Noah Smith is wrong about deportation (he's not a total retard; just very dishonest)
Just stick to cuddling rabbits, Noahpinion
Anatomy of a 𝚁̶𝚎̶𝚝̶𝚊̶𝚛̶𝚍̶ Partisan Liar
I don’t think Noah Smith is a retard. I also disagree a lot with Matt Yglesias, for example, who is also just smart as he thinks, too, but he just has (mostly, not totally - he was on GNXP the same as me) values and priorities very different from mine. So there are sharp disagreements. Noah Smith does, too. Fine.
But sometimes, people’s values lead them to a place of self-deception. They end up making arguments and justifications for things that aren’t really up for debate or are unjustifiable (if they were, they would justify them on those grounds to themselves and to their audiences). Such wayward public intellectuals then commit the unforgivable intellectual sin of falsity via their partisanship and they espouse things that make them sound like a total retard.
Observe:
“Joe Biden has done so much substantive stuff in his four years as President that all Kamala Harris really has to do is promise to stay the course on things like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, student loan forgiveness/reform, health care subsidies, export controls, friendshoring, tariffs, border controls, etc. in order to be a very substantive candidate.”, Noah writes, without a hint of shame.
Very briefly, let’s look at how the CHIPS Act is going:
Do you know why that’s happening? It’s because America lacks the ability to quickly and cheaply stand up semiconductor micro-fabrication facilities. That’s almost tautological, but do you know why that’s true? It’s because America does not have many people with the capacity to do that. And if we keep going, it’s because very few Americans have the requisite operational, technical, and industrial skillsets and experiences required to mechanically execute on those tasks. Not ‘coordinate’, not ‘administer’, not ‘supervise. To actually do that stuff.
You know who has the experience? People Who Mostly Are Not Americans:
Now, again, I accept that Noah Smith is smart. You heard it here first, okay?
He does not know more about large scale manufacturing and semiconductor fabrication and talent hiring than Elon Musk. He simply doesn’t. You don’t, either, by the way (true for almost all people reading this sentence.) Don’t argue this point. It is beyond arguing. DEI killed (and is still killing) the CHIPS Act.
There’s the law from VP Harris (president of the Senate) passed from Congress to President Biden, handed off to Biden Harris executive agencies like Commerce.
Musk is right. There really are just bizarre demands placed on the allocation of CHIPS Act funding that rest on how ‘diverse’ your workforce is and how many jobs you create for people based on their race or sex (a legal illgality). Does it make it more or less likely that the US actually can make its own compute?
Before we get to immigration, think about the mechanism at play in all this.
Very obviously—you have to be actually totally retarded not to see it—the United States of America is dependent on China/Korea/Taiwan/the Netherlands located companies for the manufacture of high tech computing devices with profound civil and military vulnerabilities as a result. This is because it doesn’t have comparable industry, and it doesn’t because of a lack of capacity and ability.
Still with me?
The CHIPS act purports to solve this by allocating some three hundred billion dollars of Federal money (American taxpayer burdening via debt/devaluation) to subsidize research and development but conditions this in great part on how many racial minorities and women take part in developing America’s capacity.
Still with me?
The result has been that everything is slowed up and even abandoned. The most prominent expert voices available point out that some features of the subsidy act are impossible to comply with because expertise and talent is largely non-American, and in fact of particular groupings of race and sex (hint: Asian males).
Noah Smith then writes:
“Joe Biden has done so much substantive stuff in his four years as President that all Kamala Harris really has to do is promise to stay the course on things like the CHIPS Act…in order to be a very substantive candidate.”
Again, I do not think Noah Smith is actually a retard. He’s smart. You can tell.
What’s happening here, though? Noah Smith is merely massively dishonest. He’s lying to himself about being a partisan on aesthetic grounds (he just HATES the MAGA-Chud Amerikaaner, basically), he’s lying to himself about his politics being motivated by wonk-ish bublic bolicy impulses, and he’s lying to his audience about all of the above and also the efficacy of stuff like the CHIPS Act.
Deportation
Let’s now talk about all the ways in which Noah Smith is wrong about deportation. Noah Smith begins by dissembling that Biden is reasonable:
Biden is doing this, and can actually implement restrictions ‘fairly similar’ to what Trump did because he started his term by reversing all of those policies. Without Congress - through executive order - on Day One, January 20th, 2021:
In total, Biden ended up taking more than 300 executive actions to reverse Trump era executive actions and legislation meant to control immigration.
The result was unprecedented and untold amounts of illegal immigration.
Any retard could have told you this would happen, and any retard would remember that it happened — but not Noah Smith, not because he’s retarded…
But because he is fundamentally a liar:
The BBC and The Economist are not right-wing MAGA Republican outlets.
Again, Noah Smith is not a retard. He’s just an inveterate liar and is deeply intellectually dishonest, fundamentally untrustworthy, and a bad person.
But he’s not stupid.
Having examined his tortuous relationship with the truth on immigration policy, under Biden, let’s look at his claims about deportation under Trump:
Noah Smith claims: “Mass deportation would not reduce the cost of living”.
He says that: “Basically, immigrants A) compete with native-born workers for jobs, but also B) buy a lot of stuff. The stuff they buy requires labor to produce, so immigrants increase labor demand…immigrants push wages down by competing with locals, but they push wages up by buying stuff, and in the end the total effect on wages is…not much.”
If Noah’s claimed mechanism were true, we’d see a linear relationship between not only immigration growth but population and standard of living. There would be no highly populated countries nor any very large commingled populations of workers who experience low wages. Please think about what you know about South Asia and Latin America. Then remember that Noah Smith is—by his own public admission—asexual. Perhaps he doesn’t understand supply and demand.
Noah continues:
“So what does this tell us about immigration’s effect on the local cost of living? The exact same logic applies. Immigrants raise consumer demand by buying stuff — housing, health care, food, etc. These prices should go up (and in the case of housing, it definitely does). But at the same time, their labor supply pushes down the cost of lots of other stuff — child care, construction, lawn care, and so on. Prices for those things should go down. The overall effect on the cost of living should be relatively small, just like the overall effect on wages.”
Noah not only admits that large numbers of immigrants (including illegal ones) increase the price of housing. He then says, hey, but they make nannies and landscaping cheaper so the overall effect on the cost of living should be small.
Just pause there for a moment. Is Noah Smith really retarded, or is he a liar?
He doesn’t really think the main challenges faced by Americans are shopping around babysitters or getting the lawn’s mulch redone. He doesn’t actually think that’s how the world works. He doesn’t really think an environment in which construction costs are the highest they’ve been in 50 years (look it up) is one fixed by mass/illegal immigration of Mexicans who cheerily install dry-wall.
He just thinks you’re either afraid of looking like a bigot, or more profitably, that you too are looking for a narrative product that gives you a set of justifications that though false, though justifying an obviously retarded stance (aCtUaLly iLleGaL iMmIgRatiOn iS fInE!) camouflage what’s actually going on (in his case: revenge against all the people who should have bullied him more in high school).
Noah Smith claims: “Mass deportation would not save the government money”
This one is even more straightforward. You can read why here in “The Cost of Illegal Immigration to Taxpayers”, Prepared Testimony of Steven A. Camarota Director of Research Center for Immigration Studies, For Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee Hearing entitled “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on Social Services,” Thursday, January 11, 2024. Blah. What a mouthful.
Endless versions of that report, painstakingly compiled, with all kinds of graphs and charts, have been prepared for the last 40 years going to all kinds of State and Federal bodies, newsrooms, political donors, etc. At the core of all of it though, is this legerdemain from Noah Smith:
“So mass deportation might take some fiscal pressure off of some local governments, but would probably make the federal government’s fiscal situation worse.”
Guess who is responsible for the roads, bridges, police, schools, water, electricity, hospitals, etc. in your day-to-day life? Local governments. Again. “Any retard.”
But Noah Smith is not a retard. He’s a profoundly deceitful, slimy, partisan hack.
Noah Smith claims “Mass deportation would not reduce crime”
This is a howler. This is one of those things that escapes the paradigm of this article, because although Noah Smith is lying about this too, the real problem is that he actually just doesn’t care and doesn’t value the US as a national home for Americans. It’s not the choice between “Yo, is he fucking stupid?” and “lmao, does he think we’re fucking stupid?”. In this case, it’s more like “Fuck that guy.”
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/guidelines-civilimmigrationlaw.pdf
The premise of the DHS is: anyone can illegally enter into the US and justice demands not removing them, up until they’re known to commit certain crimes.
You either agree or disagree with this premise and its consequences. There is no debate to be had on material aspects — this is purely about values and character.
Noah goes on: “Deportation sweeps would frighten Americans and stir up unrest”
He blathers:
”Citizens being forced to carry their citizenship papers with them at all times out of fear of being kicked out of their own country sounds like a story out of the old Soviet Union. In reality the danger was minimal — unlike in the 1930s and 1950s, ICE didn’t just round up a bunch of Hispanic-looking people and send them to Mexico. But racial profiling was common, and the raids that did happen were highly disruptive and often cruel, so the fear is understandable.”
Except it doesn’t sound at all like that. Here’s what the propiska system was. Not letting infinity Guatemalans overstay tourist visas and work illegally in jobs that American kids can’t get is not at all the same. He’s just saying it is. But it’s not. Then he says immigration enforcement was ‘cruel’, so people are right to fear it.
Noah is simply divorced from reality on how most people are and feel, so it’s not surprising that he’d be wrong about this.
But, finally, Noah starts to make a little sense:
Who says we’re not going to do that? “Any of these strategies would be far more humane and far more effective than sending government agents swarming through the country demanding to see people’s papers.”
No one said that was going to happen, either. Noah Smith is just ~ imagining~ these things. Will there be deportation raids in any kind of immigration policy that reverses illegal immigration? You Betcha. In fact, I sincerely hope I get to be involved. You know that Elian Gonzalez deportation photo? You know the one. Dream come true. That’s my project 2025. But I think much more likely is that we do something like implement nationwide E-verify. Another bugbear of Biden’s.
And there’s plenty else we could do; why is it legal to rent to illegal aliens?
Are illegal aliens really covered by the Fair Housing Act and Civil Rights Act?
I bet they aren’t. And I bet the Supreme Court would love to rule on that. Etc.
All of these things are possible. We can (and should) deport 20 Million or so illegal aliens. We should actually do things that physically remove them.
In the meantime:
Noah Smith should stick to cuddling rabbits, and just be an out and out partisan, and quietly excuse himself from the pretense of being a public intellectual.
Why do you hate Noah smith so much?