immature techno-geek with moral autism

Posted by Scott Alexander

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe

The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions.

Why shouldn’t the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US, and looms large in the American imagination. Why shouldn’t we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don’t make sense in the American context?

In my post on Baby Boomers, I argued against claims that America keeps raising taxes on the young so it can award larger pensions to the old (in fact, Social Security payouts per person have become less generous over time, not more - although total subsidies to the elderly are rising because of increasing longevity and health insurance costs). Several European readers wrote in to say that, whether or not this is happening in America, it definitely happens in Europe:

Sokow:

The anti-Boomer take has been imported in part from the EU + the UK where the pension system is not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)#Pensions_Act_2007

There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.

The Fall:

Scott seems genuinely confused about the origin of alot of Boomer hate, which is explicitly tied to European welfare systems and how they redistribute money away from young middle class earners into the pockets of the wealthiest generation, i.e. Boomers by means of pension transfers.

If Scott had broadened his research horizon a bit, he would see that the average pension in France is now higher than the average salary - which is obviously an unjustifiable disaster, especially when old people are way less likely to rent at high prices or experience childcare expenses.

So maybe this is one example of European issues leaking to a less appropriate American context. Are there any others?

In Understanding America’s New Right, Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs. He answers that their ideology centers around the idea of Western civilization, which is kind of him: a more paranoid analyst might make a similar argument around white identitarianism. Since Europe is the home of Western civilization, it’s especially galling for it to be ravaged by immigration or whatever.

This may be true, but I propose a simpler explanation: the American conservative narrative on immigration is mostly true in Europe, mostly false in America, and it is more pleasant to think about the places where your narrative is mostly true.

The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals. As our news sources love to remind us, this is untrue in the American context. The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen. This is a vague high-level claim, the answer can shift depending details of how you ask the question, and it’s certainly not true of all immigrant (or native) subgroups. Still, taken as a vague high-level claim, the news sources are right and the conservative narrative is wrong.

In Europe, the situation is more complicated. There are still some ways of asking the question where you find immigrants collecting fewer benefits than natives (for example, because immigrants are young, natives are old, and pensions are a benefit). But there are also more options for asking the question in ways where yes, immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. The European link between immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the conservatives are allowed to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries.

This makes it tempting for US right-wingers to center their discussion of immigration around stories, narratives, and images from Europe. No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian.

For example, in my research on Scott Adams, I came across the following Dilbert strip, which is apparently supposed to take place in the US:

There are no good statistics on asylum-seeker crime per se in America, but we know that the most common countries of origin for seekers are Afghanistan, China, and Venezuela. Afghans are incarcerated at 1/10th the US average rate1, Chinese at 1/20th, and Venezuelans at 1/4th. These statistics may be biased downward by some immigrants being too new to have gotten incarcerated, but this probably can’t explain the whole effect2. More likely it’s selection. The Afghans are mostly translators and local guides getting persecuted by the Taliban for helping American occupation forces; the Chinese and Venezuelans are mostly well-off people fleeing communism.

(What about the very poorest groups from the most dysfunctional countries? Taken literally, the numbers suggest that Somalis and Haitians both have lower incarceration rates than US natives. Matthew Lilley and Robert VerBruggen make the newness objection - the very newest immigrants have had less time to commit crimes - and here it has more teeth given the smaller gaps. When you adjust for it, Somalis commit crimes at about 2x native rates, and Haitians at about 1x - although nobody has actually done this adjustment with the Haitian statistics and this number is eyeballed only3. So the only group where I can find clear evidence for a higher-than-native crime rate in is Somalis4 - who mostly didn’t enter as asylum-seekers, but through a different refugee resettlement pathway. In some sense this is a boring difference - who cares exactly which legal pathway immigrants from failed states use to get into the country? But in another sense it’s exactly what I’m arguing - despite there being no relevant difference between these terms, we’re using the incorrect European ones, because we’re having the European debate.)

So US asylum-seekers as a category probably have a lower crime rate than natives (no perfectly applicable statistics, but I think the evidence suggests about half, and ChatGPT thinks it suggests 0.3 - 0.7x). Why then do Dilbert readers nod along with the idea of three people per workday getting stabbed by asylum-seekers?

In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 8x the native rate. This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about this issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of “asylum seekers” as a group5.

Unfortunately, nobody has an incentive to think about this. Conservatives don’t want to think about it because it undermines their anti-immigrant talking points. But liberals also don’t want to think about it, both because it feels problematic to admit that European anti-immigrant populists might have a point, and because they don’t like touching crime statistics for purely domestic reasons. Both sides covertly cooperate in treating “the West” as a monolithic entity.

Still, I think this plays into the conservatives’ hands. They can tell scary stories about immigrants in Europe, always hinting that they apply to America too. American liberals either ignore them or call them problematic, giving the conservatives a second victory: they can paint intellectuals as mealy-mouthed and unwilling to acknowledge reality.

I think the more honest and politically practical course would be to acknowledge when these stories about Europe are true, then challenge conservatives to return to the American context - where they’ll have more of an uphill battle6.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/political-backflow-from-europe