> The U.S. had virtually no engagement with the world outside the western hemisphere between the GOP’s formation in 1854 and World War I.

That’s not true. For example, there’s the Treaty of Wanghia (1844), the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858) the annexation of Hawaii (1898), the Open Door Policy (1899), and the Philippine-American War followed by our nearly 50-year possession of it.

> Between Lincoln’s election in 1861 to World War I tariff rates exceeded 40%

Until the Sixteenth Amendment which permitted the collection of income taxes, tariffs were the primary means of funding the Federal government. Also, protectionism was the global standard before WWII, so we were in good company. But, like the gold standard and mercantilism, it still wasn’t an economically efficient thing. We get rid of antiquated ideas for good reason and to make the world better and more prosperous.

Look, people on both sides of the aisle are happy with the status quo, even though our policies have consistently moved in the direction economists say is more “economically efficient.” On one side, people disagree with the economic consensus that investment and corporate taxes are inefficient, and want to raise those to force investors and capital holders, rather than consumers, to shoulder a larger share of the tax burden. On the other side, people disagree with economics on free trade, and want to reduce America’s dependence on foreign manufacturing.

You can yell “economic efficiency” until you’re blue in the face, but most of the country isn’t buying that. You may well be right but the only way to know is to try change and see what happens.

> people on both sides of the aisle are happy with the status quo

Did you mean unhappy? That's always true of a democratic system. Making everyone happy is impossible, so we strive for something that tries to make everyone equally unhappy (if not in kind, then at least in degree).

> You may well be right but the only way to know is to try change and see what happens.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Logical people can follow the math. And if people can look past their own biases and limited horizons (which I know is not always possible), they will also clearly see that the world as a whole is much better off, and that even if they feel poorer, they themselves are objectively better off from a quality of life perspective, especially when compared to previous generations. I realize it's a difficult sell, but it is true.

The downside risk of erecting barriers is much worse than the upside risk. For those of us approaching retirement without a guaranteed pension to look forward to, the prospect of having our savings significantly diminished is incredibly scary. And poor people should be frightened, too, because maintaining their existing standard of living (which, BTW, is much better than it ever was, historically) is about to become much more difficult.

I've never seen a cogent and defensible theory of a nation that's economically and socially better off for most as a result of putting up higher barriers to trade and immigration. ISTM anyone who wants to eliminate free trade is cutting off their nose to spite their face.

> I've never seen a cogent and defensible theory of a nation that's economically and socially better off for most as a result of putting up higher barriers to trade and immigration

That suggests you’ve just got a simplistic worldview that ignores variables. Do a thought experiment: say you replaced 200 million americans with Bangladeshis overnight. Would the country be better off or worse off? Obviously worse off. The things Bangladeshis think and believe and do that make the country the way it is—everything from corruption to littering to overthrowing the government—won’t change just because they step foot on american soil. They’d immediately vote to turn America into an officially Muslim socialist country, like back home.

Now, if you agree that 200 million Bangladeshis overnight would be bad, but say 100,000 Bangladeshis a year would be fine, you’re applying unstated assumptions about the rate and quality of assimilation. Which you likely have no empirical basis for assuming.

I would say your assertions about free trade are similar. You’re looking at a simplified model of the world that leaves out important variables and then declaring that free trade has no downsides.

Wow, dude. You've really revealed your true colors with this comment. You could have articulated a well-argued defense and chose to write this instead? It reeks of prejudice and carries a "great replacement theory" sympathetic vibe. Talk about a simplistic worldview. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I think it's time to close this discussion.

You’re the one pretending to have a “cogent” view of free trade and immigration, but what you wrote is just knee-jerk moralism. You’ve apparently developed a view of immigration that rests on ideological axioms about the fungibility of people, the degree to which people are responsible for the state of their societies, etc. You have no basis for believing that. You’re the one who should be ashamed for trying to shut down conversation because you’re triggered by the notion that countries are the way they are because of their citizens, and those citizens carry their culture and behavior with them when they immigrate. Those are fundamental questions underlying the issue of immigration and you can’t even look them in the eye.

I used Bangladesh as an example because I’m from there. My entire family on both sides going back to time immemorial is from there. Yet half my family left Bangladesh for the west. We didn’t leave because we were desperate—like most skilled immigrants, we were affluent back home. We left because we didn’t want to raise our kids in a society run by Bangladeshis.

Bangladeshis are very different from Americans on numerous cultural dimensions. You seem to think either we’re not (self-evidently false), that those differences disappear when we set foot in America (false), or that those differences are superficial and don’t alter the society around us (more debatable, but based on my experience and analysis, false).

You cannot form a cogent view of immigration policy without delving into the link between culture and societal outcomes, and the stickiness of cultural attitudes in immigrants. Otherwise you’re like a hippy complaining about nuclear power even though you don’t know anything about it.

Good materials:

https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z...

https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...

https://docs.iza.org/dp17569 (Dutch study about net contribution of immigrants; look at p. 39, showing how immigrants from different cultures have different contribution levels even adjusted for education)

People have been immigrating to the Americas since its discovery. The actual natives to this country, in fact, have been almost fully extinguished by European immigrants and are now largely relegated to reservations on the least-desirable places in the country. They are the ones who are poor and bereft; and their culture is practically extinct. So, don't lecture anyone, especially someone well-educated in American history, about how immigration can change a place.

Nevertheless, modern immigration doesn't change a place that dramatically and for the worse, especially when it's controlled. If you read your history, you'd know that every wave of immigrants to this country has been met with fear, contempt, and opposition (including my family's, as starving Jews escaping the Third Reich). Yet, in the long term, the feared outcomes--similar to the ones you describe--never came to pass. America doesn't look like Italy. It doesn't look like Ireland. It doesn't look like Israel. It doesn't look like Mexico. It doesn't look like Vietnam. It doesn't look like India. Maybe certain neighborhoods do for a while, but that's actually one of the nice things about America: that you can go spend some time and enjoy the fruits of a different culture without leaving home. Yet they're still subject to American laws, regulations, and supervision.

And immigrants don't get to vote, so they don't have much political influence for a long while, even locally. Remember, too, that it takes a supermajority to amend the Constitution, so for immigrant culture to have a serious impact on the USA itself would take generations, to the extent it ever does.

I never suggested that immigration should be entirely unregulated and that people and cultures are fungible. That's a straw man you created. And the fact that you are assuming that's the situation people want and the inevitable outcome that will result reveals who you are, and yeah, I'm going to fucking moralize on it. Racists and fearmongerers are evil, even those who hate their own kind. Your own argument supposes that morals are a part of transplantable culture, and let me tell you: Racism, fear, absolutism, and contempt for outsiders are not American values. Perhaps you need to work better on assimilation, yourself.

> Nevertheless, modern immigration doesn't change a place that dramatically and for the worse, especially when it's controlled.

Now you’re backtracking. You asserted above that you don’t see a “cogent” reason for “higher barriers to immigration.” Now you’re quibbling about how “dramatically” immigration changes the country, whether the changes are “for the worse,” and about how the changes depend on how immigration is “controlled.”

We agree 200 million Bangladeshis overnight would be a bad thing, and 1,000 per year is immaterial. But what’s your basis for asserting that there’s no “cogent” reason for “higher barriers to immigration” than we have now? It seems to me that the acceptable point between 200 million Bangladeshis and 1,000 Bangladeshis depends on all sorts of factors, and “cogent” arguments can be made based on various assumptions.

Your problem is that you are relying on assumptions about those factors that you either can’t or won’t state. Which isn’t surprising because you’re getting emotional over what is a purely logical analysis.

> Yet they're still subject to American laws, regulations, and supervision.

A telling concession! Woodrow Wilson observed, in his seminal work on the administrative state, that multiculturalism compounded the challenges of democracy: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad... (“The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes…. And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans….”)

Wilson’s solution was top-down control of the country by civil servants and bureaucrats. Wilson’s successors succeeded, ironically by mastering ethnic machine politics to mobilize immigrants. Today, we live in Wilson’s administocracy, and de Tocqueville’s America—a land of participative, bottom-up democracy—survives in only a handful of places.

> Remember, too, that it takes a supermajority to amend the Constitution, so for immigrant culture to have a serious impact on the USA itself would take generations, to the extent it ever does.

If legal documents could change people, then Iraq and Afghanistan would be flourishing democracies today.

It’s blindingly obvious that immigration changed the U.S. without rewriting the constitution. Have you been to Oregon and New Jersey? Which place is populated by British settlers with the means to travel thousands of miles across the country, but the desire to get away from civilization? Which one is populated by impoverished immigrants from southern Italy, and lots of recent Indian immigrants? Impossible to tell!

Which city was built by Mormons? Salt Lake, which is clean, orderly, and full of young moms pushing strollers? Or is it Newark? Why do my German au pairs all like Chicago and think New York is intolerably dirty? Why were the first two places in the world to legalize gay marriage (Massachusetts and the Netherlands) both historically Calvinist? These are imponderables!

> I never suggested that immigration should be entirely unregulated and that people and cultures are fungible.

Then why did you flip out at my hypothetical about 200 million Bangladeshis? If you concede regulation is necessary and cultures aren’t fungible, then you need some cogent view of how different cultures are (including the cultures of people who are immigrating today versus in the past), how sticky those cultures are, how pressure to assimilate today is a lot less than in the past, the degree to which European immigrants actually did or did not fully assimilate, etc.

These questions, however, are very difficult to answer, and most pro-immigrationists haven’t thought about them and are uncomfortable thinking about them. But you can’t have a cogent view of immigration without thinking about and reaching these issues.

> Racists and fearmongerers are evil, even those who hate their own kind.

“Racism” is if you assume I eat curry most nights because I’m Bangladeshi. Assuming that most Bangladeshis in Bangladesh eat curry most nights is a (correct) factual observation. And assuming most first generation Bangladeshi immigrants eat curry most nights is a plausible inference (that happens to be true).

It goes without saying that food preferences aren’t the only ways in which Bangladeshis differ. Assuming that those differences are only superficial is an unfounded assumption—one that happens to be false. In fact, everything from social trust to savings behaviors are transmitted culturally and sticky in immigrants: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...

None of these observations are “racism.” They’re simply observations about groups, which can be reliable because individuals average out leaving aggregate characteristics for groups as wholes.

Racism adorned in academic clothing is still racism. Your attempts to dilute it by recharacterizing it as anodyne-sounding “group behavior” are unavailing. I’ll have no part debating with bigots.

We’re done.

Oh for God's sake.

His worldview is starting to seem increasingly blinkered and reductive. It's reminiscent of something that Binyamin Appelbaum said, in his book The Economists' Hour: That Milton Friedman celebrated drivers and took roads for granted.

I don't understand why people think this is racist. I think 'rayiner is just saying that people have culture. People get their culture from family, school friends, local activities like scouts, church or sports clubs, online communities, mentors. In neighborhoods populated by immigrants from the same immigration wave, local culture can persist for a long time and will only become the same as the average US culture after more than a century.

Religion is likely to stay for longer, and will change to become more like average US culture slower. For example, I don't know if and when a mild American version of Islam will develop which is more adapted to live in harmony with other cultures found in the US.

I think you replied to the wrong comment. :)

Racism is when you stereotype people based on their racial characteristics. Calling people of a certain race or ethnicity "groups" instead of "races" when making this judgment doesn't make it not racist.

Putting that aside for the moment, the argument rayiner made, and that you appear to be supporting, is that if you bring too many foreigners into a country, it will change the cultural makeup of that country. It's an argument that seeks to exploit people's fears. It's not a new argument, and it's a largely discredited one. People who make this argument have to anticipate at least the following questions and provide some very difficult answers to them:

1. What exactly is American culture?

2. Is American culture homogeneous? If not, how do you know where immigration will disrupt existing culture, and where it won't?

3. How will you know when American culture is disrupted because of immigrants as opposed to intrinsic forces?

4. How much immigration is too much? How do you know?

5. Which immigrants do you believe are OK to permit into the country, in what numbers, and where?

6. For any potential individual immigrant, how do you know this immigrant will or won't assimilate?

7. How long should an immigrant be given to assimilate? What will assimilation look like for them? What does the bar for "good enough" assimilation look like?

8. Why isn't conformance to our laws sufficient for an immigrant to be accepted?

9. Should new immigrants be Judeo-Christian? If so, how do you square that with the First Amendment's freedom-of-exercise clause? What about all the Muslims already in the USA? Have they adversely impacted America? If so, how?

10. How do you think about the difference between a Black person already in the USA (see question 2) and a new African immigrant?

11. Do the impacts of immigration--particularly of Africans--manifest differently in the Americas than they do in other countries, say, in the UK? If so, why?

12. What about native-born Americans who don't conform to whatever American culture is (see question 1)? Should we eject them?

When I ask people these questions, they invariably end up falling all over themselves. People don't think about immigration rationally; they fall back to primitive "in-group" and "out-group" thinking and engage in "otherism." Sometimes it's religious hatred; sometimes it's racial hatred; other times it's class hatred. I encourage anyone who believes that immigration causes problems figure out for themselves the answers to the above questions and how they would craft a policy that serves everyone better, and not one that just suits their own prejudices.