Why This Libertarian Changed His Mind on Immigration

i had to disagree on i i figured you did and and this is a nice nuanced conversation i and and i i you know again we may agree on parts within this i said i said agree um but there's maybe some caveats to that that we can discuss so here's the here's the hard part for me because i actually uh you probably don't know my history i don't know probably most people listening on my history you know but i i used to be closer to uh you know an open borders a more immigration kind of person because i got into liberty through the economics and it is true that there are people here who would be more productive uh you know and it's theoretically a win-win when uh you uh when things can be made you know cheaper and we can take it and this we're not taking advantage of them in a bad sense like it's a win-win to to be when when things get you know the ai is going to make uh i'm a i'm a software engineer the ai makes it a lot easier to make software that's not a bad thing that's a good thing when um most people are consumers when it's cheaper to make things generally everyone benefits and so maybe not everyone but on net people benefit and so you know my default answer for a long time used to be closer to yours what i've grown concerned about is that is sort of you know how do you

maintain the system itself like part of part of what allows western nations america to work to the extent that they do and i'm sure you and i agree that they don't even work that well um but they do actually work better than most of the rest of the world and how do we maintain that course system how do we maintain an infrastructure um that's relatively impartial again compared to the to the rest of the world there's these concepts of like um clientelism and uh you know how much how much do you have to get favors to get things done by the government versus your government treats just treats you fairly and it's like it's basically western europe and japan are like the only places in the world that have something and again we don't think we have it that good but you look at the rest of the world we kind of we kind of do and so how do we how do we maintain those outcomes if we're if we're there are all kinds of people who might be economic contributors but they might have negative externalities on the system they might be degrading the system itself and and uh so that's one aspect of and then the other one is i do care about things beyond you know economics i do care about am i going to have personal liberty you know in my life like i would i would have liked to live in a place

you know i i do think covet to me is a very crystallizing example again where it's like i'm not saying i have the right to expel them or something but like i would like to live in a place where yeah very few people were responding the way that most of america and most of the world did i recognize that that's objectively a rare preference but if that's a rare preference and i want to sustain my preferences then i do need to be concerned about the portion of people who hold them in my in my you know polity or nation yeah and um and the other thing which i thought you were going to mention on this is is sort of you know uh statistics i mean there there are people you've you've looked at a lot of data and you've posted a lot of data there are people that just don't share our values i mean their country their entire countries where and you know you can't always discriminate against everything in a group but there are entire countries where where the over if you have any group of people where you have you know 80 85 percent of a demographic that that says something insane like you know that's completely antithetical to our values that's something that you should know and you say gee might give you pause to have these people come in and and hopefully you know

ideally we could fix that with systems i think that that having the privilege to vote and serve on a jury um you mentioned one one time before you alluded to it just now kind of you know what if what if you want to you have a dispute with your neighbor and you have somebody who just doesn't respect property rights or something i mean there's some there's some wacky people out there with wacky ideas so to that extent uh you know i definitely recognize there is a big difference in cultures um but hopefully we can solve that by systems where we create a system where it it it doesn't because we're um you know not just letting everybody in and we're certainly not letting them vote and have power over us where you know i've been all over the world i've been blessed to travel you know and i've met people that are you know from very very screwy places who have very screwy ideas um and i've met people who can't read i've met people where i'm convinced that that they cannot understand basic cause and effect and they can't understand anything i used to be very against the idea of um you know like they have in singapore caning i thought i said oh you know i'm against i'm a libertarian i don't want the government caning anybody somebody talked to me about it said you

know there are people who just can't understand anything and as a you know former martial artist i realized there's nothing that will rewire the brain better than a beating you know and you see those you see those guys you've all seen that video of those seek guys where you know they're in some socialist hell hole like california and the guy just moseys in and he's stealing the cigarettes and they've had enough and they came out from behind and they beat that tar out of him and he's screaming on the camera that guy was rewired in that moment and that saved the taxpayers you know 300 grand that they would have put him in a prison where he would have learned learn stuff there are people who and they're people especially from certain very failed states where that is the only way they'll understand however having said that this is how screwy they are having said that i i also have seen these people become quite productive i've seen these same people from the most screwy places in the world uh senegal uh somalia afghanistan um and they're they'll work like crazy very very um low wages which um if you could have somebody that you could have who's like gonna clean your car and polish your tires

and drive you and get all your food and it would cost us here in new hampshire you know 80 bucks a week or something like that that could improve our lifestyle and a lot of people would and i won't get too off topic but people would say well that's terrible and that's cruel because they need to get 20 bucks an hour it's like well in their country they're gonna die they're gonna make a dollar a day so i think it's quite humanitarian if i could put somebody and pay them uh you know what are very low wages for new hampshire and and also frankly if somebody doesn't know how to read you know they're just not as marketable as your average new hampshire person who works at a fast food joint um so anyway i think that there is big differences culturally but i think that we can we could address that i you know and again there's the ideal world versus the real world but in an ideal world we would have systems that would recognize that and make it so it's like well i don't really care if this guy's a screwball from a screwy country because he doesn't have any power over me we can use them to the extent that we can one of the things that i always come back to with that question is well okay if we get if we can have this system i because i agree that some of these

screwballs have you know there's there's they i think in the right system they could they could contribute more how is that like that system can't exist with any percentage of like if it's 90 if my population is 99 this person right my sit like yeah so even even if you think the right system could accommodate some of these people yeah there still have to be a limit yeah okay and that's interesting because we didn't have limits for a lot of our history from like i think 1790 to 1915 or 14 or something like that yeah there were but there was some natural selection yeah not in the darwinian sense but like a you couldn't get here yeah yeah yeah who who was coming here that and the world is is huge you know there are there are like i say you know a billion people without a toilet there's a you know another couple billion from second and third world countries there's another billion who just completely don't have values that that coincide with our values so you know that's a lot of probably kind of like four billion you know on the conservative side that to some degree could be disruptive particularly if you let in 200 million of them yeah you know i think i also think again people have i think generally people have the right to what what they want it

depends they don't necessarily have the right to want what they want on any scale like i can't necessarily want california to be the way that i would want it to be or whatever i don't know that's not where i live but you know if i want to live in a neighborhood that celebrates or sorry that speaks english and puts up christmas lights you know in this kind of thing like i ought to have the right there should be some way that i can produce that you know uh that you know and so what i i i think maybe that doesn't necessarily apply to america we we could talk about the various scales we probably should move on from this question but definitely i also think there has to be if if people if a lot of people want something there's generally a way of producing it that's consistent with property rights and and you know our kinds of our kinds of values and so if a lot of people you know want to live in an english-speaking you know uh christian nation maybe not everyone is christian but it's dominated by christian principles or or things in this direction like you know i always don't like it when libertarians answer is like well you're not allowed to have that you know uh because i think for the most part there is ways we can produce all kinds of different societies in ways that are

aligned with the principles of of liberty and property rights and voluntary agreement and so um i'm always where and i don't think you were saying this so i'm not trying to say you're saying that but i am