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Jan. 24, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:21
619 Immigration and Empathy
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Oh, you people with your immigration.
So I'm on this libertarian list, having a little look at it today, while working feverishly for my esteemed employer.
And, oh man, this is a real challenge for people, this whole immigration thing.
It is where people's values fall down go boom.
It's where libertarian values go to die is in the great boneyard of immigration debates.
And it shows up, I think, a little bit in abortion.
But for the most part, immigration seems to be the acid test that gets people messed up.
And, oh man, it's got to be a pretty joyous thing for the sadistic rulers to watch the sheeple tearing at each other's throats rather than focusing on the real causes of the problems.
And it is really an area, I think, where...
Is it the racism of libertarians, which I'm sure is as common as racism everywhere else?
Is it a lack of sensitivity?
Is it a feeling that bad people are going to come and vote for different policy initiatives?
Then they're going to swamp the white culture or the dominant culture and bad things are going to happen in the future and so on.
Man, oh man, oh man, I just can't fathom why it is that people get so all-stranged up about immigration.
Why? Why? Why would it be different from everything else under the sun when it comes to principles?
But I guess this is where principles face a test, right?
It's where you particularly have a challenge in your own perception of things, right?
So I had... A challenge with the military and with soldiers, that was my fetish, and I would blame that to some degree on my upbringing, but also mostly due to a lack of consistency in my own thinking.
But this immigration one, oh my God, is it ever a tough nut to crack.
I pointed out a little while back on this list that Immigration is sort of an acid test for most libertarians, especially those in the United States, and was fairly roundly condemned as a result of it.
And I'd sort of like to make the case, now I've talked about immigration before, but haven't obviously talked about it in a way that is clearing things up for people, which I think is a real shame.
And so perhaps we can do that at least from...
The standpoint of empathy, we can do that for immigrants.
And we'll just talk about the traditional, right?
The stereotypical one.
It's the Mexican who has come across to the United States.
Now, of course, most of them come over.
or a good chunk of them come over.
I think there's 11 million or so estimated to be living in the U.S., not that anyone has any real clue.
And most of them come over on work visas.
Most of them have jobs arranged before they come over because, you know, kind of tough to live when you don't have any access to a welfare state, right?
So that's not so easy.
And so I would not really assume that most people are coming over to just sponge off the welfare state.
And, of course, if they were interested in sponging off social agencies, I'm sure that they would stay.
In Mexico or some other place.
Now... What I would sort of recommend, if you want to take this on or to try this on for size, I think this will be, I hope this will be a heart-enlarging exercise.
All the statistics in the world don't mean a damn thing against prejudice, right?
Against hatred of a group, hatred of others, or fear of others subverting your political process.
So I'm going to take sort of two approaches.
And... Then we will see if we've made any progress.
One I know I haven't taken before.
I think the other one I've done sort of briefly before.
But we'll have a go-over.
A go-over, a do-over ain't such a bad thing.
So the first thing, of course, to recognize about immigration, as I've mentioned before, it's just moving.
It's just moving from one place to another.
What's the big deal? Well, the big deal, of course, is that there are political issues Organizations or political institutions in the United States that people are afraid that the Mexicans come over and then the Mexicans are going to vote en masse to turn America into Mexico.
That's really the big fear.
That the Mexicans or the immigrants or whoever are going to come over and they're going to vote like crazy and they're going to turn the US into Mexico.
And then there's that fear of foreignness.
The whites are going to be outnumbered, and English is going to be displaced as an official language.
And suddenly, the land of your forefathers, the land of your birth, and of your ancestry, and of your history, the land that you know, is taken over by another culture, and your culture is shunted aside, and you now live as a minority in somebody else's culture, but it's your country, damn it, and why the hell should it be subverted by people coming from outside and posing their will upon you through a political process?
Right? So we know this argument.
So naturally, it would seem to me that the logical response to this would be to say, well, you know what the problem is?
Kind of like the political process.
It's kind of like the political processes.
It's the institutions, really, I would say.
Those are the problems.
Just, you know, I don't want to shock you, so I'm speaking softly.
But it's the institutions that are the problem.
It's not the immigrants that are the problem.
It's not people who want to move who are the problem.
It's the people who have the guns who have the problem.
Those are the people, right?
It's the guns that are the problem, not human beings walking from one place to another with some possessions.
That's not really the problem.
It's the problem that there are guns in the room, not that there are people moving around the room.
The problem is that there are guns in the room pointed at people.
So that's my sort of not-so-hopefully-shocking approach to the challenge of immigration.
And it does seem to be a pretty significant problem for a lot of libertarians.
And I'm guessing, I'm guessing, I'm guessing that it is the traditional minarchist libertarians who have the greatest problem with immigration because they view the colonization by waspy Europeans as the foundation, I'm guessing that it is the traditional minarchist libertarians who have the greatest problem with immigration because they view the colonization by waspy Europeans as the foundation,
And therefore, somehow the United States has been infused with whitey waspiness and anything that takes away from that or diminishes that is somehow anti-American.
And there's just so many layers of fantasy that this kind of, quote, thinking is embedded in that one barely even knows where to begin.
One barely even knows where to begin.
First of all, of course...
Quite a large number of the natives here were slaughtered by the Americans who settled here.
And yes, they were paid to slaughter them by the state, and there were policies that the state was running, but there was still quite a merry band of, a merry mass of genocide occurring throughout the North American continent during the time of settlement and expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries.
So, I don't think that too many of the Mexicans want to come over and kill all the whites but the whites certainly wanted to come over and kill good portions of the Indians, of the Native Americans.
I gotta tell you, it seems like what is being received, and I'm talking in a purely collective sense here, and I apologize for that, it's silly, but it's important to understand, at least this perspective I would say, that what is being feared is far, far, far less, even in its worst conceivable incarnation, than one day of slaughtering of the domestics during the settlement of the United States.
So when Americans fear and loathe immigrants and the dangers that immigrants represent, I'd just like to cast them back to the smallpox, addled, starving, beaten up, chained, whipped, and enslaved denizens of the local system, the local and enslaved denizens of the local system, the local continent that was, you know, the people who were here when the whites arrived.
So that's sort of one aspect that I would like to point out, that if you're into the historical virtue of the United States and that's your reason for fearing immigration, you might want to dig around some of the not quite so alternative historical views on you might want to dig around some of the not quite so alternative historical views on how that settlement was in fact enacted and achieved and that there were quite a number of people here already and that the immigrants who first came over here were pretty
And And not because they were bad people or worse than anyone else, it was just the incentives.
And, of course, they were being driven from their own countries by more murderers, and it's not like they were no worse than anyone else on the planet, but they were no better either.
So, that idea that America is the shining city on the hill that was infused with virtue from its very beginning, even if you cast aside the wee minor matter of slavery, women's rights and property rights for women, and so on, is quite a bit of displacement going on through the process of immigrating.
To North America, whitey wave one was a bit of a red tide.
So that aspect may be something that's still sitting collectively in the unconscious, this fear of retribution or fear of the other coming in.
So... That sort of aspect one would be to, for me, if you're a sort of historical American who believes in the virtue of the republic and so on and fears that being threatened by cultural overwash from other people coming in from other cultures, you're still getting it a whole lot better than those original inhabitants of North America got it.
So it's kind of a little tough to hear those kinds of complaints for me, at least if they're based on the historical virtue of America.
So... That's number one.
And number two is that if you fear immigrants because you are afraid that immigrants are going to vote to take away your rights, I think it may be well worth looking at, say, the rough complexion of everyone who's running the war on terror.
I guess they got Gonzales in.
But prior to that, with the exception of Condi, kind of like a chalkboard, you know?
Kind of like the Mount Rushmore encased in snow.
Very much tidy-whities with power.
So the people who ran the foreign policy that provoked all this foreign aggression in 2001 and before and afterwards...
The people who run the military industrial complex, the people who keep raising taxes, the people who set up the Fed, the people who are pretty much involved in borrowing enormous amounts of money that are going to scalp the hides off your grandchildren, hopefully, if not your children, if not you. The people who are scraping the Social Security larder dry of even the shelf paper and leaving nothing but an IOU note and a laughing clown head.
Those people, the people who voted for the Patriot Act, the vast majority of people in Congress, the vast majority of politicians as a whole, not so much foreign, really.
Not so much minorities.
Not so much other cultures.
Pretty much your goddamn culture.
Do you see why I think, at least, it's so patently idiotic to feel afraid of Mexicans?
Mexicans! Undocumented!
Illegal! Can't vote!
Mexicans! They're your enemy, please!
This is so non-empirical, it's ridiculous, and I don't even know where to begin.
It's such a load of crap to be worried about immigrants.
Was it a bunch of wetbacks who were out there jabbering about WMDs at the UN? No!
Was it a bunch of black brothers?
Who declared war and invaded a sovereign though horrible country for no reason?
No. Is it the Chinese community or the Muslim community that is clamoring for the Patriot Act?
No. It's Pretty much people like you.
For the most part. If you're a minority listening to this, yo brother, perhaps you can teach me how to dance.
But it's the whiteys.
It's the whiteys from Harvard who are shredding your lives, who are enslaving your children, who are sending you to war, who are provoking the rat's nest of foreign dictatorships with troops stationed all over the world, who are funding the government, who are financing the planet.
The state prison planet?
There's whiteys! And some Jews.
But it's not Mexican illegals that are taking away your frickin' rights!
They can't vote and you're worried about them taking over the political process?
Look at Congress!
It's like a bunch of Pillsbury doughboys!
And they speak just like you!
Minorities? The only minority you've got to worry about are the freaking policemen, the freaking politicians, and the freaking marines.
And they both, the marines and the policemen, they report to the politicians.
So really...
Really, look at this scale!
My God, it's madness!
One guy selling oranges at a median.
Ooh, he's the evil one!
Ooh, he's gonna take all of my rights away!
Oh, he's the dangerous one!
There be Satan!
Oh, God, he's got citrus fruits!
Run! That's sort of on the one side of the equation of what people are sort of nervous and frightened about.
On the other side, you know, we have people like George Bush, Karl Rove, Rumsfeld, all these other sorts of people, right?
Pretty whiteies, right?
And they have the power to arrest you pretty much at will.
They can tap your phones.
They can steal any amount of money that they want from you.
They can seize your house.
They can imprison you without trial.
They can ship you overseas to get tortured.
They can harass you.
They can audit you.
They can cause you to swallow up your life or have your life be swallowed up by various evil regulatory agencies.
They can smash your life.
And frankly, if they want, they can get you killed and make it look like an accident.
So, this is the risks to your life and liberty, the risks to your freedom.
These are the two groups.
The two nefarious gangs.
Guy numero uno is living in a basement, painting houses, selling some citrus on a roadside.
Maybe he's fixing your car.
Maybe she's a maid.
Maybe whatever, whatever, right? Maybe they're sending their kids to school.
On your nickel or whatever, right?
These are the people who are on the one side of those who so vastly threaten your liberty that you must rail against them and break all principles of freedom, rationality and libertarianism.
That's the one group of people.
Refugees from totalitarian Mexico.
Poor Huddled, broken, frightened people who are fleeing from the mouth of pretty much the sunniest gulag on the planet, Mexico.
That's the one group who really terrify the shit out of you.
On the other side, who do we have?
Well, we have a bunch of guys in suits, occasionally a woman in suit.
And they have, what, the entire weight of the military, the police, the law courts.
They can access nuclear weapons.
They can access conventional weapons, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers, pretty much all the violence.
And they have hundreds of thousands of men and women who will die, who will kill and be killed at their command.
And they're already taking vast portions of your income, already hemming in your freedom, already forcing your children to go to the states-run indoctrination camps we call Le Publico Scolios.
And they will dictate how much money you get to retire on, and they are slowly shredding your civil liberties week by week by week.
Hmm. I wonder who's going to be the big risk.
Here's another way of looking at it.
You get to ship one class of people only out of the country.
One class of people out of the country.
Are you, if you're a good libertarian, are you going to ship out le Mexicales?
Or are you going to ship out, say, le tax collectors?
Politicians or...
People from China working under the table who came over in the barrel or the bowels of a boat.
Who are you going to ship overseas if you want to make yourself safe?
The entire foreign policy department and Congress, right?
Or a bunch of Cubans in Florida who are working and paying the bills.
Oh, I got to tell you, I think it's the gringos, man.
That's who you've got to get rid of.
That's pretty. Look in the mirror.
That's the face of the enemy.
Not some guy who's trying to build a house and feed his kids.
So that's sort of the way that I would approach it.
When it comes to people who threaten your life or who threaten your freedom or who threaten your property or who harm the brains of your children, harms the souls of your children, they're not getting propagandized, too, by a bunch of Mexicans.
It's pretty much white people like you that force them to go to school and teach them and so on.
But this is, of course, when you lose track of your principles.
This is the kind of crap that you end up spewing forward about how immigration is bad.
Yeah, Ron Paul sees a great libertarian.
He wants to put up this wall at the border.
Ah!
Because there's only 12 or 11 million people here illegally, so why not put up a frickin' wall?
Because people can't borrow or take the sea.
Oh, yeah, because, you know, keeping the drugs out worked so well that let's start doing it with people who are even more intelligent and resourceful, say, than your average bag of fuckin' cocaine.
Sigh. This is what I mean when I say it's a test of principle.
And look, I've failed tests of principles in my life, so this is just me pointing out where...
And I've even done podcasts about all the mistakes and messes and breaks with integrity I've had in my life.
I'm just having some fun pointing this one out.
Now, the other way that I'd like to sort of approach this question, if you will indulge me for a few more minutes, is...
To picture empathy, right?
Empathy is really at the root of a good number of principles, especially ethical and moral principles.
And I'd like you to think about not how you look to immigrants or anything like that.
I'd like you to imagine that you're born in Mexico.
I'd like you to imagine That you're born in Mexico.
Because being born in America is just a coincidence.
Doesn't make you right.
Doesn't make you valuable. Doesn't make you better.
Doesn't make you moral. Doesn't make any of those damn things.
It's just a freaking coincidence.
And you can't claim any rights based on where your mother happened to freaking squat and drop.
I mean, imagine if she'd been kidnapped and dropped off in Mexico just before you were born.
I guess you'd be naturalized U.S. But whatever, whatever situation you could come up with, you happen to be born in Mexico.
Maybe your mom donated some eggs to an infertile Mexican woman and your dad was down, got drunk, and you happen to be born in Mexico.
Now, in Mexico, the standard of living is wretched.
Mexico was the first communist country in the history of the world at the turn of the 20th century, and its standard of living has remained mostly unchanged for about 100 years.
Now, I'd like you to picture, knowing that there's no real difference between Mexicans and everybody else on the planet, I'd like you to consider the amount of violence that Mexicans are subjected to, such that Their standard of living has remained mostly unchanged for about 100 years.
Look at America, look at England, look at Canada, look at Sweden, look at Switzerland, look at Norway, look at, you know, all of these sorts of places.
Standard of living, 10, 20, 30 times improvement.
Mexico, ping, flatlined.
Why? Are they different?
Are they lazy? No, of course not.
Of course not. Fucking gun in the room.
Huge motherfucking gun in the room.
And, you know, it's like Soren's eye.
They always got this gun pointed at them.
Do you know in Mexico, the reason that they never finish their, you know, we'll see these hotels and buildings and so on with the wire sticking out, like the iron core wire thing sticking out.
It's because that they only have to stop paying taxes when they finish building the buildings.
So they never finish them, right? And I actually remember being in Mexico and hearing, oh my god, these Mexicans are so lazy, they never finish anything.
I punch these people in the face, except I'm a frickin' NAP guy.
It's that great line from Radio Days.
Woody Allen lives next to these communists and they're making such noise and having such great fun to get so angry.
He's like, oh man, I'm so angry.
I'm a Jew.
It's Saturday.
I'd like to go over and burn their damn house down, but I'm not allowed to light a match.
You missed the gun in the room.
You can come to all sorts of ridiculously stupid conclusions about other cultures.
Okay.
You miss the knife at the wrist, you think, hey, look at that, that guy just handed another guy's wallet, how nice.
Oh, look, that woman is enjoying her lovemaking.
I wonder why there are four guys holding her down.
You miss the gun in the room, you miss...
You then ascribe to culture or to personality that which is simply frightened and hunted fear.
So you're born in Mexico, and over you, like a quivering, bleeding arch, the keystone of which is the state, is this monolithic, poised brickwork of ever-impending violence, always hanging over you, always creaking, always groaning, like you're strapped under a bridge that's bearing too much weight.
Always and forever, over and above you, is violence.
And every time you get a job, your money is just taken away.
You're not allowed to save anything.
Or if you do save anything, the money, the peso gets devalued to nothing and you lose everything.
And you're pitifully badly educated.
Because you're stupid? No, of course not.
Because it's a totalitarian kind of dictatorship.
Now people say, well, you know, it's not Cuba.
Yeah, it's not Cuba. But it's enough Cuba that you've got millions of people wanting to flee, willing to live without papers.
Papers. Like that's the mark of a legitimate human being.
Ooh, somebody gave me a piece of paper, now I have existence.
And what can you do with your life?
What can you do? Should you get married?
Well, you could get married.
Dictatorships don't forbid marrying, but what's that going to mean?
It means that you're going to live in a room with three other married couples, or your parents and your grandparents, and that's going to be your life.
You're going to go out, you're going to go to work, you're going to earn enough for some bread, Some refried beans, maybe a fajita or two.
You're going to come home. You're going to drink your Dos Equis.
One, maybe, if you can afford it.
You're going to go to bed and you're going to wake up in a room full of other people.
And then you look forward in your life.
You look forward in your life and you say, well, I could get married, but I'm not going to have any privacy.
And each one of my days is going to be like this.
You know, it's going to be like the way that we perceive our days in the West.
And it's a beautiful thing. This is what everyone should have.
This is what everyone in the world should have.
We see our days, and rightly so, if we are ambitious and thoughtful, as we are laying bricks.
We are laying bricks, and we're building a house, and the house is our future, and that's where we're going to live.
So we'll make the sacrifices.
We'll get the education, we'll set aside the capital, we'll work extra hours to get ahead, or whatever it is that we're doing.
Because we've got all these bricks that are lying around, which is the days of our lives, and we put them down and we mortar them together, and that is our life.
And the future that we live in is largely based on the skill with which we have built our house in the past.
We continue to build our house in the future.
The bricks, we lay them sensibly, we put in the plumbing, we build things.
And each day is not just a day where labor is expended and consumed and you are left with nothing at the end other than your daily bread.
But we get to build.
We get to accumulate. Not just capital, but knowledge, intelligence, skill, ability.
Why? Because it's valuable and it gives us other things.
It allows us to barter and exchange for other things.
So that's our life in the West.
We're building a house. We've got lots of bricks, lots of materials.
We're building a house. And so, yeah, there are times when we're tired and our hands are bleeding and cold and so on, but we're still building a house.
We've still got a goal. We've still got a life we can build.
That's here. Now, over the border, it's a little different.
Yeah, you've got a lot of bricks. You don't have quite as many bricks, probably 20% or 30% fewer bricks because your life expectancy is that much shorter, but you've got bricks, right?
And this is your life in a dictatorship.
This is your life in the worker's paradise.
You get a brick and you put it down on the ground.
Do you get to dig a foundation?
No. Government owns the ground.
You don't get a permit. You can't dig a foundation.
So this is your life.
If you start building a house, you've got these bricks.
You've got to lay them down because you've got to get up every day and do something.
You lay down your bricks. You start building a house.
You can't dig a foundation.
Government won't let you do it. And then first time you get a storm, first time there's a big wind or rain, a house falls over.
So you're like, oh man, okay, so I can't build that.
Then you find some other way to build the house and you build the house and then somebody comes and takes it away.
Or pushes you off and just takes your house.
And this and that. So basically, your day is putting bricks down, but never to build a house.
Never, never, never do you get a house.
Basically what you're doing is you're laying down bricks by the side of the highway for miles and miles and miles.
One line of bricks.
One brick next to each other.
No mortar, no digging in, no purpose, no growth, no investment, no shape to your life.
Just brick laid end to brick laid end to brick laid end to brick laid end for years and years and years and years and years.
And you look forward When you're standing on this highway looking into the future of your life, and you're saying, well, what's it going to be?
Well, I guess in 20 years I'll be a whole bunch of miles down the road with a whole string of flat bricks behind me, nothing built, and everything gets consumed.
As I build it. I can't build anything up.
I can't build anything with a shape.
I'm just laying my bricks end to end to end for years and years and years.
And if you don't feel that that's a little freaking depressing to look at, That your life is going to be eating and shitting and sleeping and moving stuff around and being a slave to the state for the rest of your life and that the joys which we take for granted in the West that we're going to get married and we're going to have children,
we're going to raise those children or whatever it is we're going to do with our time that you can do these things and there's Mexicans in Mexico so clearly they do these things But you are basically going to be on the highway laying down your bricks.
You have a baby. Within a couple of years your baby is laying down the bricks and that's going to be your child's life for the rest of his life or her life.
Laying down these stupid bricks that go nowhere just to stay alive one more day.
Never to build. Never to have any shape.
Never to have any progress. Never to have anything that's worth investing in.
Not yourself. Not sobriety.
Not knowledge. Not depth. Not wisdom.
In fact, the pursuit of things like wisdom and knowledge and depth will make your life more painful.
If I was condemned to be a flat-line highway-side bricklayer for the rest of my life, I would rather have an IQ of 90.
I would much rather have an IQ of 80.
That would be humane.
But to study and learn and grow when your life is a futile sequence of identical groundhog days, stolen exploitation, slavery, what a...
What a god-awful nightmare.
And that's your life, and you wake up every morning, and you don't know why you're waking up.
And you go to work every morning, and it's only because you've got to eat, and you know that you'll never be able to build a goddamn thing in your life.
At the end of your life, you will have exactly what you started with.
And your children will have exactly what you started with, and their children will have exactly what you started with.
And why? Because there's a huge motherfucking gun in the room.
That's pointed at everyone. And whoever steps out of line is going to get shot.
and don't imagine for a moment that a Mexican jail is even a remotely non-suicidal place to be.
And that is the life of our brothers and sisters across the quote border.
This imaginary stupid line on a map.
And we haughty creatures...
Would rather keep them enslaved than free ourselves.
We would rather keep them enslaved by building cage walls and shooting at them, and as one person suggested on this forum, I freaking well hope facetiously, mining the border.
Our goal seems to be not To free people, but to enslave us both.
Now imagine, back to our Mexican mind adventure, that all of the smart people are leaving.
So if you have any intelligence or ambition or desire or goal for something, anything better, anything, to get away from the banditos, Anything.
Then all your friends who are worth talking to are all leaving.
And they're all going to the States.
Where you can build something.
Where you can build a house.
You're not just laying bricks down a highway forever.
You can actually build something.
You can build a life.
You can get married. You can have children.
The children will grow up to be doctors and lawyers, not slaves.
Grow up to be entrepreneurs, not slaves.
It's your children.
And who could you want better things more for than your children?
That your children will have a life that will have opportunity and potential and shape and growth and joy and wealth and opportunity and all those good things.
Who among us would not make it to the border?
Who among us would not cling to the axle of a truck to get across that border?
And how would we feel about those of us who say, no, no, we're in here, we're comfortable, we've got lots of goodies.
You people are slaves.
We've got lots of goodies. You people are slaves.
So we're going to put up a wall.
How would you feel? That they were sentencing you to nothing but a life of laying bricks end over end.
You'd feel suicidal and you'd feel enraged.
And this really is why I say that it's a test not just of libertarian principles.
It's a test of basic humanity.
When you see people in the dungeon of another land, you don't say, seal that fucker up.
Pave over the exit to the dungeon.
Seal them in! No.
You invite them.
You open your arms wide.
Because the immigrants are not who you have to fear.
They're not the ones taking away your freedom.
They're not the ones enslaving you.
They're not the ones taxing you.
They're not the ones stripping you of your civil liberties.
They're not the ones betraying their sworn oath to the Constitution.
They're not doing any of those things.
They're just trying to build a house.
They're just trying to get by.
And if you're worried about them voting, then don't get rid of the immigrants.
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