Posted on | November 29, 2025 | No Comments
Steve Sailer deserves a better reputation than he has, but as it is he is one of the most successful Thought Criminals of our age, having persisted in focusing on facts that liberals wish us to ignore, particularly regarding actual real-world racial differences. One of the problems we encounter in any discussion of race is that liberals always attribute mala fides to their critics. To disagree with a liberal is to stand accused of some malign motive — racism, sexism, “greed,” etc. — because of the unstated premises embedded in any liberal policy argument. The liberal begins with the assumption that his own intentions are purely beneficent. He desire to help certain unfortunate people, to offer a “solution” to some social problem (e.g., poverty), and from this estimation of his own motives, he imputes to critics a diametrically opposing motive — you wish to harm those whom the liberal desires to help, and you are defending the problematic status quo that the liberal wishes to “solve.”
Thomas Sowell brilliantly dissected this worldview in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which I have frequently recommended as the best one-volume analysis of the psychology of liberalism. It can be demonstrated that liberal policies often harm the people whom liberals wish to help, apart from the harms suffered more generally in terms of wasted taxpayer dollars, etc. Sowell’s main point (explained at length in A Conflict of Visions, the first volume of his “Visions” trilogy) is that good intentions are an insufficient justification for public policy, and the obverse implication of this is also important: “Racism” and other such accusations of bad faith are insufficient to condemn opposition to liberal policies, because it can be demonstrated that such motives do not necessarily determine the results of policies. Black people could and did prosper even under Jim Crow, just as black people demonstrably suffered under the allegedly enlightened policies of Great Society liberalism, policies that were advocated by white liberals with the sincere intention of helping black people.
Turning our attention now to immigration policy, in the wake of Afghan refugee Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s attack on National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., the Wall Street Journal editorialized:
Afghan refugees “shouldn’t be blamed for the violent act of one man. Collective punishment of all Afghans in the U.S. won’t make America safer and it might embitter more against the United States.”
To this, White House adviser Stephen Miller responded:
This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.
Self-evident facts are stated, and notice Miller’s use of the phrase “mass migration” — when you are importing foreigners by the hundreds of thousands annually, including roughly 200,000 from Afghanistan alone since 2021, certainly you are “importing societies,” not just individuals.
Two words: Numbers matter. That is the entirety of the current debate about immigration. The United States has, for the past two or three decades, been importing foreigners at a rate of roughly 1,000,000 a year — legally, that is. The million-a-year total refers to those legally admitted to the U.S. and eligible for permanent resident status (i.e., “green card” immigrants, eligible to become naturalized citizens), and does not include those who enter the country illegally, either by illegal border crossings or by overstaying temporary visas. If the number of immigrants were smaller –say, 250,000 a year — there would probably be no political controversy on the issue, but this open-the-floodgates influx, which Miller rightly labels “mass migration,” causes problems that would not otherwise occur. Having made a factual point that should not be controversial, Miller was then denounced as “un-American” by Marc Goldwein, who is Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
What an incredibly anti-American thing to say and believe.
Yes, America is magic. And its magic is not just transformative, but contagious well beyond its borders.
The vast majority of people who come here are freedom-loving because of that magic.
It may be true that “the vast majority” of immigrants “are freedom-loving,” but it very much matters how many of those immigrants are admitted. Suppose that 20% of immigrants are not “freedom-loving.” If the total number of immigrants is a million a year, this means we are adding 200,000 enemies of freedom annually. And it is not difficult to deduce that the larger the immigrant population, the less likely they are to assimilate to the national culture. In arguing for the allegedly “transformative” nature of America, however, Goldwein was unwittingly expressing a fallacy that Steve Sailer has called “Magic Dirt” theory:
One of the basic tenets of liberal thinking about race — affecting a variety of issues, including immigration, education, poverty and crime — is what Steve Sailer has called the “Magic Dirt” theory. The places where impoverished POC (“people of color”) live are demonstrably afflicted with social problems which, the liberal believes, can be solved by relocating these people to places where white people live. This idea that social problems are geographic in nature means that certain ZIP codes are “Magic Dirt,” where high SAT scores and low crime rates are more or less automatically obtained by anyone fortunate enough to live there, whereas the places with high crime and low SAT scores are “Tragic Dirt.”
Once you understand this misguided concept, it becomes impossible not to recognize the “Magic Dirt” meme in media and political rhetoric.
It is certainly true that people from poor, backward countries can and do come to America and succeed, assimilating to the culture and adopting patriotic beliefs. Yet this kind of transformation is not “magic,” a function of mere geographical location, and is less likely to occur under conditions of mass migration than it would under a more restrictive policy.
By the way, it should be noted that the population of Afghanistan is generally classified as Caucasian, so it is not racist to oppose the unrestricted admission of Afghan “refugees.” However, even if some advocates of immigration restriction do have racist motives, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Bad intentions may result in good policy, and vice-versa. Until you recognize this, you’ll never be free of the liberal guilt-trip mentality that otherwise handicaps so many conservatives. Steve Sailer isn’t enchained by that mentality, and neither is Stephen Miller.
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