Xenophobia | Benjamin Studebaker

January 13, 2015

How We Should Deal with the Charlie Hebdo Attack

As most of you probably know by now, terrorists in Paris shot up the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this week, killing 12 people. Charlie Hebdo is known for publishing provocative cartoons. Some of these cartoons mocked the prophet Muhammad, and this earned the magazine the enmity of reactionaries within Islam. Before we think about emotionally charged events like this, it often helps to think about how we should think about them. To get the objective distance we need from events to analyze them with the most fairness and impartiality we can manage, a little temporal distance can be useful. Over the last few days, I’ve been digesting a variety of visceral, emotive reactions from people across the political spectrum. In most of the think pieces I’ve read and discussions I’ve seen and participated in, there has consistently seemed to be something missing, and today I’m ready to identify that something.

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October 24, 2013

Thank a Local Immigrant for Your Public Services

Regular readers may recall that I wrote about Japan’s poor birth rate earlier in the week. I engaged in a conversation with a friend of mine about the subject (here’s his view on Japan) during which I observed that Germany’s birth rate is actually slightly worse than Japan’s, yet there’s we’re all writing about Japanese birth rates rather than the German ones. I wondered why that is, and he pointed to the immigration figures–Germany gets many more move-ins than Japan does, so the birth rate crisis in Germany has not translated into a population crisis on the same scale. This has made me want to investigate to what extent the EU and US have mitigated the effects of a birth rate slowdown with immigrants, so that’s what I’m on about today.

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July 10, 2013

Pathological British Ignorance

A new survey for the Royal Statistical Society reveals tremendous public ignorance in the United Kingdom about basic political facts. These facts are not matters of mere political trivia (i.e. “who is the current home secretary?”). They are facts the ignorance of which actively misleads British citizens into holding harmful political views, electing harmful governments, and contributing to one another’s mutual malaise.

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June 19, 2013

Population Pays

Remember that immigration reform bill that’s attempting to crawl through the congressional minefield? Back in January, I was critical of the bill, because it seems to presume that reducing immigration numbers is still a desirable goal. I argued that the bill over-emphasized border security at the expense of encouraging immigration, and that increasing immigration was fundamentally advantageous to economic growth, that immigrants contribute more to the economy than they consume in public services. At the time, my view was predominately theoretical. Now, however, we have empirical data. The non-partisan and generally trustworthy Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a report in which it predicts that immigration reform would shrink the deficit by $197 billion.

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