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Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alie

Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
What makes them reasonable? Do you subscribe to some sort of corporatist ideology, where the needs/rights of some vague swiss-german corporate outweigh the needs/rights of individual humans? If so, I'm curious about something. There are 2^{6 billion} possible subsets of humanity. Any individual human is a member of 50% of them. This makes it impossible to treat all corporates equally, so how do you determine which corporates have these rights and which don't? (I use "corporatist" in the original sense, where a "corporate" is simply some collective of humans rather than specifically a state registered limited liability corporation. I'm also very deliberately NOT mentioning a scary associated word.)
- sbmassey 10y ago
  In a given country at a given time, the set of people who are citizens of that country will have a given set of cultural norms, speak a particular language, have a particular understanding of the relation between the government and the people and the law. The immigration of enough people from outside that set will change those attributes, and therefore change how the country is run, which may be displeasing to the original set of people. You seem to be assuming that cultural attributes are randomly distributed across the world in your second paragraph.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    If enough local people engage in political activism or other cultural activities, then those attributes may also change. Those changes may be displeasing to people who favor the original values. Therefore, should we also ban political activism? If not, why not? I'm assuming nothing about cultural attributes. I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. And if it is justified morally, I also can't see why one can't use the same justification to suppress various local cultural movements which might also change how the country is run and displease a bunch of people.
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      > I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. So what you're saying is that people in Syria should not resist the invasion by ISIS. Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion
      - mamon 10y ago
        >> Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion All rumours about French people resisting Nazis are greatly exagreggated.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Of course they should resist the use of violence by others. I'm merely suggesting the French shouldn't violently resist people coming to France and peacefully selling weinershnitzel and saurkraut to people who enjoy these things.
        Natsu 10y ago
        I don't think you'll get any principle out of this beyond something like "my preferences are the best preferences."
        harryh 10y ago
        In general the right of people to do as they please as long as they aren't infringing on the rights of others isn't considered a mere "preference."
        Natsu 10y ago
        That would work if deciding which things are and are not rights was not itself a preference. You can say that you have some axiom which informs your decisions, but you may have some difficulty proving that this axiom is superior to all others, or all others known (and in which logical framework?). In practice, this usually ends up selecting for the preference to simply not care about any of the above.

Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

What makes them reasonable? Do you subscribe to some sort of corporatist ideology, where the needs/rights of some vague swiss-german corporate outweigh the needs/rights of individual humans? If so, I'm curious about something. There are 2^{6 billion} possible subsets of humanity. Any individual human is a member of 50% of them. This makes it impossible to treat all corporates equally, so how do you determine which corporates have these rights and which don't? (I use "corporatist" in the original sense, where a "corporate" is simply some collective of humans rather than specifically a state registered limited liability corporation. I'm also very deliberately NOT mentioning a scary associated word.)

sbmassey 10y ago
In a given country at a given time, the set of people who are citizens of that country will have a given set of cultural norms, speak a particular language, have a particular understanding of the relation between the government and the people and the law. The immigration of enough people from outside that set will change those attributes, and therefore change how the country is run, which may be displeasing to the original set of people. You seem to be assuming that cultural attributes are randomly distributed across the world in your second paragraph.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  If enough local people engage in political activism or other cultural activities, then those attributes may also change. Those changes may be displeasing to people who favor the original values. Therefore, should we also ban political activism? If not, why not? I'm assuming nothing about cultural attributes. I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. And if it is justified morally, I also can't see why one can't use the same justification to suppress various local cultural movements which might also change how the country is run and displease a bunch of people.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. So what you're saying is that people in Syria should not resist the invasion by ISIS. Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion
    - mamon 10y ago
      >> Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion All rumours about French people resisting Nazis are greatly exagreggated.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Of course they should resist the use of violence by others. I'm merely suggesting the French shouldn't violently resist people coming to France and peacefully selling weinershnitzel and saurkraut to people who enjoy these things.
      - Natsu 10y ago
        I don't think you'll get any principle out of this beyond something like "my preferences are the best preferences."
        harryh 10y ago
        In general the right of people to do as they please as long as they aren't infringing on the rights of others isn't considered a mere "preference."
        Natsu 10y ago
        That would work if deciding which things are and are not rights was not itself a preference. You can say that you have some axiom which informs your decisions, but you may have some difficulty proving that this axiom is superior to all others, or all others known (and in which logical framework?). In practice, this usually ends up selecting for the preference to simply not care about any of the above.