Should You Report a Green-Card Marriage?

Bertram post a response at CT, and adds a comment hours later.

Kwame Anthony Appiah has just blocked me on twitter. My only interaction with him ever was writing this post disagreeing with him. (I had a long term plan to get him to unveil some memorial in Bristol to his grandfather Stafford Cripps and to give a talk – I guess I can forget that). What a remarkable reaction.

Appiah never understood cosmopolitanism. It makes sense he'd fail the test.

Bertram makes the simplest—thus most important—argument at the bottom of the post.  He makes it an additional point when in fact it's key.

There’s also the issue of snitching on your neighbours and what happens when there’s a culture of doing so. Sometimes, where specific harms are clear, there’s a duty to do so: child abuse, for example. But the idea that it is a good thing when people go reporting their neighbours for being stoners, for minor zoning infractions or for overstaying their visas….

Immigration is an area where states are increasingly placing enforcement and surveillance obligations on ordinary people. That’s a process that’s gone much further in the UK than it has in the US, though no doubt Trump will learn from May. But this is a bad thing, and it leads to fear, mutual suspicion and the erosion of trust.

A commenter

There’s also the issue of snitching on your neighbours and what happens when there’s a culture of doing so. 

Indeed, cf. the damage this did to large parts of society in East Germany.

serendipity.