Immigration, the White Stripes, and really bad arguments
February 16, 2008Nothing engenders worse arguments than politics. Even religious debate looks like a shinning beacon of rationality in comparison. And here, today, free of charge, I’m going to demonstrate the poverty of one of those arguments.
The argument I want to look at is best captured by Jack White in the Grammy winning song, Icky Thump. The third verse begins with Jack asking a question that some professional politicians have been asking as well:
White Americans, what
Nothing better to do?
Why don’t you kick yourself out
You’re an immigrant too?
This is a reductio ad absurdum that we can make explicit thus:
American citizens want to keep all illegal aliens and their descendants out of the United States.
All American citizens (save Native Americans) are descended from illegal aliens.
Therefore the ancestors of all American citizens should not have been allowed in America.
But if the ancestors American citizens did not come to America, then American citizens would not be here to demand that all illegal aliens be kept out.
This argument is valid, but it is not sound. Put another way, were the world this argument describes our world we could affirm it as true, but it does not describe our world.
What’s different then? There are a couple of important ones. The first being that ‘no one’ is arguing that all illegal aliens and their descendants leave the United States. However, what I want to talk about more is the idea that all non-Native Americans are descended from illegal aliens.
This is patently false. In order for one to be an illegal alien it is necessary that the place wherein he takes up residence be a state, and for that state to have particular laws to make his residence there illegal. When the ancestors of modern Americans came here they did not come in violation of the laws of any state. There was no state presence in North America until its colonization by the ancestors of modern US citizens.
This does not make the actions of our forefathers innocent. We’re all well acquainted with their tendency to deceive, steal from and kill natives. But immoral and illegal are two very different things.
It is obviously sad and unfortunate that the modern world was shaped by immoral actions. But nevertheless, it is the world we live in, and there’s no changing it. Every bit of inhabitable land (and most uninhabitable as well) is now under the purview of a state. And those states have the right to make laws.
Even laws restricting immigration.
i just think your a bored eurocentric trying to peddle logical falsities to a rock song, with an amazing guitar riff. I think if you take into account that most immigrants coming here are at least mestizo probably mostly indegenous they have fifty billion times more right to be here than me or you and would gladly live on my own reservation that has a healthy weed economy
Well, I think it’s probably likely that I have some Eurocentrism (blast my tendency to care about my own heritage!). But if you think I’ve made a misstep in my *logic* then show me where.
For your own comment to have force against my argument, you need to say whence the right to live in a place and define just what that right entails.
Until then, I’ll continue to hold that even if some of the actions that established a nation were immoral, that nations laws are still valid.
I should have mentioned this in the post, but for the record, I love the White Stripes, and I think that this song deserved to win its Grammy (though I think it likely that it won as much for its liberal message as the music).