[Epistemic Effort: I thought of this argument and was so pleased by my own cleverness that I decided to post it.]
A lot of people are worried about immigration because they’re worried that immigration will dilute their culture: instead of being a place full of People Like Them, it is a place full of funny people with funny food and alien values. I actually do think this is a legitimate cost to immigration, but I don’t think that all immigration has this quality.
Every US state has open borders with every other US state. It’s true that the US state example isn’t precisely the same as fifty countries which happen to have open borders with each other, but all the differences function to make US states more similar to each other: for instance, we have a shared federal government that exercises a significant amount of control over our lives. And yet immigration has not served to make Alabama the same as New York.
In fact, immigration has probably made Alabama more different from New York! Queer liberals from all around the United States tend to move to New York City; I assume that conservative Christians from all around the United States tend to move to Alabama. Liberals are so stubborn about moving to big cities in blue states that it was a pretty major factor in this election: if liberals all stayed where we were born, Hillary might have won. I myself come from Florida (purple state), my husband comes from Wisconsin (purple state), and we both currently live in California (blue).
It’s pretty obvious why this is the case. I have absolutely no interest in living in a small town in Alabama. People might look at me funny for not going to church, I might get harassed in the bathroom, and it’s impossible to get socialist vegan pizza. Conversely, a lot of Alabamians don’t want to move to the wretched hive of degeneracy and decadence that is San Francisco. Given that basically no Californians want to move to Alabama, the only thing that closed borders between Alabama and California would do is keep vegans born in Alabama from fleeing, and therefore increase Alabama’s chance of having to put up with a socialist vegan pizza place.
You can recruit people to your culture in two ways: by socializing children born into your culture (vertical transmission) or by recruiting adults who have an affinity to your culture (horizontal transmission). Immigration has little effect on successfully socialized children, who are presumably going to stay part of your culture. But without immigration you’d have to put up with the unsuccessfully socialized children and you can’t engage in horizontal transmission at all.
Of course, this argument doesn’t work for all immigration. As far as I’m aware, there’s only one country that the US has de facto open borders with: Cuba. As the Miami Herald said in its Castro obituary, the US’s de facto open border with Cuba “transform[ed] [South Florida] from the southernmost tip of the United States to the northernmost point of Latin America.” Today, more than three times as many Miami residents speak Spanish at home than English. This is a pretty major cultural shift!
I think what’s going on here is that Cubans are not immigrating to the US because they feel like the US is a better cultural fit for them than Cuba is; they are immigrating to the US because Cuba is a horrible country. While early Cuban refugees might not have been enthusiastic about being surrounded by gringos who can’t speak Spanish, it was definitely a better option than being executed for being a member of the opposition. They are immigrating to a place where they had poor cultural fit because their other options were worse. (And transforming it to a place where they have good cultural fit, natch.)
Of course, this argument does not do a lot for pro-immigration advocates; most of us tend to care most about immigration from horrible countries, because the benefit of immigrating from a horrible country to a non-horrible country is much larger than the benefit of immigrating from a non-horrible country to a non-horrible country with better cultural fit.
However, the economic benefits of immigration still apply to non-horrible-country/non-horrible-country immigration. Increased immigration between non-horrible countries is likely to increase the cultural diversity between those respective countries and the cultural similarity within them. And since we’re only talking about immigration from non-horrible countries, we don’t have to worry as much about assimilation; the immigrants will already have non-kleptocratic liberal democratic norms.
Therefore, I propose that people who are against immigration should advocate for a policy of open borders for all citizens of Anglosphere countries. (Since the US is one of the more conservative Anglosphere countries, this has a further benefit for the average anti-immigration American Republican; the liberals would finally make good on their threat to move to Canada.) If all goes well, we can expand to include other developed countries, such as Japan and Germany.
Thing of Things 
I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but think that Alabama and California are not as different as you believe — which undercuts the strength of the effect you identify.
I say this as someone who grew up in a small suburban town in Alabama, attended undergrad in California and currently lives in NYC: states really aren’t that different. In fact, you can get quite good vegan pizza in Alabama. For one example that I like: http://mellowmushroom.com/sites/default/files/linkable/vegan%20menu%202014.pdf.
More generally, check out this Daily Show clip of Alabama/Mississippi http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/the-daily-show-alabama-mississippi-gay-video_n_4177839.html
Of course, there would be more differences if you look at rural communities in Alabama versus NY/SF. But, as anyone who’s spent any time in rural upstate New York would tell you, the same urban/rural divide in true within states as well. (I haven’t been to rural areas in extreme NorCal, but I’ve heard the same effect holds there as well).
All in all, I’m not confident that interstate mobility aspect is nearly as strong as you give it credit for. If it were, states would be even more different than they are. Sure, *some* people move for a better cultural fit, but most inter-state movement (like most international movement) is probably driven by work or educational opportunities. I know mine has been.
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Fine, I fixed it, are you happy now? 😛
(If it turns out that Alabama also has a socialist vegan pizza place I will be very surprised)
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Haha, fair enough. As far as I know, there are no socialist vegan pizza places.
Still, though, I don’t know anyone who moved to Alabama for a better cultural fit, and almost no one who moved to New York for cultural fit. Conversely, I know a ton of people who moved in either direction for a better job (or because for school).
(I know that anecdata isn’t that helpful, but I’m not sure where to get better data. Also, my observations might be biased because I work in an industry that is heavily concentrated in NY, which causes me to know a ton of people who moved here for work despite being neutral/negative on the culture.)
I also strongly believe that the reason people don’t tend to move across state lines for cultural reasons is because states aren’t that different culturally. If you live in Alabama and want to live in a very liberal area, you don’t need to move to NY, you can move to Five Points in Birmingham (which is much cheaper to get to and doesn’t require being a plane ride away from your family and friends). Similarly, if you live in NY and want to live in a very conservative culture, you can move to rural upstate New York (or maybe Staten Island?)
*Politics* is very different at the state level, because there’s a big difference between being part of the 60% of people with certain views versus being in the 30% with those views. But in terms of neighborhood feel/actual on-the-ground culture? I think Alabama and California have more in common than you might realize.
But, if you disagree, come visit! 🙂
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There are definitely socialist vegan places (with pizza!) in Ft. Worth, TX. The Spiral Diner is (or at least was, haven’t been there in years) excellent.
There are militant lesbian cafes (plural) in Oklahoma City. They have no men’s bathrooms. Just womyn’s and unisex. Nobody seems to be suing them or picketing them. Oklahomans that I’ve met have been as polite as Canadians.
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okay but does it serve exactly one kind of pizza because the kind of pizza you should eat is centrally planned, comrade
because I am not accepting anything other than the best here
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No, there were options. Heavy on the black beans, spelt and quinoa.
It was a worker-owned and operated collective however. At least they claimed to be, I never took a look at the title to the property the place stood on, though given TX’s lax zoning laws…
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As far as moving for education, I would be surprised if cultural fit didn’t play a role. People chose where they apply to and where they go for a variety of reasons. Some people are more prone to apply to go to Auburn and others to Southern California. The perceived culture of these places certainly plays a role in some people’s decisions on where to pursue education especially interstate and international.
This said, I have no idea how big this effect is. I can justify either big or small in my mind. I chose where I (first) went to college based on the quality and style of the marching band so I suppose that is a cultural consideration although a narrow one. I wonder how one would get statistics to measure the size of this effect…
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(1) Your appreciation of other cultures does not appear to extend to the strange and wondrous land of Alabama within your own nation; it appears that there are indeed vegan restaurants in Alabama so it may indeed be possible for a native-born Alabaman to get a vegan pizza
(2) Your horizontal transmission only works for the ‘nice’ migrants, the ones who will assimilate to the dominant culture in ways you find preferable (e.g. they won’t hassle you in bathrooms or won’t make a fuss about bathrooms at all). You’re not particularly interested in migrants/immigrants, be they from Alabama or Azerbaijan, who don’t get with the blue state/city programme.
Isn’t this what is called colonialism and all the other nasty “white supremacist” attitudes I’m seeing decried on Tumblr and elsewhere – ‘learn English or go home’ etc., only in this instance it’s ‘learn English and enthusiasm about LGBT rights or go home – or better yet, don’t bother coming here in the first place’
“Yes, foreign person, I am so glad to have you come here to cook your exotic foreign cuisine for me to enjoy and to patronise your cultural heritage, just as long as you prune off the parts of that cultural heritage that don’t fit with my cultural preferences, always remembering that after all, mine is the dominant culture here”.
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I am not saying anything about rural Alabama, except that I don’t like it. Indeed, I classified it in the “non-horrible countries” category (and I will stand by that classification). I like San Francisco. Therefore, it is in my interest that there continue to be places like San Francisco, which I like. I understand that rural Alabamians also like Alabama, and I support their ability to continue to have places like Alabama, which they like. Is your belief that I am supposed to like every place on the planet equally? I am sorry I have preferences.
I do believe that the balance of history has shown that Enlightenment liberalism works better than other belief systems, and that therefore it is important to teach the norms of Enlightenment liberalism to all new residents, whether born or immigrated. Part of the benefit of Enlightenment liberalism is that it allows the peaceful coexistence of people who have wildly different beliefs and preferences. It’s true that I’m judging Enlightenment liberalism based on my own Enlightenment liberal values, but… so? I’m not a moral relativist. Of course I’m prioritizing my own values, they’re mine. What’s the other option, paperclip maximization?
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I was a bit crotchety there, but my point was that there are also concerns about cultural dilution on the “open borders! everyone come in!” side, except that they are not overtly stated.
Immigrants who come in and acclimatise to be cheering on Pride parades and happy with secular liberal Western values, no problem-o. Immigrants who might picket to have that bar on your street closed down because alcohol is sinful and socially bad, will either have to get with the secular liberal programme and lose their repressive, regressive values or else. There is just as much pressure on the liberal side for immigrants to integrate and take on the dominant culture’s values as on the conservative side, but the liberals like to paint the conservatives as the small-minded yahoos who can’t appreciate delicious spicy food and quaint costumes and want everyone to eat blandly and wear baseball caps with the American flag on them.
And I do think that if people can’t appreciate the differences within their own nation, how will they appreciate the differences from a completely outside culture? If someone would never dream of making remarks about “Ugh, those Balibelistani immigrants, they wouldn’t know decent sushi if they fell over it” but feels perfectly free to characterise the Mid-Upper-South-East-Peninsula of their own country as yee-hawing gun-totin’ cousin-marryin’ whitebread munchers, where’s the actual openness to difference and attempts to understand the other?
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There’s a campaign by a bunch of people to introduce open borders between Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK on the basis of their common language, cultural heritage, and head of state.
Being a citizen of one of those, it sounds like a nice idea to me. It can be tricky to defend from charges of racism, though. Common language seems like a good justification (but why then exclude people from other countries who made the effort to learn English to a fluent level?), and “cultural compatibility” is unfortunately such a nebulous kind of criterion to use people try to argue it’s ‘not even a thing’. I suppose if no other nations were willing to join you could argue that it’s justifiable as a reciprocal thing. Lots of large immigration source countries will never allow open borders to *their* countries, which seems like a fair reason to exclude them.
I’d like to see it as a first step, but it *is* discriminatory. The approach used by NZ, Australia, and Canada right now seems like a nice compromise. It is a points-based system where borders are strictly enforced (admittedly easier when your country is made up of islands or an entire continent) and you get points for speaking English well and having a good education.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2016/06/24/brexit-boosts-canzuk-replacement-european-union-column/86347818/
https://www.change.org/p/parliament-of-the-united-kingdom-parliament-of-australia-parliament-of-canada-parliament-of-new-zealand-advocate-and-introduce-legislation-promoting-the-free-movement-of-citizens-between-the-uk-canada-australia-and-new-zealand
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“Being a citizen of one of those, it sounds like a nice idea to me. It can be tricky to defend from charges of racism, though.”
These are the same charges of racism that apply to countries that have lex sanguinis laws for who can be a citizenship – the majority of countries and almost none of those countries seem to be too fussed about it.
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1. A fairly common complaint from (relatively) low tax/regulatory burden states (CO, NH, AZ) is that people fleeing the economic burdens of high burden states (MA, CA) move there and then want to put in place those policies that made them have to leave their original state in the first place.
2. I believe that pretty much people are the same everywhere. However, I have noticed that residents of certain states (CA, NY, TX) seem to believe that they are better in some ways than other people. The problem with believing this is that for example, a Californian thinks that they are more enlightened, less racist,more educated etc. than the rest of the country, but they also witness the large number of openly racists and stupid people that exist in CA. They therefore believe that other places must be absolutely FULL of these awful people. Which is not actually the case in my experience.
3. One very odd difference I have noticed wrt different states: I moved to TX for work in the first Bush administration. People in TX literally believed that the Texas was a better place than everyone else, and were not at all surprised that I was moving there. They were proud of their state and were as welcoming to me as a cult to a new recruit. After eighteen years there, my work took me to NY. The people there believed that NY was better than anywhere else… and were jealous of outsiders enjoying it. They treated me as an invading foreigner. I was accused of taking away jobs from “real” New Yorkers. The neighborhood where my company was housing us was barricaded off with the town council saying we were not allowed to drive on their streets (The state police removed the barricade). I heard n—– uttered (as an insult) more times in my first two months there than in the nearly two decades in TX.
Maybe it has to do with perceived scarcity? TX is very big, with lots of space, lots of oil, lots of cattle and sees itself as young and growing. NY might think of itself as full, confined, with barely enough resources to support it’s own. SF has this attitude, no?
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“The problem with believing this is that for example, a Californian thinks that they are more enlightened, less racist,more educated etc. than the rest of the country, but they also witness the large number of openly racists and stupid people that exist in CA. ”
I am a Californian and grew up with that sense of superiority you refer to, and it had nothing with thinking we were more enlightened. It had to do with thinking California was the most blest place in the world to live – the food available, the physical beauty of the state and the mild climate, The presence of large and culturally influential Asian communities was a factor too.
The liberalism you allude to came out of the post-war migration out of the Midwest and northern Plains states, primarily Scandinavian and German ancestry. These states were educated and liberal in those days (before all these people left?) Some part of it was also an artifact of the political struggles in the state during the Progressive era. California had fierce nativist activism in the 19th century when the population of the state was 10% Chinese and that population was coming form a pool that was bigger and closer than the rest of the United States, and then general distrust and fear of Asians (as clever, debauched, etc.) in the early 20th century.
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The biggest problem. I see is not with immigration, as most legal immigrants will generally assimilate as they wanted to be here. But not so much with refugees fleeing their native lands who want to remain fully their culture but just be safe, and of course illegals who I think shouldn’t be here or in any country willy nilly at all. Example. Most Somalians came from their war torn native. Fine. But now I know many many of them go back for vacation and to see relatives. So apparently it’s not unsafe anymore because they go back for months at a time. So in principle. I could agree with refugee status but when it’s no longer an issue, you go back and try to rebuild your own country in the aftermath. But that ain’t gonna happen. I believe in an orderly immigration policy. I believe immigrants should assimilate into the dominant culture. They asked to be here. I do not believe they have any right to impose their culture on me. But I’m happy to observe and incorporate customs that are individualistic and personal in nature as they are practiced by the people themselves if it seems reasonable. That does not make me a hater. Nor a practioner of white privileges. Or of white supremacists at all. This is my home too, that you’ve been invited into. As a guest. Neither of us should be either rude guests or hosts.
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In a shocking turn of events, this is how refugee status already works. If you come to the US, apply for a refugee status, get it, and then ever travel back home, your status gets automatically revoked, and also in practice getting any US visa in future, even a tourist visa, will be next to impossible, thanks to the presumption of immigrant intent, which must be overcome by anyone applying for a non-immigrant visa.
(In an even more shocking turn of events to all the people who say that we should the displacement of American workers by immigrant workers, as well as hiring immigrant workers for a wage lower than an American worker would get – it is already illegal)
If someone comes as a refugee, stays, then visits their home country, and that doesn’t result in them being permanently kicked out of the US, it means that by that time they have already received US citizenship. This process is sufficiently long and tedious that you can be darn sure that anyone who gets through it very much considers America their home.
Oh, no one should be rude to guests? Then maybe a US visa shouldn’t be one the hardest in the world to obtain. Maybe a US visa application process shouldn’t involve different standards for men and women, because WTF is this shit? Maybe scientists flying to international conferences in the US shouldn’t miss them because they’re being put through months-long security clearance for no reason other than being STEM majors from wrong countries. Maybe – just maybe – the least people can do to respect their “guests” is to learn how they are actually being treated, instead of having 99% of the conversation on immigration policy being dominated by people who clearly have no fucking clue about the ways of actually getting into the US, and therefore keep saying utter nonsense.
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The people I know who are doing this are not citizens. They are on refugee status and have green cards. Newsflash. The government hasn’t been enforcing this for years.
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I’m not sure if it will hold to the same degree on the international level as it does within the US.
First, while members of severely marginalized groups can be immigrating while seeking friendlier politics, I think most people do so for economic reasons (see: Hispanic people immigrating to the US in the pursuit of better jobs, despite having to be an ethnic minority and face racism within the US, which was not the case in their home countries; also, the same pattern for people from Central Asia moving to Russia). Within the US, however, this is confounded that politics, social class, professions, and job opportunities are correlated to an obscene degree (probably just like within any other given country – definitely true for Russia, and even more so in Ukraine, where it’s also correlated with one’s preferred language). Farmers from Alabama might have been glad to move to San Francisco and increase their income fivefold, but San Francisco has little to no job opportunities in the are where they’re proficient. And if some of them do decide to change everything about their life, somehow get enough money to go to college and get a CS degree – well, odds are that by the time they will be done, they’ll have accumulated a lot of liberal values, because American colleges tend to be way more liberal than the general population. There exist programmers with dudebro culture (yes, it sounds unbelievable within this filter bubble, but I’ve literally seen Soylent-drinking programmers talking about how they like skinny chicks, and how picking them up in bars is good, because there’s less risk to encounter minors), but finding the ones against same-sex marriage seems trickier (San Francisco once famously found one, and look what happened).
But when we consider the international context, there’s another way to get the education necessary to get a job in San Francisco – get it in Russia. Russian colleges decidedly do not have the property of being more liberal than the general population (literally one has this reputation, and it considers it to be negative enough to put “hey, it’s a myth that we’re all liberals – we have a wide variety of politics here!” in their ads), and even if they were, that still would have been a pretty low standards – most “liberal” politicians from Russia (i.e. ones opposing authoritarianism and annexations, and supporting LGBT rights) tend to be openly and blatantly Islamophobic, and I couldn’t imagine them even giving the speech Bush gave about “we don’t hate Muslims, they’re our citizens, and we like them” before introducing his Muslim registry. But most colleges aren’t liberal even in that sense. One of the Russia’s most famous experts in Haskell is also a co-founder and one of the most prominent contributors of Russian Conservapedia, which is as terrible as one can imagine. So yeah, not liberal at all. But moving from any non-Moscow Russian city to San Francisco would increase the income of a software developer tenfold. And in fact more than half of the Russian middle class, despite not liking the “degeneracy” of Muslims, gays, and feminists, is considering immigration to EU and US, because the economic opportunities are so much better. It was my understanding that the situation is somewhat similar in China and India, and from what I’ve heard about it, India is even more homophobic and misogynous than Russia (homosexuality per se is not (yet) illegal in Russia, and people don’t tend to think that women on their periods shouldn’t enter the kitchen because they’re impure and would spoil the food) – yet both prepare a lot of qualified engineers, and the gain in income they could get by moving to the US is even more dramatic.
Second, on the international level, political opinions may not correlate to the same degree they do within any given country. One example I mentioned above is Islamophobia. Russia tends to be more antisemitic than the US, so Jewish people can be motivated to move, following the gradient of more liberalism and less antisemitism. But I’ve seen many of them posting at the same time articles about how gentiles are unacceptably unaware of the early signs of ethnic prosecution AND the Breirtbart-style articles about how Syrian refugees are scary barbarians, and EU countries should build more border walls to stop them. So it seems quite feasible that liberal politics would attract people who might be sharing some of them, but really against others.
Now, despite all that, I still support mass immigration. First and foremost, it would be legendarily shitty to tell people from Alabama “you can’t move to San Francisco because people from your state are disproportionately conservative,” and that applies to people from other countries as well. Also, people change, and the best way to change one’s beliefs is to have friends who share them, and the best way to stop hating minorities is to actually interact with them. So I think that people would change more than the culture around them, and even if the culture changes a little bit, it’s still worth it, given how much it can improve people’s lives. And also I support part to citizenship to all undocumented immigrants, because they’re already here, and to the extent that they can, they’re already changing the culture, and it won’t change more just because people would stop treating them terribly.
But I do think that the dynamics will be very different from those of intra-US moving.
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Yeah, I think the BRIC countries are approximately the point where this argument starts failing. It gets you open borders in the Anglosphere, Western Europe, and Japan, but not in any of the countries where migration causes a significant improvement in the average person’s quality of life.
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But the question isn’t whether migration causes a significant improvement in the average *person’s* quality of life — it’s whether it causes a significant improvement in the average immigrant’s quality of life. And, for a lot of people, economic opportunities (or anticipated economic opportunities) will be much higher in a new place — even if *average* economic opportunities aren’t any higher. As I said above, I know several people who moved to Alabama for jobs, and none of them were coming from poorer states (which is basically just Mississippi, anyway). But even though average employment prospects might be better in New York or wherever, they were moving to Alabama because their individual employment options were better there.
And I think you’d see the same thing internationally — people who might not like the culture, but who think they will have a better life (materially speaking) if they move. Moving, especially across international boarders, is a really big decision, and I doubt many people will move for purely cultural reasons. At the very least, I think it likely that the number of people moving for cultural reasons will be dwarfed by the number moving for personal economic reasons who barely consider culture at all.
I also want to respectfully suggest that you are on the far edge of the bell curve when it comes to how important culture and sub-culture are to you. I fully believe that you would be willing to relocate away from your family of origin for a better cultural fit. However, I wonder if there’s a bit of typical-mind fallacy at play and you are overestimating how many people would also be willing to do so.
My apologies if I’m wrong about that, however. Thanks for all the wonderful posts!
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1. R E F U G E E S T A T U S F O R A F R I K A N E R S
(this is something of a meme in certain circles)
2. I am currently trying to practice this myself–looking for jobs in Utah, Arizona, and Texas for this very reason. I endorse assortative migration and think we all ought to do more of it.
3. Everyone from states bordering California hates Californian migrants because their migration isn’t assortative enough, as was mentioned a couple of times upthread, and though I have not experienced it firsthand I am told that New Hampshirites pretty much feel this way about Massachussetts transplants.
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We’ve done that experiment in the EU, and I’d say the effects on culture are small enough that I can’t see or “feel” them either way.
OTOH, there is probably more economic inequality between EU members than between US states, so that might balance migration with/against cultural gradients.
On the gripping hand, there is very little evidence that rich countries are harmed by an influx of poor people. Rather, it’s mostly rich (or at least educated) people from poor countries that emigrate. Don’t quote me on this, but I vaguely remember that 3/4 of the Romanians moving to Germany have university degrees – which is definitely more than you can say for German natives.
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Living in the same country will get you a long way. Look at EU. Most countries in EU have full open borders with each other (basically same as US states in that regard), the one that don’t have something very close to it (some restrictions on employment that I think have now all disappeared but were initially put on post-2004 new members, and of course border controls between UK/Ireland and the Schengen area).
Yet you don’t constantly see people moving at the same rate that you do in the US. Even among same-language countries: it would be considered a much more significant decision for a French person to move from Paris to Bruxelles than from Paris to Lyon. I don’t think in the US people would look very differently at someone moving from San Francisco to Seattle compared to San Francisco to Los Angeles (or maybe they would?).
And the thing is, you definitely have people moving even within relatively small countries in Europe to be in communities they like better, to the point that some cities get a reputation for being full of left-wing liberal hipsters, and other areas get a reputation for being full of old racist conservatives. This is also reflected in voting patterns and local politics. But even if some countries in Europe get comparable reputations, you can hardly explain it by migration patterns. Maybe you can for England’s libertarian bent with the attraction of the City of London, but in that case people move primarily because they’re employed by big banks, not because they want to change their community. But I don’t really find evidence of less-nationalist Austrians moving in significant numbers to Germany, or less-racist French moving to Belgium, and so on.
So until you can explain this, I’m going to say that your expectations to see a similar worldwide result with “just” open borders within the Anglosphere is probably unfounded.
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I live close to a state border in the US. Someone moving 15 (24 km) miles to the other state would be less a significant move then someone moving 150 (241 km) to a different part of the same state.
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I guess at this level it kinds of breaks down, because everywhere with mostly open borders, border towns will have people living in a country and working in another one, and moving across the border would not be such a big difference. Also I deliberately used distances of the same order of magnitude because 24km makes it a lot easier to keep the same social circle than 240km do.
But thanks for providing a data point, even if it is relatively weak evidence of my position. 🙂
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Perhaps a question then: what would be more significant, somebody moving from Calais to Bruges or from Calais to Bourges? Also someone who lives in the Bay area could comment on the difference between someone moving from there to Seattle or Los Angeles. From my perspective, 240 km (still within the US from me) would be the same no mater the direction.
I’ve maintained for quite a while that there are only two distances that mater: close enough and too far. Now, which one it is depends on the question. Someone can be too far to make arraignments on the spur of the moment for a casual dinner or something while being close enough to visit if they are in the hospital. I imagine international borders, even if open, might make a difference in some situations while interstate (within the USA) would not. Some examples that come to mind are extradition (US states must extradite someone who has a felony charge in another state but not a misdemeanor), power of attorney… actually these are the only two things I can come up with and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a general extradition agreement within the EU (my guess is that countries have some leeway that US states do not have) and similar for the power of attorney. hmm…
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Does anyone actually move to Alabama for non-employment reasons? Are there actually people who are like “I grew up in the city, but I’ve always dreamed of moving to Alabama, because I want to be around other white conservative Christians!” It’s always seemed to me like people in small rural towns are there because they were born there, and people move to large suburbs/cities in red states (Scottsdale, Arizona?) because businesses move in and start hiring people.
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What definition of ‘Anglosphere’ are you using? The entire Anglosphere, or just the developed countries in it? As someone from a country that has frequent “Anglosphere culture/friendship” events but also sends a lot of economic migrants to the US, I can assure you that accepting everyone from the Anglosphere who shows up would lead to less immigration from gun-loving Brits than from job-wanting Jamaicans.
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I think you’re right, but I also I think it’s plausible that kind of open-borders Anglosphere would lead to more immigrants to the US from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (combined population 110m+) than it would from Jamaica (population 2.5 m). And the only other countries where most people speak English as a first language are tiny islands.
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What about India?
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There are a lot of countries where English is an official language, and the majority speak it, but not as a first language, like Singapore, Israel, and most of the Nordic countries. Then there’s countries where English is an official language but only a minority of people speak it, even as a second language. India definitely fits into that category.
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Oops. correction: English isn’t an official language in Israel or the Nordic countries. It definitely is in Singapore, though.
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As a rebuttal to the idea that people leave their home states when the cultural values of those states don’t match their values, I would like to present this graphic:
….which says that 35% of LGBT Americans live in the South, versus 17% on the West Coast and 19% in the Northeast. It’s consistent with something I read fairly recently but can’t source because I don’t remember what book it was in, but the argument was the the LGBT population is fairly evenly distributed across the country, and there are just as many queer people per capita in Georgia as in Massachusetts. Obviously queer people don’t all fall in the same place on the political spectrum, but in general it works as a measure of how willing people are to move because of oppressive legal structures and social values, I think. (Perhaps this would have been easier to measure prior to June 2015, since marriage equality was an easily measurable social issue with considerable variation between states.)
I would be very interested to see this broken down into the rural/urban split, though. I live in a very blue state (Oregon) which in practice is only really blue in urban centers, and if you drive half an hour out of Portland you enter confederate-flag-land. I think this is fairly consistent across the US. You don’t need to go far to move to places consistent with your values. I know that I personally grew up in Rural Conservlandia and moved to Portland because I felt much more comfortable in a queer-accepting place, and it aligned with my other values too, while still feeling like part of the same regional culture. I would be much less interested in relocating to urban areas in California (too fancy) or the Northeast (too fancy), which share my political values but not my culture.
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