Seriously, Why Are You Freaking Out?

by Will Wilkinson on February 11, 2008

My comments are teeming with racists good people who believe in the racial and cultural superiority of Americans of European descent clearly terrified by the prospect of the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony in America. The worry seems to be that with a slightly liberalized immigration regime the U.S. will swiftly devolve into some kind of squalid hell.

Like California?

Califonia Population by Ethnicity

[Click for bigger image.]

Presently, whites are well less than half the Calfornian population. Hispanics make up just more than a third. Asians at 12 percent are nearly double the black population. I’d guess it won’t be long before Hispanics pass whites to become a plurality.

Now, if my fearful commenters aren’t simply making things up in their paranoid dreams, wouldn’t California be a complete disaster already? Of course, we all know that, were it a country, California would be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. The median household income in California, $54,385, ranks 11th in the U.S., and would put California right near the top of the world rankings.

No doubt the browning of California has become unpleasant for some white natives. But according to the 2007 United Van Lines internal migration study, California just had another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rates, leaving net migration about a wash. And the out-migration that exists is probably more a result of price pressure than white flight, given that California is the most expensive state in the country in which to live. Indeed, the fact that more people don’t leave due to such high costs is an indication of how desirable life in California must be. Arizona, a border state whose population is almost a third Hispanic (and that percentage is swiftly growing), is one of the favorite destinations for internal American migration, and in some recent years has been the favorite. So Arizona, which boasts a median family income right around the national median, is either doing just fine or the many thousands of Americans who move there each year are stupid.

So what gives my xenophobic friends? If the idea is that the U.S. will inevitably slide toward second-world status if the whole place comes to look a lot more like California and Arizona demographically, wouldn’t you expect California and Arizona to be much poorer and much less popular? I mean, given the claims I’m getting from some of you, these places ought to be nightmares. But instead they are … really nice places to live!

Anyway, I can’t say I’m looking forward to the explanation of how it is that, if suddenly cut loose from the Union, an independent California and its half-wit citizens would swiftly vote its way into conditions resembling the slums of Calcutta. But I’m pretty sure it’s coming…

Viewing 65 Comments

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    My comments are teeming with racists clearly terrified by the prospect of the breakdown of Anglo-European cultural hegemony in America.

    When in doubt, or, worse, in defeat, cry racism. Works like a charm among the rubes in the coastal backwaters....

    In fact, of course, there are two distinct, though related, issues being conflated here: on the one hand, there's the "we don't need no stinkin' borders" position, which effectively undercuts the existence of any state. If a "border" has no more meaning than just a line on a map, then all the libertarian rectitude in the world will not avail when there's no longer any substantial way to distinguish between those whose rights a state must protect from those it cannot.

    On the other hand, there's a simple issue of the rate of change of a culture (not, it's tiresome to have to add, a "race") -- regardless of the skin color of those currently occupying an area, there is a limit to the rate at which they'll accept fundamental change to their symbols, language, way of life, practices, values, etc. Those who routinely and mindlessly haul out the "racism" canard at every instance of this sort of resistance are merely displaying an unpleasant combination of ignorance and moral preening.
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    Pity about those racists; well, I'm sure your legion of right-thinking readers will leap to your defence any day now.

    Appropos of nothing in particular, I was just over at Bloggingheads.tv, where I watched a most interesting program. It was the interview of a journalist named Eric Weiner who has just written a book about happiness. When pressed by his interlocutor to declare the happiest country on earth, he mentioned "Iceland" because, in part, (and I am quoting from memory here): it is small and ethnically-homogeneous. At that point, the interviewer made a lame attempt to change the subject (mustn't give the crypto-fascists any more ammunition, of course) but he made no effort to contradict the filthy, cross-burning nativist. Weiner also mentioned the importance of a strong native culture in the inclucation of happiness, a position which Wilkinson has, on this blog, denounced as veiled racism.

    What was the matter? Didn't you feel like debating the gentleman?

    p.s. "slightly liberalized immigration regime"

    What happened to the dream of totally unindered travel of peoples, labour moving toward its highest value and all that jazz?
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    Look, if can't call people openly asserting European racial superiority and pining for the loss of apartheid racist, then who can I call a racist?

    Larry, maybe you'd like to address the point of the post?

    What I want is an argument about the point at which higher rates of immigration become counterproductive. Many of the commenters clearly think we are ALREADY past that point. I'm asking for evidence and providing a bit of my own.
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    Fred, I think you're being a bit dense. I didn't pursue it because there is nothing much to pursue. Most of the world's least happy places are ethnically homogeneous. And a high level of toleration for pluralism is one of the strongest correlates of happiness.

    p.s., see above... this post wasn't about the dream, it was about the point of diminishing returns from liberalizing immigration. I don't see a shred of evidence we're anywhere near that point. So there is no excuse for not liberalizing immigration. I prefer a large guest worker program that separates the right to live and work in the U.S. from other benefits of citizenship.
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    Well, first, maybe you'd like to actually point to the people "openly asserting European racial superiority". I'm afraid I missed that.

    And then perhaps you could clarify "the point of the post" -- are you saying that, yes, there IS a point at which higher rates of immigration become counterproductive", but we're just not there yet? Or are you saying that there's no such thing as too high a rate of immigration? And are you saying that economic damage is the only measure of "counterproductivity"? Whatever happened to happiness? Last, but not least, are you really saying that a state's borders should be just a cartographic artifact, or are you just fooling around?
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    Larry, A few posts down I said, "I am open to serious, empirically-minded arguments about the location of the point at which additional openness to migration leads to diminishing benefits. But, I’m afraid, one sees very little of this." I do think there is likely such a point. I think we are miles from it. Economic growth (or lack thereof) is I think the best and least tendentious measure of counterproductivity. Californians are quite happy, FYI. State borders are the boundaries of public goods jurisdictions. That means something pretty important, but something much, much less important than nationalist would have it.

    For the racism, try this one out.
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    Will,

    You can call this blogger a racist. I don't think he'd mind at all. He also seems to be an anti-Semite. (A lot of racists are also anti-Semites.) Note that the author, while a racist, does indeed live in California. I suspect he is not the only racist in this notoriously racist state.

    The racist South African blog South Africa Sucks is also a good source of racism. Don't miss the racist Death of Johannesburg photo galleries, linked on the left. It has many interesting racist comments from racist South African refugees, many of whom seem to be racists.

    I'm not endorsing these racist sites. I'm just suggesting that they're a good way to calibrate your racist-o-meter. If SAS is a 10 out of 10, what is Steve Sailer? A 2? A 4? It's food for thought, that's for sure. If you don't mind thinking about racists.

    Also try Google Books. They have most stuff before '22, and pretty much all the American history written between 1890 and 1940 was seriously racist. The racist professors William Archibald Dunning and John Burgess, of Columbia, were two of the great racist historians. Most of Dunning and Burgess is on GB, and I think you'll find their work quite interesting - if, of course, racism is your cup of tea. Or you can try racist Edgar Bowers' racist history of Reconstruction, the 1930s racist bestseller The Tragic Era.

    But the original racist is of course Carlyle. If you feel it is appropriate to refer to anyone whose epidermis is darker than a soy macchiato as "Quashee," you are probably a racist, and you'll probably like Carlyle. An fascinating exercise for the aspiring antiracist might be to ask oneself which racist writer is the most racist - "The Big Effer," "The Uhuru Guru," or Carlyle? Perhaps you'll consider this in a future post.
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    Will,
    I consider myself a reasonable person who is instinctively libertarian—both fiscally and socially—but is also sympathetic to nativist concerns and would very much like to see an honest, open debate on this subject. It’s my general impression that the reasonable nativist arguments will stress the following:

    1) A decline in out-migration is hardly a ringing endorsement of a policy; perhaps it just means that things have more or less gotten as bad as they are going to. Besides, the general pattern of out-migration is precisely what nativists predict.

    2) A very important statistic to look at will be income inequality in California. I believe that the most defensible nativist story will be that increasing Hispanic immigration leads to more Tiebout sorting and an increase in land prices; so the high land prices and large influx of immigration are very much linked. This story is entirely consistent with the notion that California is a nice place to live, given that you are rich enogh. Feudal Europe was a nice place to live, given that you were rich enough.

    I also feel that if you’re going to call people racist, you ought to be willing to say specifically what propositions you consider to be racist. Do you think any propositions with the following forms are racist: 1) X% of the observed IQ differences between groups are caused by variations in gene frequencies (i.e. is there some number of X that causes 1 to become a racist proposition.) 2) Y% of the observed socioeconomic differences between group are caused variation in gene frequencies between groups.

    I am generally sympathetic to pro-growth propositions, and have not yet heard the nativist’s put on a strong enough economic argument to convince me, but I also think that dismissing their concerns out of hand and calling them racists is intellectually dishonest.
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    [Here's the same without the broken tag.]

    To be slightly more serious, the main thing that’s happened to California is that it has (a) become bankrupt, and (b) become a one-party state. If you have a WSJ subscription, a fair summary of the latter is here.

    Other than that, the changes are relatively minor, unless of course you live somewhere where the housing is cheap enough to attract non-Asian minorities. Then you have to flee. As Time, that notorious racist rag, puts it, “Los Angeles is in terrible shape - again.”

    I live in SF, not LA. I used to live in a gang-controlled area of the Mission - Norteños, I believe. The Mexican gangs in SF don’t really hate white people, for whatever reason, so it’s not that bad, as long as you don’t mind being surrounded by barbarism and mayhem. My gay roommate had a bottle thrown at his head once. But it missed.
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    KapKool, I am calling RACISTS racist, really. It is good to do this, I swear, and intellectually and morally dishonest not to do so. But it certainly hampers conversation, doesn't it? I think claims of ethnic inferiority and unassimilability are racist. How's that?

    Can you explain your Tiebout sorting point? I'd think the reason there is so much clustering around the border comes from the violation of the cost-free movement assumption.
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    Here's a fresher discussion on LA's gang problem. Which scares you more? These dudes, or global warming? If the latter, you may be a progressive.

    If you're not familiar with the LA Weekly, I think it's LA's leading alternative racist tabloid. Perhaps comparable to the Jackson, Miss., Negro Crime Report, the Topeka White Times or the Vanilla Underground up in Seattle.
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    Tiebout sorting just refers to effect of peoples’ preferences for public goods and services on the demographic distribution across an area of land. For instance, if you thought that an influx of immigrants into a community would lead a lot of people in that community to relocate or to raise barriers to entry into the community (e.g. more restrictive regulations on home appearance or a shrinking of the geographic area for admittance to school districts) you’d say that there would be Tiebout sorting effects.

    The basic nativist scenario seems to me to be that immigration and ethnic heterogeneity has the sorting effects of native out-migration and increased cost of access to public goods as natives cluster more densely into their own communities and seek to keep immigrants out (e.g. more natives bidding for immigrant-free land raises land prices; wanting to avoid admitting immigrants into native school districts leads to higher local taxes, etc.) Certainly, such barriers to entry into a region could lead to clustering around the border.
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    "Most of the world’s least happy places are ethnically homogeneous"

    Well, Will, dense though I be, I think ethnic homogeneity might be a necessary, but not a sufficient, criterion for happiness. But let's discuss the cultural element further, since it was brought up and emphasized greatly by the impeccably cosmopolitan Eric Weiner. He emphasized the mistrust, atomism and the absence of a unifying culture as the important reasons for Molodova's notable unhappiness. Would even "slightly liberalised" immigration ameliorate or exacerbate these qualities in the United States? If you're perplexed, there's a kindly professor at Harvard named Putnam (formerly of Bob Jones U., no doubt) who has the answer.

    "Economic growth (or lack thereof) is I think the best and least tendentious measure of counterproductivity."

    Amazing how you can beg a question so completely whilst simultaneously proclaiming your lack of tendentiousness. If your attitude is: let the Heavens fall if it raise GDP 1%, then I pray to God you travel as far from the levers of power as the Orange Line will take you. Mass immigration has resulted in the infusion of people with higher incarceration rates, gang membership and violent crime rates, greater welfare dependency (especially beyond the first generation), higher drop-out rates, even (as though all that weren't enough) greater obesity. Have those trends irreparably damaged the fabric of American society in any way that can be quanitified to your satisfaction? I highly doubt it, but that has more to do with the standard you've selected than with the actual harm inflicted (none of them have helped the withering-away of the state you ostensibly crave).
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    Will: I do think there is likely such a point [ at which the rate of immigration is too high]. I think we are miles from it.

    Well, fine. Then it's a question of assessment or judgment, not principle, and then I think you really should apologize for calling people who have a different judgment racists. I don't, for example, agree with everything Mencius writes, but I don't see the sort of racial -- as opposed to cultural -- superiority you impute to him. If, as you assert, everything is just fine at present levels of immigration, both legal and illegal, then fine, Will -- you really are the White Hat arguing with bad people and phantoms. But perhaps we're not "miles from it" after all -- perhaps we're already at or approaching levels of cultural change that are not sustainable, within any culture or "race".
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    Mencius:

    That LA Weekly article is curiously gloomy, as the CA violent crime rate has generally been trending lower for quite a while.. Murder rate in L.A. is lower now than it was when I was a kid in the 70s.
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    "... another year of decline in out-bound intra-U.S. migration rate ..."

    LOL.

    I'm not saying you're wrong because of it, but here you're just spinning a stat which doesn't support your argument to make it seem like it does. Californians are leaving their state and have been for several years now. Thanks for the info Will.
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    Mencius: The proposition that modern human populations are, like dog breeds, the product of strong recent selection - I have even seen the word “domestication” deployed - is essentially established at this point.

    Okay, when I asked, skeptically, for examples of actual racism here I hadn't seen this. And I'll agree that "calling RACISTS racist" is a good and honest thing to do. What's not so good or honest is to use them as blunt instruments with which to bash those who oppose the elimination of state borders, or those who make the crucial distinction between race and culture.
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    Oh, it's okay, I don't need an apology. In fact I probably owe one - this whole conversation seems to have stressed our host out a little. I think the problem is just that he has no experience arguing with racists, for obvious reasons, and so feels a little ambushed.

    Will, if you want to brush up on your antiracist kung fu, I recommend working out on the moronic, foul-mouthed kids over at SAS. Try explaining to them why the breakdown in Anglo-European cultural hegemony, not to mention electrical hegemony, isn't so bad at all. Perhaps Cato can even be coaxed into springing for a field trip.

    The thing about cultural hegemony is that someone always has it. While you're reading the racists, why not branch out a little and try a fascist or two? I can't think of a better starting point than Robert Michels.

    Transnational progressivism is a culture, too. It's a set of values, beliefs and perspectives. As we see, it can't exactly be described as tolerant of contradictions. What culture is? And if it isn't "Anglo-European," what is? Where did all these ideas come from, Indonesia?

    In fact, even "Anglo-European" is too narrow. Both our contending traditions are "Anglo," period - British and Protestant. The old war between liturgical and pietist Christianities is on again, with the racist replacing that old standby, the Papist. If you look at American fundamentalism as a sort of hick neo-Catholicism, the pattern of Anglophone history is quite unbroken. And certainly the connection between Puritan and progressive is undebatable.

    What I find most interesting about this discussion is its extremely rarefied moral tone. Again, very Puritan. And very common among libertarians, who are always on about fundamental this or that. Humean oughts can no more be proved wrong than right, but the idea, perhaps shared by many of us outside the Beltway, that the purpose of government is just to create a safe, pleasant and open society in which ordinary people can live ordinary civilized lives, is perhaps too foreign to the Cotton Mather mentality. To which libertarianism owes more, I think, than it thinks.

    LA is certainly open. As a resident of SF, there is not much of it I'd call pleasant. There are certainly large areas of it which are extraordinarily unsafe. The same is true of SF, although most of our nasty bits are safely on the other side of 101.

    I do feel that a sovereign state with a $3T budget should at least be able to secure its cities and clear them of racist militias - "Anglo-European" or otherwise. Just a small request for our Potomac overlords. Do us this little favor, and we'll let you get right back to the vital moral imperative of invading and inviting the world - as Mr. Sailer so charmingly puts it.
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    Larry,

    Why not head over to John Hawks's and point that out to him? I'm sure he'd have no problem being described as a racist, or better yet, RACIST. Heck, perhaps Professor Hawks is the "Uhuru Guru" himself. You never know with these handles.
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    Here, I'll throw in the abstract for those too bored to click:

    Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate high enough to explain the number of recently selected variants would predict (i) site heterozygosity at least 10-fold lower than is observed in humans, (ii) a strong relationship of heterozygosity and local recombination rate, which is not observed in humans, (iii) an implausibly high number of adaptive substitutions between humans and chimpanzees, and (iv) nearly 100 times the observed number of high-frequency linkage disequilibrium blocks. Larger populations generate more new selected mutations, and we show the consistency of the observed data with the historical pattern of human population growth. We consider human demographic growth to be linked with past changes in human cultures and ecologies. Both processes have contributed to the extraordinarily rapid recent genetic evolution of our species.

    Is the good professor right? Perhaps he is and perhaps he isn't. In case you're confident of the latter, I'm sure all these universities have diversity offices, not to mention ethnic studies programs, which would be quite interested to hear that they are sponsoring scientific racism. Or you could even go straight to the SPLC. Why mess around? Just sue the bastards.

    I know one thing, however, which is that Professor Hawks and his sheet-clad coauthors don't have a radio station called "93.3 The Race." Perhaps they are still trying to get funding for this.