If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will

[Dill]

(03-11-2019, 12:47 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/david-frum-how-much-immigration-is-too-much/583252/

This article was shared by a libertarian person I follow on social media, and he said how it made him question his open-borders position. I thought I would share it here. It's long, and I haven't finished it, yet, but I thought it would be a good conversation starter for those interested in such things.

That's a good think piece.  Frum was a speech writer for W., a traditional conservative of the neocon variety, and generally thoughtful. He authored the "axis of evil phrase" for Bush SOTU speech back in 2002. Frequent guest on Bill Maher too.

I have some quarrels with his data on immigrant contributions to the economy, but he makes very good points about

1) our current system of "accreted" improvisations, from kicking the can down the road,

2) the need to shift our view of immigrants from the dominant economic perspective to recognition of the social and cultural issues which attend immigration, and

3) that immigration needs to be thought of as a system not populist-style as a symbol.

As far as the main argument and conclusion--that immigration will become such a problem that people will turn to fascists (by which he means, I am guessing, some form of authoritarianism) to solve it--I am still not sold on that.  Following his own source, Stenner, I think the authoritarian support for Trump-style solutions has maxed out. I get that he is looking to a future in which "dreamers" reach 65 etc. And we have millions of non-citizens without health care.  That is a looming problem, but I am not sold on the idea it could keep expanding Trump's base even after Trump is gone. I agree with the urge to think about "smart" immigration policies, though, and applaud his effort to think through a range of existing immigration and related problems.

James Kirchick makes a similar argument in his book The End of Europe (2017) and other writings.  His tack is that liberals and social democrats in Europe need to de-politicize the immigration issue and not demonize people who raise the issue of limits and quotas as "NAZIS" and xenophobes. If center-left-right politicians do not address the problem, then "the people" will chose politicians who will address it, and these will turn out to be illiberals and proto-fascists, like Orban in Hungary and Le Pen in France. 
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/03/06/ignoring-immigration-is-empowering-the-far-right/

This doesn't really account for why the tendency to illiberal politics has become so dominant in countries like Hungary and Poland, which have MUCH less immigration than Germany or certainly Sweden, while the latter are still holding the line on liberal democracy.