Thread by @wanyeburkett

I remember once being at a bar with a good friend, a good, kind person, and telling her that I had to leave because I was conducting some technical interviews at work the next morning and wanted to be sure I was well rested. She was asking a bit about it, and as I described the process, which by tech standards wasn’t all that rigorous, but which did involve more than one technical round, you could see her face kind of scrunch up. The whole thing clearly sounded elitist and snobby distasteful to her; and after all, “you’re just my buddy who hangs at the bar where we’re all equals, who do you even think you are that you can gatekeep a job in this way?”

The feeling was unmistakable, like that feeling you get when you’re on a date and you know you’re not impressing.

This is the emotion on a broader scale that is underlying a lot of liberal thinking about immigration. When you start talking about vetting, about standards, about earning potential, even about criminality, their faces start to crunch up like, “who do you think you are, anyway? Who are you to judge other human beings? To put a measure on their worth?”

They feel this way about job interviews, about college admissions, about immigration policy. This is why you get into these weird debates where they try to beat you on a technicality with the language of legality. None of that is real, or at least it’s not primary. What’s primary is that feeling they get when you start talking like this. They are extremely emotional about it and the policy follows from the emotion. It’s primary, immediate, reflexive. It’s all in the way their face scrunches up when you mention it.

The idea that they’ve arrived at that position because they understand the contours of the debate better than you, because they know the law, because they have looked at all the data, because they’re just simply moron, gosh darn it, couldn’t be more absurd. Their face scrunches up when you start talking aboutstandards in admissions. It’s involuntary, reflexive. Every single piece of data they’ve ever learned about immigration is marshaled in defense of that initial lowering of the eyes and raising of the corners of their mouth.

I think the most charitable thing you can say about this is that if you felt that feeling, then you would be equally suspicious of anybody who didn’t. It would feel to you internally like an expression of basic kindness and openness to humanity and an absence of it would present as a form of casual sociopathy.

It would take a unique kind of person who was both pretty smart and very good at decoupling their own immediate emotional reactions from policy to feel as they do and not draw that conclusion about the other side. So of course almost none of them are able to avoid it.

My view, of course, is that some amount of this feeling is innate. Some of that innateness is genetic, some of it random. You can be more or less predisposed toward this feeling; and then there is the culture, your friends, what is valued by the institutions you inhabit, what you’re taught in school, what is valued by the society. I think this latter portion is fairly large. We know that people don’t always feel this way in every setting and the people within our own country don’t feel this way in equal measure everywhere. Some of that is down to selection effects, sure, but I think culture plays a big part.