Nativists Need Not Justify Themselves to Liberals

This is a matter of moral fundamentals, not of economics and graphs

Suppose you live in a house with two other roommates. One day the two roommates come to you and inform you that a fourth roommate will be moving in. This fourth roommate will pay his share of the rent, so in a very real sense you will benefit financially from his presence. However, he will be sleeping on your couch, will be using your dishes, and all the rest of it. Furthermore, he does not speak English, and you will have to communicate with him via a translator app on your phone.

You complain to your roommates that you were not given a say in this, that you don’t approve of it, and that they can’t just move in this new guy without even consulting you. The two roommates counter that, on the contrary, because they have outvoted you two to one, they can essentially do whatever they like with your home. To them, the financial benefit with regards to rent payments is worth whatever other inconvenience the new roommate might bring. The fact that you see things differently does not matter to them.

Who do we think is in the right in this situation? Have you been treated unfairly in some manner, or are your roommates correct that “democracy” overrides your preferences without exception?

Given the specifics of the example, almost everyone will agree that you’ve been treated unfairly, and your roommates are in the wrong despite outnumbering you. Obviously I am making an analogy to immigration, and liberals clearly won’t feel that the analogy translates, because they support mass immigration over the objections of conservatives. If 50% + 1 of the population votes for the new roommates to cross the border, the other 50% - 1 of us have no choice but to suck it up. That’s “Our Democracy”™! Hell, some liberals probably support it regardless of how many people voted for it or not.

So, how will the liberal attempt to square this circle? Why is it that he will agree you are being treated unfairly in the roommate example—given that it is presented to him in a totally apolitical context, such that he does not recognize it as an analogy for immigration, of course—yet will almost certainly support mass immigration into his home country no matter how many racist conservative chuds have a problem with it?

Well, the obvious solution in the roommate example is for you to simply move out and live somewhere else, with more reasonable roommates. Of course in the real world if something like this happened you’d probably go to your landlord about it and get it settled that way, but in the case of immigration, the “landlord” is the pro-mass-migration deep state. So to keep the analogy consistent, if you go to your landlord, he’ll actually side with your roommates who want to move in a new guy unannounced! That means we’re back to “just move out” as the only practical solution.

But you see, it’s a lot easier to move out of an apartment than it is to move out of a whole country. You can only ever be born once; generally speaking, people only have one homeland, one mother country. Apartments are interchangeable in one’s life in a way that native culture, national identity, etc., are not. Furthermore, when it comes to immigration, white people have nowhere immigrant-free to go! Jews can flee to Israel if they want to live in an ethnostate of their own, but this option is explicitly denied to whites. All white nations support mass migration and call you racist if you disagree.

Well, what about re-locating internally? Europe might be kinda crowded, but some nations, such as Canada and the USA, are huge empty expanses with tons of unused land to go around. If we want to exercise our freedom of association and continue to live with our original “roommates” only, why not go somewhere out in the Midwest and set up a town with a “no darkies allowed” sign out front? I probably don’t need to tell you why this isn’t an option. It’s explicitly forbidden as a result of the Civil Rights movement. Darn!

So, the landlord sides with your asshole roommates who’ve screwed you over, and it’s literally illegal for you to move out. There’s nowhere for you to go. The analogy is now complete and the conclusion is grim—you’re just gonna have to get used to Pedro sleeping on your couch and mooching your food. Given this reality, we can now see that you’re actually completely in the right to protest against mass migration that has been forced on you against your will. In this context, there can be no doubt that you are the aggrieved party.

Why don’t immigration debates play out this way? It seems to me that this is the way they should play out, if one is on the nativist/anti-immigration side of things. Instead, conservatives frequently allow their opponents to set the frame of the debate, by arguing about whether or not immigration is “good for the economy,” or squabbling over how much crime immigrants commit. Remember, in the roommate example, your rent actually does go down by having Pedro move onto your couch. It really is good for you economically, and he’s entirely law-abiding, if we don’t count his intrusion into your living space! But that’s not really the central issue, is it?

In the roommate example, the reason that you are so clearly the aggrieved party is the breaking of an agreed-upon contract without your consent. Does this aspect of the analogy translate over to the concepts of nation-states and immigration? I think it is quite clear that it does—for instance, we have something explicitly called “social contract theory” which lays out one of the most common understandings of a government’s purpose and function. Under this “social contract,” citizens of the nation-state grant the government a monopoly on violence, and in exchange the government is bound to serve their interests and protect their rights.

This is a very popular view of the proper relationship between government and citizen, probably the most popular, at least in the English-speaking world. Any form of government which does not fall within the broad confines of this definition is typically viewed as “authoritarian” and therefore automatically bad. I don’t think these are unreasonable views to hold. Notice, however, that the contract here is formed between state and citizen. This implicitly excludes non-citizens from the arrangement, in the same way that a lease grants you and your roommates exclusive use of a piece of property, to the exclusion of all others.

If this exclusion is not granted, then the contract becomes pointless, and you would never sign it. A lease stating that a condo is free and open for use by anyone for any reason is self-evidently ridiculous. The same thing applies to the social contract for the same extremely obvious reasons. If there are no criteria what so ever for citizenship in a particular nation, and citizenship in that nation is synonymous with the human species as a whole, then what good to anyone is said citizenship? No good at all, it’s a worthless and empty title to have.

This is the switcharoo that liberals are pulling when they tell you to accept mass migration into your country. The easier it is for any random jackass to gain citizenship—or to gain the inherent benefits of citizenship, of which arguably the greatest is the right to live within your country’s territory—the less valuable that the citizenship becomes. This is economics 101. The liberals probably think this is worth it in exchange for whatever trade-offs, but that doesn’t give them the right to impose it against your will by force.

We understand this implicitly when it comes to other fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech and expression. If you suggest to a liberal that perhaps gay pride flags should be banned from display in public so long as 50% + 1 of the people find them offensive, they will recoil in horror at the sheer outrageous homophobia of such a notion. Yet when it comes to undermining the very foundations of the social contract through mass migration, they are perfectly fine applying that standard.

Liberals should be held to their own supposed loves of freedom and voluntary association on this issue. Freedom of association is at least as important as any of our other freedoms, possibly more important, and freedom of association explicitly means the freedom to disassociate—to exclude those who are unwanted or unqualified. Without such a freedom, there can be no such thing as voluntary association at all, and the nation-state is clearly the highest and most consequential form of this concept. If people have any fundamental rights at all, then they should have first the fundamental right to a government that will safeguard their particular interests above those of foreigners, full stop.

If liberals wanted to act in good faith on this issue, they would therefore seek permission from nativists to allow mass migration, rather than attempting at every turn to force it upon nativists over their objections. Whenever a liberal chooses to do the latter instead of the former, he is showing that he is perfectly willing to choose tyranny over freedom so long it serves his personal preferences.