Hi, there! First off, I want to say thank you to everyone who viewed, shared, liked, and subscribed. Your support means everything. I took a deliberate two-week break from this newsletter to reshape certain things among others. Thank you for your patience. Anyway, welcome to the Monday Edition of Intellectual Sunglasses, a newsletter by Tiwaloluwa Onibonoje about culture, global trends, and some neat stuff in between. If you’d like to know more, please check out the About page. And if you wish to come aboard, click the subscribe button below. You can also do me the privilege of sharing with friends, relatives, exes, workplace rivals, mortal enemies, … really, I won't mind.
Rights, noun: The ability to make someone else responsible for your own welfare. Reserved only for certain cases. Unless certain, please do not apply.
Refugee, noun: A condition of life in which everyone is definitely willing to help you with everything you need except a home.
George Santayana wrote once that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It's a nice quote if you are an historian, an history teacher, a museum curator, or anyone interested in sounding intelligent. Since that last part covers all of us, you tend to see Santayana's statement everywhere. But Santayana is giving history too much credit. People act on what they feel rather than what they know, and the range of human emotion and consequent activity is pretty much the same deck of cards throughout all millenia. History just tags along for the irony.
Approximately three hundred and thirty years ago, the English were number one in Europe when it came to loading ships with people who definitely did not want to come for the journey and offloading them to Britain among other countries. This successful string of conquests got a rather modest name: the trans-Atlantic Slave trade. Today, the English are fiercely insisting that their boundaries remain closed to all migrants and refugees. Give or take a few hundred years and everything comes back full circle.
Priti Patel, the British Home secretary, is very clear on her reasons against asylum seekers:
In the last year, 70 percent of the individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants. They are not genuine asylum seekers.
Patel's statements have attracted a lot of detailed criticism pointing out the intricacies of the situation she tried to simplistically reduce. But there is no need to go that far. It gives the statement merit it doesn't deserve because it’s simply ridiculous to state that people who are willing to die for what they want do not want it genuinely.
Other anti-migrant criticisms are much subtler than Mrs. Patel. These criticisms, rather than just quote percentages with no previous research, instead draw attention to how migrants and refugees constitute a poor cultural fit and can dilute the very vague values and culture of the host country.
Culture is such a convenient answer in these situations partly because of disguised discrimination. You can shift dislike for a group of people into dislike for their culture. The first sounds like what it is: blatant racism. The second can sound like an enlightened consideration of the situation. Unlike democracy or inclusion, culture is a buzzword that’s almost always used negatively. But they are all used for the same purpose: words that are useful precisely because everyone agrees that they are without any agreement on what they are. Culture is hot like that.
And so, the term is almost always used negatively, as a way to set one apart from others. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson maintained that societies become themselves by defining themselves in opposition to other societies and amplifying these differences over time. If you like fancy words, the fancy word is schismogenesis. This means that from the start, culture is defined by the minus sign, by what it is that that other society “lacks”. What drives this beautiful process is nothing less than our good old friend, prejudice.
In 1903, Sidney Gulick releases his book, the Evolution of the Japanese. In it, he makes the following comments:
Many Japanese give the impression… of being lazy and indifferent to the passage of time.
You have to admire the work “ give the impression” is doing there. Beatrice Webb, his contemporary, is much more “courageous”. About Koreans, she compliments as follows:
12 millions of dirty, degraded, lazy, and religionless savages.
These aren't random ignorant people either. Gulick lived in Japan for over two decades and campaigned for Asian-American rights. Beatrice Webb was a renowned British intellectual who inspired founding movements of trade unions and labour activism. Prejudice is not always hatred.
The problem here is since culture is so amorphous, people generally just mentally switch economy for culture and never notice the difference. If your economy is good, your culture is good. If your economy isn't good, then something somewhere is wrong with your culture. Japan and Korea at the time did not have the economic stature they have now. Their cultures were derided accordingly
Today, these refugees come majorly from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sub Saharan Africa. None of these places have properly functioning economies. By extension, their cultures are instantly rubbished as well.
A FAR MORE SENSIBLE REASON
There is a sensible reason, however, why no Western country wets itself with the prospect of refugees. The reason is economic. The Samuelson-Balessa hypothesis predicts that in the absence of transportation costs and tariffs, and in the presence of all necessary information, prices of goods stay constant everywhere. Services are a different story. What they cost correlates quite strongly with the purchasing power of the members of that economy.
Or in simpler terms, hair dryers should cost pretty much the same everywhere. And they kind of do. It’s kind of because obviously, transport and tariff costs are not the same everywhere. Hair dressing,on the other hand, does not as prices wildly vary for the same service. Services cost much more where people earn much more. These are the benefits of a fairly captive audience. The reason handymen in London earn ten times their counterparts in Lagos has very little to do with skill or talent. In the immortal words of Harold Samuel, it's all Location, Location, Location.
Governments don't want refugees in their country because of a sometimes justified belief that they inevitably depress the wages of the host country's middle and lower classes. Often, the only people who want completely free borders are people whose skillsets insulate them from wage competition. Immigrants also have a very nasty habit of working much much harder. This has nothing to do with any actual or perceived laziness of the natives. It's just a matter of incentive. When you are starting from zero with an inferior or non-existing support system, you work much much harder.
SIGNALS AND OTHER STUFF
For all the guys and girls and men and women and the 56 other genders out there - yes, i'm keeping my bases covered - remember that time you had a crush and everytime they did anything at all, you were immediately sifting through it for any signs of interest. And eventually, cos you are not half the person you are now, they just went on to choose you know, that guy, the one who didn't deserve her or him or any of the other 56 genders out there.
The issue with crushes and with life in general is at the end of the day, no one can read minds. Guesses have to be made, and signals have to be scrutinised. Everyone starts with a fundamental ignorance about who you are and what you want which is as much of an advantage as it as an hindrance.
Take a university degree. The chances that a person will be fully equipped for a job with a university degree is like the chances of being able to write award-winning editorials in Spanish if you are training by watching Spanish telenovelas all day.
The real value of a university degree is that it's a signal. It's a signal of intelligence, discipline, and a good memory. It is also a signal that you finished something well enough in the eyes of external assessment. Signals are everywhere you look. But I'm particularly interested in what Alvin Roth, the renowned economist, calls signals of interest, signs of one party's interest in what the other party has to offer.
There's a curious gap in the signalling literature, however. Sometimes, signals of interest are exactly what the other party is not interested in. Signals of interest can do precisely the opposite of what they are intended to achieve. It sounds rather ironic but is very commonplace:
The people who desperately need a loan, a.k.a the destitute, are not the sort of people a bank wants.
The people who desperately need a job, a.k.a the chronically unemployed, are not the sort of people employees want.
The people who desperately want a girlfriend, a.k.a incels, are not the sort of people girls want.
And the people who desperately want to come to your country are not the kind of people your country wants.
These are people with marginal disposable income, limited skills, zero to limited literacy, and very few better prospects. These are people who often require significant psychological and financial and social assistance.
No country is against outsiders, and yes, not even North Korea. If that were the case, tourism wouldn't exist. Britain's pre-covid intake of tourists was as high as 37 million people. Diplomacy wouldn’t exist either. Neither would an extensive buffet of scholarship programmes. Countries aren't against outsiders; they only want the right sort of outsiders. And the right kind of outsiders are usually not people who use boats to illegally navigate the English Channel. They are not people who need your country that badly.
The right kind of outsiders also depends on the needs of that country to begin with. In the nascent global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what mattered more than anything was the production of physical commodities - sugar, cotton, silver, gold, rubber, cocoa.. These commodities needed plantations and mines whose outputs were produced by cheap slave labour. The right kind of outsiders were more often than not slaves and indentured labourers.
We no longer live in that economy. The global economy of the twenty-first century is governed by non-physical work, work whose most significant element is mental rather than physical. And so the right kind of outsiders are physicists, computer programmers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, business owners, etc. These are not the sort of people who use boats to illegally navigate the English Channel.
You see, Europe and the rest of the industrialized world still depend on a substantial influx of foreign talent and still readily poach these talents. It's just a different kind of talent is required.
A TERRIBLE SOLUTION FOR A TERRIBLE PROBLEM
The British Government is currently pursuing a host of initiatives to stop foreigners from taking the rather porous English Channel. Chief among these initiatives is to extensively police the route in order to shut it down completely. These types of strategies hardly ever work though. The British need only ask the Americans.
In the early twentieth century, the Americans pursued a war on alcohol. Hint: consumption increased.
In the late twentieth Century, they instigated a famous war on drugs. Hint: consumption increased.
And in this century, they have commenced a war against illegal immigrants. Hint: it's not working.
We are taught that the first rules of supply and demand are that as price increases, supply increases, demand decreases, and vice versa. In my estimation, there is an even more basic rule: as long as demand exists for a good, a service, or a product, supply will find a way to meet that demand.
As long as people want to watch violent sex or take weed or abort or illegally enter your country, they will find ways to do so. Human ingenuity is more resilient than is first assumed. Some of this bears substantial similarities with what Economist Richard Cowan defined as the Iron Law of Prohibition.
The Iron Law of Prohibition postulates that as supply of a particular good is banned, suppliers react to increased costs by concentrating the good in more potent quantities to save space in storage, to reduce transport costs and to earn more money. In this way, the product progresses from mild to very very dangerous.
Take for instance a good we will simply call illegal substance. As the costs of getting illegal substance to customers increase, it makes more sense to just start selling illegal substance undiluted. Diluted versions contain more ingredients and pack less of a punch per ounce. This means they take up more space, making them harder to conceal and more expensive to transport.
The Iron Law of Prohibition is powerful but its explanatory power is limited to goods. When it comes to services, it is consumers rather than suppliers that determine what happens.
When a service is prohibited, it becomes harder to find and carries greater consequences for consumers who remain. Because of this, those who do not want or need it so much drop out of the market leaving only the most desperate and hardened consumers.
When anything is banned, it eliminates a large segment of former consumers who are not deeply interested in going through the trouble to continue consumption. So, who is left? The addicts and those in desperate need. Suppliers inevitably begin catering to the remaining market who do not mind the increased barriers. And the market is now more concentrated and more dangerous than it was before the ban.
If the English channel becomes extensively policed, immigrants will find even riskier and more dangerous ways to get themselves into England. By cutting off the desperate, England will be ironically opening its borders to the most desperate. The restraints will inevitably backfire. They always do.
Open Borders and Similar Nonsense.
Whenever tragedies like these occur, calls are quickly raised for open Borders. Yet when you think deeply about it, you realize that the idea, like Universal Basic Income, fails on its own terms. There can never be a world with fully open borders because it will be fully exploited by those the sending country is glad to see the backs of.
Besides, those in favour of open borders are like the tireless sirens of foreign aid. It's not just the dangerous assumption that it's one country's responsibility to solve another country's problems. It is the fact that they tackle a problem by fighting its consequences. Turning off a leaking faucet in a flooded house won't stop it from sinking.
The big question is the sociopolitical conditions of those countries that required so many to abandon their homes, possessions, friends, and former lifestyles. A slightly smaller one is why did 27 people decide to risk their lives rather than stay where they were. The first port of call is in addressing how badly suited to human life refugee camps often are. Places like Calais give people shelter. But shelter can be found literally anywhere. What people need more than just space to exist in is a place to live and thrive and flourish. Refugee camps need to be redesigned and organized in better ways than they are now. They need to become communities and not camps.
It won’t change everything. It certainly wouldn't change why these people left in the first place. But it ought to help them reconsider a second journey.
When something terrible happens, our natural human instincts is to begin assigning blame the way certain lecturers dish out homework. Yet bad things can happen without anyone intending they should have. Tragedies do not always require villains. But they always require participants.
To close with the words of Warsan Shire, 'you only leave home if home is the mouth of a shark.' It is a beautiful exaggeration. Twenty-seven persons left the mouths of several sharks some months ago. Some of their bodies are still in the water.
TILL NEXT TIME, STAY COOL.