The “Fantasy of Replacement”

Last updated on: February 5, 2018 at 11:04 am by Jane the Actuary

The “Fantasy of Replacement” 2018-02-05T11:04:32-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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A few paragraph from Saturday’s Ross Douthat column in the Times, after describing the state of affairs in California and elsewhere with high unskilled immigration, which have become stratified into rich and poor, the later consisting of immigrants willing to work long hours for low wages:

the winners in this system . . . inhabit a world where they only see their fellow winners and their hard-working multiethnic service class. Which in turn encourages them toward mild contempt for their fellow countrymen who don’t want to live under a cosmopolitan-ruled caste system, who feel alienated from the Californian or Parisian future.

For some pro-immigration Republicans this contempt is Ayn Randian: We’ll all be better off with more hard-working immigrants and fewer shiftless mooching natives. For pro-immigration liberals it’s the predictable cultural triumphalism: The arc of history is long, but thanks to immigration we won’t have to cater to heartland gun-clingers any longer.

In both cases there’s a fantasy of replacement that’s politically corrosive, and that’s one reason why Donald Trump is president and Jeb! and Hillary are not.

Douthat goes on to push back on the notion that it’s beyond the pale to question current rates of unskilled immigration, and proposes as a middle-ground that immigration continue but with a shift to higher-skilled immigrants, who would compete with “economy’s winners” rather than with those who are struggling.

And it seems to me that this “fantasy of replacement” is no different than the tendency to wish away the poor that’s inherent in proposals to IUD-ify all poor women until they can make their way to being not-poor and thus deserving of having kids. (See my old post on whether poor families can responsibly choose to have families.) And there’s a similar tendency to wish away the poor in the Third World in the same way, in particular in areas which are extremely densely populated and where it’s hard to see any improvement. (See: the Gaza Strip.)

Image: By Lewis W. Hine(Life time: 1874-1940) – Original publication: Photo-studyImmediate source: Brooklyn Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51292180

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"fantasy of replacement"

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