Rate limiting

The debate over immigration seems to have become one where actual discussion is rapidly becoming impossible. Even over at Brothers Judd, I can’t seem to get people to engage my actual arguments. Instead of wasting my typing there, I will expound on my point here where I have the space and time to provide a fuller explanation.

As I have discussed previously, I am not sanguine about the ability of the USA to absorb large influxes of immigrants. The essence of this is two questions I asked the proponents of unrestricted immigration.

• Is there an upper limit to the number of immigrants who can be successfully assimilated per unit time?
• If so, how likely is it that proposed changes in immigration laws would create immigration rates larger than this limit?

David Cohen provided a coherent and relevant reply which makes him stand out in the crowd. He agrees that there is a limit but that no real world rate would exceed it. I disagree, but it’s certainly an arguable proposition. Other responders didn’t seem to understand the question.

The essence is that in order to function in a society, one must have a set of attitudes, habits, conventions, expectations, etc., that I will refer to in short hand as “memeware”. This includes things as abstract as a general expectation of liberty to the proper way to queue up for voting¹. The expression of these memes creates the society that can be observed². From this, we can deduce that immigrants in general have dysfunctional memeware, because otherwise their original societies would be as good as ours and they wouldn’t have gone to the effort to emmigrate.

As in my previous post, I don’t think this is anything different than the past. The particular dysfunctions may be different but the overall situation is basically the same. I will note that the memeware that we have in the USA that enables us to have the society we do was developed at great cost over multiple centuries. Transmission of the memeware, fortunately, is much easier than creating it³. This is what makes assimilation of immigrants without permanent damage to the host society possible. The dysfunctional memes can be replaced by ones from the host society, making the immigrant a native over time⁴.

There’s a catch, though — the memeware that runs our society is not a priori obvious. Much of it can only be learned, not deduced. Therefore, someone must teach it. That is the limiting factor on the rate of assimilation. There are only so many natives to teach, only so much of their time they will devote to it. This has the effect that, until the limit is reached, there is little negative impact from increasing immigrant flows. It seems to me, however, that the flip side is that once the limit is exceeded, things can get worse very rapidly⁵. A key point which seems to get missed is that the desire of the immigrants to assimilate becomes irrelevant past the limit point because the societal resources simply do not exist to satisfy the desire.

I was accused of wanting a government training or propaganda operation, despite my history of opposing direct governmental intervention in social matters. It’s particularly sad because the same person posted this less than 24 hours later in which he describes an archetypical example of what I meant. He writes

I began to notice that, far from being the socio-economic burden I feared and expected, Somali kids were starting to win all the school prizes and Somalis were proving to be far more pleasant, informed and diligent in stores than the clueless young native-born Canadians who seemed irritated that you were bothering them and appeared never to have been taught the word “thank-you”. The story isn’t trouble-free — immigration never is — but that my city has been enriched by the Somalis is plain for all but the wilfully blind to see.

One young boy of Somali immigrants plays on my son’s hockey team, which I coach. He is smaller than his team mates and more enthusiastic than talented, but he plays his heart out and does whatever is asked of him. His entire family comes to all games, including his mother and sisters in traditional dress. The other night, he scored our winning goal and the sheer innocent pride and joy he and his family expressed was a wonder to behold.

Exactly! The Somalis came in dysfunctional but were taught (by a combination of the school system, class mates, neighbors, soccer coaches, etc.) how to function in liberal democracy. It is a natural process for societies that are capable of it (and if they’re not, no government program will change it). That young boy gets to be on a soccer team with natives, who provide direct instruction and examples for him. He, in turn, may some day be the coach himself, passing on what he has acquired. But, and again this is the catch, the entire process depends on there being enough natives that their memeware dominates and the immigrant gets the upgrade. This is the same limiting factor, viewed more concretely.

Orrin Judd claims that “the superior culture assimilates the inferior” with an allusion to Darwinism. However, Darwinism is filled with chance and error, providing no guarantee at all that the superior will win out, only that it is more likely to do so. History verifies this. There are many expatriate Americans who should carry our culture to foreign lands but do not that our “superior culture assimilates the inferior”. In fact, the Americans (particularly in the State Department) are the ones who assimilate to the local culture. It is obvious to all but the most blinkered that numbers matter, which is yet another view of the limiting factor I have been writing about.

What, then, are we left with? There is a limit to the ability of our nation to assimilate immigrants. We have little idea what the limit is. Historical records are of some use, but one can make strong arguments that our capacity has decreased since those days. We note that our society is a rare thing, being almost unique despite its obvious success and effort at export. If it is lost here, there is no guarantee that it will arise again. It is for these reasons that I am cautious of opening the immigration gates wide from the start. I would support significant increases in current rates, but I think it behooves us to ease them up somewhat gradually instead of trusting to fortune that we have not made them too high.

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¹ I don’t use the term “culture” because that is usually taken to mean the expression of a more limited set of memes, not the internal information that exists inside people. In addition, a society can have many cultures and I want to talk about the broader set of memes that create the society.

² Orrin Judd writes “Darwinism is true as a social science, just false as a biological one” but he is unwilling to follow the logic of his own claim, because that makes memes the competitors, unless one goes in for biological determination of those memes.

³ There’s an anti-singularity argument in there, where one could argue that as we approach the putative singularity, the meme transmission cost to sustain the society in which that is possible rises as fast as the technology, thereby preventing the sort of run-away process the creates the singularity.

⁴ It is of course one of the memes of American society that makes it such a successful society that a native is one who has acquired a minimal set of the societal memes. We have been an information society from before the very beginnings of our nation.

⁵ To riff on the education analogy again, it’s just like class size. Experience shows that up to a limit, class size matters very little. But once class size exceeds a limit, things fall apart. The system does not degrade gracefully.