Of course, we’re all entirely rationalists. Given our tagline around here we can hardly be otherwise, can we? But we can extend this a little more. Every grouping, every culture, insists that there are certain hard truths about the world and the one that comes after it. And witchcraft is being on the wrong side of those obvious and evident truths.
People from other groupings and cultures are going to be guilty of that witchcraft given that they’ve got a different set of such truths.…
See More
It was, of course, appalling that 39 people froze to death while being smuggled into the UK. This was indeed a result of the fact that we have immigration restrictions. Then again, a rich country with a welfare system is always going to have immigration restrictions, free movement cannot happen in the presence of a money tree.
A slightly different worry though. Upon Brexit then we Britons will be out of the EU’s specialist unit on people smuggling.…
See MoreWe can all see what the underlying idea here is but it does sound remarkably fascist, authoritarian, doesn’t it? Only companies which display GoodThink will be allowed to sponsor people to be come immigrants. Roughly, that’s what Javid is saying here. And I, for one, think such ideological status tests stink, stink to high heaven.
Organisations that fail to uphold British values to be barred from recruiting foreign workers
Entirely true, we’d prefer not to allow BackPackBombsRUs to be recruiting their live demonstration models from Peshawar.…
See MoreIt’s not obvious that these are all different stories but this was indeed the lineup for the BBC London news earlier:
BBC London headlinesWe have indeed been enriched by so much diversity, haven’t we?
See MoreThis sounds harsh and given modern mores is in fact harsh. But there’s also a great deal of truth to it:
Acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli blamed the father in the now-infamous photograph of a drowned man and his daughter at the southern border for both of their deaths.
Who, of his own volition, went into the water with his daughter? At least some of whatever responsibility there is to hand around must go to the person who made that decision, no?…
See MoreSure,m the Danish far right populists have lost votes and seats in the election there but they still won. On he same basis that Ukip won in the UK without ever getting anywhere near to any sort of political power. Simply by making damn sure that the desired policy is the one that was enacted.
Ukip did this by continually making the case that we shouldn’t be in the European Union. So, we had a vote, we’re going to stop being in the European Union.…
See MoreDonald Trump has announced the use of his emergency powers to impose import tariffs on goods from Mexico. This is, obviously enough, not wise given that it is American consumers who benefit from imports, they who bear the costs of trade restrictions. But we know he doesn’t understand that. However, it’s the reason which is so extraordinary. It’s to stop illegal immigrants moving through Mexico. Which is something that’s not really under the control of the Mexican government in the first place – it’s illegal, right?…
See MoreIt’s well known that the net effect of immigration upon wages is pretty much zero. Immigrants bring with them their own desires as well as their labour. It’s also well known that the overall economic effect of immigration is positive. The fastest way to make someone richer is to move them from a poor country to a rich one. That’s not the end of the story though. What’s the cultural effect of immigration? Fortunately we have past historical exercises we can study to find out:
Gifts of the immigrants, woes of the natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration
Marco Tabellini 25 May 2019
Recent waves of immigration in the US and Europe have triggered debate around the economic and political impact.…
See MoreThis isn’t a surprise, it’s a long known result in fact. But it’s nice to see the empirical proof. Immigration doesn’t hit the average long time indigene – in an economic sense that is – as the arrival of the new labour coincides with both the arrival of new demand and also more division and specialisation of labour opportunities. The immigrants benefit greatly. So, who gets hurt? The last wave of immigrants who are still doing those low end jobs the new immigrants are now competing for:
Opening the floodgates: Immigration in the aftermath of the eastern enlargement
Bernt Bratsberg, Andreas Moxnes, Oddbjørn Raaum, Karen-Helene Ulltveit-Moe 09 May 2019
In the aftermath of the eastern enlargement of the EU, Norway experienced one of the largest immigration shocks of the 21st century.…
See MoreWas slavery a bad thing?
Yes.
Was slavery a common thing?
Yes.
Just about every society up to and just past the steam engine had slavery. True, it might have been villeinage, serfdom, rather than pure chattel slavery but yes, it existed pretty much everywhere and when.
There’s not even anything wholly different about the Atlantic trade in the chattel slavery of blacks from sub-Saharan Africa. The trans-Saharan trade predated it and outlived it. The East African trade most certainly outlived it – there were episodes of the Royal Navy capturing slavers in the 1920s.…
See More