monopoly on violence, that ensures the current low crime rate. Crime rates are a function of the sociological environment. Import the people, they'll bring that with them.
If American institutions are so great that to function they don't actually require Americans, you'd just export them to places that lack them. You've tried that before with nationbuilding in the Middle East and it did not work.
You should be advocating for Mexican immigration to a country like Japan, which has a 30x lower homicide rate. Also Japanese people are older and poorer than Americans, so their deaths are less costly.
I agree! though I wonder whether there might not be some broader knock on effects that might balance the scales a little more. e.g. lowering Social trust, or, say, getting people to vote for someone like Trump.
If this is intended seriously, it's naive. Nobody's a utilitarian when push comes to shove. Taken to its logical extreme it requires the dissolution of kinship. (do you really value a child on the other side of the world as much as your own child? No, of course you do not).
Is this a troll post? Or is this just what EA people do? I sincerely cannot tell.
The worry expressed in the first two objections is entirely mischaracterized here. Your response to the first objection — that we have special obligations to citizens that we don't have to non-citizens, and so, ceteris paribus, ought to prefer for crimes to happen outside it rather than inside it (even if the total volume of crimes is fewer if they happen inside a developed host nation) — treats it as concern for harm reduction simpliciter. But that's not it at all. An asymmetric concern for reducing harms to one's fellow citizens v. non-citizens can be completely justified if you think that harms to one's citizens undermine your prospects for the continued social cooperation necessary to sustain a flourishing country to which people from the less-developed world would like to migrate. Only the most dyed-in-the-wool cosmopolitans would think otherwise — and people rightly reject these kind of cosmopolitan worldviews as not just naive, but wrong.
The raw appeal to intuitions here is just silly — most people just don't have well-worked-out views about _why_ it's worse for the very same crime to be committed in your community than one to which you don't have binding ties of social cooperation. Even if you showed me polling data saying "crime is bad because it’s bad for the people who experience it" in ways that were completely neutral over the relationship between you, the crime, and your community that wouldn't make those views actually correct. Ethics isn't a polling practice. People can be wrong all the time.
Which is why your response to the second objection also entirely misses the point. The objection about social costs isn't to be understood as some autistic little summation of individual costs quantified in terms of a silly policy concept that really only makes sense in limited medical contexts — as if this were the only way to meaningfully represent social costs. No, the social costs are worse in the host nation than in the sending nation precisely because in these cases we're worried about, the host nation has more accumulated social capital — quantified in terms of the maturity of their political, educational, welfare, and economic institutions. The very differences which explain the direction of migration are the differences in value which threaten to be undermined by importing disorder — even if importing that disorder were to lower the global level of disorder. _That's_ the social cost with which the objection is concerned.
Ultimately though, what leaves me so baffled about this post is just how quickly and carelessly you deal with these objections. Like, in what world do they deserve anything less than 3000 word treatment? If it is a troll post then well done, you wasted twenty minutes of my saturday. If not, maybe spend some time with Joseph Heath's _Cooperation and Social Justice_ and get back to us with a deeper treatment?
Just because there are second-order arguments against immigration ("prospects for the continued social cooperation necessary to sustain a flourishing country") doesn't mean it's not important to point out that many people's first-order arguments against immigration are badly calculated due to ignoring one whole side of the equation. You need to understand first-order effects correctly before you can talk productively about second-order effects, and even if the second order effects run counter to the first-order effects they are not necessarily more important than the first-order effects.
I'm not a cosmopolitan so I don't agree with the moral premise here. But I used to be and I know the argument made sense from a cosmopolitan premise.
I'm not sure what you mean by first and second-order effects here. There are just effects and their impact. Can you maybe say more about why we ought to privilege one set over the other in our thinking?
A first-order impact would be the direct harm of the immigrant's crime. A second-order impact would be that when the immigrant commits a crime, it undermines the social cooperation necessary for flourishing, like natives start voting for the far right and so on, and that eventually leads to more suffering.
We should privilege the first set because the second set depends on the first set, and is impossible to talk accurately about the second set without first being accurate about the first set. For instance, after recognizing that immigrants would still be committing crimes anyway even if they couldn't migrate, we will recognize that immigrants would still be undermining social cooperation in their home countries even if they couldn't migrate.
Second, even without privileging one set of effects over the other, it just may be the case that a given first order impact happens to be bigger than a given second order impact. Like maybe it's worth undermining social cooperation if it means there is less crime! Maybe? Therefore, do not shut down discussion of the first-order impacts by saying that it is trolling or a waste of time. Respect the argument, but then give the counterargument.
Good that’s much clearer. Appreciate you taking the time to make that explicit — makes it easier to isolate disagreement.
I don’t think you can hold first order harms fixed when considering the same crime committed domestically v internationally. It is rational to care more about preventing the murder of your family member/neighbor/countryman than the murder of someone with whom you bear no political relations. The former just is more harmful to you (victim aside). Idk, maybe you consider that a second-order effect, but the harms to the families of crime victims seem quite relevant to evaluating the counterfactuals?
I also just kind of reject the premise that we can safely assume the criminal immigrant would be just as likely to commit a crime in their country of origin. It just seems plainly intuitive that conditions in the host country could be such that they raise a person’s criminal propensity. Obviously we should want to be better at accommodation so this doesn’t happen — but the ghetto-fication of African immigrant communities in Europe seems to kind of raise the stakes for this point? If economic and social life in the host country turns out to actually be harder than it is in the origin country (or if the barrier to entry for crime in the origin country is higher because it’s cornered by extremely militant cartels) then we should expect criminal propensities to also differ across the counterfactual cases.
It’s those kind of arguments that Inwould have liked to see addressed. I am certainly not trying to shut down discussion — if anything, my continued engagement here should be evidence I want to deepen it. But I also do not have much respect for Glenn’s argument. That may be a problem for people’s willingness to further engage in discussion, but if so that’s a vice with which I have to contend.
thanks. not that I disagree overall but I think it's just kind of crazy to do the analysis without acknowledging both sides of the ocean. And I can think of like 2 people who have ever written about it this way, namely, the OP and me.
It is not in any way rational to prefer that any human alive suffer one iota more than you would accept for yourself or your friends or the people who by random chance live within geographic proximity…
Hey Kristin, I think you'll find that most EA folks will be comfortable granting that we have some special obligations to family, neighbors, and countrymen that we don't have to people in general. They have a hard time grounding that in consequentialist terms, but there are very few who bite the bullet and say we don't — those are wildly unintuitive views I think most people would rightly interpret as reductio's of EA.
The claim is just that these special obligations are rational, and that they can ground rationally asymmetric preferences, cares, etc. It's really worth thinking critically about the geographic point. I know those who are Singer-brained find it hard to believe after reading about kids drowning in ponds, but I think if you reflect on it for a while you'll understand that we actually do have these special obligations to those with whom we're in political and geographic community.
You can believe all that and still believe that all humans have equal dignity and worth, and that none deserve to suffer more than any other (ceteris paribus). It doesn't follow from that that all moral relationships are fungible in the way that Singer and some consequentialist egalitarians need for their views to work. If you're interested, you might have a look at Hilary Greaves' concessions on this score. There aren't many professional philosophers who take EA seriously (which should tell you something), but Hilary is one of the few who does it seriously with the rigor it demands. And even she concedes that we have these special obligations and that it's rational to have some partiality towards those you're close to. Ofc, pure consequentialism can't account for this — and that's one of the many reasons why folks think it's wrong.
Anyway, you're right to push for clarity here and I appreciate your curiosity. Keep it up.
I mean I genuinely don’t understand how we have any different obligations of even one molecule to any human alive than to our parents or best friends. I do find the Singer view entirely intuitive for the exact same reason that I don’t take the side of friends in disputes where there is even a modest indication that they were in the wrong when dealing with a stranger or opponent.
Of course I also called myself out at second base playing softball when the ump missed a call and said I was safe, so admittedly I clearly struggle with some aspects of in group preference that deeply deeply trouble me now.
Do you object to buying birthday or Christmas presents for your family members?
There are 8 billion humans on Earth. You can't buy a present for everyone. Best to not buy anything, so as to treat everyone equally?
How about paying for gas to go see your grandparent in the hospital if they are dying? You wouldn't pay for gas to visit a random homeless person on their deathbed. If the obligations are identical, you should insist on your grandparent dying alone, since you can't be with everyone when they are dying.
My view is: These reciprocal family/friend relationships are, by and large, mutually beneficial and allow both parties in the relationship to prosper to a greater extent than they would otherwise. Your friend lets you crash on their couch when you are broke; you do the same when they are broke. We have built-in bio-hardware for forming such close relationships, which we can leverage for mutual prosperity. Increased prosperity means we have more resources to help distant strangers. So we can reconstruct the case for close family/friend relationships from first principles, even for a hypothetical impartial altruist. No person is an island.
You are talking about convenience or scale of outcomes. I don't see why having an impartial altruistic obligation to all people somehow denies pareto-optimality when it comes to personal relationships. Nor why buying presents for friends and family would somehow subvert an equal or greater obligation to donate to effective charities or to support high global transfers of wealth...
You're not being very clear. How, exactly, is buying presents for family and friends consistent with a belief that your obligations to family and friends don't differ by "even one molecule" from your obligations to a random person in Africa?
The random person in Africa calls you on the phone, says "Hey Kristin, where is my present? You bought a present for your sister. Why not for me?" What do you say in response?
If you're not careful, I'll be in your DMs soon, demanding that you send *me* free stuff, in accordance with your professed philosophy 😉 I could use some free stuff!
It sounds like you’re just a moral idiot.
How or why aren’t you a cosmopolitan anymore?
It doesn't make sense to me anymore to care about other people if those people don't likewise care about me. If the Middle East was a rich safe place while America was screwed up and full of criminals, they would not be allowing us to immigrate there.
I don’t think that adopting the ethics of one’s interlocutors, especially if that ethical position inevitably degrades into the prisoner’s dilemma, works. Especially not when it comes to making individual human lives subject to an inverted hypothetical. Do you want the ethos of your conceptual opponents to govern your world?
I think it is especially dangerous, and dark, to apply this to the very persons likely to flee such a country. Who are in many cases precisely the people who aren’t even welcomed or safe in their nation of birth.
Whether utilitarianism or virtue modeling or an honest application of the veil of ignorance or deontological values about the value of each life, I really don’t see how one can escape cosmopolitanism without sacrificing one’s very core.
There's a famous tweet that goes: "My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying."
If you are invariably super nice to everyone, regardless of how nasty they are, you're feeding resources to nasty people the same way the neighbor is feeding cats to the local coyotes.
If you want people to be nice, you have to provide incentives for them to be nice. In game theory terms, being a CooperateBot just feeds resources to DefectBots, which leaves us collectively worse off, since the DefectBots now have more resources.
Glenn's post is premised on the idea that the US has effective law enforcement, i.e. we're willing to punish DefectBots with reasonable swiftness and certainty. That's essential for peace and prosperity. From a game-theoretic point of view, in the prisoner's dilemma, the most altruistic strategy is actually tit-for-tat with forgiveness, not CooperateBot.
When the Utilarpitarian says something short-termist that you genuinely just hit him with that Kantian stare…
No part assumes utilitarianism
Interesting… now split out the US born population crime statistics by race… I want to see something
This is a great argument for reestablishing colonial rule. It's a win-win! Americans get to rebuild a high trust society, and the third world gets first world governance and organization.
In Europe we find that young male migrants are more likely to commit crime in the more tolerant west. Poorer countries can easily manage criminals in 2026 it's not really a matter of money. El Salvador isn't rich and significantly reduced crime. The USA as a more liberal country needs to be especially careful in regards to who they admit
>The correct position on immigrant crime is that it’s a good thing, or at least plausibly a good thing compared to the alternative, which is immigrants committing crimes in their home countries.
The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, "A good thing for whom?"
Allegedly solving the world's problems in the abstract all at other people's expense -entitled liberal
Does this article really categorically call every American rich to justify this slop? Please, how many dumb liberals in this comment section would go to bat for poor Americans and their socioeconomic factors the instant the framework isn't this terrible article?
Spineless, this article is a meme that is a wall of text. Judge Dred style law and order is more sane than this anarcho tyranny slop.
The problem with the trolley analogy is that it’s static. People in the real world respond and adapt as the game repeats.
In round one, a criminal who would have offended in Honduras now offends in Houston instead, where he’s more likely to be caught and jailed. Global crime falls.
But it doesn’t end in round one. There are many more rounds to follow. As crimes mount, people notice. If Americans voted to “dismantle the Constitution” over immigrant crime in 2024, as the author says, what happens when it doubles or triples? More police, surveillance, and profiling. Less trust and freedom.
The exchange rate between “a death in the U.S.” and “three deaths in Mexico” isn’t a constant. The ratio shrinks every time the trolley makes its run and our institutions - rule of law, trust - erode, and we eventually become Mexico.
Thank you. I’m using this as an example of how completely insane the logic of the far left is.
I think my position, “there should be less crime,” is a pretty sane and not remotely leftist position, actually
That’s not what you wrote at all you clown
It’s exactly what I wrote. Can’t you read?
You’re arguing to decrease 3rd world crime by increasing 1st world crime. That’s not how crime works dumbass. This is like arguing to calm down Visigoths by inviting the Ostrogoths and Lombards into your country with no restrictions.
I’m arguing that we should pursue the policy that reduces crime in the aggregate. You haven’t explained what about that you think is insane and far left.
That’s not how you decrease crime “in the aggregate”. Your entire argument is leftist, what are you talking about?
It does not decrease “aggregate crime”. Crime isn’t some zero-sum math equation you just move around to dilute it. How can you even think like that. It’s a question of order and disorder. If you spread the entropy, it will only spread chaos and disorder. That’s exactly what’s happening, and what has always happened
It’s not about “spreading crime around.” US legal institutions are more effective at deterring and incapacitating criminals than the average sender country, so allowing more criminals to move from sender countries to the US reduces the total amount of crime they get away with.
Also, my argument is that states should stop interfering with free market processes that reduce the amount of crime in the world. What’s leftist about that?
They wouldn't be as effective if they were inundated with lots of new criminals, and would rapidly become as ineffective as they are in other countries. The US would then become like those places, which we as Americans do not want, and it is our government's sworn duty to prevent such a disastrous outcome.
This is either the dumbest article on Substack or an unbelievably good troll. There is no in-between.
That’s a problem with scale. You’d run into that problem at some point but it seems pretty clear that the US could still accept a lot more criminal migrants right now without anything like that happening.
No. Our criminal justice system is designed to administer justice in America. When you add 3rd world criminal networks, American law enforcement (especially in liberal cities still being defunded) cannot face the onslaught. In the end entropy wins….as it always has. Law and order is a very rare thing. You are treating it like it’s an easy thing.
No, that does not seem clear at all. The judicial and prison systems are already overwhelmed. Homelessness is a national crisis. State and municipal budgets are already stretched thin. Some crime always leads to more crime. Your ideas would impose immediate financial and social costs, which would grow rapidly with time.
You are an imbecile.
No. No. That’s not how it works
Ok do you actually have a reason for saying that though?
England. Ireland. France
Literally all of history and all of legal theory.
It’s none of my business if they commit crimes in a shithole country, as long as they don’t come here and turn my country into a shithole