you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something. Could you please tell me, let’s say, two people you have shown us were prosecuted for something at any point in this discussion?
It seems to me that however vague the laws about “hate speech” are—and I remind you that this is another thing for which you have given no actual evidence: not one instance of a specific law that is vague in a specific way and permits some specific sort of abuse—you cannot reasonably claim to have supported your original claim without showing us someone prosecuted for something.
I am not claiming that hate-speech laws—either any specific ones that actually exist, or the broad concept—are good laws. I am only pointing out that if the actual situation is that “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration in ways designed to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants” then it is not correct to describe that situation as “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration”.
(For clarity: I was not claiming that “with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred” is language suitable for writing into law. It might not be, even if one wanted to criminalize fomenting resentment and hatred. Vagueness in my description of an action does not equate to vagueness in the actual laws that apply to such actions. Maybe the actual laws are in fact too vague, but let’s see some examples.)
You keep making claims about what hate-speech laws permit. I doubt those claims. (I repeat: that does not mean that I endorse those laws. They might be bad laws. But I am not convinced that you are describing their consequences accurately.) Could you please give some examples of particular countries’ hate-speech laws, and of things that don’t go beyond “objecting to immigration” that they criminalize?
(But, I reiterate: no matter what is in those laws, nothing you can say about just the laws can be justification for your claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, because you have not shown any examples of people who were prosecuted for anything.)
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something.
Come on. One of the links’ titles is “Prosecuted, yet popular? Hate speech prosecution of anti-immigration politicians in the news and electoral support”.
I admit that the summary (which is all I can read, since it’s in a paywall) doesn’t contain names, but it’s pretty obvious that such people exist.
Nope. It makes it obvious that some people are anti-immigration and have been prosecuted for hate speech. Very likely the things they were prosecuted for aren’t independent of their opposition to immigration, but we don’t know anything about what those things were.
Oooh. You can get the actual paper (or maybe it’s an earlier pre-publication version of it) here. Let’s take a look at the first few concrete examples in it, assuming there turn out to be some.
In the Netherlands, PVV leader Wilders has been prosecuted for hate speech twice, in 2009-2011 and in 2014-2016 [...] While acquitted in June 2011 for a complaint about targeting Islam, Wilders was convicted in December 2016 after having insulted Moroccans at a 2014 Election Rally in The Hague. However, no sentence was imposed.
This looks like it might be informative—it seems as if we have two cases near the borderline between what gets actual legal penalties and what doesn’t. (For the avoidance of doubt: I appreciate that merely getting prosecuted is unpleasant, time-consuming, potentially expensive, etc. I think there are a few key thresholds: what do you have to do to get prosecuted, what do you have to do to get convicted, and what do you have to do to get a substantial sentence imposed?)
2009-2011. I think this document quotes the things he said that got him in trouble. (Though not enough trouble for an actual hate-speech conviction.) A few I-hope-representative samples: “Islam wants to control, subdue and is out for the destruction of our Western civilization.” “The demographic composition of the population is the biggest problem of the Netherlands. [...] We must stop the tsunami of the Islamisation.” “The core of the problem is the fascist Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as laid down in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Quran.” “One out of five Moroccan youngsters is registered with the police as a suspect.” “Former chief of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that the Third World War has already started. I am not putting these words in my mouth, but it is correct though.” “I have had enough of the Islam in the Netherlands: no more Muslim immigrants. I have had enough of the adoration of Allah and Mohammeed in the Netherlands: no more mosques. I have had enough of the Quran in the Netherlands: prohibit this fascist book.”
I am on the whole glad that Wilders was not convicted of any crime for saying these things. But I think it is clear that, even though immigration is one thing he mentioned, this was not about “opposition to immigration”, it was about going allegedly-too-far in criticizing Islam and Muslims.
2014-2016. (Note: his conviction in 2016, for which no penalty was imposed, was overturned in part in 2020.) In this case I haven’t found actual documents. News articles mention a rally at which he asked the crowd whether they want “fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands”, the crowd chanted “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”, and Wilders said “we’re going to arrange that”. It seems like the rest of what he said is relevant, but no one seems to be quoting that or providing the text of the actual charges he faced.
The specific thing alleged in the news articles doesn’t sound to me like something one should face legal penalties for, but again it seems like this isn’t just about “objecting to immigration”. If he’s going to make there be fewer Moroccans then it sounds like, in the best case, he’s proposing to start deporting them. And, going out on a limb, I’m going to guess that the complaints were about whatever he said leading up to his question about “fewer or more Moroccans” as well as the question itself and its aftermath, and that that probably wasn’t just “objecting to immigration”. But I’ve found it frustratingly difficult to determine exactly what he was accused of doing in this case.
In Belgium, Daniel Féret, then party leader of Front National (since 2012 onwards “Démocratie Nationale”), was prosecuted in 2002 for disseminating flyers in which North African immigrants were stigmatized. He was convicted for inciting hatred in April 2006 [...]
I think this is describing one prosecution that went on for 4 years, not two separate incidents. I haven’t found documents from the trial itself, but Feret went to the European Court of Human Rights complaining that his right to freedom of expression had been violated, and their judgement has some useful information. And there’s a little bit of information in this BBC News article. The documents at issue here were election pamphlets, and e.g. one of them featured a cartoon showing “the brown plague” and “the black international” (represented by a couple of Africans with bones through their noses). Again, whatever you might think of the merits of the laws involved, this case was not about “objecting to immigration” and I don’t think one can reasonably deny that Féret, or more precisely his party, was trying to incite hatred.
In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen was prosecuted numerous times for targeting immigrants, Jews, Muslims and Roma when he was leader of Front National (since 2018 onwards “Rassemblement National”) in the 1990s and 2000s.
“Numerous times” isn’t very helpful. Most of what I found in a web search for “Jean-Marie Le Pen prosecuted” was about two things: calling the Nazis’ gas chambers “a detail of history”, and saying that the Nazi occupation of France wasn’t particularly inhumane. Neither of these is particularly about “objecting to immigration”.
In Germany, Günter Deckert and Udo Voigt were, both as the leader of the NPD, prosecuted several times for inciting racial hatred after making comments about Jews, the Holocaust, the Nazi past, and blacks.
It’s 3:30am and this is taking a lot of time, so rather than trying to research this one I’ll just remark that this also doesn’t sound like it’s about “objecting to immigration”, it’s about defending the Nazis. (I don’t know whether what he said about black people was immigration-related, though.)
I’m going to leave it there; as already mentioned it’s late and this is taking a while. But my main takeaway so far is that this doesn’t look to me like a lot of cases of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration; some of the cases don’t seem to have had much to do with immigration at all, and even where the immigration link is clear the complaint was (in reality, not merely as a fiction where what’s actually just not liking immigration is portrayed as hate) about attempts to stir up large-scale hate against immigrant groups.
Again, it may well be that laws against stirring up hatred against racial / national / religious groups are bad laws. That isn’t what I’m disputing. What I’m disputing is that there’s any truth to speak of in your original claim, that objecting to immigration exposes one to any real risk of legal consequences. That’s just not what’s going on in any of these cases.
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something.
does not leave room for “it doesn’t count because they’re prosecuted for the wrong thing”.
At the point when I said “Regardless of the merits …” the nearest you had come to providing actual examples of prosecutions was gesturing vaguely towards an article neither of us had read, the information about which we had gave us no information about any prosecutions. I concede that in some sense this constituted evidence for the proposition “some people have been prosecuted for something”, but it did not tell us anything of the form “someone was prosecuted for X” where X could credibly be “objecting to immigration”.
Then I found the actual paper (note: I did, you didn’t; all of the actual intellectual work in this discussion is being done by me) and now the situation is no longer “we don’t have any examples of anyone prosecuted for anything”.
It turns out that this doesn’t actually help your case, since the examples in the paper don’t appear to include anyone who can credibly be described as having been prosecuted for objecting to immigration. But it does mean that my previous simpler objection (no examples of prosecutions provided, nothing else to say) needed to be replaced by something more complicated (now we have some examples of prosecutions, so let’s see what they are).
Yes, I change what objections I’m making when the argument I’m addressing changes. In this case it changed because I discovered I was able to perform a part of your job that you hadn’t bothered to do, namely finding some concrete examples.
So. Got any specific examples of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration, yet? Or any specific examples of hate-speech laws for which you can explain how they would criminalize objecting to immigration, as opposed to attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants?
(For the sake of explicitness: if you wish to scale your claim back to ”… now you get people prosecuted for attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants”, I will readily agree that that happens, but not that there’s no real difference between forbidding that and forbidding objecting to immigration. But I think you are still attempting to claim that there are prosecutions for things that a reasonable person would describe only as “objecting to immigration”, and that these happen because hate-speech laws are broad enough to cover some such things. This could be true! But you haven’t given any examples, and the things you have presented as examples all seem to be non-examples. In these circumstances a reasonable person updates away from the claim you’re declining to give examples of.)
But I think you are still attempting to claim that there are prosecutions for things that a reasonable person would describe only as “objecting to immigration”, and that these happen because hate-speech laws are broad enough to cover some such things.
The “only” is about the reach of the law, not the person’s actions.
It’s like having a law that criminalizes breathing, and the law is being used to prosecute a thief. Even though the person’s actions were not only breathing, I’d still call that “prosecution for breathing”.
The law in this case criminalizes stirring up hate (at least, that is what “hate speech” laws generally do, and you have not seen fit to clarify what specific laws you have in mind).
Your analogy would be valid if there were laws against objecting to immigration and they were being used to prosecute someone who is stirring up hatred. That is not the case.
Rather, it’s as if there were a law against theft, and they were used to prosecute people who were breathing, and you said “look, people are getting prosecuted for breathing”. If the anti-theft laws were broadly enough drafted, or being applied in an unprincipled enough way, you might have a case, but the onus would very much be on you to show that that was what was happening, because prima facie there’s a law against theft and it’s being used to prosecute a thief. (In this case: prima facie there are laws against stirring up hatred and they’re being used to prosecute people who are stirring up hatred.)
I was initially going to reply to Jiro’s last comment to me, but you grasped the nettle so firmly that I think I’d be just superfluous here, so I just wanted to say I almost completely agree with everything you write and that it’s awesome you put in so much effort.
It turns out that this doesn’t actually help your case, since the examples in the paper don’t appear to include anyone who can credibly be described as having been prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
As I keep pointing out, who counts as being prosecuted for immigration depends on whether prosecuting someone selectively under a broad law, while officially calling it something else, counts as prosecuting them for immigration. We haven’t settled that yet, and you shouldn’t be acting as though we’ve settled that.
If I say “there are people being prosecuted for being black”, and present as evidence a bunch of black people prosecuted for theft, fraud, murder, etc., and claim that this justifies my claim because the laws against theft, fraud, murder, etc., are too broad, then it is my responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s race rather than their actual behaviour.
If you say “there are people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and present as evidence a bunch of anti-immigration politicians prosecuted for hate speech, and claim that this justifies your claim because the laws against hate speech are too broad, then it is your responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s opinions on immigration rather than the incendiariness of their rhetoric.
But you aren’t doing any of the work required to justify your (prima facie implausible) claim. You’re behaving as if everyone’s default assumption should be that (1) the hate speech laws are so broad that they make basically everyone who objects to immigration a criminal, and that (2) what on the face of it are prosecutions for hate speech are really motivated by wanting to punish everyone who objects to immigration. I do not think either of those is a reasonable default assumption. I think both are implausible, and I think that if you want us to believe them you should give some evidence for them.
However, I’m kinda losing hope of your ever producing any evidence for any of the claims you make, so I guess I’ll have to do your job again.
Consider four possible worlds.
In world A1, hate-speech laws are extremely broad and criminalize a lot of things that don’t really involve stirring up hate and resentment and whatnot. This fact is exploited by the law-enforcement system to persecute people who object to immigration, so that such people are likely to get arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and punished.
In world A2, the hate-speech laws are just as broad as in world A, but there is no particular attempt to persecute people who object to immigration. What gets you prosecuted under hate-speech laws is behaving in ways that seem to be stirring up hatred and resentment; because the laws are very broad, some people get in trouble despite not intended to stir up hate and/or not actually succeeding in doing so, but the distinguishing feature of people who get in trouble is something like “incendiary rhetoric” or “throwing broad sweeping insults at large groups of people” rather than “objecting to immigration”.
In world B1, the laws are not so broad, but as in world A1 the law-enforcement system is keen to persecute people who object to immigration. So those people are extra-likely to get arrested and prosecuted. Most of them will then be acquitted because the laws don’t really criminalize what they’ve done, but sometimes the persecution is sufficient to get the laws misapplied too and they get convicted.
In world B2, the laws are not so broad and there is no attempt at persecution. The people who get in trouble under hate-speech laws are pretty much the people who are, or would seem to a reasonable person to be, trying to stir up hate and resentment. No system is perfect and some people may get in more or less trouble than the lawmakers intended, but on the whole what happens is that serious efforts to stir up hate get you into trouble and (as far as these laws are concerned) other things don’t.
(So A/B is about breadth of laws and 1⁄2 is about exploitation of the laws to try to persecute people who object to immigration.)
Being good Bayesians, let’s now ask how plausible these worlds are a priori and what sort of evidence we might expect to see to distinguish them.
Prior expectations on A/B: it’s common for laws to be somewhat too broad, but usually not absurdly so; “hate speech” is naturally a thing with fuzzy edges; I would expect the laws to leave substantial room for discretion (so that e.g. abuse would certainly be possible) but to be drafted in such a way that most things that aren’t actually attempts at stirring up hate and resentment would not seem to a reasonable person to be forbidden by the laws. Depending on your overall level of cynicism about how laws are made, you might reasonably have different priors on this one.
Prior expectations on 1/2: the bulk of any such persecution would have to be done by police, public prosecutors, and judges. It looks to me as if these are all groups whose tendencies run much more anti-immigrant than pro-immigrant. So I would be a little more surprised by 1 than by 2.
On either of these, you might disagree (and in fact I bet you do), but what seems clear to me is that there isn’t any sort of overwhelming prior reason to anticipate A over B or 1 over 2.
What about evidence?
The clearest evidence for A and 1 would be that people who object to immigration in ways that aren’t particularly hate-fomenting suffer actual arrests, prosecutions, convictions and penalties which is why I keep asking you to provide some examples of these. In the A-worlds we should expect actual convictions. In B1 we should expect lots of arrests and some prosecutions but fewer convictions and penalties.
From the things I’ve looked at so far, it does not seem that this happens. E.g., I gave a number of examples of politicians being vigorously anti-immigration and not getting into any sort of legal trouble for it, and the examples you have gestured towards don’t seem to include any where people have got into legal trouble for clearly-not-hate-fomenting objections to immigration.
We might also see, especially in the 1-worlds, that among people who are in fact trying to foment hate there are disproportionately many arrests/prosecutions/convictions/penalties for people who are also anti-immigration. This may be tricky to assess because if someone hates a particular group we should confidently expect them to oppose immigration by that group. But e.g. racism is often broad, so we might look to see whether people getting into trouble for racist “hate speech” are being hate-speech-y about racial groups that don’t do a lot of immigrating to their country.
Tricky to assess, as I said. But e.g. note that two of the four examples (France and Germany) in that paper about anti-immigration politicians getting prosecuted for hate speech seem to be mostly about antisemitic or pro-Nazi speech rather than anti-immigrant speech. That doesn’t look to me like what we should expect if these laws are actually functioning as tools for punishing people for objecting to immigration.
We could look at the actual laws; that should help to distinguish A from B.
Since it’s so central to your argument, I’d have expected that by now you’d have given some examples of over-broad hate-speech laws; but you haven’t.
I took a look at the UK’s law, as an example (the UK’s because English is my native language; I think the UK is less immigrant-friendly than some mainland European countries so its laws may be less stringent). I think the relevant thing is the Public Order Act 1986, as amended on various later occasions. It has a section on “racial hatred” which seems like the thing we want here. The language it uses repeatedly goes like this: ”… he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby”. (And “racial hatred” is defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”.
On the face of it, this prohibits exactly the things that a law against stirring up racial hatred is supposed to prohibit. On the other hand, it’s not hard to see how it could be abused; anyone could argue that anything is likely to stir up racial hatred having regard for all the circumstances. But that feels like it’s just a fundamental difficulty with any law of this type, which I think is shared with e.g. laws against slander or libel or fraud.
I don’t see any way in which a reasonable person could hold that this law makes it criminal to say “there should be less immigration, because more-homogeneous societies are more stable” or “there should be less immigration, because typically immigrants cost the country more than they bring in economic gains” or “there should be less immigration, because our population density is already too high”. So it definitely isn’t a law that criminalizes objecting to immigration as such.
Arguments along the lines of “immigrants from the US are disproportionately criminal, so we should stop accepting them” or “Chinese people tend to be communists and communism is bad, so we shouldn’t accept immigrants from China” come on a spectrum of incendiariness, depending not only on what the argument actually is but how it’s expressed. I would expect almost all reasonable people to feel that some things along these lines are perfectly legal according to these laws and some aren’t, though I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree on where the boundary is.
On the whole, this seems more B than A to me.
We could look at how actual prosecutions have gone: whether the arguments made in court focus on the tendency of any given statement to stir up hate, or on whether it opposes immigration. We could look for signs that arguments nominally about stirring up hate are really trying to draw juries’ attention to opposition to immigration. That would need us to look at actual transcripts of court sessions, or something. I’m not sure whether those are available, but I know I haven’t seen any and I am betting you haven’t either. (So, in particular, it is not plausible that your position is based on evidence of this kind.)
So, anyway, my assessment of the evidence known to me is that this looks more like a B-world than like an A-world, and more like a 2-world than like a 1-world. If you disagree, what would you expect to see that’s different in a B-world, and what would you expect to see that’s different in a 1-world?
So far the nearest things to a positive argument you’ve offered are:
that the hate-speech laws are broad. I don’t really see how they could be much less broad while still being hate-speech laws; are there any possible worlds in which (1) there are laws against stirring up racial hatred but (2) you would not say that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and if so what do those worlds look like?
that some anti-immigration politicians have been prosecuted for hate speech offences. As I’ve said, on the face of it what they’re being prosecuted for is in fact “stirring up hate” rather than “objecting to immigration”; are there any possible worlds in which anti-immigration politicians are prosecuted for hate speech offences but you wouldn’t view it that way, and if so what do those worlds look like?
The claim you originally made, once again:
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something. Could you please tell me, let’s say, two people you have shown us were prosecuted for something at any point in this discussion?
It seems to me that however vague the laws about “hate speech” are—and I remind you that this is another thing for which you have given no actual evidence: not one instance of a specific law that is vague in a specific way and permits some specific sort of abuse—you cannot reasonably claim to have supported your original claim without showing us someone prosecuted for something.
I am not claiming that hate-speech laws—either any specific ones that actually exist, or the broad concept—are good laws. I am only pointing out that if the actual situation is that “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration in ways designed to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants” then it is not correct to describe that situation as “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration”.
(For clarity: I was not claiming that “with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred” is language suitable for writing into law. It might not be, even if one wanted to criminalize fomenting resentment and hatred. Vagueness in my description of an action does not equate to vagueness in the actual laws that apply to such actions. Maybe the actual laws are in fact too vague, but let’s see some examples.)
You keep making claims about what hate-speech laws permit. I doubt those claims. (I repeat: that does not mean that I endorse those laws. They might be bad laws. But I am not convinced that you are describing their consequences accurately.) Could you please give some examples of particular countries’ hate-speech laws, and of things that don’t go beyond “objecting to immigration” that they criminalize?
(But, I reiterate: no matter what is in those laws, nothing you can say about just the laws can be justification for your claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, because you have not shown any examples of people who were prosecuted for anything.)
Come on. One of the links’ titles is “Prosecuted, yet popular? Hate speech prosecution of anti-immigration politicians in the news and electoral support”.
I admit that the summary (which is all I can read, since it’s in a paywall) doesn’t contain names, but it’s pretty obvious that such people exist.
Nope. It makes it obvious that some people are anti-immigration and have been prosecuted for hate speech. Very likely the things they were prosecuted for aren’t independent of their opposition to immigration, but we don’t know anything about what those things were.
Oooh. You can get the actual paper (or maybe it’s an earlier pre-publication version of it) here. Let’s take a look at the first few concrete examples in it, assuming there turn out to be some.
This looks like it might be informative—it seems as if we have two cases near the borderline between what gets actual legal penalties and what doesn’t. (For the avoidance of doubt: I appreciate that merely getting prosecuted is unpleasant, time-consuming, potentially expensive, etc. I think there are a few key thresholds: what do you have to do to get prosecuted, what do you have to do to get convicted, and what do you have to do to get a substantial sentence imposed?)
2009-2011. I think this document quotes the things he said that got him in trouble. (Though not enough trouble for an actual hate-speech conviction.) A few I-hope-representative samples: “Islam wants to control, subdue and is out for the destruction of our Western civilization.” “The demographic composition of the population is the biggest problem of the Netherlands. [...] We must stop the tsunami of the Islamisation.” “The core of the problem is the fascist Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as laid down in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Quran.” “One out of five Moroccan youngsters is registered with the police as a suspect.” “Former chief of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that the Third World War has already started. I am not putting these words in my mouth, but it is correct though.” “I have had enough of the Islam in the Netherlands: no more Muslim immigrants. I have had enough of the adoration of Allah and Mohammeed in the Netherlands: no more mosques. I have had enough of the Quran in the Netherlands: prohibit this fascist book.”
I am on the whole glad that Wilders was not convicted of any crime for saying these things. But I think it is clear that, even though immigration is one thing he mentioned, this was not about “opposition to immigration”, it was about going allegedly-too-far in criticizing Islam and Muslims.
2014-2016. (Note: his conviction in 2016, for which no penalty was imposed, was overturned in part in 2020.) In this case I haven’t found actual documents. News articles mention a rally at which he asked the crowd whether they want “fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands”, the crowd chanted “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”, and Wilders said “we’re going to arrange that”. It seems like the rest of what he said is relevant, but no one seems to be quoting that or providing the text of the actual charges he faced.
The specific thing alleged in the news articles doesn’t sound to me like something one should face legal penalties for, but again it seems like this isn’t just about “objecting to immigration”. If he’s going to make there be fewer Moroccans then it sounds like, in the best case, he’s proposing to start deporting them. And, going out on a limb, I’m going to guess that the complaints were about whatever he said leading up to his question about “fewer or more Moroccans” as well as the question itself and its aftermath, and that that probably wasn’t just “objecting to immigration”. But I’ve found it frustratingly difficult to determine exactly what he was accused of doing in this case.
I think this is describing one prosecution that went on for 4 years, not two separate incidents. I haven’t found documents from the trial itself, but Feret went to the European Court of Human Rights complaining that his right to freedom of expression had been violated, and their judgement has some useful information. And there’s a little bit of information in this BBC News article. The documents at issue here were election pamphlets, and e.g. one of them featured a cartoon showing “the brown plague” and “the black international” (represented by a couple of Africans with bones through their noses). Again, whatever you might think of the merits of the laws involved, this case was not about “objecting to immigration” and I don’t think one can reasonably deny that Féret, or more precisely his party, was trying to incite hatred.
“Numerous times” isn’t very helpful. Most of what I found in a web search for “Jean-Marie Le Pen prosecuted” was about two things: calling the Nazis’ gas chambers “a detail of history”, and saying that the Nazi occupation of France wasn’t particularly inhumane. Neither of these is particularly about “objecting to immigration”.
It’s 3:30am and this is taking a lot of time, so rather than trying to research this one I’ll just remark that this also doesn’t sound like it’s about “objecting to immigration”, it’s about defending the Nazis. (I don’t know whether what he said about black people was immigration-related, though.)
I’m going to leave it there; as already mentioned it’s late and this is taking a while. But my main takeaway so far is that this doesn’t look to me like a lot of cases of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration; some of the cases don’t seem to have had much to do with immigration at all, and even where the immigration link is clear the complaint was (in reality, not merely as a fiction where what’s actually just not liking immigration is portrayed as hate) about attempts to stir up large-scale hate against immigrant groups.
Again, it may well be that laws against stirring up hatred against racial / national / religious groups are bad laws. That isn’t what I’m disputing. What I’m disputing is that there’s any truth to speak of in your original claim, that objecting to immigration exposes one to any real risk of legal consequences. That’s just not what’s going on in any of these cases.
You are shifting between objections.
does not leave room for “it doesn’t count because they’re prosecuted for the wrong thing”.
At the point when I said “Regardless of the merits …” the nearest you had come to providing actual examples of prosecutions was gesturing vaguely towards an article neither of us had read, the information about which we had gave us no information about any prosecutions. I concede that in some sense this constituted evidence for the proposition “some people have been prosecuted for something”, but it did not tell us anything of the form “someone was prosecuted for X” where X could credibly be “objecting to immigration”.
Then I found the actual paper (note: I did, you didn’t; all of the actual intellectual work in this discussion is being done by me) and now the situation is no longer “we don’t have any examples of anyone prosecuted for anything”.
It turns out that this doesn’t actually help your case, since the examples in the paper don’t appear to include anyone who can credibly be described as having been prosecuted for objecting to immigration. But it does mean that my previous simpler objection (no examples of prosecutions provided, nothing else to say) needed to be replaced by something more complicated (now we have some examples of prosecutions, so let’s see what they are).
Yes, I change what objections I’m making when the argument I’m addressing changes. In this case it changed because I discovered I was able to perform a part of your job that you hadn’t bothered to do, namely finding some concrete examples.
So. Got any specific examples of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration, yet? Or any specific examples of hate-speech laws for which you can explain how they would criminalize objecting to immigration, as opposed to attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants?
(For the sake of explicitness: if you wish to scale your claim back to ”… now you get people prosecuted for attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants”, I will readily agree that that happens, but not that there’s no real difference between forbidding that and forbidding objecting to immigration. But I think you are still attempting to claim that there are prosecutions for things that a reasonable person would describe only as “objecting to immigration”, and that these happen because hate-speech laws are broad enough to cover some such things. This could be true! But you haven’t given any examples, and the things you have presented as examples all seem to be non-examples. In these circumstances a reasonable person updates away from the claim you’re declining to give examples of.)
The “only” is about the reach of the law, not the person’s actions.
It’s like having a law that criminalizes breathing, and the law is being used to prosecute a thief. Even though the person’s actions were not only breathing, I’d still call that “prosecution for breathing”.
The law in this case criminalizes stirring up hate (at least, that is what “hate speech” laws generally do, and you have not seen fit to clarify what specific laws you have in mind).
Your analogy would be valid if there were laws against objecting to immigration and they were being used to prosecute someone who is stirring up hatred. That is not the case.
Rather, it’s as if there were a law against theft, and they were used to prosecute people who were breathing, and you said “look, people are getting prosecuted for breathing”. If the anti-theft laws were broadly enough drafted, or being applied in an unprincipled enough way, you might have a case, but the onus would very much be on you to show that that was what was happening, because prima facie there’s a law against theft and it’s being used to prosecute a thief. (In this case: prima facie there are laws against stirring up hatred and they’re being used to prosecute people who are stirring up hatred.)
I was initially going to reply to Jiro’s last comment to me, but you grasped the nettle so firmly that I think I’d be just superfluous here, so I just wanted to say I almost completely agree with everything you write and that it’s awesome you put in so much effort.
Thank you for the kind words!
It seems that Jiro has lost interest, though.
As I keep pointing out, who counts as being prosecuted for immigration depends on whether prosecuting someone selectively under a broad law, while officially calling it something else, counts as prosecuting them for immigration. We haven’t settled that yet, and you shouldn’t be acting as though we’ve settled that.
If I say “there are people being prosecuted for being black”, and present as evidence a bunch of black people prosecuted for theft, fraud, murder, etc., and claim that this justifies my claim because the laws against theft, fraud, murder, etc., are too broad, then it is my responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s race rather than their actual behaviour.
If you say “there are people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and present as evidence a bunch of anti-immigration politicians prosecuted for hate speech, and claim that this justifies your claim because the laws against hate speech are too broad, then it is your responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s opinions on immigration rather than the incendiariness of their rhetoric.
But you aren’t doing any of the work required to justify your (prima facie implausible) claim. You’re behaving as if everyone’s default assumption should be that (1) the hate speech laws are so broad that they make basically everyone who objects to immigration a criminal, and that (2) what on the face of it are prosecutions for hate speech are really motivated by wanting to punish everyone who objects to immigration. I do not think either of those is a reasonable default assumption. I think both are implausible, and I think that if you want us to believe them you should give some evidence for them.
However, I’m kinda losing hope of your ever producing any evidence for any of the claims you make, so I guess I’ll have to do your job again.
Consider four possible worlds.
In world A1, hate-speech laws are extremely broad and criminalize a lot of things that don’t really involve stirring up hate and resentment and whatnot. This fact is exploited by the law-enforcement system to persecute people who object to immigration, so that such people are likely to get arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and punished.
In world A2, the hate-speech laws are just as broad as in world A, but there is no particular attempt to persecute people who object to immigration. What gets you prosecuted under hate-speech laws is behaving in ways that seem to be stirring up hatred and resentment; because the laws are very broad, some people get in trouble despite not intended to stir up hate and/or not actually succeeding in doing so, but the distinguishing feature of people who get in trouble is something like “incendiary rhetoric” or “throwing broad sweeping insults at large groups of people” rather than “objecting to immigration”.
In world B1, the laws are not so broad, but as in world A1 the law-enforcement system is keen to persecute people who object to immigration. So those people are extra-likely to get arrested and prosecuted. Most of them will then be acquitted because the laws don’t really criminalize what they’ve done, but sometimes the persecution is sufficient to get the laws misapplied too and they get convicted.
In world B2, the laws are not so broad and there is no attempt at persecution. The people who get in trouble under hate-speech laws are pretty much the people who are, or would seem to a reasonable person to be, trying to stir up hate and resentment. No system is perfect and some people may get in more or less trouble than the lawmakers intended, but on the whole what happens is that serious efforts to stir up hate get you into trouble and (as far as these laws are concerned) other things don’t.
(So A/B is about breadth of laws and 1⁄2 is about exploitation of the laws to try to persecute people who object to immigration.)
Being good Bayesians, let’s now ask how plausible these worlds are a priori and what sort of evidence we might expect to see to distinguish them.
Prior expectations on A/B: it’s common for laws to be somewhat too broad, but usually not absurdly so; “hate speech” is naturally a thing with fuzzy edges; I would expect the laws to leave substantial room for discretion (so that e.g. abuse would certainly be possible) but to be drafted in such a way that most things that aren’t actually attempts at stirring up hate and resentment would not seem to a reasonable person to be forbidden by the laws. Depending on your overall level of cynicism about how laws are made, you might reasonably have different priors on this one.
Prior expectations on 1/2: the bulk of any such persecution would have to be done by police, public prosecutors, and judges. It looks to me as if these are all groups whose tendencies run much more anti-immigrant than pro-immigrant. So I would be a little more surprised by 1 than by 2.
On either of these, you might disagree (and in fact I bet you do), but what seems clear to me is that there isn’t any sort of overwhelming prior reason to anticipate A over B or 1 over 2.
What about evidence?
The clearest evidence for A and 1 would be that people who object to immigration in ways that aren’t particularly hate-fomenting suffer actual arrests, prosecutions, convictions and penalties which is why I keep asking you to provide some examples of these. In the A-worlds we should expect actual convictions. In B1 we should expect lots of arrests and some prosecutions but fewer convictions and penalties.
From the things I’ve looked at so far, it does not seem that this happens. E.g., I gave a number of examples of politicians being vigorously anti-immigration and not getting into any sort of legal trouble for it, and the examples you have gestured towards don’t seem to include any where people have got into legal trouble for clearly-not-hate-fomenting objections to immigration.
We might also see, especially in the 1-worlds, that among people who are in fact trying to foment hate there are disproportionately many arrests/prosecutions/convictions/penalties for people who are also anti-immigration. This may be tricky to assess because if someone hates a particular group we should confidently expect them to oppose immigration by that group. But e.g. racism is often broad, so we might look to see whether people getting into trouble for racist “hate speech” are being hate-speech-y about racial groups that don’t do a lot of immigrating to their country.
Tricky to assess, as I said. But e.g. note that two of the four examples (France and Germany) in that paper about anti-immigration politicians getting prosecuted for hate speech seem to be mostly about antisemitic or pro-Nazi speech rather than anti-immigrant speech. That doesn’t look to me like what we should expect if these laws are actually functioning as tools for punishing people for objecting to immigration.
We could look at the actual laws; that should help to distinguish A from B.
Since it’s so central to your argument, I’d have expected that by now you’d have given some examples of over-broad hate-speech laws; but you haven’t.
I took a look at the UK’s law, as an example (the UK’s because English is my native language; I think the UK is less immigrant-friendly than some mainland European countries so its laws may be less stringent). I think the relevant thing is the Public Order Act 1986, as amended on various later occasions. It has a section on “racial hatred” which seems like the thing we want here. The language it uses repeatedly goes like this: ”… he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby”. (And “racial hatred” is defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”.
On the face of it, this prohibits exactly the things that a law against stirring up racial hatred is supposed to prohibit. On the other hand, it’s not hard to see how it could be abused; anyone could argue that anything is likely to stir up racial hatred having regard for all the circumstances. But that feels like it’s just a fundamental difficulty with any law of this type, which I think is shared with e.g. laws against slander or libel or fraud.
I don’t see any way in which a reasonable person could hold that this law makes it criminal to say “there should be less immigration, because more-homogeneous societies are more stable” or “there should be less immigration, because typically immigrants cost the country more than they bring in economic gains” or “there should be less immigration, because our population density is already too high”. So it definitely isn’t a law that criminalizes objecting to immigration as such.
Arguments along the lines of “immigrants from the US are disproportionately criminal, so we should stop accepting them” or “Chinese people tend to be communists and communism is bad, so we shouldn’t accept immigrants from China” come on a spectrum of incendiariness, depending not only on what the argument actually is but how it’s expressed. I would expect almost all reasonable people to feel that some things along these lines are perfectly legal according to these laws and some aren’t, though I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree on where the boundary is.
On the whole, this seems more B than A to me.
We could look at how actual prosecutions have gone: whether the arguments made in court focus on the tendency of any given statement to stir up hate, or on whether it opposes immigration. We could look for signs that arguments nominally about stirring up hate are really trying to draw juries’ attention to opposition to immigration. That would need us to look at actual transcripts of court sessions, or something. I’m not sure whether those are available, but I know I haven’t seen any and I am betting you haven’t either. (So, in particular, it is not plausible that your position is based on evidence of this kind.)
So, anyway, my assessment of the evidence known to me is that this looks more like a B-world than like an A-world, and more like a 2-world than like a 1-world. If you disagree, what would you expect to see that’s different in a B-world, and what would you expect to see that’s different in a 1-world?
So far the nearest things to a positive argument you’ve offered are:
that the hate-speech laws are broad. I don’t really see how they could be much less broad while still being hate-speech laws; are there any possible worlds in which (1) there are laws against stirring up racial hatred but (2) you would not say that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and if so what do those worlds look like?
that some anti-immigration politicians have been prosecuted for hate speech offences. As I’ve said, on the face of it what they’re being prosecuted for is in fact “stirring up hate” rather than “objecting to immigration”; are there any possible worlds in which anti-immigration politicians are prosecuted for hate speech offences but you wouldn’t view it that way, and if so what do those worlds look like?