The Logic of Thanos: Malthus, False Utilitarianism, and the Zero-Sum Immigration Debate
It’s pretty clear when you listen to anti-immigration hardliners that, for them, the immigration debate has little to do with creating a sane border policy. Rather, it’s about fear, about race, about competition.
This attitude has a historical pedigree in the United States, dating back to our founding but coalescing around a set of race-based quotas in the late 1800s and early 1900s designed to limit immigration as much as possible to Protestant whites. The rhetoric was racist, first and foremost, as much of today’s restrictionist argument is, but it often couched it in sustainability terms. The need, the restrictions said, was to preserve what defined America and Americanness. For the early restrictionists, that meant maintaining a mostly white, Protestant population and strict limits on immigration from China and Eastern and Southern European nations from which Jews and Catholics were emigrating.
The quota approach remained in force, tweaked as our definitions of whiteness and Americanness shifted, until the 1965 immigration reforms that passed as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Gone were the quotas and, in their place, a new system ties to family and work was…
