how likely is infinity Bomalians?

will the left go bonkers?

Frequent commenter Michel Djerzinski has been challenging me to prove the following: how do I know that these crazy leftists won’t invite in millions of Africans? I think it is highly unlikely, and I will explain why.

First of all, Michel is modeling leftist policy on the basis of mass ideological justification: “they’re poor, we did a colonialism, muh climate change, muh communism.” It is true that this is how leftists justify their current immigration policies, and the true believers could take things endlessly in this direction. It wouldn’t matter if we became “literally South Africa.” There are committed leftists who believe in open borders.

These leftists, historically, have never gained power. The Soviet Union certainly didn’t have open borders. Instead, it had the most extensive and bureaucratic internal system of borders of any country in history. North Korea doesn’t have open borders, and neither did East Germany.

There’s a group of leftists, centered on Trotsky and Chomsky, who probably would denounce these forms of communism as “authoritarian” and say that these “weren’t real leftists.” The right-wing has tended to believe them, on the strength of their moral fervor.

Moralization works until it doesn’t. When the state-media-military complex permits Chomsky to have a hissy fit over the “authoritarianism” of the Soviets, as a left-libertarian, he is free to say whatever he wants. But when he starts to undermine our interests, he can be thrown in the trash heap. He’s no longer sexy. He’s just an old white (Jewish) man. Thus always to moralists. They are useful, until they’re not, and then they are discarded.

This is a top-down view of moralization and ideology. Of course, there are cases in history where an ideological vanguard successfully perpetrates a revolution, as in the Protestant Revolutions of 1618, the English Civil War of 1642, the Boston Revolt of 1689, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We could even consider the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to be an example of a successful leftist movement which captured the state. So why can’t the Squad pull off the same trick today? What’s to prevent AOC from declaring a revolution?

Revolutions require one of three things: money, military, or media. The Bolsheviks had money, they had military assistance, and it had an international media apparatus to advance its ideology. Stalin and Lenin started their career by planning bank robberies. Once AOC starts carrying out guerrilla warfare, I will begin to take the threat of a leftist takeover more seriously. No, BLM does not count.

Additionally, the Russia regime in 1917 was extremely weak: the Russian Orthodox church betrayed the monarchy, the military was floundering, and the treasury was empty, as people cried out for peace, land, and bread. Had the Russian state been strong, the Bolsheviks would have never succeeded.

As long as America maintains a strong military, a strong economy capable of feeding everyone, and a powerful media system that excludes the extreme left, a leftist revolution is not possible.

“But Biden is a communist!”

Right-wingers probably agree that a leftist revolution is not likely, but many of them would maintain that the revolution already happened, in 1965. The logic of Civil Rights, they argue, leads inevitably to mass immigration. Billions must immigrate.

I think that mass immigration can be viewed from a much less ideological lens, where we assume that policy makers are neither stupid nor insensitive to corporate lobbying. Even in Springfield, Ohio, it is obvious that someone is benefitting from Haitian migration. Immigration has distributed costs and concentrated benefits. The factory owner receives cheap labor, and the citizenry complain about cats, dogs, and bad drivers.

Immigration isn’t driven by a single cynical motivation, but by many. The factory owner gets cheap labor; Democrats get a future voting base; real estate speculators benefit from “white flight” out of cities and into suburbs. If it works with 20,000 Haitians, why not 20 million Africans?

The best way to understand policy is in terms of “steady states.” In biology and chemistry, processes continue until they reach a certain “capacity.” Parasites suck blood until they are full and bacteria feast on rotting flesh until it wastes away. In the case of parasites and infections, they will often kill their host. This is the conservative model of leftist policy: they will literally bring in millions of Africans until the whole country collapses, and white genocide is complete.

But there are other models of steady states. For example, deer. If you plop down a small population of deer into a forest, they will multiply, but they will also be subject to predation, and winter starvation, and disease. Eventually, the deer will reach a certain carrying capacity or “steady state.” This is because there are negative pressures acting upon the deer, in addition to the positive pressures which increase their population. This is also the case in physics, where the downward pressure of gravity is equal and opposite to the forces in your bones and ligaments which keep you from collapsing into a pool of JELL-O. If the force of gravity were to suddenly increase (as on an amusement park ride or in a jet airplane), you would feel more “strain,” but you wouldn’t simply collapse.

Conservatives who predict apocalyptic levels of African immigration are ignoring a few obvious facts:

1. Immigration is largely opportunistic;

2. Refugees are few are far between (less than 3.6 out of 47.8 million);

3. Plane tickets are relatively expensive;

4. Africa and America do not share a land border.

How crazy is Biden/Harris?

Conservatives love to point out that the Mexican border is completely open, and they use this fact to infer that mass African immigration is inevitable. They claim that Biden’s refugee policy is historically unusual, but that future administrations will continue to exceed this and “one-up” each other, leading to infinity Bomalians.

Except, that hasn’t happened at all.

Biden has let in less refugees than Obama, Clinton, Bush Sr, and even Reagan.

It is true that, in the past, refugee programs were much more geared toward the victims of communism, like Ashkenazi Jews, Vietnamese, former Soviet citizens, Yugoslavians. Since 2003, refugee programs have refocused on the Middle East, with Afghans and Somalians being new beneficiaries of the program.

Of the top 10 countries over the last 14 years, America has received around 539k refugees. 33.8% have been east Asian; 31.4% have been Middle Eastern; 30.8% have been Sub-Saharan African; 4.1% have been eastern European.

Over the last 15 years, the government has spent $457 billion dollars on refugees. This doesn’t mean that we are literally spending $847,866 per refugee, because a percentage of this budget goes toward refugees who were already settled in America prior to 2009. But still, that’s a lot of money.

Conservatives need to decide their narrative: is America sliding downward into full economic collapse over the next 20 years, or is America going to spend $847 trillion dollars to bring one billion Africans into our country? At some point, these become mutually exclusive positions.

One of the reasons why the refugee program has been so successful thus far is because of the amount of money that’s been spent. Refugees aren’t just picked up and dropped off in the middle of nowhere with no food, no clothes, and no shelter. Instead, refugees are provided with free education, healthcare, housing, and language services. Haitians might be less competent at taking advantage of these services, and as a result, have a lower rate of assimilation than Ukrainians. However, no one is advocating that we just load millions of Africans on planes and drop them off in Kansas with no plan. If anything, the refugee resettlement programs do too much, are overfunded, and over-planned.

The conservative projection works by a kind of double negative:

1. Ask a liberal, “how much immigration is too much?”

2. The liberal refuses to answer.

3. Assume that they want infinite Bomalian immigration.

4. Start projecting that as the most likely outcome of liberal hegemony.

This is a very simplistic, naive, and self-serving assumption. It is a lawgic trap.

No liberal actually believes in unrestricted African immigration. Even the South Africans themselves hate African immigration. Liberals will performatively do a little interpretative dance to signal their virtue, but these are middle management types whose only power is college admissions. They don’t control immigration policy. They never will. Not because they are entirely incompetent, but because policy is still determined rationally, not ideologically. Even in the most extreme versions of total communism, border controls still existed.

When I say that “policy is rational,” I don’t mean that policy is optimal or fair to the white working class. White nationalists would love to kick out all the refugees and give the unemployed drug addicts of Springfield, Ohio shiny new pickup trucks, so they could drive around playing “Pour Me a Drink,” by Post Malone, or whatever they listen to.

When I say that policy is rational, I mean that policy can be modeled as a market, where “supply” is determined by votes, and “demand” is determined by lobbyists. If a policy doesn’t get many votes (like resettling Haitians in Ohio), the supply is low, and so the “demand” (by lobbyists) must be high. There is a business lobby in America which likes cheap labor flooding into the market, and this lobby thinks Haitian immigration (on the scale of thousands) is good. But if this increased to millions (the population of Haiti is less than 12 million), both “demand” and “supply” would likely reach a critical minimum, by which point the policy would reduce in proportion.

On the other hand, when “supply” is high, and “demand” is high, things happen very quickly. After 9/11, voters were eager to go to war, and lobbyists agreed. The result doesn’t sound “rational” — the GWOT was a tremendous waste of money, and gave Iran a land corridor to supply Lebanon through Iraq and Syria. But whether or not the result was “optimal” from my point of view, it did follow a certain internal logic. High voter supply, high lobbyist demand.

Illegal immigration, and low skilled immigration in general, is unpopular. It still happens for two reasons:

1. It isn’t very impactful on America’s military, economy, or media apparatus.

2. Stopping illegal immigration requires increased government competence, whereas allowing it to continue requires nothing at all.

In general, immigration has distributed costs. Drunk drivers, crime, gangs, and lower social-trust all affect the people who can’t afford to move (downwardly mobile whites). But it has very little budgetary impact in the grand scheme of things. Most immigrants are not the vicious killers portrayed by Trump. Most of them are short, round, apathetic Marvel movie goers. Yes, they use welfare, but they also pay taxes. It’s a mixed bag. Not the collapse of civilization.

My prediction is that America follows Canada, Britain, Australia, and Silicon Valley in pursuing a merit-based immigration system. That means less Haitians and more Chinese and Indians. I have warned that this form of elite Immigration is much more threatening to the mythic fabric of America, because elite immigrants will have a much more top-down impact on our military, media, and financial system than waves of low-skilled migrants from Mexico. Conservatives, by fear-mongering over the non-existent threat of infinite Bomalians, distract from the real crisis on the horizon.