The current ICE situation in the US is a wild pendulum swing after decades during which the voters all over the West signalled their growing rejection of more immigration and the previous elites persisted in ignoring the message stubbornly.
I am a bit afraid that once the US administration changes again, it will be back to the Bourbon-style "they have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing" and thus priming the situation for future wild pendulum swings again. Much like the Bourbon restoration did in France.
I'm tired of this self-mortification. Every movement has a reaction. The current state of things is the result of a rippling, infinite taylor series of oscillating sums; each successive term carefully balancing and responding to the previous. You are too many terms deep. This kind of religious purification is more suited to the hills of medieval Perugia.
From the economic perspective, elites *should* ignore that message, because it's a dumb, counterproductive message.
That said, if enough voters believe a wrong idea, politicians still have to take it seriously. In an ideal world they should respond by educating the voters about why it's a wrong idea. Since voters won't actually listen, I guess the only answer is to actually do the dumb thing and hope voters will wise up before the damage is too great.
So, dems should figure out how they're going to get illegals out of the country. My take is: go after employers. Approximately all immigration to the US is economic, so to stop it you just have to make illegals unemployable, and the way to do this is to aggressively prosecute the Americans who hire them. Also, make it very easy for employers to get caught. My suggestion for that is that we should offer work visas or green cards to illegals who report their bosses.
"From the economic perspective, elites *should* ignore that message, because it's a dumb, counterproductive message."
Maybe in the US, but the few Western European countries that did the math, all found out that immigration from the Islamic world was a net economic loss and a burden on the public finances. Even disregarding the cultural clash between Islam and modern secular societies, it made no sense to allow it for so long.
population of total foreign-born is ~15%, second generation migrants ~6% this includes people who moved from EU country to other EU country
also why do you think they don't support western values? (also, what are western values? liberalism? AfD-ism? Jesusism? Muslims are also around 6%, but obviously more in France, while much less in Spain for example)
accepting other people was also a western value for a while. well, pogroms too. so it's kind of a toss up.
Probable misuse of resources. Most of those Western European countries have historically not been at full employment and apparently are not interested in reforming to make employment easier.
Thanks for that. I took a look and the data is pretty compelling, though I don't think your characterization is quite accurate. You said that immigration from the Islamic wold was a net economic loss, but that hasn't been consistently true: The Danish study talks about 55k workers in the 70s who were a net economic benefit, as compared with the later refugees who were a net economic loss, even though they were from the same culture.
It seems to me that there are two factors at play here in the economic benefit/loss question (and neither are "What culture did they come from"):
The first is motivation. The 55k workers in the 70s came specifically to work, to take advantage of the rich economic opportunities. They had jobs before they arrived, and they kept those jobs. The later immigrants came to find a new place to live.
The second is the relative standard of living provided by the generous Nordic welfare states compared to what the immigrants were accustomed to. If I offered you a chance to retire right now and double your standard of living, would you take it? I know I would! I know that because I'm eyeing retirement and trying to figure out how large a reduction in my standard of living I'm willing to exchange for not working any more, and what lifestyle my savings can support.
Add to that what it must be like for someone who's been traumatized by horrific experiences, doesn't speak the language and doesn't understand the culture. It would be very hard to hold down a job... and if you're living better than ever without doing that, why would you?
Relating this to the US, nearly all of our immigrants are seeking economic opportunity. Even most of those who are allegedly seeking asylum honestly aren't, they're looking for a place they can earn more money.
Also, although the US has a much more generous welfare state than most people realize, immigrants are ineligible for a long time. Asylum seekers can spend years waiting for their cases to be heard, during which time they are ineligible for all federal welfare programs. Some states provide some support, but it's not a lot. Those who immigrate through non-asylum paths are ineligible for all federal welfare for five years.
So if you come to the US, you're going to have to find a way to earn a living for several years at least, and odds are that by the time you do become eligible for welfare benefits, you'll keep working because you've already figured out how to do that and are probably already enjoying a standard of living at least as high as what welfare will provide (and nearly all welfare benefits are means-tested, so you don't gain much by continuing to work and filing for benefits).
So what I see is that the core difference between the experiences of Europe and the US is a selection effect. The US system selects for people who want to get ahead, whereas the European system selects for people who need help. The Danes also selected for workers in the 70s. Morally, the Europeans are in the right, but that moral superiority comes at a cost. Until/unless the immigrants are fully integrated and adopt their new countries' expectations around lifestyle, many will choose to live on government largess.
Back to the original point, my comment was, of course, in the context of the US and its stinginess to immigrants. And in that context the argument against immigrants is an uninformed argument that should be ignored by elites. At least until it becomes a political problem, when the elites should accommodate the dumb.
Sounds like a description of massive influx of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe from 1870-1940. Imagine how rich our country could have been if we could have avoided the economic drain from all those horrible people from those s-hole countries! (not to mention the Chinese and Sicilians and etc. etc.)
Note to literal readers: I am being massively sarcastic.
Well, it depends upon your time frame. My father came to this country from Turkey in '48, and items 1, 3 and 5 applied to him. He was drafted immediately into the US army, where he picked up English, and as far I can tell, he was never unemployed. He married my mom (native New Yorker) in '54, and they had bought their first house on Long Island by '62. Their kids both are college educated, and one of them started three companies in the 1980s-2010s, each of which was a financial and technical success.
It's hard to tell who's going to be a net burden on the country.
I think the difference is motivation. What motivated your father to come from Turkey in '48? Was he fleeing a horrific situation and looking for someone to give him relief, or was he looking for economic opportunity? These two options aren't mutually exclusive, of course, a person can have both in equal measure or more one than the other.
Related to motivation is the question of opportunity. When your father arrived, supposing he'd been offered a generous welfare payment, enough to give him and his family a significantly better lifestyle than he was accustomed to (though maybe not as good as what his new American neighbors were accustomed to), would he have insisted on working? If his primary focus was on maximizing his economic future, he would have. If his primary focus was on just getting by, he might not. Either way, though, it doesn't matter because that offer was not on the table in 1948, and in the vast majority of cases isn't available to US immigrants today.
But for immigrants from low-GDP countries to Nordic countries that effort-free lifestyle improvement is on offer. I don't think anyone should be surprised that people take it.
there was a post about them being on track with regards to integration, and as it took time for the previous cohorts it will take time for them too, but I can't find it now
(even though others mentioned Turkish migrants were mostly economic migrants, who "immediately" found jobs, so it seems integration is quite successful even for refugees)
Turks and Turkish Kurds have been trickling into Germany for decades, and now have deep roots. Turkey is an EU country, that's extremely liberal by comparison to most other Muslim countries. Which makes it no surprise they've integrated so successfully.
Turkey isn't an EU country, in large part because it isn't liberal enough to meet EU standards on these things. But it has a long and quite recent history of interacting with Europe - especially with Germany - under different guises and I think it probably is rather more attuned with Europe than other Muslim states.
Continue Trump's enforcement at the actual border, fix the asylum loophole, and deport illegal immigrants who are arrested for violent crimes. Don't be like Biden and let a bunch of asylum seekers surge over the border, but also don't be like Trump and start deporting people who have peacefully lived here for years (along with harassing legal immigrants and American citizens)
Saying you will only deport illegals who commit violent crimes is only one step above total open borders and will provide little, if any, deterrent to illegal border crossing. If the stats are true and illegal immigrants are less likely than US citizens to commit violent crimes you're basically signalling that if you sneak into the US (or illegally overstay your visa) and can successfully play ICE hide and seek for X years you become immune to deportation. There's probably at least 100 million people on the planet who would be ok with those odds.
Well the actual deterrent to illegal border crossing should be hard enforcement of the border. I simply think that people that have been here 5, 10, 20 years, working hard, contributing to their communities, shouldn't be deported as we see now.
So the USA can hypothetically have an totally sealed border where absolutely no one gets in or out without getting shot on-sight or blown up by a landmine if they even try to cross (think North and South Korea's border on steroids) but that would still be not-far-removed from an open border because people like visa-overstayers can't also get out?
I get the opposition to ONLY deporting violent illegal immigrants (it'd be better to say one is prioritizing deporting violent illegal immigrants without totally excluding deporting the non-violent ones. There's also the task of incentivizing legal immigration which helps disincentivize illegal immigration). What I don't get is this expansion of the definition of "open border" which you and Noah subscribe to, which would mean that even a Korean-demilitarized-zone-like border would at best be a single step from "open borders" or at worst basically equal to "open borders".
I asked one of my leftist friends- if Biden didn’t use decrees to open the borders and if all states and cities cooperated with ICE in deporting convicted criminals, do you think immigration would have been a winning issue for Trump and the Repubs, and that otherwise law abiding illegal immigrants would be worried about ICE?
They don’t care. They want open borders and criminal illegals running free- apparently it’s humanitarian. Or at least that is part of the check list of things they must pledge allegiance to in order to maintain their standing amongst peers.
I sure wish we had a reasonable prez who could communicate calmly and clearly to the public rather than sending ICE to Minnie as a political wedge issue and riling people up with OTT rhetoric, but we don’t. In good part we have Dem policies to thank for this. And Trump is doing everything possible to ensure Dem activists and donors never change their policies.
The best Dems can hope for is a two-faced Obama type who pretends to be reasonable while issuing illegal decrees (DACA, DAPA) to satisfy donors and activists.
Biden (or whoever was running his administration in 2023) did eventually reverse course at the border. Too little too late for 2024, but one can reasonably hope the next Democratic president will resume what was a much more reasonable approach.
In videos Pretti is wearing a cap and shades, and his coat is closed, but isn't here. Pretti is not surrounded here, but is in videos. The agent in the background appears to have a gun out and be standing at a distance, this doesn't appear in any video. The guns in agents' hands, and the pink of Pretti's face here just don't look right, they look too high-contrast and the pink of the hand looks unconvincing.
I'm not doubting he was executed, murdered... but there is an avalanche of evidence, we don't need fakes!
By not supporting Ukraine in its war with Putin the US is missing a chance to improve its abilities to build and deploy the new tiny smart weapons - drones and other autonomous vehicles.
Putin expecting Ukraine to fall in days and Xi reshuffling the PLA look like different expressions of the same risk: leaders insulated from inconvenient assessments and feedback loops. Great powers acting stupid indeed.
While we might arguably not consider the EU a Great Power I'd like to submit an entry for them acting stupid:
On Jan 17th they signed a FTA with Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) after 25 years of negotiations and coalition building to create the largest free trade zone in the world. This is especially important now in a time of Great Power politics as it adds more partners, shores up world trade, and strengthens the ties between democratic countries.
4 days later they did this:
>>On 21 January 2026, the European Parliament approved a measure by a vote of 334–324 to ask the European Court of Justice to rule on whether the free trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur can be applied before full ratification by all member states and whether its provisions restrict the EU's ability to set environmental and consumer health policies, a move that could delay the deal by two years.
The EU is an attempt to co-ordinate action across a range of policy areas, between states with diverse cultures, economies and interests, often with long histories of bitter conflict. Europe learned the hard way that being a Great Power is bad for the collective soul. Whether other candidates for Great Power status can learn the easy way from the European experience, remains to be seen.
Re: China, there's a few uncorroborated stories floating Xi's purge is in reaction to a coup plot. Given exactly how opaque CCP politics really is, though, I don't think anyone can truly say one way or another
In all, a disheartening set of comparisons, from this American's point of view. It is like making an actual choice for taking the express train to a national second tier status. "Wow, I shot myself in one foot, and it's not so bad! Let's shoot the other foot!" It's like we are trying to win a National Darwin Award. What could possibly go wrong?
But within the report, a question comes up for me: The charts point out that Europeans have a lower income than Americans. But how does that play out relative to overall "quality of life"? In general, the Europeans don't have issues with either health care or education, while these are two major dollar sinks for Americans. They also have much better public transportation, saving many the cost of a car. Do these comparative income figures account for the almost forced/required spending in both areas that Americans incur relative to Europeans? I'd be interested in figures that showed levels of possible discretionary income available in both areas.
Actually Europeans have plenty of problems with healthcare. For example, like at the NHS over in the UK and how hard it is to get care that's non emergency (and look at how big of a category that is). Or the funding problems they have for it.
Or look at how basic things in the US like air conditioning are not available for the many people over there (Noah's done some reporting on this).
What I've read is that in all advanced countries, people gripe about healthcare, it's just different gripes in different countries. And what the people want varies, too. I read in some book a Brit saying he didn't understand Americans and "their fascination with the new and shiny. Brits want the tried and true."
And over the years, I've heard various gripes about the higher ed systems in various countries, but again, they're different from the gripes in the US.
As many have noted, public transit works much, much better in places with high population density. And US cities with high population densities generally do have good public transit.
Worley, I would tend to agree with your first and second premise. People gripe about what doesn't fit their particular needs. That is why we have not just S, M, and L after all.
I would bring another view to your point about transportation systems. I think the US systems are perhaps more capitalistic and less socialistic than the European ones. By that I mean that the choice of making roads for ease of the distribution of goods led the the assumption that private automobiles would assume the role of "public transportation" by choice. Living in suburbs, allowed by roads, and the assumption of the responsibility to getting to work by yourself are all personal choices. But that has also led to the economic hollowing out of the center cities (witness Baltimore or Detroit). This has led to a poorer urban transportation system as well as a fragmented set of systems where the buses don't coordinate with the trains, etc. By example, I can get on an Amtrak, get off at Newark airport and take a shuttle train to the airport. I can then fly to Orly airport outside Paris, get off the plane and walk the short distance to the high speed TGV train to southern France. Similarly, probably 25 years ago I took a local train out of Geneva Switzerland to some very small stop - and the train was met by the local bus that would take us further.
But try doing any of that to Dulles or JFK airports, arguably the international airport for these leading cities of the most powerful country in the world (etc, etc). It took 50 years to get a train anywhere near Dulles airport! And to JFK from Grand Central Station it takes 30-45 minutes by train and you have to change trains. Buses are slower by far.
My overall point is that by judging any single mode of transportation for the costs involved and the fact that it will move X number of people, we forget who it is these systems are supposed to serve, and how well. We now have intermodal truck-train systems for moving cargo efficiently, but in our planning we in the US seem to have forgotten that for the moving of people.
I do want to echo what Shawn W. says below -- if you really want to reduce illegal immigration, hit employers with large fines for employing illegal immigrants. That, and likely only that, will really reduce illegal immigration.
Right now, illegal immigrants get screwed, because as illegals, they can't push back against employer abuses, like being paid below minimum wage, terrible hours, or really anything. The legal residents displaced by them suffer unemployment or reduced wages. The employers make out like bandits, since they get a malleable workforce they can push around. Almost any other immigration policy would help legal residents more than the status quo.
Clearly a better policy would be to have better border enforcement, crack down on bogus asylum cases (if living in a corrupt country is enough to claim asylum, the US will see an unlimited flow of asylum seekers), and admit more skilled immigrants (and reduce green card wait times for them).
None of this even remotely justifies what Trump's ICE brownshirts are doing killing peaceful protesters, however. If there is an overreaction to current immigration policies, it will be because Trump's thugs are running amok. ICE really needs to be reconstituted from scratch, since right now, it's filled with untrained murderous agents.
I agree with all of this except for reducing green card wait times. What good does that do? If skilled workers are willing to come here on a temporary basis then why take on the expense of their retirement?
First, it's not clear skilled workers are willing to come here without a path to becoming citizens. I also don't think it is a good idea to have a lot of workers in your country who aren't citizens -- they can generally be abused by the state or by companies without having a say in the government.
The waits for a green card are extreme these days -- around 10 years for people from India. During this time, they are unable to flexibly move between jobs, which also hurts the economy by imposing artificial constraints on free movement of labor.
I'd expect that, like most self-employed people, he buys it through healthcare.gov. I'm sure he makes too much money to qualify for subsidies, but it's still an effective marketplace.
Because he was cagey about it when he did his post on healthcare. He was very blithe about "well, people get it through the marketplace, but most people get it through their employer." (Employer coverage is about 45% of the US.)
As for it being an effective marketplace... It really isn't. We know what those marketplaces look like in countries that do them well. Switzerland does it well, the Netherlands does it well, and they don't look like the way we do it here.
Noah Smith's favorite Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, do their healthcare financing in an entirely different way. (Taiwan is a national single payer system with public and priviate providers and Japan has 5 different insurance types that are dependent on who you are, whether or not you have a job and whether your job is a big corporation.)
He rails against socialism in this post, but he is doing the "European social democracy = socialism" fallacy. In addition, what people like about European social democracy isn't the world beating companies or the various cheeses and cookies, they like the good public transport, robust and fair healthcare systems, and the generally lessened precarity.
Talking about these economic numbers is fine and he is dunking on someone making a dumb argument, but it is kind of beside the point.
It's like comparing two restaurants and saying, "Aha, Pizza Place A gives out much bigger slices than Pizza Place B, Argument over!"
"What about the taste?"
"ARGUMENT. OVER."
The size of the slices is an important metric, but there are many more things that go in there.
Me asking about his personal health insurance experience is the equivalent pf a followup where someone asks. "Was the pepperoni any good?" because they suspect that the reviewer is ignoring that it tastes like cardboard in order to foreground the pizza slice size argument.
"(Employer coverage is about 45% of the US.)" That's not correct.
"In 2023, 53. 7% of the U. S. population had employment-based health insurance coverage"
Also when you look at the non elderly population (which is what people are really thinking about here).
"Employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) is the largest source of health coverage for non-elderly people, covering 60. 4 of this population in March 2023."
Moreover
"As of 2022, approximately 78 of the population are eligible for health insurance obtained through their employers"
So the vast majority of working age adults can and/or do get the coverage from their employers
My kids have used the marketplace, and it was fine. Inexpensive, even, with the subsidies they qualified for. I'm sure it could be better, but my somewhat-direct experience (I helped them navigate it) with it was entirely positive.
Even though it's taking a lot of losses, Russia still has a lot more people than Ukraine - the danger is that Ukraine will run out of people to be soldiers and Russia will win by sheer attrition. :/
The silver lining would be that, if something like that does happen, there won't be anyone left in Ukraine to conscript to fight in Russia's next war, because any Ukrainian who can fight will be dead or in another country.
Russia is more populous, but they can't necessarily tap that population in the way they would need to win an attritional fight. They've gotten along so far by recruiting from their hinterlands with large signing bonuses, but they are worried that if they start heavily recruiting from their population centers that will cause political instability that could topple the government.
Ukraine is fighting for its existence. Their population is much more willing to fight, and so they don't have the same mobilization issues.
At this point, yes, there are populations that Russia hasn't tapped. The question then becomes, if Russia does start running out of people in the hinterlands to recruit before Ukraine runs out of soldiers, which will Putin think is riskier to himself: pissing off Russians by drafting them, or pissing off Russians by admitting that he's spent all that blood and treasure for nothing?
I think beliefs about American inequality are driven by two things: Hoarding of housing wealth by older middle- to upper-middle-class people, leading to 20- and 30-somethings seeing the "American dream" recede as fast as they can chase it (see: median age of first-time homebuyers topping 40), and then a very small number of extremely gauche rich people whose wealth actually isn't _that_ relevant to the averages, and whose impact on politics is hard to judge.
Obviously certain billionaires spent a lot, but at least some of that was probably actively counter-productive. But they certainly he helped give the public impression of our politics being dominated by billionaires. To the extent that our politics really are corrupted by money, the issue is MUCH more around things the public doesn't really see or understand, like certain PACs that never run ads about the issues they actually care about, they just make clear to members in safe-red or safe-blue seats that if they cross the PAC, the PAC will lavishly fund a credible challenger who agrees with the PAC on the PAC's issue, but will pick out whatever totally-unrelated issue they can, to attack the incumbent. The incumbent won't even necessarily lose, it just will make life suck for them. In the face of this kind of thing, many incumbents just fold and accommodate themselves to the PAC. This is how the crypto industry is doing things. It's how AIPAC has worked for years. Etc.
You won't defeat the Great Replacement Theory because when Whites go from being 90% of the population to 65% in a single lifetime there's no other explanation.
The difficulty with "the Great Replacement" is that in terms of *replacement*, it's true to a considerable extent; the US has gone from being definitively white-dominated to being multiracial. (Though in 1965, whites were only 85% of the US population.) And it's also true that some Democrats were publicly chortling that all those non-white immigrants were going to vote Democratic forever, giving the Democrats a permanent majority. (Though many of those non-whites started voting Republican.)
What's cynically funny is that the Immigration Act of 1965 was deliberately constructed to appear to be even-handed toward all foreign countries while favoring northeastern Europe. This was so that third-world countries we were trying to enlist as allies against the Soviets wouldn't see that we overtly discriminated against them as immigrants. But it was repeatedly publicly stated (inside the US) that the Act wouldn't change the ethnic composition of the US (i.e., not too many dark-skinned people and not even many southern and eastern Europeans). But that all failed due to "chain immigration". But nobody has been able to construct a large enough constituency to change the Act.
In the end, though, you've got to fish or cut bait. And you've never been able to define an ethnicity for which the US is the homeland; any circle of descent that includes even 50% of Americans has always had to include mostly people in other countries. So we have to fall back on being a "creedal nation", we are bound not by blood but by a set of ideals. And as far as I can tell, the people who choose to come to the US almost universally share our creeds, starting with #1, which is that the goal of life is material prosperity.
The elites lied that the Immigration Act of 1965 wouldn't change the ethnic composition of the US because otherwise no ordinary American would've supported it. Turns out oligarchs lie to people. Surprising, I know.
No. The Founding Fathers did not see America as purely a creedal nation. Look at how Ben Franklin felt about German mass migration. Look at the Naturalization Act of 1790, signed by George Washington which banned non Whites from becoming US citizens. There's a reason they didn't want blacks to have US citizenship even though multiple Founding Fathers agreed slavery was wrong or at least unsustainable in the long run.
The Founding Fathers saw America as a primarily Anglo country that sort of followed Enlightenment principles. They did not see America as purely an economic zone with your "goal of life is material prosperity" nonsense. The US was founded as a Herrenvolk democracy.
It is true that the original ethnic groups that inhabited North America have been wiped out or almost wiped out. But American culture, institutions, and prosperity have been primarily created by Anglo-Saxon Christians so it's really a sort of wonky WASP cultural homeland if anything.
What I cannot understand is why American prosperity growing off the backs of almost all European Christian immigrants justifies letting in a zillion Somalis and Salvadorans. How do the achievements of Albert Einstein, a German Jewish physicist, justify letting in a bunch of no skill Somalis instead of creating easy pathways for highly skilled Germans to immigrate? Simple: it doesn't.
Are you going to really sit here and say there and say that there are no highly skilled Somalis or Salvadorans that are here legally, citizens or have had 2nd gen kids that have done well in America? You aren't wrong that a lot of Founding Fathers were racist and also elites who didn't necessarily think that the uneducated or those who didn't own property weren't entirely equal. But the ideals laid out in our Constitution (with amendments) and Declaration of Independence don't make exceptions based on ethnicity.
To also say that American culture, institutions and prosperity has been primarily created by Anglo-Saxon Christians is such an ignorant take that I don't even know where to begin to dispel it. You do know that American culture is an amalgamation of so many different people right? You also realize that our prosperity is tied to our collective GDP and all our labor right?
Like what exactly are you trying to say? That because white people make up a smaller share of the overall population, that the white nationalist support of the white replacement theory rhetoric and downstream politics is okay?
ICE is trying to enforce the law. Theyve detained and deported hundreds of thousand of illegal immgrants over tbe past year, including several thousand from Minnesota. They’ve been able to detain and deport these immigrants without wantonly shooting them.
If the problem was ICE being untrained and trigger happy , we’d see unjustified shootings in huge numbers all across the country. Instead, we only see it in Minneapolis where “direct action” protests directly interfere with officers performing their duties.
Localized problem means localized cause.
The training of all types of police has been less “serve and protect” and more “get home safe” for decades, which means any reasonable ground for an office feeling fear seemingly justifies them sending lead downrange. I vehemently disagree with this training. Noah is right that this creates problem in a 2A society where many citizens are legally armed. Of course an officer might feel fear encountering an armed individual in their face. That does not give them the right to shoot that person.
Of course, it is also perfectly legal to be holding a flashlight or a pocket knife or to drive a car, but if one is being confronted by officers and being put under arrest then resisting arrest and making a furtive movement with that perfectly legal item becomes cause to get shot.
I don’t trust the average cop at all- their goal is to protect themselves at all costs in stressful and potentially dangerous situations. The rules of engagements for cops in America are much looser than for the military (say policing in Iraq where you might see people carrying AK47s around), which seems wrong. However, given the training and the rules, if you are in possession of any potential weapon- car, gun, flashlight, pocket knife- do not grapple with officers or resist arrest - explain that you are cooperating and following instructions.
To clarify, I’ve seen nothing in these videos that justifies shooting the guy, nor officers or officer firing perhaps a dozen times on a crowded street. I’ve seen speculation elsewhere that the cop de-holstering the activists weapon might have accidentally discharged it (leading to officers then shooting). Who knows? I’ve also seen nothing that justifies the officer arresting or grappling with the guy - though as the protestor was carrying a weapon it would be perfectly reasonable for an officer to ensure he wasn’t going to be a threat to officers or the public and the weapon was legal. You do this by asking the guy, not tackling him (unless he was uncooperative when asked).
I don’t think leftist pols should be inciting violent resistance nor should NGOs be training people to grapple or jostle officers or resist arrest or interfere with arrests. This is a recipe for disaster and it is why we’re seen these shootings of activists in Minneapolis while ICE has managed to detain hundreds of thousands of immigrants without killing them in cold blood.
ICE is...out of control. All the new hires are mall cops with only weeks of experience, who can't pass open book exams. And who work for an agency that's the opposite of transparent, and now has a budget that dwarfs FBI & CIA combined.
Trump promised he was going after the "worst of the worst," but now is uprooting families without any criminal history who work hard and pay their taxes. ICE has morphed into a nightmare clusterfuck primarily aimed at Dem cities to piss off voters, damage the economy, and create video content for RW media.
I don’t disagree that the ICE ops in Minnie (and the violent protests) are political theatre designed to rile up voters and create video.
However, ICE is everywhere. In Florida and Utah, too, not just blue states.
There is a reason these shootings are only where direct action protestors are deliberately interfering with arrests.
If it were a matter of training or attitude we’d see these trigger happy shootings everywhere as they’re have been hundreds of thousands of arrests and deportations. We don’t .
The large-scale ICE sweeps are used exclusively in Blue cities, like right now in MN.
They are paramilitaries armed to the teeth for fights with Narco gangs on the border. NOT for crowd control and sweeps in the heartland. Sealing the border is one thing. Crippling economic activity across the country in key industries is NOT what the citizenry voted for. Paying more for vegetables, hotel stays, and home purchases because Trump2 hates brown-skinned people is not what people voted for.
The Pretti killing fallout now includes a likely partial government shutdown. A few Democratic Senators need to support the bill to get to 60 votes but now no one is interested in packing the part of the package that funds ICE.
"Senate Democrats to block government funding after second fatal shooting in Minneapolis
The move could force a partial government shutdown next weekend. Lawmakers are set to vote on spending bills this week but may look to split Homeland Security from other agencies."
And even if they were casualties it would probably be at least as bad for Russia, and maybe even worse. A death removes an economically productive worker. A crippling does the same and adds the expense of caring for a non worker on top of that.
The current ICE situation in the US is a wild pendulum swing after decades during which the voters all over the West signalled their growing rejection of more immigration and the previous elites persisted in ignoring the message stubbornly.
I am a bit afraid that once the US administration changes again, it will be back to the Bourbon-style "they have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing" and thus priming the situation for future wild pendulum swings again. Much like the Bourbon restoration did in France.
Yes, I'll write about this more.
I'm tired of this self-mortification. Every movement has a reaction. The current state of things is the result of a rippling, infinite taylor series of oscillating sums; each successive term carefully balancing and responding to the previous. You are too many terms deep. This kind of religious purification is more suited to the hills of medieval Perugia.
From the economic perspective, elites *should* ignore that message, because it's a dumb, counterproductive message.
That said, if enough voters believe a wrong idea, politicians still have to take it seriously. In an ideal world they should respond by educating the voters about why it's a wrong idea. Since voters won't actually listen, I guess the only answer is to actually do the dumb thing and hope voters will wise up before the damage is too great.
So, dems should figure out how they're going to get illegals out of the country. My take is: go after employers. Approximately all immigration to the US is economic, so to stop it you just have to make illegals unemployable, and the way to do this is to aggressively prosecute the Americans who hire them. Also, make it very easy for employers to get caught. My suggestion for that is that we should offer work visas or green cards to illegals who report their bosses.
"From the economic perspective, elites *should* ignore that message, because it's a dumb, counterproductive message."
Maybe in the US, but the few Western European countries that did the math, all found out that immigration from the Islamic world was a net economic loss and a burden on the public finances. Even disregarding the cultural clash between Islam and modern secular societies, it made no sense to allow it for so long.
[citation needed] + compare it with the counterfactual, where the active population shrinks even more (especially relative to the size of the elderly)
Denmark, page 21: https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf
The Netherlands, page 70: https://www.cpb.nl/system/files/cpbmedia/publicaties/download/immigration-and-dutch-economy.pdf
Another one from the Netherlands, page 18: https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf#page237, color coded map on page 88
Arrest rate for every 1,000 people, by ethnicity in the UK (scroll down): https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/number-of-arrests/latest/
Counterfactual would be a country like Estonia or Poland neither of which are doing that badly.
If the population is shrinking then bringing in a bunch of immigrants that don't support western values is an even worse idea.
population of total foreign-born is ~15%, second generation migrants ~6% this includes people who moved from EU country to other EU country
also why do you think they don't support western values? (also, what are western values? liberalism? AfD-ism? Jesusism? Muslims are also around 6%, but obviously more in France, while much less in Spain for example)
accepting other people was also a western value for a while. well, pogroms too. so it's kind of a toss up.
Probable misuse of resources. Most of those Western European countries have historically not been at full employment and apparently are not interested in reforming to make employment easier.
Cite? I'd like to see that math.
Denmark, page 21: https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf
The Netherlands, page 70: https://www.cpb.nl/system/files/cpbmedia/publicaties/download/immigration-and-dutch-economy.pdf
Another one from the Netherlands, page 18: https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf#page237, color coded map on page 88
I'm not sure why people are reluctant to admit that migrants who
1. often don't speak the new country's language fluently
2. Don't have a good understanding of the country's culture (which along with language fluency is necessary for professional and social networking)
3. Don't have educational or vocational credentials that are recognized in the new country (they might have low education in their home country)
4. May be physically and/or psychologically traumatized (if they're refugees) and therefore require extensive medical care
5. May not have family in the new country so will need housing support
will be an economic drain, not a gain
Thanks for that. I took a look and the data is pretty compelling, though I don't think your characterization is quite accurate. You said that immigration from the Islamic wold was a net economic loss, but that hasn't been consistently true: The Danish study talks about 55k workers in the 70s who were a net economic benefit, as compared with the later refugees who were a net economic loss, even though they were from the same culture.
It seems to me that there are two factors at play here in the economic benefit/loss question (and neither are "What culture did they come from"):
The first is motivation. The 55k workers in the 70s came specifically to work, to take advantage of the rich economic opportunities. They had jobs before they arrived, and they kept those jobs. The later immigrants came to find a new place to live.
The second is the relative standard of living provided by the generous Nordic welfare states compared to what the immigrants were accustomed to. If I offered you a chance to retire right now and double your standard of living, would you take it? I know I would! I know that because I'm eyeing retirement and trying to figure out how large a reduction in my standard of living I'm willing to exchange for not working any more, and what lifestyle my savings can support.
Add to that what it must be like for someone who's been traumatized by horrific experiences, doesn't speak the language and doesn't understand the culture. It would be very hard to hold down a job... and if you're living better than ever without doing that, why would you?
Relating this to the US, nearly all of our immigrants are seeking economic opportunity. Even most of those who are allegedly seeking asylum honestly aren't, they're looking for a place they can earn more money.
Also, although the US has a much more generous welfare state than most people realize, immigrants are ineligible for a long time. Asylum seekers can spend years waiting for their cases to be heard, during which time they are ineligible for all federal welfare programs. Some states provide some support, but it's not a lot. Those who immigrate through non-asylum paths are ineligible for all federal welfare for five years.
So if you come to the US, you're going to have to find a way to earn a living for several years at least, and odds are that by the time you do become eligible for welfare benefits, you'll keep working because you've already figured out how to do that and are probably already enjoying a standard of living at least as high as what welfare will provide (and nearly all welfare benefits are means-tested, so you don't gain much by continuing to work and filing for benefits).
So what I see is that the core difference between the experiences of Europe and the US is a selection effect. The US system selects for people who want to get ahead, whereas the European system selects for people who need help. The Danes also selected for workers in the 70s. Morally, the Europeans are in the right, but that moral superiority comes at a cost. Until/unless the immigrants are fully integrated and adopt their new countries' expectations around lifestyle, many will choose to live on government largess.
Back to the original point, my comment was, of course, in the context of the US and its stinginess to immigrants. And in that context the argument against immigrants is an uninformed argument that should be ignored by elites. At least until it becomes a political problem, when the elites should accommodate the dumb.
Sounds like a description of massive influx of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe from 1870-1940. Imagine how rich our country could have been if we could have avoided the economic drain from all those horrible people from those s-hole countries! (not to mention the Chinese and Sicilians and etc. etc.)
Note to literal readers: I am being massively sarcastic.
Well, it depends upon your time frame. My father came to this country from Turkey in '48, and items 1, 3 and 5 applied to him. He was drafted immediately into the US army, where he picked up English, and as far I can tell, he was never unemployed. He married my mom (native New Yorker) in '54, and they had bought their first house on Long Island by '62. Their kids both are college educated, and one of them started three companies in the 1980s-2010s, each of which was a financial and technical success.
It's hard to tell who's going to be a net burden on the country.
On an individual level it's unpredictable. Across a large cohort it's extremely predictable.
I think the difference is motivation. What motivated your father to come from Turkey in '48? Was he fleeing a horrific situation and looking for someone to give him relief, or was he looking for economic opportunity? These two options aren't mutually exclusive, of course, a person can have both in equal measure or more one than the other.
Related to motivation is the question of opportunity. When your father arrived, supposing he'd been offered a generous welfare payment, enough to give him and his family a significantly better lifestyle than he was accustomed to (though maybe not as good as what his new American neighbors were accustomed to), would he have insisted on working? If his primary focus was on maximizing his economic future, he would have. If his primary focus was on just getting by, he might not. Either way, though, it doesn't matter because that offer was not on the table in 1948, and in the vast majority of cases isn't available to US immigrants today.
But for immigrants from low-GDP countries to Nordic countries that effort-free lifestyle improvement is on offer. I don't think anyone should be surprised that people take it.
The Turkish and Kurdish minorities in Germany seem to have integrated reasonably well. The Arabs fleeing the wars in Iraq and Syria, not well at all.
there was a post about them being on track with regards to integration, and as it took time for the previous cohorts it will take time for them too, but I can't find it now
(even though others mentioned Turkish migrants were mostly economic migrants, who "immediately" found jobs, so it seems integration is quite successful even for refugees)
there's this study https://doku.iab.de/kurzber/2025/kb2025-17.pdf , someone on Reddit characterized it as "okayish"
> 64% of the 2015 refugees now have a job (men 76%, women 35%). Thats slightly lower than the average in Germany of 70% (men 72%, women 69%).
Turks and Turkish Kurds have been trickling into Germany for decades, and now have deep roots. Turkey is an EU country, that's extremely liberal by comparison to most other Muslim countries. Which makes it no surprise they've integrated so successfully.
Turkey isn't an EU country, in large part because it isn't liberal enough to meet EU standards on these things. But it has a long and quite recent history of interacting with Europe - especially with Germany - under different guises and I think it probably is rather more attuned with Europe than other Muslim states.
Is there not a reasonable compromise?
Continue Trump's enforcement at the actual border, fix the asylum loophole, and deport illegal immigrants who are arrested for violent crimes. Don't be like Biden and let a bunch of asylum seekers surge over the border, but also don't be like Trump and start deporting people who have peacefully lived here for years (along with harassing legal immigrants and American citizens)
Saying you will only deport illegals who commit violent crimes is only one step above total open borders and will provide little, if any, deterrent to illegal border crossing. If the stats are true and illegal immigrants are less likely than US citizens to commit violent crimes you're basically signalling that if you sneak into the US (or illegally overstay your visa) and can successfully play ICE hide and seek for X years you become immune to deportation. There's probably at least 100 million people on the planet who would be ok with those odds.
Well the actual deterrent to illegal border crossing should be hard enforcement of the border. I simply think that people that have been here 5, 10, 20 years, working hard, contributing to their communities, shouldn't be deported as we see now.
So the USA can hypothetically have an totally sealed border where absolutely no one gets in or out without getting shot on-sight or blown up by a landmine if they even try to cross (think North and South Korea's border on steroids) but that would still be not-far-removed from an open border because people like visa-overstayers can't also get out?
I get the opposition to ONLY deporting violent illegal immigrants (it'd be better to say one is prioritizing deporting violent illegal immigrants without totally excluding deporting the non-violent ones. There's also the task of incentivizing legal immigration which helps disincentivize illegal immigration). What I don't get is this expansion of the definition of "open border" which you and Noah subscribe to, which would mean that even a Korean-demilitarized-zone-like border would at best be a single step from "open borders" or at worst basically equal to "open borders".
I asked one of my leftist friends- if Biden didn’t use decrees to open the borders and if all states and cities cooperated with ICE in deporting convicted criminals, do you think immigration would have been a winning issue for Trump and the Repubs, and that otherwise law abiding illegal immigrants would be worried about ICE?
They don’t care. They want open borders and criminal illegals running free- apparently it’s humanitarian. Or at least that is part of the check list of things they must pledge allegiance to in order to maintain their standing amongst peers.
I sure wish we had a reasonable prez who could communicate calmly and clearly to the public rather than sending ICE to Minnie as a political wedge issue and riling people up with OTT rhetoric, but we don’t. In good part we have Dem policies to thank for this. And Trump is doing everything possible to ensure Dem activists and donors never change their policies.
The best Dems can hope for is a two-faced Obama type who pretends to be reasonable while issuing illegal decrees (DACA, DAPA) to satisfy donors and activists.
Biden (or whoever was running his administration in 2023) did eventually reverse course at the border. Too little too late for 2024, but one can reasonably hope the next Democratic president will resume what was a much more reasonable approach.
Looking comparatively good by simply not self-destroying: 🇪🇺🤝🇮🇳
India-EU FTA coming sometime soon too!
Please don't post fake images of Pretti's murder!
In videos Pretti is wearing a cap and shades, and his coat is closed, but isn't here. Pretti is not surrounded here, but is in videos. The agent in the background appears to have a gun out and be standing at a distance, this doesn't appear in any video. The guns in agents' hands, and the pink of Pretti's face here just don't look right, they look too high-contrast and the pink of the hand looks unconvincing.
I'm not doubting he was executed, murdered... but there is an avalanche of evidence, we don't need fakes!
Whoa! I'll trust you and use a different image.
By not supporting Ukraine in its war with Putin the US is missing a chance to improve its abilities to build and deploy the new tiny smart weapons - drones and other autonomous vehicles.
The US is supporting Ukraine. The navy is now even seizing Russian oil tankers.
Putin expecting Ukraine to fall in days and Xi reshuffling the PLA look like different expressions of the same risk: leaders insulated from inconvenient assessments and feedback loops. Great powers acting stupid indeed.
Putin is Waist Deep In The Big Muddy.
https://youtu.be/24VOo7-ctKU?si=Lw5x-Q-v_a3KjLXX
While we might arguably not consider the EU a Great Power I'd like to submit an entry for them acting stupid:
On Jan 17th they signed a FTA with Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) after 25 years of negotiations and coalition building to create the largest free trade zone in the world. This is especially important now in a time of Great Power politics as it adds more partners, shores up world trade, and strengthens the ties between democratic countries.
4 days later they did this:
>>On 21 January 2026, the European Parliament approved a measure by a vote of 334–324 to ask the European Court of Justice to rule on whether the free trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur can be applied before full ratification by all member states and whether its provisions restrict the EU's ability to set environmental and consumer health policies, a move that could delay the deal by two years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93Mercosur_Partnership_Agreement
They talk a good talk at Davos but can't get out of their own way when it comes to implementation.
The EU is an attempt to co-ordinate action across a range of policy areas, between states with diverse cultures, economies and interests, often with long histories of bitter conflict. Europe learned the hard way that being a Great Power is bad for the collective soul. Whether other candidates for Great Power status can learn the easy way from the European experience, remains to be seen.
Re: China, there's a few uncorroborated stories floating Xi's purge is in reaction to a coup plot. Given exactly how opaque CCP politics really is, though, I don't think anyone can truly say one way or another
Maybe we should coin the term "Zhongnanhaiology" by analogy with Kremlinology?
In all, a disheartening set of comparisons, from this American's point of view. It is like making an actual choice for taking the express train to a national second tier status. "Wow, I shot myself in one foot, and it's not so bad! Let's shoot the other foot!" It's like we are trying to win a National Darwin Award. What could possibly go wrong?
But within the report, a question comes up for me: The charts point out that Europeans have a lower income than Americans. But how does that play out relative to overall "quality of life"? In general, the Europeans don't have issues with either health care or education, while these are two major dollar sinks for Americans. They also have much better public transportation, saving many the cost of a car. Do these comparative income figures account for the almost forced/required spending in both areas that Americans incur relative to Europeans? I'd be interested in figures that showed levels of possible discretionary income available in both areas.
Actually Europeans have plenty of problems with healthcare. For example, like at the NHS over in the UK and how hard it is to get care that's non emergency (and look at how big of a category that is). Or the funding problems they have for it.
Or look at how basic things in the US like air conditioning are not available for the many people over there (Noah's done some reporting on this).
What I've read is that in all advanced countries, people gripe about healthcare, it's just different gripes in different countries. And what the people want varies, too. I read in some book a Brit saying he didn't understand Americans and "their fascination with the new and shiny. Brits want the tried and true."
And over the years, I've heard various gripes about the higher ed systems in various countries, but again, they're different from the gripes in the US.
As many have noted, public transit works much, much better in places with high population density. And US cities with high population densities generally do have good public transit.
Worley, I would tend to agree with your first and second premise. People gripe about what doesn't fit their particular needs. That is why we have not just S, M, and L after all.
I would bring another view to your point about transportation systems. I think the US systems are perhaps more capitalistic and less socialistic than the European ones. By that I mean that the choice of making roads for ease of the distribution of goods led the the assumption that private automobiles would assume the role of "public transportation" by choice. Living in suburbs, allowed by roads, and the assumption of the responsibility to getting to work by yourself are all personal choices. But that has also led to the economic hollowing out of the center cities (witness Baltimore or Detroit). This has led to a poorer urban transportation system as well as a fragmented set of systems where the buses don't coordinate with the trains, etc. By example, I can get on an Amtrak, get off at Newark airport and take a shuttle train to the airport. I can then fly to Orly airport outside Paris, get off the plane and walk the short distance to the high speed TGV train to southern France. Similarly, probably 25 years ago I took a local train out of Geneva Switzerland to some very small stop - and the train was met by the local bus that would take us further.
But try doing any of that to Dulles or JFK airports, arguably the international airport for these leading cities of the most powerful country in the world (etc, etc). It took 50 years to get a train anywhere near Dulles airport! And to JFK from Grand Central Station it takes 30-45 minutes by train and you have to change trains. Buses are slower by far.
My overall point is that by judging any single mode of transportation for the costs involved and the fact that it will move X number of people, we forget who it is these systems are supposed to serve, and how well. We now have intermodal truck-train systems for moving cargo efficiently, but in our planning we in the US seem to have forgotten that for the moving of people.
I do want to echo what Shawn W. says below -- if you really want to reduce illegal immigration, hit employers with large fines for employing illegal immigrants. That, and likely only that, will really reduce illegal immigration.
Right now, illegal immigrants get screwed, because as illegals, they can't push back against employer abuses, like being paid below minimum wage, terrible hours, or really anything. The legal residents displaced by them suffer unemployment or reduced wages. The employers make out like bandits, since they get a malleable workforce they can push around. Almost any other immigration policy would help legal residents more than the status quo.
Clearly a better policy would be to have better border enforcement, crack down on bogus asylum cases (if living in a corrupt country is enough to claim asylum, the US will see an unlimited flow of asylum seekers), and admit more skilled immigrants (and reduce green card wait times for them).
None of this even remotely justifies what Trump's ICE brownshirts are doing killing peaceful protesters, however. If there is an overreaction to current immigration policies, it will be because Trump's thugs are running amok. ICE really needs to be reconstituted from scratch, since right now, it's filled with untrained murderous agents.
I agree with all of this except for reducing green card wait times. What good does that do? If skilled workers are willing to come here on a temporary basis then why take on the expense of their retirement?
First, it's not clear skilled workers are willing to come here without a path to becoming citizens. I also don't think it is a good idea to have a lot of workers in your country who aren't citizens -- they can generally be abused by the state or by companies without having a say in the government.
The waits for a green card are extreme these days -- around 10 years for people from India. During this time, they are unable to flexibly move between jobs, which also hurts the economy by imposing artificial constraints on free movement of labor.
I am once again asking what Noah Smith does for his personal health insurance.
I'd expect that, like most self-employed people, he buys it through healthcare.gov. I'm sure he makes too much money to qualify for subsidies, but it's still an effective marketplace.
Why do you want to know?
Because he was cagey about it when he did his post on healthcare. He was very blithe about "well, people get it through the marketplace, but most people get it through their employer." (Employer coverage is about 45% of the US.)
As for it being an effective marketplace... It really isn't. We know what those marketplaces look like in countries that do them well. Switzerland does it well, the Netherlands does it well, and they don't look like the way we do it here.
Noah Smith's favorite Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, do their healthcare financing in an entirely different way. (Taiwan is a national single payer system with public and priviate providers and Japan has 5 different insurance types that are dependent on who you are, whether or not you have a job and whether your job is a big corporation.)
He rails against socialism in this post, but he is doing the "European social democracy = socialism" fallacy. In addition, what people like about European social democracy isn't the world beating companies or the various cheeses and cookies, they like the good public transport, robust and fair healthcare systems, and the generally lessened precarity.
Talking about these economic numbers is fine and he is dunking on someone making a dumb argument, but it is kind of beside the point.
It's like comparing two restaurants and saying, "Aha, Pizza Place A gives out much bigger slices than Pizza Place B, Argument over!"
"What about the taste?"
"ARGUMENT. OVER."
The size of the slices is an important metric, but there are many more things that go in there.
Me asking about his personal health insurance experience is the equivalent pf a followup where someone asks. "Was the pepperoni any good?" because they suspect that the reviewer is ignoring that it tastes like cardboard in order to foreground the pizza slice size argument.
"(Employer coverage is about 45% of the US.)" That's not correct.
"In 2023, 53. 7% of the U. S. population had employment-based health insurance coverage"
Also when you look at the non elderly population (which is what people are really thinking about here).
"Employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) is the largest source of health coverage for non-elderly people, covering 60. 4 of this population in March 2023."
Moreover
"As of 2022, approximately 78 of the population are eligible for health insurance obtained through their employers"
So the vast majority of working age adults can and/or do get the coverage from their employers
https://insuranceinformant.com/what-proportion-of-people-use-their-employers-to.html
My kids have used the marketplace, and it was fine. Inexpensive, even, with the subsidies they qualified for. I'm sure it could be better, but my somewhat-direct experience (I helped them navigate it) with it was entirely positive.
Off exchange policies are usually better- more options
Even though it's taking a lot of losses, Russia still has a lot more people than Ukraine - the danger is that Ukraine will run out of people to be soldiers and Russia will win by sheer attrition. :/
The silver lining would be that, if something like that does happen, there won't be anyone left in Ukraine to conscript to fight in Russia's next war, because any Ukrainian who can fight will be dead or in another country.
Russia is more populous, but they can't necessarily tap that population in the way they would need to win an attritional fight. They've gotten along so far by recruiting from their hinterlands with large signing bonuses, but they are worried that if they start heavily recruiting from their population centers that will cause political instability that could topple the government.
Ukraine is fighting for its existence. Their population is much more willing to fight, and so they don't have the same mobilization issues.
At this point, yes, there are populations that Russia hasn't tapped. The question then becomes, if Russia does start running out of people in the hinterlands to recruit before Ukraine runs out of soldiers, which will Putin think is riskier to himself: pissing off Russians by drafting them, or pissing off Russians by admitting that he's spent all that blood and treasure for nothing?
I think beliefs about American inequality are driven by two things: Hoarding of housing wealth by older middle- to upper-middle-class people, leading to 20- and 30-somethings seeing the "American dream" recede as fast as they can chase it (see: median age of first-time homebuyers topping 40), and then a very small number of extremely gauche rich people whose wealth actually isn't _that_ relevant to the averages, and whose impact on politics is hard to judge.
Obviously certain billionaires spent a lot, but at least some of that was probably actively counter-productive. But they certainly he helped give the public impression of our politics being dominated by billionaires. To the extent that our politics really are corrupted by money, the issue is MUCH more around things the public doesn't really see or understand, like certain PACs that never run ads about the issues they actually care about, they just make clear to members in safe-red or safe-blue seats that if they cross the PAC, the PAC will lavishly fund a credible challenger who agrees with the PAC on the PAC's issue, but will pick out whatever totally-unrelated issue they can, to attack the incumbent. The incumbent won't even necessarily lose, it just will make life suck for them. In the face of this kind of thing, many incumbents just fold and accommodate themselves to the PAC. This is how the crypto industry is doing things. It's how AIPAC has worked for years. Etc.
You won't defeat the Great Replacement Theory because when Whites go from being 90% of the population to 65% in a single lifetime there's no other explanation.
The difficulty with "the Great Replacement" is that in terms of *replacement*, it's true to a considerable extent; the US has gone from being definitively white-dominated to being multiracial. (Though in 1965, whites were only 85% of the US population.) And it's also true that some Democrats were publicly chortling that all those non-white immigrants were going to vote Democratic forever, giving the Democrats a permanent majority. (Though many of those non-whites started voting Republican.)
What's cynically funny is that the Immigration Act of 1965 was deliberately constructed to appear to be even-handed toward all foreign countries while favoring northeastern Europe. This was so that third-world countries we were trying to enlist as allies against the Soviets wouldn't see that we overtly discriminated against them as immigrants. But it was repeatedly publicly stated (inside the US) that the Act wouldn't change the ethnic composition of the US (i.e., not too many dark-skinned people and not even many southern and eastern Europeans). But that all failed due to "chain immigration". But nobody has been able to construct a large enough constituency to change the Act.
In the end, though, you've got to fish or cut bait. And you've never been able to define an ethnicity for which the US is the homeland; any circle of descent that includes even 50% of Americans has always had to include mostly people in other countries. So we have to fall back on being a "creedal nation", we are bound not by blood but by a set of ideals. And as far as I can tell, the people who choose to come to the US almost universally share our creeds, starting with #1, which is that the goal of life is material prosperity.
The elites lied that the Immigration Act of 1965 wouldn't change the ethnic composition of the US because otherwise no ordinary American would've supported it. Turns out oligarchs lie to people. Surprising, I know.
No. The Founding Fathers did not see America as purely a creedal nation. Look at how Ben Franklin felt about German mass migration. Look at the Naturalization Act of 1790, signed by George Washington which banned non Whites from becoming US citizens. There's a reason they didn't want blacks to have US citizenship even though multiple Founding Fathers agreed slavery was wrong or at least unsustainable in the long run.
The Founding Fathers saw America as a primarily Anglo country that sort of followed Enlightenment principles. They did not see America as purely an economic zone with your "goal of life is material prosperity" nonsense. The US was founded as a Herrenvolk democracy.
It is true that the original ethnic groups that inhabited North America have been wiped out or almost wiped out. But American culture, institutions, and prosperity have been primarily created by Anglo-Saxon Christians so it's really a sort of wonky WASP cultural homeland if anything.
What I cannot understand is why American prosperity growing off the backs of almost all European Christian immigrants justifies letting in a zillion Somalis and Salvadorans. How do the achievements of Albert Einstein, a German Jewish physicist, justify letting in a bunch of no skill Somalis instead of creating easy pathways for highly skilled Germans to immigrate? Simple: it doesn't.
Are you going to really sit here and say there and say that there are no highly skilled Somalis or Salvadorans that are here legally, citizens or have had 2nd gen kids that have done well in America? You aren't wrong that a lot of Founding Fathers were racist and also elites who didn't necessarily think that the uneducated or those who didn't own property weren't entirely equal. But the ideals laid out in our Constitution (with amendments) and Declaration of Independence don't make exceptions based on ethnicity.
To also say that American culture, institutions and prosperity has been primarily created by Anglo-Saxon Christians is such an ignorant take that I don't even know where to begin to dispel it. You do know that American culture is an amalgamation of so many different people right? You also realize that our prosperity is tied to our collective GDP and all our labor right?
Like what exactly are you trying to say? That because white people make up a smaller share of the overall population, that the white nationalist support of the white replacement theory rhetoric and downstream politics is okay?
Relative fertility rates, and a lifetime being at least two generations. :P
ICE is trying to enforce the law. Theyve detained and deported hundreds of thousand of illegal immgrants over tbe past year, including several thousand from Minnesota. They’ve been able to detain and deport these immigrants without wantonly shooting them.
If the problem was ICE being untrained and trigger happy , we’d see unjustified shootings in huge numbers all across the country. Instead, we only see it in Minneapolis where “direct action” protests directly interfere with officers performing their duties.
Localized problem means localized cause.
The training of all types of police has been less “serve and protect” and more “get home safe” for decades, which means any reasonable ground for an office feeling fear seemingly justifies them sending lead downrange. I vehemently disagree with this training. Noah is right that this creates problem in a 2A society where many citizens are legally armed. Of course an officer might feel fear encountering an armed individual in their face. That does not give them the right to shoot that person.
Of course, it is also perfectly legal to be holding a flashlight or a pocket knife or to drive a car, but if one is being confronted by officers and being put under arrest then resisting arrest and making a furtive movement with that perfectly legal item becomes cause to get shot.
I don’t trust the average cop at all- their goal is to protect themselves at all costs in stressful and potentially dangerous situations. The rules of engagements for cops in America are much looser than for the military (say policing in Iraq where you might see people carrying AK47s around), which seems wrong. However, given the training and the rules, if you are in possession of any potential weapon- car, gun, flashlight, pocket knife- do not grapple with officers or resist arrest - explain that you are cooperating and following instructions.
To clarify, I’ve seen nothing in these videos that justifies shooting the guy, nor officers or officer firing perhaps a dozen times on a crowded street. I’ve seen speculation elsewhere that the cop de-holstering the activists weapon might have accidentally discharged it (leading to officers then shooting). Who knows? I’ve also seen nothing that justifies the officer arresting or grappling with the guy - though as the protestor was carrying a weapon it would be perfectly reasonable for an officer to ensure he wasn’t going to be a threat to officers or the public and the weapon was legal. You do this by asking the guy, not tackling him (unless he was uncooperative when asked).
I don’t think leftist pols should be inciting violent resistance nor should NGOs be training people to grapple or jostle officers or resist arrest or interfere with arrests. This is a recipe for disaster and it is why we’re seen these shootings of activists in Minneapolis while ICE has managed to detain hundreds of thousands of immigrants without killing them in cold blood.
ICE is...out of control. All the new hires are mall cops with only weeks of experience, who can't pass open book exams. And who work for an agency that's the opposite of transparent, and now has a budget that dwarfs FBI & CIA combined.
Trump promised he was going after the "worst of the worst," but now is uprooting families without any criminal history who work hard and pay their taxes. ICE has morphed into a nightmare clusterfuck primarily aimed at Dem cities to piss off voters, damage the economy, and create video content for RW media.
I don’t disagree that the ICE ops in Minnie (and the violent protests) are political theatre designed to rile up voters and create video.
However, ICE is everywhere. In Florida and Utah, too, not just blue states.
There is a reason these shootings are only where direct action protestors are deliberately interfering with arrests.
If it were a matter of training or attitude we’d see these trigger happy shootings everywhere as they’re have been hundreds of thousands of arrests and deportations. We don’t .
The large-scale ICE sweeps are used exclusively in Blue cities, like right now in MN.
They are paramilitaries armed to the teeth for fights with Narco gangs on the border. NOT for crowd control and sweeps in the heartland. Sealing the border is one thing. Crippling economic activity across the country in key industries is NOT what the citizenry voted for. Paying more for vegetables, hotel stays, and home purchases because Trump2 hates brown-skinned people is not what people voted for.
You make a couple of good points that I don’t disagree with
The Pretti killing fallout now includes a likely partial government shutdown. A few Democratic Senators need to support the bill to get to 60 votes but now no one is interested in packing the part of the package that funds ICE.
"Senate Democrats to block government funding after second fatal shooting in Minneapolis
The move could force a partial government shutdown next weekend. Lawmakers are set to vote on spending bills this week but may look to split Homeland Security from other agencies."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/01/24/senate-democrats-block-funding-ice/
Thanks for this post Noah!
Re: Ukraine: I know he said “deaths” but don’t you think this is actually “casualties”?
I know it’s not entirely blunting your point, but might be good to be clear…
The Ukrainian source is extremely explicit about saying that these are DEATHS, not "casualties".
And even if they were casualties it would probably be at least as bad for Russia, and maybe even worse. A death removes an economically productive worker. A crippling does the same and adds the expense of caring for a non worker on top of that.
Yeah totes, I just was going from Phillips O’Brian interpretation of that same quote in his last weekend update.
Regardless I don’t think it changes the substance of your point.
Do we have any estimated figures on how this relates to Ukraine births and their casualties?
Yes, it's casualties, not deaths. Don't know what the trickleback % is; but the number of seriously wounded that later return to the front is low.