I think locking out anyone who might be a criminal, when you have the power to potentially stop them being a criminal and their home country doesn’t, is morally negligent. (I’m your standard no-frills utilitarian; the worth of an action is decided purely by whether you satisfied people’s preferences and made them happy. Forget “state’s duty to the citizens”, the only talk of ‘duty’ I really entertain is each of our duty to our fellow humans. “The White Man’s Burden” is a really stupid idea because it’s every human’s responsibility to help out their fellow humans regardless of skin colour.) I think it doesn’t matter whether you decreased or increased crime on either side of a border, since borders are neither happiness nor preferences and mean nothing to your standard no-frills utilitarian type. I just care about whether you decrease crime in total, globally.
Let me try to briefly convince you of why there should be a state’s duty to citizens from a utilitarian perspective, also corresponding greater concern about internal than external crime:
1) A state resembles a form of corporate organization with its citizens as shareholders. It has special obligations by contract to those shareholders who got a stake on the assumption that they would have special rights in the corporation. Suddenly creating new stock and giving it to to non-shareholders, thereby creating new shareholders, would increase the utility of new shareholders and decrease the utility of old shareholders to roughly the same extent because there is the same amount of company being redistributed, but would have the additional negative effect of decreasing rule of law, and rule of law is a very very good thing because it lets people engage in long-term planning and live stable lives. (There is no such problem if the shareholders come together and decide to create and distribute new stock by agreement—and to translate back the metaphor, this means that immigration should be controlled by existing citizens, rather than borders being declared to “mean nothing” in general.)
2) A state is often an overlay on a nation. To cash those terms out: A governing entity with major features usually including a legal code and a geographically defined and sharply edged region of influence is often an overlay on a cluster of people grouped by social, cultural, biological, and other shared features. (“Nation” derives from those who shared a natus.) Different clusters of people have different clusters of utility functions, and should therefore live under differing legal codes, which should also be administrated by members of those clusters whom one can reasonably expect to have a particularly good understanding of how their fellow cluster-members will be happiest.
3) Particularly where not overlaid on nations, separate states function as testbeds for experiments in policy; the closest thing one has to large-scale controlled experiments in sociology. Redistributing populations across states would be akin to redistributing test subjects across trial arms. The utilitarian thing to do is therefore to instead copy the policies of the most successful nations to the least successful nations, then branch again on previously unexplored policy areas, which each state maintaining its own branch.
Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
If you are a kid facing persecution and a high possibility of being murdered in your home country, coming to the UK and receiving an education here and going on to a career here is a massive utility gain, and if you go on to a successful and altruistic career it’s an even bigger utility gain. The disutility of the kid coming here—maybe the teacher in the local state school has to split their attention between 31 pupils instead of the original 30 - is only a very small disutility.
Um, that style of logic doesn’t work. You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society. This is the kind of computation that’s impossible to do intuitively (and probably impossible to do directly at all since we have no way to directly measure utility). It is, however, easy to see what the implications of a large scale population transfer are and to see that they are negative. You assert that there exists a threshold below which immigration is positive utility. However, you have no way to calculate it’s value or show we are below it (or even show that it’s not zero), without resorting to what looks like wishful thinking.
You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society.
That’s reason for Pigovian taxes, not outright bans. There are plenty of other things which have diffuse negative externalities, e.g. anything which causes air pollution, and we don’t just ban them all.
Except neither Acty nor anyone currently in politics is proposing Pigovian taxes. Also, since most of the would-be immigrants wouldn’t be able to afford them, this wouldn’t be an acceptable policy for the pro-immigration forces.
Let me try to briefly convince you of why there should be a state’s duty to citizens from a utilitarian perspective, also corresponding greater concern about internal than external crime:
1) A state resembles a form of corporate organization with its citizens as shareholders. It has special obligations by contract to those shareholders who got a stake on the assumption that they would have special rights in the corporation. Suddenly creating new stock and giving it to to non-shareholders, thereby creating new shareholders, would increase the utility of new shareholders and decrease the utility of old shareholders to roughly the same extent because there is the same amount of company being redistributed, but would have the additional negative effect of decreasing rule of law, and rule of law is a very very good thing because it lets people engage in long-term planning and live stable lives. (There is no such problem if the shareholders come together and decide to create and distribute new stock by agreement—and to translate back the metaphor, this means that immigration should be controlled by existing citizens, rather than borders being declared to “mean nothing” in general.)
2) A state is often an overlay on a nation. To cash those terms out: A governing entity with major features usually including a legal code and a geographically defined and sharply edged region of influence is often an overlay on a cluster of people grouped by social, cultural, biological, and other shared features. (“Nation” derives from those who shared a natus.) Different clusters of people have different clusters of utility functions, and should therefore live under differing legal codes, which should also be administrated by members of those clusters whom one can reasonably expect to have a particularly good understanding of how their fellow cluster-members will be happiest.
3) Particularly where not overlaid on nations, separate states function as testbeds for experiments in policy; the closest thing one has to large-scale controlled experiments in sociology. Redistributing populations across states would be akin to redistributing test subjects across trial arms. The utilitarian thing to do is therefore to instead copy the policies of the most successful nations to the least successful nations, then branch again on previously unexplored policy areas, which each state maintaining its own branch.
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Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
Um, that style of logic doesn’t work. You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society. This is the kind of computation that’s impossible to do intuitively (and probably impossible to do directly at all since we have no way to directly measure utility). It is, however, easy to see what the implications of a large scale population transfer are and to see that they are negative. You assert that there exists a threshold below which immigration is positive utility. However, you have no way to calculate it’s value or show we are below it (or even show that it’s not zero), without resorting to what looks like wishful thinking.
That’s reason for Pigovian taxes, not outright bans. There are plenty of other things which have diffuse negative externalities, e.g. anything which causes air pollution, and we don’t just ban them all.
Except neither Acty nor anyone currently in politics is proposing Pigovian taxes. Also, since most of the would-be immigrants wouldn’t be able to afford them, this wouldn’t be an acceptable policy for the pro-immigration forces.