Immigrants Aren't Like Rotten Food

Dave Smith's very stupid analogy to argue against immigration

Libertarians Alex Norwasteh and Dave Smith recently debated over whether “Government restrictions on the immigration of peaceful and healthy people make sense from a libertarian standpoint, especially in present-day America.” Alex was for the affirmative, Dave for the negative.

Dave won via the rules of the debate (audience vote). You’ll have to watch it for yourself, but in my opinion, the audience was wrong. Alex won pretty easily.

I’m not very familiar with Dave Smith, but I wasn’t impressed by his performance. His argument was basically that because free immigration is wildly unpopular, it would go against Libertarian principles to force free immigration on people. If the question being debated was whether Libertarians should prioritize free immigration, he might’ve had a case. But that wasn’t the question. Whether or not people want free immigration has nothing to do with whether immigration makes sense from a Libertarian standpoint.

I have to believe that Dave knows that Libertarianism is perhaps the most unpopular political ideology in America today. Alex made a version of this point multiple times in the debate. If you switch the question to literally anything else that Libertarians want, welfare, taxation, drugs, etc, Dave would be arguing his ass off in the affirmative, even though the majority of people do not agree with the Libertarian perspective. But, for some reason, when it comes to immigration, now the will of the people is of utmost importance. It’s completely incoherent and should’ve automatically disqualified him from winning. The fact that he still won shows just how much people, even Libertarians, truly hate immigration.

One argument of Dave’s that I wish Alex pushed back more on came during an exchange on immigrants and crime. Dave argued that even if Alex’s research that shows immigrants commit less crime is true, which he is skeptical of, it doesn’t matter, and, to make his point, he used an analogy from Ann Coulter.

Saying that immigrant commit fewer crime is like if you had some food in your fridge and 50% of it is was rotten. And then you went to the supermarket and you said “the food I got at the supermarket is only 20% rotten, isn’t that great?” No! Because the expectation that the food you’re supposed to bring in is supposed to be 0% rotten. You’re just bringing in more rotten food in here. Even if immigrants commit crime at a lower rate, you are still bringing in more crime.

This is so stupid I honestly can’t believe he said it out loud. It’s so stupid that he actually made Ann’s original quote even stupider than it already was.

Amazingly, Bersani's study also produced this startling result: There is very little difference in crime rates between young native whites and blacks. Even if the immigrants' crime rate were the same as "the overall population" - and it's not - we're supposed to be admitting immigrants who are better than us, not "six of one, half dozen of the other."

Why? Because we're picking them. If the food in your refrigerator is rotten, you don't go out and buy more rotten food on the grounds that it's no more rotten than the food you already have. This is the new food you're picking and you're paying for.

But let’s just go through Dave’s version because that’s the one he actually proudly uttered. His analogy only makes sense if you make the assumption that there are supermarkets with no rotten food. But that’s obviously not the case in this hellish hypothetical. If it was, you wouldn’t have any rotten food in your fridge. So, if your regular supermarket sports a 50% rotten rate, of course you should be excited if you find a supermarket with only a 20% rotten rate.

It’s the same result in the real world. If immigrants sport a lower crime rate than natives, natives by definition have to be committing crimes. Thus, the alternative to admitting immigrants isn’t a crime-free world. There is still crime, just without all of the economic benefits immigrants bring.

Even though he didn’t make this point in direct rebuttal to this ridiculous hypothetical, Alex was right in saying that arguments against immigration in this vein could also be used as arguments against having kids. For instance, black people have a higher crime rate, so we should stop black people from having kids. Or, more accurately as it pertains to immigrants, asian people commit very few crimes but they still do commit some crimes, so we should stop asian people from having kids. It’s a disgusting argument that anybody, not just Libertarians, would immediately find as such. But, many people somehow find this logic perfectly acceptable when they want to keep out foreigners.

There are legitimate practical political arguments against immigration. But, on its merits, I’m not sure there actually is a good argument against it. If there is, Dave definitely didn’t make it.