Adam Smith against nativist immigration policy

First, let me say that I’m looking forward to reading the book, and am sympathetic to the impulse behind it. But…

I’m disappointed to see this invocation of Smith, given that I’m almost certain (unless you’ve changed almost all of your published views) that you otherwise reject Smith’s view here, and with good reasons – it’s incompatible with any sort of affirmative action programs, or with more substantial attempts to ensure fair equality of opportunity. It’s incompatible with significant attempts to engage in egalitarian redistribution (let alone “predistribution”). It’s probably incompatible with much environmental and financial and other regulation that all sane people today realize is necessary. And so on. Why think it’s right in the case you’re interested in, but only that one, and not all the ones where you’d reject it? This, like making common cause with libertarians who favor open borders (_Because_ they think it will make the welfare state, let alone anything more just, impossible) seems to me to be a serious error. I’d like to hear why you think Smith is right _in this one case_ but can be safely rejected in all of the cases where your own published views strongly imply he can be rejected.

And of course, note that rejecting Smith’s view here is completely compatible with accepting that current immigration policy in the US and (perhaps especially) the UK, is very bad, and should be made better. The idea that we have either the libertarian “utopia” of open borders or else the Trump/Tory view is itself obviously false, so that can’t support the invocation here, either.

Matt seems to have a point here.

It’s worth considering that the example Smith originally gives of the man of system is this: motivated by public spirit and a love of humanity, he sees the real distress and inconveniency faced by others; on the basis of this he advocates a system of reformation that he claims will solve the problem, a plan that requires significant modification of what other people are used to, in ways that get resistance; the party gets intoxicated by the imagined beauty of how much better this plan will make things; under such intoxication, they refuse to accommodate their opponents; as a result, they often just make things worse. This is contrasted with the case where public spirit is not mingled with love of system:

“He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear. ”

At this point in the TMS, Smith is speaking quite generally — the whole idea is that it does not matter how good, or wise, or benevolent, or just the content of your system (a word he takes to cover any general account putting forward goals for government) may be; the problem Smith identifies is failing to aim at what people will accept in the pursuit of what you think ought to be the case. He explicitly castigates the arrogance of someone thinking that they know better than their fellow-citizens how society should work, especially when it involves trying to push through policies that the interests and prejudices of their fellow citizens lead them to oppose; the less partisan road is the more public-spirited road. It’s an argument that the best road is generally practical compromise, taking small steps that are in what you think is the right direction but which accommodate the prejudices of your fellow citizens, and that this is so no matter how right your side may be. (This fits with a theme found throughout TMS in various forms, namely, that human beings and human lives are very flawed and inconsistent, but that our muddling through often works much better than trying to stamp out the flaws and inconsistencies.) It’s true that nativists and nationalists would be among those who would often be censured by Smith’s argument; but so would a lot of people with strong and definite political views or schemes for reformation, regardless of the content of those views.

“our governments are conducting a war against migrants”

Hyperbole, anybody? Wars tend to involve shooting, shelling, bombing the other side: see Sri Lanka or Syria for so-far successful recent examples of a government conducting a war against its own citizens. In the US, against immigrants? In the UK?

Obviously I haven’t read CB’s book “Does the state have the right to exclude immigrants?” What odds would you give me that the answer is “No”? Or that the odds against getting the majority to agree with that are extremely long?

In the immediate context, Smith’s “every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it…” is most easily read as saying that men of system ignore human nature and this makes things go badly. But if they ignore system and conform to human nature, things go well. The certainty about what human nature is, is typical Enlightenment I think.

As to the potentially reactionary implications, it seems to me that this is not a misreading but a historical fact. There’s a reason most conservatives have cited Adam Smith against Marx (instead of acknowledging their economics as a repudiation of political economy.) This sort of thing looks to me to be the reason. You can try to turn this into support for open borders, but, but, but, if every chess piece has its own principle of motion, then every nationality has its own character…and its own country.

But there is a great mystery in this extract. Namely, what “men of system” could Smith be talking about? What historical catastrophes caused by “men of system” violating human nature gave Smith the confidence to condemn their folly? I suppose one might think of Diocletian or Wang Mang but I don’t think Smith looked back so far. Or possibly one might think Peter the Great or, even more likely, John Calvin, if one could be sure Adam Smith considered these men to be failures.

At first glance, it appears that Smith’s “men of system” are very much like Burke’s ideologues whose utopian schemes inevitably led to the horrors of the Great French Revolution as they were foisted on humanity. That is to say, they never were anything but nightmare fancies conjured from prejudices, bugaboos to scare readers away from unwelcome conclusions.

Unless of course, Smith really did mean to speak of rulers enforcing religious conformity?

@Cranky
I would have thought “men of system” referred directly to “the legislature”, vide Smith’s opposition the Poor Laws. Analogizing contemporary America, that would be Clinton and Obama and their supporters, who produced the social engineering of EPA, OSHA, and CAFE, which has engendered the largely irrational pushback we are suffering through, just as the OP. The present GOP is not conservative, but reactionary. ( … they also seem to have no theory of mind.)

I don’t feel especially equipped to make claims about the actual opinions of the historical Adam Smith, but the quote on its own seems to me quite compatible with liberalism instead of libertarianism. In order for legislation to have any effect at all it has to make some people do things they would not otherwise do. And to talk about legislatures and the general population acting in harmony assumes that the legislatures have reason to exist in the first place. So people’s principles of motion has to mean something a bit more flexible than just people doing whatever they want to do without any external constraint.

The better way to look at it would be about how people react to the constraints of laws without being tightly pushed one way or another. If a regulation leads people to adjust their behavior in a way which brings into effect the desired policy result, that’s better than if a regulation leads to resistance and/or if people act in perversely counterproductive ways. The difference between, say, if people react to a carbon tax by switching to more energy-efficient technologies versus if people react to a carbon tax by finding ways to evade the tax. In that case the issue is not to be a libertarian who just dogmatically opposes things like carbon taxes as a general thing, (a priori, it might work and it might not) but to be pragmatic and see if policies are working or not and adjust them accordingly.

And from that perspective the problem is not merely that people would like to move to certain countries and can’t, but that people try really hard to migrate despite this and there’s a constant struggle of the state cracking down on them, and that it’s this broader conflict which suggests a deeper problem with immigration restriction. Everything is going to have some resistance, so no particular level of conflict definitively rules out a policy, but the more we have to deal with, the more problematic the policy is.

To the extent that its meaningful to assign Smith to a modern political category, I’d say he was a liberaltarian. That is, generally sceptical about the efficacy of government action (as in the quote above) but particularly hostile to interventions that aid the rich and harm the poor.

Support for liberal immigration policies would be consistent with this. Worth pointing out, also, that free movement was the default until the 20th centurY.

More precisely, the big difficulty was in leaving your home country (where you might be subject to some variety of serfdom/indenture/impressment), not in getting in to another.

I would suggest that the ‘immigration policy’ of the UK is more of a state of affairs than a ‘policy’. The Home Office hardly know how many illegals (in the objective sense) are in the country let alone being able to manage numbers.

But the main thing is that the structure of the EU super-imposed on the realities of the vastly different wage levels from west to east in Europe (UK is about 3x Slovenia, Slovakia, and I guess 4x Bulgaria, Romania etc, for the same kind of work), plus perceived value of being English speaking (if younger people from any other country speak any other language, it will be English, and they want to get better).

The result of this situation is a gravitational attraction of the UK in the last 15+ years to countries in central/eastern Europe, with the EU laws enabling a fairly free and ultimately uncontrolled flow (it’s not quite as simple as that, but let’s not quibble on the details).

This in effect makes any immigration ‘policy’ almost impossible, because the latter can only apply to what you can control, which is immigrants from non-EU countries (people like myself in fact), who come in all categories: ‘highly skilled migrant’; refugee, key worker (healthcare, physics teacher etc); asylum seeker and so on.

So although one can excoriate the Home Office for its hopeless management of things (and it has been pretty hopeless, particularly under one Theresa May), the groundswell of reaction against uncontrolled immigration (i.e. Brexit) isn’t reflective of policy, but of lack of control.

If we believe in nation-states, we by definition believe in borders, and thus immigration control of some kind. Further questions abound, related to Adam Smith: to what extent can any country save or help endless numbers of immigrants from war-zones, economic crises (of both the African and Greek varieties) and generalised mayhem in the world? It must have some limits on numbers, otherwise you put your own country in danger. To what extent can a country absorb immigrants with an incompatible value system? Is open-door immigration even the right way to help countries at war or in economic stress or dictatorship? Saying so is equivalent to saying that vast swathes of the world can just be written off as a total loss – unfit for human habitation with dignity. That thinking is likely to generate its own premise.

The sane alternative is that all countries have to accept responsibility for providing a reasonable existence for their citizens, including asking for help if needed. Countries that manage to do this need to consider carefully what to do about others run by dictatorships and/or engaged in ideological wars, since the symptoms of both do not respect borders.

I would suggest that the real problem here is to develop clearer political (and maybe even moral) principles that say why people should be rescued from boats or beaches in the immediate present, but that far more serious longer term strategies need to be created that operate in home countries that reduce the streams of immigrants who would not leave if not for failing economy, war or totalitarianism, or even objectively absurd constructions like the EU / Euro.

‘Life is a game of chess where each piece makes its own moves’ is fine and dandy if you’re a rook, not so much fun if you’re a pawn. Then you might find it expedient to coordinate your moves with other pawns, perhaps even in a dreaded system. And think about changing the game.

Whirlaway@11 suggests Smith’s “men of system” were the legislature that devised the Poor Laws. This seems highly unlikely, as the Poor Law didn’t ignore the poor, it targeted them. But maybe I misunderstand?

Matt@12 to my eyes implies Smith’s “men of system” did indeed include any legislators so foolish as to impose regulation and control of the market. I’m unfamiliar with the people who demonstrated how this isn’t libertarian.

If these are correct, then Chris Bertram @18 is incorrect: The quote will not serve as a peg to hang anything, because it’s slanted the wrong way. I suppose he could go the full Humpty Dumpty and say that “men of system” means what he wants, not what Adam Smith wants. I don’t know how he would impose this meaning on the obtuse readers who see “men of system” and try to picture these horrid creatures.

PD@14 stirs the pot by throwing in another Smith quotation from Theory. I’ve seen the claim that the book is a best seller among the right people in China, which is disturbing. The notion that people who really value esteem for the properly philosophic reasons will of course never be prey to irrational fears that prompt solicitude for their dignity strikes me as an excellent example of ignoring the principles of motion in the pieces on the grand chessboard of life.

The notion that insatiability for honors is due to a guilty conscience, salve for an awareness that the bad person doesn’t really deserve them, also strikes me as rather schematic. A person may well want endless re-affirmation of their dignity, not because it is a temporary sop to their vanity, but because of the social utility of being superior to others. If you are doing something so trivial as arguing about public policy, insisting on due respect for your intellectual accomplishments as duly certified, can be helpful. In discussing public policy, having a reputation as a serious and accomplished person, as proven by your accumulation of vast wealth, may well even be profitable in a monetary sense.

This extract gives the distinct impression that Smith was rather reductive in his moral/psychological analysis. Perhaps it was Adam Smith who was the “man of system,” inadvertently confessing because of his guilty conscience. The doyens of the Scottish Enlightenment were far too safely conservative to insulted as “philosophes.” But perhaps they should have been?

A remarkably thoughtful thread. I especially liked Thomas Beale @ 17.

The historical Adam Smith is railing against the degenerate corporate state that survived into the early modern period, with its chartered monopolies and artisan and merchant guilds and panoply of feudal aristocracy, ornamented but useless. In context, I imagine Colbert would be the epitome of his man of systems.

The aggressive null pose that F. Foundling identifies as the characteristic rhetorical device of latter-day libertarians may be foreshadowed by negligence and omission in Smith’s work. He is the welcome apologist for a new class and we should not forget his love of the improving landlord.

@Chris Bertram 01.22.18 at 11:23 am
>Then I suggest you inform yourself about the effects on families of the UK’s spousal migration laws on families or those families torn apart by Trump’s deportation of long-term US residents.

I did say ‘I don’t think anything or anyone prevents people from doing that *in general*’. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t cases when there will be obstacles for other reasons. There is no ban on marrying people of other nationalities as such, there are requirements for the immigrant, together with his/her native partner, to be able to support themselves without assistance from the state (in the UK) and for residents, married or not, to be citizens and not illegal immigrants (in the US). This doesn’t strike me as unreasonable. One can’t expect all other considerations to be ignored and an indefinite amount of public money to be spent for the sole purpose of accommodating a relationship; at most, you can argue about the exact size of the minimum income required.

@Layman 01.22.18 at 11:45 am

>If you’re a lawful resident or citizen of the US and you want to bring your spouse into the country … it will take 6 months or more for your application to be processed … If you’re not a citizen, but rather a lawful resident, your spouse will spend at least 2 more years on a waiting list

This applies if the spouse’s only justification for being in the country is being a spouse (and immigrant visas in general can take years, from what I’m hearing). In the meantime, s/he can still get a US visa with many other justifications, such as work, and then the waiting time is far shorter, AFAIU (the gov website also recommends a separate Petition for Alien Fiancé(e) while the application for a permanent resident visa is being processed). If you’re not a citizen, we are probably not talking about ‘loving nationalities other than one’s own’, but of successive immigration of a couple of the same nationality. Anyway, in general, the same response as the above applies. Such ‘international’ relationships coupled with immigration are quite commonplace, there have been many such cases in the circles and communities that I belong to for quite a few decades, talking as if the scary totalitarian states with their borders (now branded ‘utopian’, too?!) make this an impossibility, some sort of Romeo-and-Juliet-style tragedy of impossible love, seems just … odd.

@nastywoman 01.22.18 at 12:35 pm

>TEH DOUGH!

For once I agree, people love dough, and it’s not just immigration officials. But I couldn’t possibly agree with the notion that this ‘prevents’ love. As a matter of fact, I’d say that dough very frequently deserves some credit as a major ingredient & contributing factor that kindles & stirs up the sweet fire of passion and romance. Even internationally, believe it or not. International mobility can also be a form of social mobility. For me, for instance, even arguing on the internet with a real American like you is a bit like rising above my station. :)

>novakant 01.22.18 at 5:35 pm

I don’t think that immigration is a satisfactory solution to decreasing birth-rates, even setting aside the various undesirable side-effects that excessive or uncontrolled immigration can have under given circumstances. In the long run, rich and advanced countries shouldn’t rely indefinitely on other countries’ poverty, crises or cultural backwardness producing an excess population; after all, the goal should be for the latter countries to become rich and advanced themselves. The ability to sustain itself biologically is the least thing one can expect of a functioning society.

Bruce Wilder@27 suggests Colbert as a likely referent for Smith’s “men of system.” The thought has occurred to me too, though, which is likely a disrecommendation. Worse, Colbert as Satan to me suggests libertarians are in Smith’s camp. Or vice versa.

F. Foundling@31 “The ability to sustain itself biologically is the least thing one can expect of a functioning society.” No, it is not. Or at least not by people who favor capitalism, whether the illusory social democratic version or the real thing. The demographic transition is generally regarded in most favorable terms, and is never regarded as a sign of difficulty in reproducing the working class. (Well, Marvin Harris thought this, but Harris is universally despised these days.)

The ability of a given state to inculturate new immigrants i closely related to its ability to give workers a better life. Or, failing that, indoctrinating their kids in a functional public school system. A failing polity that can’t deliver the goods (literally and metaphorically) tends to rely on the favorite tools of all decadent societies, such as provocation of ethnics rivalries to divide and rule, an oppressive public religiosity that strangles public discourse, mercenary armies and a police state. High-minded fears about incompatible values are more a confession of not having such attractive “values” to offer in practice, I fear.

@31
”As a matter of fact, I’d say that dough very frequently deserves some credit as a major ingredient & contributing factor that kindles & stirs up the sweet fire of passion and romance.”

Agreed too – as the lack of dough very frequently deserves some credit as a major ingredient & contributing factor which prevents ”some sweet fire of passion and romance.” – especially in immigration officials – or in other words:
What’s this whole conversation worth – we have here – if you can buy ”visas” the way you can buy them in the US and the UK – while mysteriously INTO some other ”very advanced modern and democratic countries” which originally weren’t ”immigration countries” at all the entrance is free – and novokant –
NO! –
Germany doesn’t ”NEED” 400.000 migrants a year.
A lot of Anglo-American economists who believe in ”unlimited economical growth” might believe that any country, where the population is ”not growing” will be ”not a winner” anymore – but believe me – a lot of Germans don’t believe that – and considering them the acceptance of so many ”fureigners” is an even more impressive ”act of love” –
(if I may call it like that)

And if we are just a little bit more… ”patient”? – the whole deal is anywhoo sealed – especially in London – where the LOVE between all kind of races and nationalities is so wonderful… intense – that it now even has reached ”the monarchy” – and so in the coming years – while one by one the ”racistic F…faces” will be… let’s call it ”pass away” – WE the future generation will LOVINGLY ”mix” to the degree that one ”beautiful day” we ALL will be as ”multiracial” and ”multinational” -(as most of my family already is)

And yet we will win – for sure!

Adam Smith is telling us, with a choice of metaphor typical of his time, that complex systems are not well managed by a single authority than believes itself separated in nature and function from what it purports to manipulate. That’s a crucially important insight, but like Matt, I believe it is of methodological or liminal nature at best when the particular problem considered here is discussed and F.Foundling is right to write “*any* system will contradict, at one point or another, *somebody’s* ‘principle of motion’, and systems are generally justified precisely by people’s ‘principles of motion’. […] A call for no politics is a refusal to engage other humans as humans.”

I happen to be strongly in favor of freedom of movement and settlement myself, and a genuine one by the way (because, after all, no man of systems is preventing me to move to and settle in Paris seventh arrondissement, and if I were to move to Pacific Heights or Ginza, immigration policies would be the lowest bar I would have to clear), but a general methodological point does little in way of arguing for or against a specific proposal, even those as repulsive as May’s, Trump’s or Macron’s (don’t forget to mention him when discussing sharp and brutal turn for the worse in immigration policies).

F. Foundling: “This applies if the spouse’s only justification for being in the country is being a spouse (and immigrant visas in general can take years, from what I’m hearing). In the meantime, s/he can still get a US visa with many other justifications, such as work, and then the waiting time is far shorter…”

Put another way, it’s easier and faster for the person to get into the country if they can find an employer to sponsor them, than it is for them to do so by being the spouse of a citizen. If that doesn’t strike you as a strange and hard-to-justify barrier to ‘loving people of nationalities other than their own’, then maybe you’re not really looking for evidence of the problem.

Chris Bertram @41
“Voters might thing of their nation state as a pristine little moral universe only recently facing an issue of immigration, but that is often a very false picture.”

I don’t know how many voters think that, but my impression in the UK, US, France and the other Euro states, also Brazil, where I travel frequently, is that those living in states heavily built on immigration (UK, US, France, Brazil) – the same places where this open doors v pull-up-the-drawbridge debate plays in the media – that voters are pretty aware of the immigrant past and current situation. Les francais de souche probably do exist a little bit (I’ve met some) but en gros, you’re probably right.

My observation is that immigration systems are far less ideologically driven than some think, and far less in control than everyone thinks. Secondly, there are at least three conversations normal voters want to have but can’t in the current public space for various reasons.

1. concern about Islamic immigration bringing Islamic ideology and values to Europe / the West etc, plus a ‘re-awakening’ of ideological Islam among current generations of earlier Muslim migrations.
2. concern about the economics of low-paid workers taking jobs (UK Brexit…)
3. concern about ‘my culture’ disappearing.

Immigration systems in the countries I mentioned currently address 2 somewhat (but 2 may or may not be real), and refuse to talk about 1 and 3, which is why UKIP, FN, AfD and to some extent Trump win votes.

NB: I’m not offering opinions above, but there is no doubt at all that all 3 of these items demand open and thoughtful conversation – the kind that is blocked by the usual automatic tic of screaming ‘racist’ and ‘islamophobe’ when anyone mentions them.

My main point I suppose is that until such things can actually be talked about, immigration policy is formulated on a chaotic, mostly unstated set of ideas that do not cohere at all, and I think it’s a real stretch to show they are based on heavily ideological notions such as ‘othering’ – these are pretty far from the minds of the most ardent Merkel supporter and the most typical AfD/FN/UKIP voter.

Sorry to stray from the OP…

@42
– you might want to talk to @40 about it? –
as sadly – you are right – and it is not only… let’s call them – ”Conservative” Anglo-American economists who tend to reinforce the believe in ”never ending economical growth” – and thusly somehow in the need of ”severe ending population growth”.

So I think debunking them, as a matter of a Swiss fact, is rather important.

Lee A. Arnold@48 does sound plausible. A philosopher taking a dig at another philosopher is not unimaginable.

Overall, I’m afraid I still think the whole passage is kind of hard to make sense of without any notion of what “men of system” are.

– and I really don’t understand – if somebody comes up with a ”fitting” quote –
why the need to counter with other quotes who are supposedly contradicting the ”very well fitting quote”.

BE-cause it’s from the same… dude? –
So what – or as one time a very famous American Philosopher said:

Really?
That’s what you guys think I said – when I said it?
Really?
I never thought about it – but it sounds ”GREAT”!

@Chris Bertram Let me say that fellow Gouverneur Morris did not put “We the better sort of white people” in the Preamble, though he was not opposed to the “better sort of white people”. I do understand the sordid story of race in America, but it really and truly has never been an “ethnostate” at the top level. As for Adam Smith, he is not an acceptable substitute for constitutional government.

Thomas Beale

Secondly, there are at least three conversations normal voters want to have but can’t in the current public space for various reasons.

1. concern about Islamic immigration bringing Islamic ideology and values to Europe / the West etc, plus a ‘re-awakening’ of ideological Islam among current generations of earlier Muslim migrations.
2. concern about the economics of low-paid workers taking jobs (UK Brexit…)
3. concern about ‘my culture’ disappearing.

It is not true that people cannot talk about these things. People frequently do. Sometimes they get responses they don’t like, but those responses are also contributions to the conversation.

NB: I’m not offering opinions above, but there is no doubt at all that all 3 of these items demand open and thoughtful conversation – the kind that is blocked by the usual automatic tic of screaming ‘racist’ and ‘islamophobe’ when anyone mentions them.

You have not explained why you think these topics in particular demand open and thoughtful conversation; you have also not explained what leads you to think that the necessary open and thoughtful conversation has not been taking place. As I mentioned, people do talk about these things. Also, the use of the words ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobe’ is not an automatic tic; the words are not usually screamed; and they aren’t always used when your topics are mentioned. Look! You mentioned those concerns here just now, and nobody blocked you, did they?

@Chris Bertram, I would direct you to the rather more important statement that the values of capitalist economics are *not* the values of the United States Government and really ought not to be “overlaid” on our government for whatever misguided if seemingly “progressive” reason. The book of America is not *The Wealth of Nations* but Montesquieu’s *The Spirit of the Laws*; you are exhibiting all too common a confusion. Let our multi-ethnic polity figure it out.

The book of America is the Bible.

There have been distant seconds, at times. Before the Revolution, perhaps Cato’s Letters and Blackstone’s Commentary? After the Revolution, The Federalist Papers?

Chris, I’m not ‘hiding behind a fake email address,’ I’m using a bona fide email address, just not my main personal or work email: I thought that was allowed.

[As you’ll recall, when we attempted to contact you on said address, communication failed because you had forgotten the password and you told us you would supply an email address which would work]

I can’t see why you would my first two comments objectionable but apologies if posting a Blake quote without explanation or context seemed disruptive or rude: you’re welcome to delete it.

Afaics I’ve only commented on one of your posts in the last six months: the photography one from yesterday, in which I was entirely non-polemical. Prior to that I did disagree in a perhaps overly combative vein with your posts on Macron and Jane Jacobs. I plead guilty there and elsewhere to sometimes being ‘snarky’ but not to being ‘content-free’. And my estimation of Macron, Jane Jacobs and Adam Smith has remained rather constant over the years so I disagree there has been any ‘degeneration’ on my part.

But happy to take another break and sorry for any offence the tone of any of my comments may have unintentionally caused.

Jeffrey Rubard
I began my commenting by asking you a question which you haven’t answered, so here it is again:

I would direct you to the rather more important statement that the values of capitalist economics are *not* the values of the United States Government

Whose statement is that and what leads you to think it is (a)important and (b)true?

Here is a more extended version of the quote from Engine Charlie Wilson:

For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the nation is considerable.

I don’t get how the more extended version supports a contrary interpretation. How do you get to that conclusion, or are you relying on a different extended version?

As for Coolidge’s famous quote, which of course I am familiar with, for-profit enterprise is legal in the United States, but it is not the business legislators and civil servants are in.

Perhaps not; at least, not legally so; but the observation that legislators and civil servants are not in the business of for-profit enterprise is not equivalent to your earlier stated conclusion that their values are not the values of capitalist economics.

*The Spirit of the Laws*, and not Smith or Locke or St. Paul or anything else, was the source of the ideas incarnated in the Constitution by the Constitutional Convention

If you are suggesting that the Constitutional Convention drew some of their ideas from Montesquieu, I don’t dispute it (although they didn’t draw all their ideas from that source), but what of it? I can’t figure how that might be considered creditable to Montesquieu, or the Convention, or the Constitution; but, more importantly, the country is not simply an embodiment of the Constitution and the Constitution tells us only a little about the country.

Chris Bertram you surely can’t mean that we can’t [I think you meant can here but I may have lost track of the negations ] reason about climate change, human rights, the problems of refugees and many other global problems purely from within a national community [or that] the only forum for discussion is a national one. So what do you mean?

I think I do roughly mean what you say I can’t possibly mean but it all depends on what you understand by we, reason and forum for discussion. If you intend to develop a philosophical understanding of the topics you mention, then of course you’ll find many interlocutors ready to philosophically investigate with you independently of any national community. Reasoning in this way is fine, informative and important, but concerns only a very specific we engaged in a very specific discussion.

In addition to such an intellectual discussion, social change requires social and political engagement and that normally (in the statistical, not normative sense) entails concrete social mobilization of a we representing a significant chunk of the population around the issue. Usually, such mobilizations (through associations, unions, political parties…) requires that individuals engaged in them have some degree of common understanding of the issues at stake (in order to conduct the discussion, if you wish). Living in the same area is typically more than sufficient to achieve this degree of common understanding. I certainly don’t claim it is conversely necessary, but in the absence of co-residence, something else has to obtain.

But let us be concrete. Is it desirable, perhaps necessary, that there be a meaningful coordinated social mobilization of citizens in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy (to take a continuous chunk of Europe) around the question of migrations? Sure. Can there be one considering how far these four countries have moved from each other in the last three decades? I doubt it. Perhaps you think it self-evident that there can be one, but I would be curious to know why. Can we agree, as a preliminary, that there is none, as in literally zero, at the moment? How many people can even name the person in charge of that question in each of these four countries or outline even very broadly what is the current shape of their respective immigration policies and general attitude towards migrants and refugees?

CB @67
Based on the sheer volume of reports coming from across (mainly US social sciences) academia in the last 3 years, and some direct evidence from Oxford, UCL, City here in the UK, Green Parties across Europe etc, I don’t think it is. Admittedly ‘younger middle class’ isn’t a good term, but what I was trying to get at was the category of students who haven’t seen much hardship personally and are younger generation. I don’t doubt that there are perfectly normal/good students in the humanities, probably a majority. All I am saying is that the phenomenon I mention is perfectly visible, and has been reported by all mainstream news outlets by now, and that this species of thinking appears in numerous places to be making normal debate on tricky topics problematic, including by policy-makers.

“This kind of thinking has been ingrained into many in the younger middle class so that they do indeed instantly react to attempts to discuss immigration in real terms, with ‘racist’, ‘islamophobe’ etc. This happens routinely. Hence the by-now well-known situation of snowflake politics in many US (and some UK and other) universities derailing normal academic process.”

From a different place than CB — Madison, Wisconsin — this is just about completely unrecognisable. My students are open, thoughtful, un-ideological. Even those of them that are left wing, and even those that are right wing. Out of 28,000-ish undegrads, maybe 150 or so snowflakes? Far too many, in fact, who are unduly deferential (see this story: https://crookedtimber.org/2016/12/20/racist-incidents-on-campus/)

Here’s a conjecture. Haidt etc spend a lot of time around extremely privileged young people who are unused to being challenged on their views and attitudes. When they are challenged, they don’t like it. But they represent a miniscule proportion of students. And this is nothing new!

Have you spent much time among older very privileged people who are unused to being challenged? They react exactly the same way. Have dinner with very wealthy right-wingers and see how well they react to careful, serious, thoughtful, challenges of their ill-thought out opinions. A lot of people who use the ‘snowflake’ rhetoric seem, if you listen to them, to be exemplars of the phenomenon they deplore. (Not accusing Haidt of that, btw).

No worries; apologies again if my tone came across as more dismissive than I intended

Congrats on the book! Looking forward to reading it.

harry b@71
that is good to know. I of course have no statistical or other aggregate view of ‘snowflake-ism’, and I probably should not have mentioned it, as it is not important to my point. My point was to do with the poor quality of public discourse and how it is hard to see, with the combination of a lack of basic critical reasoning faculties and the blocking of discussion on topics that relate to ethnic culture, religion, immigration etc via accusations of ‘islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’, ‘racism’ etc, in any typical political interview, panel programme, and mainstream news, how the issues of immigration can even be articulated let alone coherent policy be formed.

Thomas Beale (and anyone else who thinks we can’t “talk about” immigration) should be forced to spend a week reading only the daily mail and the sun, or listening to hate radio in the us or Australia.

Such arrant bullshit to say this stuff isn’t discussed. Either disingenuous or a sign that you aren’t reading what the majority of ordinary people are reading. Yet I bet in the next breath you’ll go on to talk about academics in their ivory towers. Boring!

I’m worried about the poor quality of public discourse and incoherent consequent policy

“coherent” -> “ways you understand” -> “ways you agree with”. Essentially you’ve equated disagreement with gibberish, which is… not useful for us.

You need to stop projecting your inside-your-skull experience [“this makes no sense to me”] onto external reality as a property of same [“this is incoherent”].

Jeffrey Rubard

On the first and third points of our exchange, it’s not as clear as you suggest that legislators and civil servants are not in it for the money. They are paid, and at the higher levels paid highly, and for many of them (at least at the higher levels) a government career becomes an important part of the foundation for a subsequent lucrative career in the for-profit sector. This is not enough to demonstrate conclusively that they are in it solely for the money, or even that they are in it primarily for the money, but at the least it makes it hard to believe that they are indifferent to the money. Also, the idea that they are not in it for the money themselves is still fully compatible with the idea that they are imbued with a value system that tells them that their job, in government, is to make it easier for people to make money, or that, to use your own later expression, those who have the gold make the rules.

On the second point, if somebody begins a sentence ‘I long thought that X …’ I am set up for a continuation in which the idea X is repudiated; on the other hand, if somebody begins a sentence ‘I have long thought that X …’ I am set up for a continuation in which the idea X is reaffirmed. In either case, however, the expectation created can be disappointed subsequently, because people are not all equally careful in their choice of words, including verb tenses. In the longer version of the quote, Wilson’s choice of verb tenses is confused, switching without explanation from the past ‘did’ to the present ‘is’, ‘goes’, ‘is’. There’s no unambiguous repudiation of the earlier idea.

On the fourth point, you write:

If you think the US is a good thing, and the ideas are at least partially from Montesquieu, wouldn’t that be “creditable” to Montesquieu? Obviously Federal law is not the only thing going down in America Town but really your protestations about my pointing out that it has a different character than “He who has the gold, makes the rules” are paltry.

Firstly, you must be aware that some people don’t hold to the view that the US is a good thing, and that’s one of the things that would need to be established in order to establish that the US is to Montesquieu’s creidt. Secondly, even if it’s true that the Constitution derived in large part from Montesquieu’s ideas, the US did not derive from the Constitution; rather the Constitution derived from the US, which came first. Some people who thought that the US was a good thing thought that the Constitution was a bad thing. Thirdly, in a situation where those who have the gold make the rules, there’s no reason to expect that to be explicitly written into the rules, because if you do in fact control the rules you don’t need a rule that announces this fact; it could be actively unhelpful to you, because secrecy can be an advantage for controllers. So the absence of a rule that states that those who have the gold make the rules is no evidence that it’s not true.

@86
”but it seems reasonable to point out in response to the above that it appears to be widely accepted that there is a generalised lack of critical thinking capabilities among college and university intakes”

Absolutely – that’s why everybody always thinks that he -(or even she) is always the only one with ”the critical thinking capabilities” – while actually I (ME! – and perhaps you?) –
are the only ones with them ”critical thinking capabilities”!

Thomas BThe part of your comments about there being a general lack of critical thinking skills is not the part that I disputed, although I did not explicitly affirm it; the reasons for that are, or at least I hope so, an example of my own efforts to apply critical thinking skills. It seemed plausible to me that there is a widespread lack of such skills; on the other hand, I asked myself how I could know it’s true, and couldn’t answer. I do appreciate the link you provided; it was interesting to read that there has been a systematic study of faculty at California universities which found that a majority (by a wide margin) agreed that it was important to teach critical thinking, but only a minority (again by a wide margin) could give an explicit explanation of what critical thinking skills are. That’s a solid basis for concluding that there’s a serious lack of a particular kind of intellectual equipment among faculty at California universities. Strictly speaking there’s still a question about whether that generalises to any larger population, such as faculty at all US universities, or the whole US population, or the worldwide academic community; but it is at the very least a plausible suggestion.

It’s the other parts of what you’ve written that I’m still dubious about. Try applying critical thinking skills to what you’ve offered as a basis for your conclusions in this latest comment. ‘I would have thought it was clear that …’; ‘This cannot possibly be controversial …’; ‘… has been discussed in the literature for decades’–that last one seems slightly less flimsy, but wait a minute–which literature? I ask myself that question and find that, if you mean the literature of some scientific or academic discipline you have given no indication I can find which discipline it is, and so I can’t tell what you mean.

You say you produced one example, and I acknowledge that you have, but when I try to apply my critical thinking skills to it I find problems. In an earlier comment you wrote ‘That’s why we have endless nonsensical ranting based around the word “Islamophobia” (to take just one example) as if its referent was ‘Muslims’ rather than a particular religious ideology.’ I responded ‘it isn’t clear whether you are decrying all use of the word “Islamophobia” (in which case it isn’t clear why) or decrying only some uses while accepting others (in which case it isn’t clear how you’re distinguishing; or why). I don’t like nonsensical ranting, either, but how do we determine what counts as nonsensical ranting? The use of the word ‘Islamophobia’ is not a useful test.’ In this most recent comment you didn’t deal with my response, but reiterated ‘the term “Islamophobe” that is used in public as if its referent is something different from what it obviously should be’. As I understand it, the word ‘referent’ means ‘what a term is used to refer to’, not ‘what a term should be used to refer to’, and the referents of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Islamophobe’ are therefore whatever people use those terms to refer to. In my experience, when people use the word ‘Islamophobia’, they mean ‘bigotry against Muslims’. Here is just one example, from my own country, the website of the Islamophobia Register Australia, which includes this text:

We will seek to categorise Islamophobia incidents in the following groups:
Assaults or attacks on persons of Muslim Background
Attacks on Muslim Property or institutions
Verbal abuse and hate speech/social media abuse
Any form of discrimination in a public or private environment

All the things they list are manifestations of bigotry against Muslims, which tends to confirm that I have understood correctly. If you have some reason for thinking that people should not be using the term in this way, or that it is an example (as you suggest) of a mode of bad thinking, you have not explained it (in stating your position you used the word ‘obviously’, but it’s not obvious to me).

Layman – the Trump proposal, which can be found here, https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=4360033-White-House-Framework-on-Immigration is not, unsurprisingly, all that clear, but as far as I can understand it, it would make the US’s prospective immigration policies much closer to those found in other “western” countries. It would limit family-based immigration to minor children and spouses, which is what most countries provide. It would eliminate benefits for parents (now considered “immediate relatives” of citizens, the most favored group), adult and/or married children, and siblings of citizens. (Those are the only other family members currently benefited in the US, despite the dishonest and misleading rhetoric of many anti-immigration people.) I think this would be bad – I think that the larger amount of family immigration available in the US is good over-all – but this particular change would be bringing the US into closer alignment with most other countries. (It’s not clear if numerical caps would be placed on immediate relatives of US citizens. Currently there are none. If such caps were put in place, it would be a very major and very negative change.)

The Diversity Visa – the so-called “green-card lottery” would also be eliminated. I favor this visa and think it’s good for a number of reasons. (One of them – I think it’s a benefit for an immigration system to offer means for people from a wide number of countries and cultures to come, and by design, this is what the diversity visa does.) I think it has very few negative aspects. But, I’ll note that a very large percentage of “progressive” immigration law professors and practitioners on a immigration law list serve I am on had been calling for the elimination of this visa for a long time, on the grounds that it “discriminates” against people from high-immigration countries (Mexico, India, etc.) who are not eligible for it. This has always seemed misguided to me, but the opposition to the visa has come from many sides, making it an easy target. I hope it won’t be eliminated, but it’s probably going to be. The over-all effect will be to reduce the amount of legal immigration (unless employment based immigration is stepped up radically), but mostly to make immigration policy in the US more like that in most “Western” countries, and to that extent, worse. (There are also lots and lots of possible details, most of them probably bad, that are not included here, and as of yet unknown.)

I don’t doubt at all that the motivation for this is largely, perhaps completely, racism. But, this can perhaps best be seen in a number of the bullet points in the proposal, many of which are, from a legal perspective, exceedingly unclear or just nonsense, but rhetorically charged and not encouraging. (Expanded use of “expedited removal” is particularly bad, for example, as it is pretty typically inconsistent with the rule of law.)

Jeffrey Rubard

… the President is given $400,000 a year today, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

In the context of the US federal budget, $400,000 a year is a tiny sum. In the context of the statistical distribution of individual income, it’s a huge sum. If somebody seeks and takes a job that pays a salary of $400,000 a year, it’s reasonable to suspect that the money was one significant motivating factor.

Let us say it is no different for lesser figures in the government: the money is not as good as the private sector and they have very strict rules about interacting with the private sector.

The President of the United States receives a salary higher than some in the private sector and lower than others. The same is true of the Chief Justice of the United States, or the Speaker of the House of Representatives, or the Attorney-General, or of the holder of any other position in the public sector you care to name, senior or junior. It’s not clear what it means to say that the money in the public sector is not as good as the money in the private sector. It’s not possible to make a general comparison between similar jobs because there are many public-sector jobs for which there are no comparable jobs in the private sector. It might be possible to investigate whether people who leave the private sector to take public-sector jobs are generally getting a higher salary or a lower salary by doing so, but I don’t think it would be easy; I’m not inclined to accept assertions about what the results would be without evidence.

In any case, tracking back our exchange, I return to the point where you asserted that the values of the US government are not the values of capitalist economics. Please note that I never met your assertion with a denial; what I did was ask you what made you think that assertion was true. Even if turned out to be the case that people who take jobs in the public sector are usually accepting a pay cut to do so, or that it is true in some other sense that the money is better in the private sector than it is in the public sector, that would not be sufficient evidence to establish the truth of your assertion, and my response would still be ‘Well, that may be so, but it hasn’t been clearly established’.

Government workers are of course permitted to hold a variety of political viewpoints, including very pro-free-market ones, but if you think this means “nothing is true, everything is permitted” I think you need to make a visit to a psychiatrist.

I’ll ask a psychiatrist about that the next time I’m talking to one, if I remember; but in any case I do not think that ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’. I am curious to know what it is that I wrote that made you think I did.

The statement by the man you *insist* on calling “Engine Charlie Wilson” is not difficult to parse (even if one would rather be talking about Walter Reuther).

I referred to him once as ‘Charles Erwin Wilson’, once as ‘Engine Charlie Wilson’, and once just as ‘Wilson’. If my lapse into frivolity vexed you, I regret it. I don’t know why you’d rather be talking about Walter Reuther.

He is establishing that he believes in a *notional* distinction between the interests of large corporate concerns like GM and the government.

I agree that he’s acknowledging a notional distinction. What is not clear to me is whether he accepts that the distinction is more than notional. If it is in fact the case (and the words leave the possibility open, as far as I can figure) that you have a Cabinet member, confirmed by the Senate, who takes the view that the distinction between the interests of the country and the interests of its large corporations is only a notional one, I think that’s a piece of evidence relevant to this discussion.

Well, if you don’t think the US is a good thing I’m not sure why Americans would want to include you in policy discussions.

The relevance of this remark is not clear to me; Americans are not including me in policy discussions. If you don’t want to engage in discussion with me unless I first affirm that the US is a good thing, you needn’t (surely you must realise that?). I’m not requesting that you engage in discussion with me.

Secondly, the US is categorically defined by the “basic law” of the Constitution; of course there was the period of the Articles of Confederation, but that is “deprecated”, and beyond that the reality of the Americas, but that is not a system of laws.

The US really existed not only before the Constitution did, but even before the Articles of Confederation did. The US existed before the US system of laws did, and brought that system of laws into being. That’s the normal sequence: a country, already existing, creates a system of laws for itself.

We in the US have been historically oriented to an open-texture system of democratic, republican government that involves a *serious, searching* effort to publically interpret laws and regulations in a way such that everyone can “play” by them.

I am unable to figure out what this sentence means, and therefore I am unable to figure out how it’s relevant to this discussion.

If somebody asserted that the United States has historically been a more openly and democratically governed country than many others, I would be inclined to agree that is so, and further that it is a good thing; but then I’d still be unsure how Montesquieu deserves the major credit for this. I think I’d be inclined to credit it more to situational factors than to individual geniuses.

F. Foundling: “I don’t know why the processing of immigrant visas has to take so long and I’m not particularly interested in defending every single detail in the procedures of US bureaucracy, but it still doesn’t look to me as if couples specifically are targeted.”

I think you’d have to actually be interested to find what you’re looking for. What kinds of people actually succeed in entering the US? By and large, it’s workers and family members (including spouses). It’s harder for the latter to come than the former, and it takes longer. This may not convince you that couples are targetted, but that wasn’t the original claim. The original claim was (quoting you):

“I keep encountering this line about ‘loving people of nationalities other than their own’. I don’t think anything or anyone prevents people from doing that in general…”

Here is a thing that makes it harder! Is it deliberate? Maybe, maybe not, but so what? If the regime makes it harder, then it prevents some people, and you will hear that line you keep hearing and don’t believe. Yet they’re right, and you’re wrong. Maybe you should be more interested in the problem, or less interested in disputing it. Being interested enough to dispute it while lacking any interest in understanding it is, well, perverse.

Thomas Beale
The author of that comment you cite is making the same mistake you’re making. The meaning of words is not controlled by etymology. By etymology, ‘nice’ would mean ‘ignorant’; but ‘nice’ does not mean ‘ignorant’. By etymology, ‘shirt’ and ‘skirt’ would have the same meaning; but ‘shirt’ and ‘skirt’ do not have the same meaning. The meaning of ‘racism’ is not controlled by the meaning of ‘race’; the meaning of ‘Islamophobia’ is not controlled by the meaning of ‘phobia’. The meaning of words evolves; what controls it is how the words are used. It is not a misuse of a word to use it in a way which deviates from its etymological origins; it’s a routine linguistic phenomenon.

As I mentioned earlier, the meaning of ‘referent’ is not ‘what a word should be used to refer to’ but ‘what a word is used to refer to’. If the word ‘Islamophobia’ is generally used to refer to ‘bigotry against Muslims’, then that is the referent of the word and its meaning, regardless of etymological considerations.

Bigotry against Muslims is a real phenomenon, and it’s useful to have a word to apply to it; but it’s the same real phenomenon whether it’s referred to with the word ‘Islamophobia’, or with some other newly coined word, or by a compound description like ‘bigotry against Muslims’. In cases like these, objections to the way a particular word is coined or used can be an obfuscatory technique, obstructing discussion of the phenomenon. It’s handy for people who don’t want bigotry against Muslims to be discussed to be able to object, instead, ‘but that’s not what Islamophobia means’.

The objection that things are sometimes referred to as instances of bigotry when they are not in fact instances of bigotry is a different one, and overwhelmingly likely to be true because misidentification is a common phenomenon; but occasional misidentifications don’t demonstrate non-existence. It may well be the case — it probably is the case — that some accusations of bigotry against Muslims (or Islamophobia) are incorrect, but bigotry against Muslims is still a real phenomenon. You affirm that abuse of Muslims in Britain is reprehensible and should be reported; are you pleased that the four most highly rated comments on a Guardian article about it are from people who want to derail the discussion to another topic? (Number one: how we should use words. Number two: Muslim reactions to ISIS. Number three: the practice of face covering. Number four: the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and another incident I was unaware of, apparently involving a Kalashnikov on a train.)

@ Layman 01.27.18 at 10:53 am

>Here is a thing that makes it harder! Is it deliberate? Maybe, maybe not, but so what?

‘Making something harder’ is not the same thing as ‘preventing’ it ‘in general’. I said: ‘I don’t think anything or anyone prevents people from doing that *in general*’. Did I mean that there aren’t *any* circumstances, including human-related circumstances, that have the effect of causing *some* difficulties to mixed-nationality couples? Of course I didn’t, such a claim couldn’t possibly be true in our universe, and every human activity is made *somewhat* harder than it otherwise would have been by certain circumstances – natural ones, since it takes place in nature, as well as social ones, since it takes place among other humans, i.e. in a society (libertarians keep refusing to accept that last part). To me, the phrase *in general*, as well as the word *prevent*, does imply that mixed-nationality couples are *consistently* and *efficiently* prevented from, well, being couples, which would normally be the result of their being targeted *as such*. And I find it hard to take seriously any love relationship that could actually be *prevented* by trivial nuisances such as visa waiting times. If anyone was seriously making an effort to prevent such a thing, things would have looked different, since there are far better ways to do it than what is actually observed.

The OP states defiantly that, in spite of the politicians’ efforts to ‘impress on’ people ‘principles of motion’ that are alien to them, and to ‘keep human beings … with others like them’, people will always love those of nationalities other than their own. To me, this sounds very much as if politicians are either deliberately seeking to prevent mixed-nationality relationships, or imposing systems that are, mostly if not wholly, incompatible with such relationships. I just don’t think that either of these things is the case. Are there certain difficulties under certain circumstances? Yes. Is it generally a big problem? No. It is very, very common, and has coexisted with these ‘unnatural’ systems for ages.

The issue of the ‘unnaturalness’ of the systems leads me to the claim that ‘free movement was the default until the 20th century’ (@15) and on restrictions by states not being ‘normal and therefore normative’ (@38). ‘Free movement’ may have obtained in some sense as a de facto *practice*, but not as a *right*, in the way it is conceived now. These were regimes that generally gave less, not more positive and negative rights to their subjects and to aliens than what is normal today, and would certainly never give up the right to prevent people from entering their territory, or to force them to leave it – or, in most cases, even to prevent them from leaving it for that matter – when they saw fit, even if they didn’t use those rights all the time on each and every individual. I doubt that *any* human polity – a state, a tribe or anything in-between – in ages past has willingly renounced the *right* to decide who enters or resides in what it considers to be its territory. On a related note: in the past, the more positive and negative rights citizenship has meant, the more restrictive it has been and the more jealously it has been guarded, and vice versa – compare classical Athens and the Hellenistic monarchies, or the Gracchi’s Rome with Caracalla’s Rome. While a true expansion would, of course, be great, it is important to make sure that a relaxation doesn’t form part of the same developmental ‘journey’ as those polities went through instead. The issue of social services has already been touched upon by Matt 01.22.18 at 8:34 am (@16), and of democracy by Z 01.23.18 at 3:39 pm (@50).

The word is now useless, but if it were to have found use with its proper meaning ‘fear of Islam’ or even ‘unreasoned fear of Islam’ (the definitional referent), many discussions would have not been derailed.

Do you know what else would stop derailment of arguments? if people stopped making specious arguments about linguistics. Words mean what they’re used to mean, and good language is language that communicates well.

I mean, suppose I call you a pigfucker. “Pigfucker” wears its etymology like a condom, an agent of pigfucking, sex acts involving swine. But you wouldn’t respond, “I’ve never fucked a pig in my life, not even a cute one”, because you’d understand that the word wasn’t being used in the sense its etymological origins suggest.

Why the difficulty with “islamophobe”, then?

Well, I can’t explain why they *should* simply show up and be admitted either.

You don’t have to: the basis of the “liberal” framework is that people can as far as possible act as they please. If someone wants to prohibit or restrict something, the rhetorical burden lies on them to justify that.

Collin Street @ 101
Er… that’s basic. Your chosen example epithet is a metaphorical one, and since it’s in the category of insult terms, can be used to point to almost anything/anyone in the real world. The term not used at all in its literal sense. The intensional definition of ‘Islamophobe’ is quite clear: phobia of Islam, but it’s used in the real world to refer to Muslims, not Islam. A category error…

F. Foundling: “Well, I can’t explain why they *should* simply show up and be admitted either.”

Mayve to avoid the charge that immigration policies are designed to / have the effect of preventing ‘loving people of nationalities other than their own’. Isn’t that the charge you were disputing?