If the latter, would it be okay to only accept Muslims who are not a part of that subset, or would that be bigotry as well?
Let’s walk this back a bit…then I’ll deal with the condescending poster asking me if I know what ‘normative’ means. The post I was responding to stated ’ Everyone has a right to be here. Border controls and immigration restrictions of any sort are a crime against humanity and a human rights violation’. This has nothing to do with me telling you who you can or can’t rent to or from (though where that is coming from I have no idea). Give me a historical example of how, before WWI or whatever, humans allowed unrestricted immigration and zero border controls, and that anyone ever felt that by having any sort of restriction or border that it was a crime against humanity and human rights violation. Feel free to draw from any historical example you like, but address THAT. I can’t think of any historic examples either modern or ancient that demonstrate zero borders and unrestricted immigration…not unless the native people’s ‘allowing’ said unrestricted immigration and open borders had literal guns to their heads. Even THEN, it was an agreement (at gun point), not a natural state where they just felt that no borders existed and everyone and anyone should be able to immigrate in with no restrictions.
[QUOTE=Beren Erchamion]
The current situation is not ipso facto just or correct.
[/QUOTE]
Same as the above to you. I don’t even think totally nomadic people’s had zero restrictions on immigration into their territories and no borders (though they probably had pretty vague borders or territories that they hunted and moved in). So, it’s not just the ‘current situation’ that doesn’t conform to your wants and wishes. Or, maybe it does and you can show me some historical examples of this in action.
Then you should have said you THINK this is how it SHOULD be. My question to you would be ‘do you understand how to actually make a normative claim correctly?’. I get that YOU think that it OUGHT to be this way, that there should be no borders and unrestricted immigration and that YOU feel that it SHOULD be a crime against humanity the way it is.
Yeah, I took anthropology in college too. 
As well as history. I even took a class on philosophy.
This is why Trump got in and why he’ll stay in for the next 4 years. He was absolutely correct when he said he could walk down 5th avenue and shoot someone and his supporters will still support him. They don’t care what comes out of his mouth and readily admit it’s all bullshit and then they just twist it to mean whatever they wish. :smack:
Shouldn’t you be much more concerned about the millions of (white) conservative and evangelical Americans who treat women as second-class citizens, like taking away their rights to medical treatment (via spreading lies and untrue facts); being obsessed with purity (up to purity balls); demonizing girls and women who get raped (up to pastors supposedly counseling afterwards telling the victim it would’ve been better to resist and get killed but stay pure than allow the rape to happen).
Do you want to send them elsewhere? (Not many places want to take them, I think).
As a civil rights activist, shouldn’t you be much more worried about all the (white) American who are islamophobic? Because that’s an irrational fear based on lies and untruths, that can easily be distorted to target any other group (Siks because they wear turbans, anybody who’s brown because they must be Arabs…)
By lying about Islam being the problem, you miss that the patriarchy/ autocratic system is the real problem - and that’s a big entrenched problem in white Christian macho US culture. Shouldn’t you fight against that?
How do you know their values? Are all western Countries christian? Are all christian countries, like catholic ireland and protestant netherlands, the same, or are there cultural differences? Because the same applies to “Islamic” countries. As long as you allow rich Saudi Arabian business men to invest heavily into your country, while also exporting Wahabism (a very extremist and fundamentalist form of Islam) it’s not useful to ban other countries.
You also send a terrible signal. 99% of Muslims don’t want to destroy the Western World. They want to live in peace. They wish the Western World would stop killing them with bombs or drones, or stop supporting dictatorships that oppress and torture them, or wish that IS would stop oppressing and killing them …
There are many streams in Islam, similar like protestant Christianty. Not all Christians are like Westborough baptists. Not all Muslims are IS. There are liberal Imams. There are female Imams. There are scholars on what Islam means for a modern society with a dozen opinions, and extremists talking about a golden age that never existed because they lie about history, just like christian fundamentalists lie about US history.
What the Islamist want is to rile the ordinary Muslims up to their war. The best way to do that is to show that the West hates all Muslims, not just the extremists. So a ban on being Muslim helps the extremist right along. The Muslims who are being oppressed by IS and fleeing the terror now have one place less to flee to.
What American values do you want to enforce? That women don’t get paid maternity leave or access to contraception or abortion or even cancer screenings (what the conservatives are fighting for)? That women should be silent when men speak (what girls are taught to attract boys)? That women need to be pure (what evangelicals push for)? That the only value women have is how pretty they are, a good reward for the hero (what Hollywood shows)?
If you want to lead with good example, stop killing people in other countries by acting in short term self-interest, directly by bombing them, indirectly by supporting dictatorships, putting trade restrictions and similar in place.
Because people don’t leave their home countries if their life there isn’t terrible, so if you help making their life there better, less will come.
You do know that statistics show that most terrorist attacs on US soil were carried out by young white men of Christian background? That the pushback against women’s rights is from white, conservate politicans? So should all Christians confirm that they aren’t of the Fred Phelps gay-bashing, women-hating variety?
But Saudi Arabia is exempt from the ban and Trump has lots of goods friends there (like Bush).
Budget Player Cadet, this is a really good question, and I’m glad you’re asking it. I’ve been on both sides of this issue over the last year or two, so I can see both sides. If I was in your place this conversation might make me more sympathetic to a Muslim ban, since so many of the pro-immigration arguments made here have been really terrible. European countries are debating the same issue right now, four countries have already indicated they don’t want any Muslim immigration, and in general I think that approach makes a lot of sense for Europe. I think European countries would be well advised to put much tougher restrictions on future immigration, and in some cases I think they would be well advised to try to encourage existing ethnic minorities to leave through financial inducements. (I don’t mean just Muslims here). I want a world in which societies and peoples are able to maintain distinct ethnic, religious, and cultural identities, and that means in practice a world in which most societies are mostly closed to mass immigration. It took Europe a long time and a lot of suffering and bloodshed, to establish relatively cohesive and homogeneous ethnic nation-states (Hungary for Hungarians, Slovakia for Slovaks, Greece for Greeks and so forth). I think it was worth it, and I’m saddened that that is now going to be imperiled. A globalized world in which ethnic differences have faded away into some formless mush is like my nightmare.
I don’t think such a policy is well advised <I>for the United States</I> for a variety of reasons. Here’s the most important reason: Muslims, unless they all convert en masse (and short of Jesus returning, I don’t see that happening) are going to need to live somewhere. For the medium term future, a lot of Muslim societies are going to be increasingly uninhabitable due to things like climate change, crop failures and the like. (Much of eastern Africa, which includes quite large Muslim populations, is experiencing severe hunger problems right now, and the Syrian civil war was apparently precipitated by a climate change induced drought). My first preference would be lots of foreign aid so that Africans and Asians can live better lives in their home countries, or failing that, resettlement of refugees in more culturally compatible countries, but that isn’t always going to be possible. If the choice is for Muslims to immigrate to the United States or to Europe or Latin America, I’m always going to say that the United States is the best option. We are large enough, ethnically and culturally diverse enough, and pluralism is written deeply enough into our national creed that we’re much better suited to assimilate ethnic and religious minorities than a country like Poland or even a country like England or Denmark is. And unlike most European countries, we don’t have a distinct ethnic and religio-cultural identity that mass immigration might jeopardize. A Poland that was 50% Pakistani Muslim would no longer be Polish; an America that was 50% Pakistani Muslim might be a better or worse America than the one we live in right now, but it would still be in some sense discernibly American.
I said just now that I believe in general in a world of distinct ethnic and cultural groups living within generally failry homogeneous societies with mostly closed borders, and I do. America has a unusual role in the world though, and has had for a very long time. Among other things, America’s openness to foreign immigration has served as a kind of safety valve for other societies to assuage their own ethnic tensions, because ethnic minorities from those other societies (e.g. Chinese from Vietnam, Mandaeans from Iraq, Jews from the former Soviet Union) were often able to emigrate to America. I think America could play an equally important role today in terms of taking pressure off European societies by welcoming Muslim immigrants (as well as other minority groups that haven’t assimilated well into European society, like the Roma in eastern Europe).
I don’t believe that ‘diversity is our strength’ in principle, and I think mass immigration has a lot of costs as well as some benefits. In the long term I’m hoping to leave America myself, because I don’t particularly like or feel invested in the American national creed (about liberty, beacon of democracy, etc.). That being said, I think America is better set up to minimize those costs than most other societys though, and it would probably be a good thing for the world if Muslim immigrants move here rather than to Europe.
Regarding assumption 1, do you have any evidence? Most people base their immigration decisions on economic considerations, not on culture or principles. Lots of Americans move to Saudi Arabia or Qatar to work, do you think they do so because they admire Wahabi political morality?
Some immigrants, in some countries, assimilate well. Other immigrant groups in other countries, not at all. Pakistanis in the UK, famously, have not assimilated well at all.
Do you have any evidence of this?
My assumption would be the opposite: the more the broader society is suspicious of immigrant communities, the quicker immigrants would want to shed their ethnic identity and assimilate into the broader society.
Muslims in the former Soviet Union are probably the most secularized in the world today, and I don’t think anyone would describe Russia either in its Czarist, Soviet or present day iterations as an especially tolerant place. (The Soviet Union was officially multicultural of course, but you don’t change people’s basic culture in a couple generations).
They didn’t. Jared Diamond in his recent book The Day Before Yesterday argues that H/G and primitive horticulturalist peoples were intensely suspicious of outsiders and protective of their territory.
This is part of why I don’t believe in the liberal theory of human rights. In certain cases, the only sensible way to reason about people is by treating them as exemplars of a group, not individuals. Immigration is a good example: you’re trying to decide what your society will look like in, say, 100 years if you welcome in millions of people from a particular group. You can’t judge them as individuals because those future people don’t exist yet. The most you can do is extrapolate from the general characteristics of the group.
Here’s a non-Muslim example. The World Values Survey indicates that currently, Scandinavian countries and East Slavic countries are among the most culturally different from each other of any in the world, at least on the “survival vs. self expression” axis.
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world - Wikipedia
If five million people from Sweden were to move to Belarus over the course of a century, how would Belarus look a hundred years from now? You can’t interbiew those future people to determine their cultural attitudes: the most you can do is to look at the typical view of Swedes today. And doing so would tell you that mass Swedish migration to an East Slavic country would change it very drastically (for better or worse, depending on whether you like the values oif Swedish society or the values of Belarussian society more).
Muslims in the US vs Muslims in Europe.
“Muslims in Europe” and “Muslims in the US” are not even close to being two random samples of Muslims.
But just out of curiosity, which of those regions do you think are more welcoming to Muslims or more tolerant of Muslims already there? You might think it’s obvious, but I don’t think it is.
How many immigrants do you imagine we’re talking about? The United States is a big country. If the entire population of Syria immigrated to America (an idea far beyond what anyone has suggested) they would make up less than five percent of the country’s population. Whose culture do you think would get assimilated?
Yes. Well, I agree, as I think I mentioned in my comment a few posts up, “We are large enough, ethnically and culturally diverse enough, and pluralism is written deeply enough into our national creed…”
I don’t think that this country, at this moment in time, faced with the particular immigration wave that we are, should institute a ban on Muslims or members of any other ethnic or religious groups. This is not because I object to racially, ethnically or religiously discriminatory immigration policy in general, it’s because I think in this case, as you point out, the best thing would be for the US to remain open to Muslim immigrants (and other groups). I was making a more general argument as to why I disagree with UDS about immigration policy in particular and about (small-L) liberal theory of human rights in general
Europe isn’t a thing. There are lots of different European countries which vary extremely in terms of their degree of ethnocentrism vs. tolerance, their Muslim populations and how many problems they have with Muslim minorities.
Bosnian Muslims in central and Eastern Europe are very secularized / assimilated. Somali Muslims in Finland and Pakistani Muslims in Britain are, uh, not. This is in spite of the fact that no one would argue that Austria or the Czech Republic are more tolerant / multicultural places than Scandinavia or Britain.
In any case, I’m going to need more than an n=1 to be convinced. US Muslims represent an entirely different social cross section than, e.g., British Pakistanis. US Muslims are typically highly educated professionals: a large chunk of the British Pakistani population were displaced peasants from southern Kashmir brought over in the 1950s and 1960s when the UK had a liberal immigration policy wrt the commonwealth, and when mill owners up north wanted cheap labour.
And a lot of the men are perfectly happy knowing that their daughters will grow up much more free in their new country than they would have in the old one, the way the old one is going. Not every woman is a feminist, and not every man from a male-chauvinistic society is a male chauvinist.
We can compare these groups directly – are Somali Muslims more welcomed, and more assimilated, in Minnesota or Finland? How about Arab Muslims in Michigan or Washington DC vs the UK? I think in most cases in which we’d try this comparison, we’d find the US answer is both more welcomed and more assimilated.
The least they’ll be allowed to, though, specially if there is something that instantly marks them as different from the idea that particular society has of what “our people” look like.
As Pierre Desproges would say, “One should never despair of imbeciles. They can be turned into soldiers with very little effort.”