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	<title>Commentarius</title>
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		<title>Systemic Forces</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Systemic forces are environmental pressures that shape society independent of any individual’s intentions.  If human nature is immutably self-serving and human knowledge limited, as conservatives often suppose, then constructive systemic forces are critical for advancing prosperity.  The classic example of a productive systemic force is the free market.  The free market allows people to transmit [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1191</link>
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		<title>Ideological Cancer</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Nativism is an ideological cancer that corrupts the principles conservatives claim to hold dear.  In order to defend immigration restrictions, conservatives must embrace arguments that are bitterly antagonistic to their vision of a free and self-responsible society.  And when conservatives embrace nativism, they drive away people sympathetic to their independent rhetoric. First, any broad immigration [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1186</link>
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		<title>The Psychology of Nativism</title>
		<description><![CDATA[To my ear, arguments against immigration sound like rationalizations.  I suspect that most people simply oppose immigration whether or not they have a reason to oppose it.  So perhaps we need not a policy argument for nativism, but a psychological explanation.  If I had to explain anti-immigrant sentiment, I would tentatively explain it this way. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1175</link>
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		<title>Two More Bad Arguments Against Immigration</title>
		<description><![CDATA[* Unfair Fairness Bullies love to make others suffer as they have suffered, and even immigrants can be bullies.  I sometimes hear naturalized US immigrants complain that “Illegal immigrants are jumping the line.  They should have to wait their turn like I did.”  My Vietnamese roommate told me this recently (ironically, while she was helping [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1171</link>
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		<title>The Externalities of Immigration</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sometimes immigration critics will make a watered-down version of the prudential argument.  Instead of claiming that an increase in immigration will destroy the country outright, they object that immigrants inflict unnecessarily painful costs on their host nation.  These costs can be roughly divided into two categories – welfare costs and crime costs. If our nation [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1166</link>
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		<title>The Utilitarian Argument</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some people reject arguments about rights and freedom.  To these people, natural rights arguments ignore the fundamental importance of results.  Humans don’t fundamentally care about means, they care about ends.  That’s why they are called ends, Milton Friedman would say. What are the results of immigration?  In a capitalist society, people specialize in a certain [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1162</link>
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		<title>The Prudential Argument</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The strongest argument that conservatives make against open immigration is the prudential argument.  This is the only uniquely conservative argument (applied to any topic) that I ever find particularly compelling. Civilization, conservatives like to argue, is a mysterious, fragile thing.  Arguments about rights and utility are nice, but they presuppose a stable society whose roots [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1159</link>
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		<title>National Security</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Perhaps it would be nice if we could let foreigners exercise their natural liberty.  But in an era of terrorism, America needs to keep its citizens safe from violent Islamist extremists.  If we open up our borders, we risk another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse. This is the deeply irrelevant national [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1157</link>
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		<title>The Rule of Law</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Illegal immigrants violate American immigration laws.  America is a society based on the rule of law.  If we change American laws to accommodate criminal immigrants, we will be rewarding them.  We will be encouraging them to break the law in the future and to scoff at the authority of law in the present.  We must resist law-breaking [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1152</link>
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		<title>The Moral Obviousness of Open Immigration</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The case for open immigration is simple.  It is simple, that is, for anyone who begins from an assumption of human freedom, rather than arbitrary authority.  People should be free to live where they please.  They should be free to travel.  They should be able to do business or associate with whomever else is also [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.commentarius.org/?p=1147</link>
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