The Red, White and Green March

I write slowly and occasionally these days. Life gets busy (generally for good reasons, if you were worried), and the weeks slip by. Mostly, this is unfortunate for my writing, as I feel myself slipping into being a consumer of other people's thoughts, rather than a producer of something new. But one advantage is that sometimes I'm tempted to write about something, then events overtake me before I get around to it, and I'm forced to think harder about it.

Back in early April, you may remember a story about a coming gigantic migrant caravan making its way up from Honduras, through Mexico, to the US border.

April 2nd:

This year, the annual US-bound migrant caravan sparked a Trump tweetstorm

I'll bet you didn't know that America received an annual caravan of migrants turning up en masse before Trump tweeted about it, did you?

April 3rd:

Trump threatens Honduras' foreign aid over migrant caravan

April 7th

Trump Administration Sends Hundreds of National Guard Troops to U.S.-Mexico Border

You can tell that this was a big story, just by plotting the Google Trends search volume for "Camp of the Saints", Jean Raspail's prophetic novel about a mass refugee takeover of Europe. This really felt like the Camp of the Saints had arrived. Admittedly it was only a thousand people, whereas the million or so in Europe is much closer to Raspail's vision, but the organised aspect got people highly alarmed.

It was at about this point that I remember thinking about the two options given: threaten Mexico and Honduras to fix the problem, versus send the US troops to the border.

The first option seemed like a credible possibility. Unlike in Raspail's book, the caravan was coming over the land, not over sea. This means that if the land is owned by someone, and that someone can be threatened or cajoled by the US, you've probably got a good chance at it being in their interests to shut it down.

But it's worth pondering the following. Mexico is a broke, third world country, who ships lots of its own underclass to America, which is a large part of the overall immigration problem. And yet America is apparently relying on Mexico to police the flow of people from the even more wretched Honduras.  Which makes you wonder - why doesn't America do the job itself?

Which gets to the second policy - sending troops to the border. When I first heard about this, I suspected that it might turn into an absolute catastrophe.

You send the might of the US Army to the border. Then what?

Well, there's two possibilities, both of them bad. And both of them have actually happened.

The first is that the troops actually fire. This one played out in Israel, around the same time:

Israeli forces kill three Gaza border protesters, wound 600: medics

So what of that, you may say? 600 wounded to only 3 killed is actually a damn good ratio if you're trying to not kill them and you're vastly outnumbered.

But remember, this is America we're talking about, not Israel. And the key difference is that in Israel, there's enough political consensus backing these troops' actions that there was an effective fence there in the first place.

In America, the border wall will never get built, notwithstanding the hopes of Trump supporters. This is because the overwhelming majority of important political players oppose such a development. And this tells you what the reaction would be if the same thing happened here.

Let's consider the event where the protesters mass at the Mexican border and begin to stream across. Nation Guard units stand opposed, with instructions to stop them at all costs. The order is given to fire. Against all likelihood, the troops actually fire.

Congratulations, random National Guardsman who gave the order! You get to be painted as the modern William Calley, subjected to imprisonment and approbation for the rest of your life. Except it's The Current Year, not 1971, and some Democrat-appointed judge just can't wait to paste you with life in prison to set an example to not violate Steve Sailer's Zeroth Ammendment to the Constitution.

But deep down, everyone knows this is what will happen, and calculates accordingly. Plus people sign up for the US military with (optimistically) hopes of fighting against ISIS, not firing on women and children. And so, even if the order is given, nobody will actually fire.

Then what?

We'll we've seen that too. Welcome to one of the most criminally under-appreciated events of the 20th Century - the Green March.

The Green March was, to borrow from Boldmug, a little piece of 21st Century European history that somehow dropped into 20th Century Africa. 

Western Sahara was a Spanish Colony in the desert on the coast of North-West Africa. It was 1975, Franco was dying, and pretty much everybody knew the colonialism game in Africa was up. Spain was clinging onto control of the colony against an insurgency that had been going on for two years, out of Mauritania. Algeria and Morocco were similarly circling the sick wildebeest that the Spanish colony had become, hoping to take over once the Spanish retreated or were driven out.

And in this context, Morocco decided in November 1975 to do something brilliant. Instead of sending in the army, it assembled 350,000 Moroccan civilians, mostly women and children. This was symbolically chosen to be the number of births in Morocco that year. They were given the order to march on Western Sahara, waving flags and banners, green, the color of Islam.

It is an axiom of firearms training that you should understand the purpose of a gun. It is not a magic wand, a holy cross, or an amulet to ward off evil doers. It is a device constructed to end the life of its intended target. One of the first lessons any competent firearms instructor will tell you is to never, ever point a gun at anything you are not willing and intending to destroy right then.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't use a gun as a bluff. People do this all the time. But bluffing with a gun is a very dangerous game. You might be intending to bluff, and the gun goes off by accident. You might get your bluff called, and now you're in an even worse position than before. Your opponent now knows that you're unwilling to fire, and has a good chance of taking the gun off you.

An army is a merely a collection of men with guns. And having your troops point guns that they are unwilling to fire works no better at a national level than it does with the burglar in your home.

The bluff was called. The Moroccans marched, and the Spanish were unwilling to fire. Sensing that the jig was up, they even cleared away mines from some of the areas to avoid bloodshed. Ironically, Morocco's bigger problem turned out to be not the well-equipped but demoralised Spanish military, but the ramshackle yet willing troops of the Polisario Front out of Mauritania, with whom Morocco fought an ongoing insurgency for years afterwards. But win they did, and Morocco now firmly controls Western Sahara.

The Green March was a combination of weaponised mass immigration and weaponised non-violent protest. King Hassan II understood the Keyser Soze principle: to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. He was willing to get hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Spain was not.

It is prophetic, because it forces starry-eyed immigration supporters to confront something quite uncomfortable. We can haggle over whether the current torrent of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East flooding Europe right now ought to be considered an invasion. Your mileage may vary. But it is very, very hard to argue that the Green March was anything other than an invasion. The fact that women and children armed with flags proved more effective than young men armed with AK-47s is irrelevant. Sovereign control was transferred, involuntarily. The population was replaced, involuntarily.  The fact that this met with virtually no resistance in the end is as irrelevant as the fact that Nazi Germany met with virtually no resistance when it took Denmark.

A rinky-dink group like "Pueblo Sin Fronteras" can organise a thousand Central Americans to turn up at once. Decentralized incentives, combined will pull factors like Angela Merkel idiotically signalling that everybody could come on in, will get you a million people shambolically turning up over a year or two.

But if you want 350,000 people to turn up, at the same place and time, with co-ordinated flags and banners, there is simply no substitute for a nation-state doing the organising. This allows for a formal transfer of sovereignty. But many similar effects are achieved by an informal transformation by population inundation.

Or, if one is talking to a progressive, there is an even stronger example. How should the Native Americans have thought of the Pilgrims turning up at Plymouth Rock in 1620? They may be just a small number of civilians at the time, against a far larger combined group of Native Americans. And they may not be immediately attacking you, or doing anything hostile. But make no mistake: they're here to take everything you have. And if you don't treat them as an existential threat and a military invasion, right now, they'll succeed.

Immigration can very easily be weaponised. And the distinctions between the weaponised and non-weaponised forms are surprisingly difficult to pin down.

But for our purposes, regardless of where you think the present case falls on the spectrum, the response of western authorities against undesired migrants tells you a lot about the defenses available to the west if immigration were to be weaponised.

The answer is not universal. Weaponised immigration is a powerful weapon against an opponent riddled with virtue-signalling, pathological altruism, and a divided political system. It is literal suicide against an opponent who lacks these traits.

And the western response is not uniform. It failed spectacularly in Israel, repeatedly. It failed recently in Hungary and Poland. It worked well in Italy, Germany and France.

How well might it do in America?

For better or worse, Trump in his presidency is much better at talking a big game than he is at delivering a big game. This goes triply so for cases where the achievement of the goal cannot be established just by executive edict, or by provoking an easily-outraged media. If the goal requires the assent of a large bureaucracy, expect a lot of talk and little action. See, for instance, The Wall.

The charitable reading of this is that Trump is an expert at understanding the problem of kings from time immemorial. The central challenge of a king with notionally broad powers is to know what orders will actually be obeyed if given, and limit oneself to only those orders. Do not brandish a gun you are unwilling to fire. Do not attempt to fire a gun that is empty. Do not give orders that will be openly disobeyed. So he'll go for a stripped down version that achieves some limited media victory, and can be implemented. Because giving an order and seeing it flouted would be worse than nothing. It would undermine his authority, on top of not getting the actions implemented.

The uncharitable explanations mostly involve him being too lazy and inattentive to see complicated things through, too narcissistic to properly co-ordinate with a faceless bureacracy, or an outright conman just tricking the right-wing rubes with empty promises.

Pick your theory. But the prediction is pretty reliable.

After threatening to send the troops, within a few days came the first signs that those hoping for a military confrontation would come away disappointed.

On April 9, the Washington Post openly mocked:

Troops sent by Trump to border will fly drones, gather intel — and clear brush, too

He's sending troops, alright, just not sending them to actually confront the people marching on the border.

The right was probably disappointed in this. I can't share this view at all. We can thank our lucky stars that Trump, or someone near to him, understood what a catastrophe it would have been to send armed troops to confront the caravan.

Behind Door Number One is My Lai. Behind Door Number 2 is Western Sahara. Which one would you prefer?

In this respect, Trump's initial instinct is right. Threatening Honduras and Mexico is actually the best possible response, because the alternatives are calamitous in The Current Year. It is much, much easier for Trump to effectively threaten the Mexican government than to effectively assert control of his own government. And if you're going to lose, it is far better to lose quietly, than to lose noisily with all the TV cameras rolling.

Here, I'm going to make a pretty confident prediction, for those of you that remember hearing about the initial story in early April.

You never heard about how the whole thing ended, did you? How do I know this? Same picture as before.

In our ADHD culture, the caravan simply took too long to arrive, and by the time it did, people had lost interest.

So allow me to fill you in. From April 30th, when the Caravan finally reached San Diego:

Everyone who has been waiting is still here. Nobody has been processed,” said Alex Mensing, from the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

“They have not processed anybody at San Ysidro port of entry,” Mensing said.

Organizers of the group told ABC News that there are about 100 people sleeping outside a port of entry in San Diego. 

...

 On Sunday evening, Border Patrol commissioner Kevin McAleenan released a statement saying that the San Ysidro port of entry had "reached capacity."

He suggested that could change but gave no timetable, saying that in the meantime "those individuals may need to wait in Mexico as CBP officers work to process those already within our facilities."

"As sufficient space and resources become available, CBP officers will be able to take additional individuals into the port for processing," McAleenan said in the statement.

From May 1st:

Slowly but steadily, caravan migrants who trekked across Mexico are pleading their cases to US authorities on why they should be granted asylum.

More than half of them have now been accepted to begin processing by US authorities at the border with Mexico, Alex Mensing -- whose group, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, organized the caravan -- said Wednesday.

Even though it's only a hundred of you, our boldest claim made by a government employee under the Trump presidency is that you may face some delays as the faceless bureaucracy processes your case. You start out claiming to be the mighty Parliament that toppled King Charles I. You end up being the modern House of Lords, with the ability to create mild inconvenience through small delay.

This much can be reliably inferred.

If the Mexican government ever decides to pull a King Hassan II, you would be a brave and foolish man to bet against them.

Of the Personal and Statistical

The current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is a tragedy.

Should that sentence strike regular readers as a little trite, bear with me. I mean it in the classical sense that the Greeks thought of tragedy.

It is calamitous, deplorable, cathartic. It is a sorrowful tale of human misery stemming from root causes of human folly and flaws. It is a tale whose outcome the audience knows in advance, as they have seen the story many times before. It could have been prevented, perhaps, but we all knew it wasn't going to be.

The modern bastardisation of the concept of tragedy is that of a simple morality play, where good and evil are clearly delineated ahead of time. In the Disney-fied version, the upshot of all the sorrow is the lesson that Something Must Be Done.

I feel much has been lost by the Disney-fication of drama. We can no longer see the sadness of tradeoffs, of characters who are simultaneously victims and authors of their own misfortune, of the inevitability of human suffering.

So what, then, is the ultimate tragedy on display in this case?

It is this:

Individually, any one person is the undeserving and unfortunate victim of their broken society.

Collectively, all the people in a society are the reason that the society is broken in the first place.

Now, my instincts regarding public policy lean strongly towards emphasising the general, statistical formulation over the particular, personal formulation. The formulation as written may seem to suggest the primacy of the second statement over the first.

But do not misunderstand me here. It would not be a tragedy if it had such a simple resolution as that. Both parts are true. Try just reversing the order of the two statements to get a different feeling. The most common statement about the general and the specific has a very different connotation about which should be preferred. It is attributed, perhaps apocryphally but understandably, to the great monster - one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

The specific of the Syrian refugee exodus you have almost certainly seen by now. It is heartbreaking, and does not need any particular explanation:



Oof. The sheer sorrow hits you like a punch in the guts.

People's second thoughts after seeing this photo will vary wildly. You may be furious at the policies that let this happen. You may be suspicious of your emotions being manipulated here. You may wonder about what should be done in response. This is the intellectual question - what you make of it all.

But before that, I am almost certain your first thoughts, like mine, were of sadness and despair. Imagine if that were your child.

Humans are endowed with two great traits - empathy and reasoning. Those without empathy are sociopaths and monsters. Those without reasoning are dangerous imbeciles and fools.

Empathy yearns to try to end this senseless suffering by those in the middle of this war by granting them refuge. This is attempting to ward off the Scylla of heartless cynicism, and the gleeful egg-breaking-in-the-pursuit-of-omelettes that characterised the worst tyrants of the 20th century.

But what, then is the Charybdis? What gets ignored if we do not think about the general proposition?

Reasoning wants to know why Syria is the way it is, and what consequences will flow from possible responses to the current war.

What tends to get seldom emphasised in the face of such grief above is the heuristic I always associate with John Derbyshire (though I can't remember exactly where he wrote it) - that the more migrants you bring in from country X, the more your own country will resemble country X.

Several things are notable about this proposition.

One, it is extremely straightforward.

Two, it does not depend on one particular theory of development, and holds for many socially acceptable theories. If you think that poverty is driven by childhood nutrition, the result still holds, as long as the current adults are already impacted by malnutrition from years past. If you think that current ethnic conflict has its roots in colonial history, the result still holds, as long as the hatreds do not disappear upon touching foreign soil. As long as the trait is observable in citizens and fixed in the short term, then the Derbyshire result holds at least in the short term.

Third, it is completely outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion.

But is it true? You will have to decide that for yourself. The general result is always uncertain and contingent in a way that the emotional result is not. You have to dig a little deeper to find out. Why is Syria the way it is? And how much of that will be replicated if there is extensive Syrian immigration to a western country, such as from a refugee resettlement program? Hard to say, precisely. But here's something to ponder, from Australia in 2012:

A forum discussion on SBS TV's Insight program looking at the uprising in Syria further exposed the divide amongst Syrian Australians over the conflict....

The main sectarian divide in Australia's Syrian community, though, is between the two main Islamic sects, Shi'a and Sunni....

In February, a group of men stormed the Syrian embassy in Canberra, smashing up the ground floor.

Three staff members were there at the time but no one was hurt.

Just days later, there was a shooting in Sydney apparently linked to the Syrian conflict.

The injured man, Ali Ibrahim, was an Alawi, like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

After expressing pro-Assad views on Facebook, he was shot three times in the legs on the doorstep of his home.

His father, Jamel el-Ali, believed it was a warning from the anti-Assad camp.

It doesn't punch you in the guts in quite the same manner, does it?

But to the thinking person, rather than the feeling person, alarm bells are ringing. Australia did not used to be a country where embassies were stormed and people were shot for expressing political views in public forums. At the moment, this is at a small scale. But how many Syrians can one admit before this is no longer the case? If you bring all of Syria into your country, will you not have simply replicated Syria somewhere else?

This is all well and good, the particularist responds, but how many dead children are you willing to see washed up on a beach in order to forestall this speculative possibility?

It's a good question.

To get a flavor for the generalist argument, it is sometimes necessary to examine it in contexts that do not raise immediate emotional responses. Such as, for instance, the late Roman Empire's decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of Goths. Steve Sailer has a great summary of Edward Gibbon's take on the consequences of that here.

I suspect that the particularist temptation is to wave this away as a largely abstract and irrelevant example. It doesn't resonate emotionally, that's for sure.

But the human catastrophe that resulted from the destruction of the Western Roman Empire was a tragedy that affected Europe for the next thousand years.

If you're waving that away, which one of us is sounding like Stalin now?

The Charybdis, in other words, is that you become so focused on the emotional response to a single death that you forget to think about the long-term consequences of your actions, and end up causing many more deaths.

To my mind, the starting point of the answer, is to shut up and multiply.

This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

Whether a policy makes you feel good is less important than its ultimate consequences. Of course, this then comes back to your view of why the third world is the third world. This is why 'shut up and multiply' is only the start of the answer, not the end of it.

It would be ideal if the policy formulation that saved the most lives in the long run also made you feel emotionally good in the short run.

But what if the two aims are at odds? Are you willing to look clear-eyed on the photos of dead children and still see the lives that you think you're saving by not doing anything? Will you waver? Should you waver?

Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.

The Crocodile Tears Of Refugee Advocates

Look at these preening poseurs, parading their ostentatious compassion like a badge of their moral purity:

Thousands of people have held candlelight vigils around Australia for slain asylum seeker Reza Berati, who died in violence at the Manus Island detention centre last Monday.

If your only knowledge of this story came from the ABC article, you would probably fail  to make much sense of the bizarre euphemism that Mr Berati 'died in violence' at the detention centre. In fact, he died as part of a riot started by other asylum seekers. The vigil-holders seem to display a curious lack of concern with finding and bringing to justice those that started the riots which led to Mr Berati's death. But they would, wouldn't they?

How you view this kind of tragedy depends in part upon how much responsibility you think should be attributed to the government for the indirect but perhaps predictable consequences of its policies, notwithstanding that the proximate cause of the tragedy is with the victims themselves.

The left, perhaps not unreasonably, wants to hold the government accountable for reasonably foreseeable consequences of its actions. It's not obvious that this is always the right way to evaluate government policy, but very well, let's take that path.

The biggest murderer of boat people in Australia by this reasoning is Kevin Rudd. By a long shot. The greatest savior was John Howard. As I've written about on multiple occasions. Let's look at my favorite picture on the subject:



Care to see an updated version, where things are plotted in terms of flows and not levels, in order to make it even more plain? From La Wik:



Correlation doesn't equal causation and all that. But it certainly seems like something very stark changed when Kevin Rudd started parading his compassion for asylum seekers by greatly relaxing the conditions they were held under. If you have another theory, do feel free to describe it in the comments.

The entirely predictable result of this fiasco was the following: 46,000 asylum seekers trying to come to Australia, and over 1100 drowning along the way.

What's it going to be, you worthless candle-holding popinjays? How come these guys never get a mention? It's not like they just went missing in the middle of the ocean. They were drowning by the dozens in front of the TV cameras on Christmas Island. How much concern did that elicit then?

Is it your contention that people don't respond to incentives at all? Or that this was all unpredictable, like a lightning strike? Unfortunately for the latter theory, there were plenty of people, myself included, describing this process quite early on. The fact that you didn't predict it doesn't make it unpredictable.

Here's Australia's most worthless politician, Green's Senator Sarah Hanson-Young describing whether she'd accept any responsibility for the drowning deaths of 200 people when a boat sank off Java:

"Of course not. Tragedies happen, accidents happen."

Would the same logic be equally compelling to you if advanced now by the Abbott government?

You'll forgive me, Ms Young and other candle-light twerps, for being unmoved by your sudden and very narrowly circumscribed concern for the welfare of asylum seekers. I've been saying for several years that the thousands of drowning deaths were needless and horrible consequences of bad government policy. Where the hell were you? When the buck stopped with your guy, and not the other guy, did the deaths somehow bother you less?

Kevin Rudd scrapped the Pacific Solution around February 8th, 2008. Tony Abbott instituted Operation Sovereign Borders on the 18th of September 2013. That's approximately 2047 days in total that Labor Policy governed how asylum seekers were treated.

Since these clowns don't seem to be so good at maths, let me spell it out as plainly as I can: under Labor Policy, one asylum seeker was drowning on average roughly every two days.

By contrast, what's the situation now?

Scott Morrison says there have been no boats for 64 days, the longest stretch since August in 2008

Congratulations to Immigration Minister Scott Morrison! Thanks to your courageous decision to do what's right, not necessarily what feels good, 32-odd people are alive today who wouldn't have been if your policies hadn't been in place. One, very sadly, is dead.

If you don't think that tradeoff is worth making, then @#$% you and your fake compassion.

Better Late Than Never

Fancy that, another 200-odd people drowned off the cost of Indonesia while trying to reach Australia. *Yawn*. What's on TV?

And finally, at long last, a couple of the more intellectually honest among Australia's left are starting to admit the obvious truth: having more lenient policies towards asylum-seekers encourages more asylum seekers to journey to Australia in leaky boats, which leads to more deaths.

Tim Blair points out that lefty Australian academic Robert Manne has finally woken up and smelt the coffee:

For its part, the left has been unwilling to concede that the Pacific Solution succeeded in deterring the boats. Between 1999 and late 2001, 12,176 asylum seekers arrived by boat. In the years of the Pacific Solution - 2002 to 2008 - 449 arrived. Since its abandonment, 14,008 asylum seekers have reached Australian shores.

The left's unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious has been of great political significance. Following Kevin Rudd's election in 2007 a wise asylum seeker policy would have involved leaving the Pacific Solution intact but humanising policy by increasing the annual quota of refugees and ending mandatory detention. The internment camps on Nauru were virtually empty. The undeniable cruelty of the policy had reached its natural end.

No one on the left with an interest in asylum seeker policy - and I include myself - was far-sighted or independent or courageous enough to offer the incoming Rudd government such advice.

Well, I'm certainly not of the political left, but I've pointed this out on multiple occasions. Good to have you on board, Robert (no pun intended).

There is only one way to solve this problem. Let's take as given the number of asylum-seekers we're willing to accept. The problem is that the current system incentivises people to attempt risky crossings because once they reach Australia, their application has a vastly higher chance of success.

And that's what you have to end. The only way the boats, and the senseless deaths, will stop is if you actually disincentivise attempting the crossing. Here's the Shylock policy - absolutely no applications for asylum will be accepted from anyone making a ocean crossing and arriving in Australia illegally. Every such person will be summarily deported. Applications for asylum will only be accepted at Australian embassies in foreign countries.

And that is literally all you'd have to do. Visibly enforce that a few times, and you don't need to worry about the cruel detention centres that Robert Manne dislikes as a matter of compassion (and not unjustifiably).

But even past this point, there are two large objections to the whole enterprise.

The first is this - Indonesia is a pretty tolerant place. If you've made it that far, it's highly unlikely you're still at risk of any kind of political repression. So why should Australia accept you as a refugee on the basis that you were persecuted in Afghanistan, notwithstanding that you've already escaped such persecution?

And the second even less politically discussed point is made quite convincingly by Tim Blair

Survivors of the latest doomed voyage claim that everyone aboard each paid between $2500 and $5000. Individually, those amounts would easily cover air fares to Australia. Collective amounts – Saturday’s vessel carried around 250 passengers – would be sufficient to purchase several vessels of greater seaworthiness than that which sank.

Refugee advocates don’t like to discuss why these safer options are not explored. The reasons are to do with identity and culpability. Those arriving in Australia by air require passports, which makes easier the task of disproving the legitimacy of asylum claims. Those arriving from Indonesia on boats commonly carry no identification at all, allowing certain freedoms with their stories.:

In other words, it is quite reasonable to have a presumption that a lot of the people arriving by boat probably have bogus stories.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about their drowning deaths or them being locked up in detention. But for the people who really are economic migrants, there is a quite justified revulsion at rewarding their desire to bypass the normal (long) queues to get into Australia. And if the policy of detaining illegal economic migrants on Nauru has deterrent effects but is harsh on the illegal economic migrant themselves, I can't get too saddened by that.