That’s like saying “I wanted an example of someone being put in jail for just marijuana possession, and also not being arrested.”
“Hate speech” is the excuse used by Europe to prosecute people for objecting to immigration. It’s something you guys made up in order to stop free speech.
Obviously green_leaf’s claim is not merely that the people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration are being accused of hate speech, but that they are doing things that a reasonable person would consider hate speech rather than merely “objecting to immigration” and that the latter, if done not-hatefully, doesn’t get anyone prosecuted.
The paywalled article at your first and second links proves that some people are objecting to immigration and getting prosecuted for hate speech, but (at least on this side of the paywall) doesn’t make it clear exactly what they’re saying, hence doesn’t let us tell whether they’re just “objecting to immigration” as opposed to, say, calling immigrants vermin or suggesting that they should be thrown into the sea or something.
The third link gives several purported examples but again doesn’t do much to clarify exactly what was said in each case.
Markos Vasilakis: I don’t have the text of his sermon or anything, but the Gatestone Institute article about it links to a Greek-language article that quotes some fragments and (from Google’s translation, whose accuracy I can’t vouch for) it doesn’t seem as if the Gatestone Institute is being very honest when e.g. it says that he merely “express[ed] accurately the percentages of refugees and illegal migrants entering the country”. Also, was he actually prosecuted? The GI article says that the government “asked the district attorney to prosecute” Vasilakis, but that doesn’t seem like it’s the same thing.
British man arrested “for tweeting about a conversation he had with a Muslim woman about terrorism”: he tweeted that he had “confronted” a Muslim woman and demanded that she “explain” the terrorist attacks that had recently happened in Brussels, and followed it up by saying “Britain is for Britain’s” (presumably he meant “Britons”) and “Who cares if I insulted some towelhead?”. Whatever you might think about that, I don’t think “objecting to immigration” is a reasonable description of what he did. Also, “arrested” and “prosecuted” are two very different things.
German police raiding homes over online hate postings: their cited source says: “The operation focused in particular on the German state of Bavaria, where according to police sources, a secret Facebook group had posted messages glamorizing National Socialism, which is illegal in Germany. The police said that this group and others spread xenophobic, anti-Semitic and other radical far-right content.” Again, this is not about “objecting to immigration”.
Dutch police threatening someone over a tweet: their cited source is an article that’s been taken down, but I found something that seems to quote it; it points to a dw.com article that begins: “In rare instances, Dutch police are knocking on social media users’ doors and asking them to be careful writing posts about refugees that could lead to real-life violence and, ultimately, to charges of online incitement.” Certainly seems heavy-handed, but again this is a long long way from prosecuting anyone for objecting to immigratiion. (Also, we don’t know what else this chap tweeted, and it might be relevant.)
US attorney threatening to prosecute people for writing about rape by refugees: another article that’s been taken down, and this time I haven’t found its text elsewhere. But the “remarkable statement” they quote seems pretty unremarkable to me, and despite their language “threatened to prosecute” it doesn’t look to me as if anyone is threatening any specific other person with prosecution. This seems like a nothingburger.
So far, I am seeing zero examples of people “prosecuted for objecting to immigration”. That doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any, of course, but if it’s a thing that actually happens then I am a little surprised you haven’t been able to provide more convincing examples.
If you think it’s possible to object to immigration in Europe in a manner similar to other political views, in a way which can’t easily be painted as ‘hate speech’, I’d like to know some examples of things which can be said, without watering down objections to immigration.
Well, since your earlier claim was that people are being prosecuted “for objecting to immigration” and so far as I can tell none of the people in the FairUS article were actually prosecuted, one answer to that would be “all the things the people you used as examples said”.
But here are a few other concrete examples of people saying anti-immigration things without being prosecuted. The examples I’ve given are of politicians because they tend to be the people who say these things very visibly and get reported on. They’re mostly from the UK because that’s where I am and English is the language I know best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoieBSjNpqA Nigel Farage: “I think that if you have an immigration rate that runs too high, with people who speak different languages, have a totally different culture, and in particular attitudes towards women and their place in society, then I think you’re storing up for yourself an enormous problem which then leads to cities with divided communities.” Complains that after a period with ~30k immigrants per year “Blair opened the doors, the Tories have kept them open, and that’s why this has now become a big political issue”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63466532 Suella Braverman (the UK’s “Home Secretary”): “The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not. Some 40,000 people have arrived on the south coast this year alone, many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs.” She got some criticism for this, unsurprisingly, but equally unsurprisingly she did not face prosecution or official censure by the House of Commons or losing her job near the top of the UK government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNeV_Wo0SNE Richard Tice of the “Reform Party” talking about a “betrayal of Brexit” represented by current levels of immigration to the UK. “They’ve betrayed us on taking back control of lawful immigration, they’ve betrayed us on the legal immigration … outside healthcare we need a pause, we need zero lawful immigration until there’s a catchup”. So he’s calling for zero net immigration other than healthcare workers. He is not in any sort of legal trouble for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZh5oOzOfao French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour calls for forcible “remigration” of 100k illegal immigrants per year. Zemmour has had (repeated) legal trouble for some other things he has said about immigrants; for instance, in 2020-09 he said that Pakistani immigrants to France “have nothing to do here. They are thieves, they are murderers, they are rapists, that’s all they are. They must be sent back and they must not even come”. It seems to me that there’s a pretty clear difference between that and merely “objecting to immigration”.
They don’t seem especially watered-down. But I’m not really sure what you mean by “without watering down objections to immigration”. If what you’re now saying is simply that some things some people want to say about immigration may get them into legal trouble, then I completely agree that that’s true and I’m sure green_leaf does too. I took you to be claiming something more than that. Perhaps you might clarify, e.g. by listing a few specific things people have been prosecuted for that an impartial reasonable person would classify as merely “objections to immigration” and not, e.g., “attempts to stir up anti-immigrant hatred”.
(I am not claiming that attempts to stir up anti-immigrant hatred should necessarily get you prosecuted; not everything bad needs to be illegal, freedom of speech has value, etc. I don’t know what the best tradeoffs are. But I don’t think you should say “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration” if what’s actually happening is that people are prosecuted for promoting anti-immigrant hatred.)
But here are a few other concrete examples of people saying anti-immigration things without being prosecuted.
That’s not what I asked for. What I asked for was
in a way which can’t easily be painted as ‘hate speech’,
And there’s a reason why. “Hate speech” censorship works by having vague, broad, rules that let the governments censor anything they want related to the subject. The fact that the government hasn’t actually chosen to use this unlimited discretion all the time, yet, doesn’t mean that they don’t have it.
Are you claiming that not only were those statements not prosecuted as hate speech, but they can’t be prosecuted as hate speech?
for instance, in 2020-09 he said that Pakistani immigrants to France “have nothing to do here. They are thieves, they are murderers, they are rapists, that’s all they are. They must be sent back and they must not even come”. It seems to me that there’s a pretty clear difference between that and merely “objecting to immigration”.
If he wanted to claim that such immigrants are merely disproportionately criminals, thus not using the literally false word “all”, would he be permitted to do that? Would it matter if they actually are disproportionately criminals?
What you originally said is that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
I think you should provide some examples of people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration. I looked at the things you cited, and not one of them seems to be that.
But now you’re demanding examples of anti-immigration sentiments that can’t possibly be painted as “hate speech”, that couldn’t possibly result in prosecution. That seems like an obviously impossible demand; if I give what I claim is an example, you can just say “nah, they’d totally call that hate speech” or “so it didn’t get prosecuted this time, but it totally could have”.
Do you have examples of people being prosecuted just for objecting to immigration? Or did you claim that that’s happening without having any evidence?
Reminder: what you said was:
you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration
I think you should (1) show us some compelling examples where the thing you claimed happens has actually happened, preferably enough and clear enough to show that it’s an actual pattern and an isolated weird one-off; or (2) explain what good reason you have for believing that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration” that doesn’t enable you to provide a compelling list of examples; or (3) admit that you made that claim without actual grounds for thinking it to be true.
As for the weaker claim you are making now: it may well be true that laws around “hate speech” are too vague and too broad. However, I invite you to show me a law valid in (let’s say) the UK, France, or Germany, that makes it a criminal offence for someone to say, for instance, “In my opinion, societies with high immigration rates are less stable, and I therefore think that my country should reduce its immigration rate by a factor of 10″ or “Immigration is expensive and many immigrants cost the country they move to more than any economic benefit they provide, and I therefore think my country should only permit immigration by people with demonstrably marketable skills”.
What you originally said is that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
They are. A subset of them prosecuted is still people being prosecuted. Using “hate speech” as an excuse to prosecute them doesn’t mean it doesn’t count, since “hate speech” is so broad it can apply to anyone.
As for the weaker claim you are making now: it may well be true that laws around “hate speech” are too vague and too broad.
The original claim is directly related to the “weaker” claim, because if “hate speech” is broad, prosecuting them for it is just an excuse for prosecuting them for something else; they’re really being prosecuted because they don’t like immigration.
I invite you to show me a law valid in (let’s say) the UK, France, or Germany, that makes it a criminal offence for someone to say, for instance..
But that waters down the previous statement. It no longer claims that immigrants have high crime rates, and uses the vague term “stable”. If you were asked to clarify and you said “by stable I mean low crime, since immigrants are disproportionately criminals”, that’s still hate speech.
(And of course the government could say “he said ‘stable’, but that’s a dogwhistle for ‘high crime’. Illegal hate speech.”)
Suppose I say “these days there’s so much racism that you can get arrested for being black”. You express some slight skepticism about this. I present five examples of black people getting arrested. You point out that they were arrested for assault, tax fraud, libel, and theft. I say “A subset of them arrested is still people being arrested”. You would, I take it, not be impressed.
If you say that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration, you need to show us some examples where that is what they are being prosecuted for. (Though … a first step would be showing us some people being prosecuted at all, for anything, which so far you haven’t bothered to do.)
that waters down the previous statement
No, it’s completely separate from the previous statement. The two anti-immigration propositions I mentioned are not intended to be equivalents of any other anti-immigration things that have been discussed elsewhere in the thread. They are examples of ways in which one could “object to immigration” while facing no, zero, none, zilch, zip, nada, risk of prosecution for it. Which (if I am right about the risk being negligible) shows that it isn’t true that objecting to immigration puts you at risk of prosecution. It’s other things that do that.
You made the claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”. You have presented no examples of this. You have in fact presented no examples of people getting prosecuted at all, and it’s not clear that any of the examples you’ve (indirectly) given are of people who were merely “objecting to immigration”. You have given no specific examples of relevant laws. You have given no specific examples of things someone could do that (1) could reasonably be described as merely “objecting to immigration” and (2) would pose any real risk of prosecution.
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It is not my job to give you examples of people who couldn’t be prosecuted. You claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”. Show us.
Suppose I say “these days there’s so much racism that you can get arrested for being black”. You express some slight skepticism about this. I present five examples of black people getting arrested. You point out that they were arrested for assault, tax fraud, libel, and theft. I say “A subset of them arrested is still people being arrested”.
I’d respond “is assault defined in such a way that it can be used against most black people, and it just isn’t because of government whim? If so, then being arrested for assault could be described as being arrested for being black.”
Of course, you would answer “no, assault isn’t defined that way”. Then I’d say that since assault has a narrow definition, a black person who’s arrested for assault was arrested specifically for assault, not arrested for being black with assault as the excuse.
Needless to say, I’d answer the corresponding question differently for hate speech.
So far you have given zero evidence that “hate speech” is defined in such a way that it can be used against most people who want less immigration. And, I repeat, you’ve shifted the goalposts (from “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration” to “people could be prosecuted for objecting to immigration”) and not acknowledged having done so.
Note: I’m not sure that’s actually the right way to operationalize the distinction you’re trying to make. Suppose there’s some drug, let’s call it cake, that 51% of people use. Then a law against using cake could be used against most black people, but I think it would be wrong to say that it means people can be arrested for being black. (For the avoidance of doubt, I also think it would be a bad law even if cake is very harmful; laws that criminalize very large sections of the population usually are; in that case the laws should target the dealers.)
And, I repeat, you’ve shifted the goalposts (from “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration” to “people could be prosecuted for objecting to immigration”)
Those two things are connected.
The fact that the laws are broad enough that they could be used to prosecute almost anyone opposed to immigration implies that, for the subset of people who are prosecuted, “violated the law” is an excuse and “arrested for opposing immigration” is what’s actually going on.
Suppose there’s some drug, let’s call it cake, that 51% of people use.
If most people use cake, but aren’t arrested for it, then it’s entirely plausible that the people who get arrested “for using cake” are really being arrested for some other reason with cake as the excuse.
Governments love to do this—create laws that lots of people violate, and selectively prosecute when politically expedient.
Of course they’re connected and no one has suggested otherwise, but they are not the same and you started claiming one and have switched to demanding that I disprove the other.
Do you have any intention of giving any actual examples of the thing you claim is happening?
you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration
You offered three links in support of this. One is behind a paywall and from your own description it doesn’t sound as if you have read the paper any more than I have, so we don’t know what the people in question were actually prosecuted for (other than that officially it was “hate speech”). The second is the same paper as the first. The third is the thing we have already discussed, which so far as I can tell includes no examples of anyone being prosecuted for anything. (And only one example of anyone suffering any consequences for “objecting to immigration”, where (a) the consequence was police warning him that if he stirs up violence he could be legally responsible, and (b) the police allegedly referred to “your tweets” but we were only shown one tweet, so we don’t know whether there was more and if so what, and (c) so far as I can tell we only have that one person’s word for what happened.)
(I do not know for sure that the Greek bishop was never actually prosecuted. But I do know that the article says only that someone in government had asked for him to be prosecuted, and that six years later I cannot find any sign on the internet that any such prosecution ever happened. But I don’t know Greek well enough to e.g. search for possibly relevant Greek-language terms to find local news that might have covered it, so maybe it did happen?)
You have (without acknowledging that it’s a change) shifted from “prosecuted” to “arrested” but it doesn’t appear that any of the people involved in these stories were arrested any more than they were prosecuted.
You keep talking about “the vagueness of the laws” but this is another thing you have been curiously unwilling to give examples of. Show us some actual examples of hate-speech laws that could be used to punish people for objecting to immigration.
It seems as if you feel that
you don’t need to give examples of people actually being punished for objecting to immigration, because as we all know the laws are so vague that all there will ever be is examples of people being punished for hate speech when all they were really doing was objecting to immigration
you don’t need to give examples of hate-speech laws that permit people to be punished merely for objecting to immigration, because as we all know it’s happening all the time, so no need to waste our time looking at the details of the laws
the net result of which is that you are making claims that the thing is happening without feeling any need for actual evidence. Maybe I’m wrong and you do have evidence. But in that case it seems strange that you haven’t shown any of it.
you don’t need to give examples of people actually being punished for objecting to immigration, because as we all know the laws are so vague that all there will ever be is examples of people being punished for hate speech when all they were really doing was objecting to immigration
That’s the whole point fo having a vague law—so you can selectively prosecute with plausible deniability.
So show us the vague laws, and how they’re vague, and what scope they give for that sort of selective prosecution. And show us some specific cases where people have been prosecuted for doing things that clearly shouldn’t be illegal and that got them in trouble only because the laws are too vague.
None of which you’ve done, even though it seems like minimal epistemic hygiene around this mindkilling stuff, and even though I’ve politely asked for examples several times.
Less and less politely, I admit, because it’s becoming harder and harder to believe that you’re actually making any sort of honest effort to distinguish truth from untruth on this topic. Can’t you see how your mode of argumentation here insulates your position from all actual contact with empirical observation? You’ve apparently found a way of believing that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration” that isn’t actually causally linked to whether or not people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
Can’t you see how your mode of argumentation here insulates your position from all actual contact with empirical observation?
It’s not hard to falsify empirically at all. Take a broad set of anti-immigration arguments that people actually use, and see whether the laws can be twisted to cover them. If they can’t, they’re not vague (in a relevant way).
I suspect the real answer is that you think that most anti-immigration arguments are hate speech anyway, so using the laws to cover them isn’t twisting them. What exactly do you think is hate speech?
For instance, if the example about criminals was modified so he just said that too many immigrants are criminals, would that be hate speech? What if he mentioned specific crimes, or said that the immigrants are poorly educated, or even low IQ? What if he said that immigrants should be kept out based on his personal bad experiences with them, without being able to prove that those experiences are representative?
And does being true matter for whether something is hate speech?
I don’t think falsification is nearly as straightforward as you’re trying to argue. I can already see how it would go.
“Here’s an argument. I don’t think it could reasonably be called hate speech according to typical hate speech laws.” “Of course it could! Those laws are so vague, anything can count as hate speech.”
And, I repeat for what seems like the dozenth time but probably isn’t actually more than the sixth, you made a specific claim which you have so far neither given any evidence at all for nor retracted, namely that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration. If they are being prosecuted for attempting to stir up hatred of immigrants, maybe that’s a good thing or maybe it’s a terrible thing, but it is not the same thing as being prosecuted for objecting to immigration. And even if you claim that the laws are drafted in a way that could in principle have someone going to prison who hasn’t actually attempted to stir up hatred, I think we need to ask who is actually getting prosecuted, and who is actually getting convicted, under these laws, and so far as I can tell it is generally people that any reasonable person would agree were trying to stir up hatred.
I haven’t looked carefully into this. I am willing to be corrected. By actual evidence.
Now, on to your latest attempt at distraction, which asks: am I arguing against you only because actually I think that objecting to immigration is generally hate speech?
I do not think that most anti-immigration arguments are hate speech. I do think some anti-immigration arguments as actually made can reasonably be called hate speech; I do think some opponents of immigration are in fact motivated by something akin to hate, and some people arguing against immigration are doing so in a fashion that they intend to stir up hatred against immigrants. But certainly not all.
I gave, above, four examples of European politicians saying very negative things about immigration for which they have not been prosecuted and are not likely to be. They were not cherry-picked as being particularly inoffensive or anything like that. I do not think any of the specific things they said and were not prosecuted for are things that they should have been prosecuted for. (By which I mean 1. I don’t think existing hate-speech laws make the things they said criminal, and 2. I would prefer not to have hate-speech laws that make the things they said criminal.) All those people have said other things about immigration on other occasions [citation needed] and for all I know some of those other things may have been worse; I am not claiming that they haven’t said other things that deserve legal sanction.
For each of the five more specific things you ask about, my answer would need to be a fairly lengthy paragraph saying “well, if they said X in way Y then I’d think Z, but …”. I know this because I originally wrote those paragraphs and decided that my comment was too long even without them. But the general answer to all of them is: it depends; many of the things you describe are things that I think are usually said with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred, and I don’t know that I approve of that being illegal but it definitely isn’t just a matter of “objecting to immigration”, but it’s surely possible to say them in a way that doesn’t have that intention and isn’t likely to have that effect. And most of them, most of the time, are bad arguments against immigration, but making bad arguments should probably not be criminal.
you made a specific claim which you have so far neither given any evidence at all for nor retracted
Saying “haven’t given evidence” over and over again doesn’t make it true. I gave evidence; you just didn’t like it. The argument about the vague laws determines whether the evidence is good, and you haven’t settled that yet. You can’t say I haven’t provided evidence when we’re still arguing something that determines whether the evidence counts.
But the general answer to all of them is: it depends; many of the things you describe are things that I think are usually said with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred
I would agree that the law isn’t vaguer than that standard of hate speech, but that’s just because they’re equally terrible and equally prone to abuse.
“Banning hate speech” according to your standards—that is, making something illegal because it’s said “with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred”—grants unbridled discretion to the law. Anyone opposing immigration could be found guilty under that standard. It’s an example of the kind of vagueness I was talking about. (That’s why your example of “less stable” doesn’t work—if the law claimed that the word “stable” was trying to insinuate something that foments hatred, you have no defense.)
you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something. Could you please tell me, let’s say, two people you have shown us were prosecuted for something at any point in this discussion?
It seems to me that however vague the laws about “hate speech” are—and I remind you that this is another thing for which you have given no actual evidence: not one instance of a specific law that is vague in a specific way and permits some specific sort of abuse—you cannot reasonably claim to have supported your original claim without showing us someone prosecuted for something.
I am not claiming that hate-speech laws—either any specific ones that actually exist, or the broad concept—are good laws. I am only pointing out that if the actual situation is that “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration in ways designed to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants” then it is not correct to describe that situation as “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration”.
(For clarity: I was not claiming that “with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred” is language suitable for writing into law. It might not be, even if one wanted to criminalize fomenting resentment and hatred. Vagueness in my description of an action does not equate to vagueness in the actual laws that apply to such actions. Maybe the actual laws are in fact too vague, but let’s see some examples.)
You keep making claims about what hate-speech laws permit. I doubt those claims. (I repeat: that does not mean that I endorse those laws. They might be bad laws. But I am not convinced that you are describing their consequences accurately.) Could you please give some examples of particular countries’ hate-speech laws, and of things that don’t go beyond “objecting to immigration” that they criminalize?
(But, I reiterate: no matter what is in those laws, nothing you can say about just the laws can be justification for your claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, because you have not shown any examples of people who were prosecuted for anything.)
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something.
Come on. One of the links’ titles is “Prosecuted, yet popular? Hate speech prosecution of anti-immigration politicians in the news and electoral support”.
I admit that the summary (which is all I can read, since it’s in a paywall) doesn’t contain names, but it’s pretty obvious that such people exist.
Nope. It makes it obvious that some people are anti-immigration and have been prosecuted for hate speech. Very likely the things they were prosecuted for aren’t independent of their opposition to immigration, but we don’t know anything about what those things were.
Oooh. You can get the actual paper (or maybe it’s an earlier pre-publication version of it) here. Let’s take a look at the first few concrete examples in it, assuming there turn out to be some.
In the Netherlands, PVV leader Wilders has been prosecuted for hate speech twice, in 2009-2011 and in 2014-2016 [...] While acquitted in June 2011 for a complaint about targeting Islam, Wilders was convicted in December 2016 after having insulted Moroccans at a 2014 Election Rally in The Hague. However, no sentence was imposed.
This looks like it might be informative—it seems as if we have two cases near the borderline between what gets actual legal penalties and what doesn’t. (For the avoidance of doubt: I appreciate that merely getting prosecuted is unpleasant, time-consuming, potentially expensive, etc. I think there are a few key thresholds: what do you have to do to get prosecuted, what do you have to do to get convicted, and what do you have to do to get a substantial sentence imposed?)
2009-2011. I think this document quotes the things he said that got him in trouble. (Though not enough trouble for an actual hate-speech conviction.) A few I-hope-representative samples: “Islam wants to control, subdue and is out for the destruction of our Western civilization.” “The demographic composition of the population is the biggest problem of the Netherlands. [...] We must stop the tsunami of the Islamisation.” “The core of the problem is the fascist Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as laid down in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Quran.” “One out of five Moroccan youngsters is registered with the police as a suspect.” “Former chief of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that the Third World War has already started. I am not putting these words in my mouth, but it is correct though.” “I have had enough of the Islam in the Netherlands: no more Muslim immigrants. I have had enough of the adoration of Allah and Mohammeed in the Netherlands: no more mosques. I have had enough of the Quran in the Netherlands: prohibit this fascist book.”
I am on the whole glad that Wilders was not convicted of any crime for saying these things. But I think it is clear that, even though immigration is one thing he mentioned, this was not about “opposition to immigration”, it was about going allegedly-too-far in criticizing Islam and Muslims.
2014-2016. (Note: his conviction in 2016, for which no penalty was imposed, was overturned in part in 2020.) In this case I haven’t found actual documents. News articles mention a rally at which he asked the crowd whether they want “fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands”, the crowd chanted “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”, and Wilders said “we’re going to arrange that”. It seems like the rest of what he said is relevant, but no one seems to be quoting that or providing the text of the actual charges he faced.
The specific thing alleged in the news articles doesn’t sound to me like something one should face legal penalties for, but again it seems like this isn’t just about “objecting to immigration”. If he’s going to make there be fewer Moroccans then it sounds like, in the best case, he’s proposing to start deporting them. And, going out on a limb, I’m going to guess that the complaints were about whatever he said leading up to his question about “fewer or more Moroccans” as well as the question itself and its aftermath, and that that probably wasn’t just “objecting to immigration”. But I’ve found it frustratingly difficult to determine exactly what he was accused of doing in this case.
In Belgium, Daniel Féret, then party leader of Front National (since 2012 onwards “Démocratie Nationale”), was prosecuted in 2002 for disseminating flyers in which North African immigrants were stigmatized. He was convicted for inciting hatred in April 2006 [...]
I think this is describing one prosecution that went on for 4 years, not two separate incidents. I haven’t found documents from the trial itself, but Feret went to the European Court of Human Rights complaining that his right to freedom of expression had been violated, and their judgement has some useful information. And there’s a little bit of information in this BBC News article. The documents at issue here were election pamphlets, and e.g. one of them featured a cartoon showing “the brown plague” and “the black international” (represented by a couple of Africans with bones through their noses). Again, whatever you might think of the merits of the laws involved, this case was not about “objecting to immigration” and I don’t think one can reasonably deny that Féret, or more precisely his party, was trying to incite hatred.
In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen was prosecuted numerous times for targeting immigrants, Jews, Muslims and Roma when he was leader of Front National (since 2018 onwards “Rassemblement National”) in the 1990s and 2000s.
“Numerous times” isn’t very helpful. Most of what I found in a web search for “Jean-Marie Le Pen prosecuted” was about two things: calling the Nazis’ gas chambers “a detail of history”, and saying that the Nazi occupation of France wasn’t particularly inhumane. Neither of these is particularly about “objecting to immigration”.
In Germany, Günter Deckert and Udo Voigt were, both as the leader of the NPD, prosecuted several times for inciting racial hatred after making comments about Jews, the Holocaust, the Nazi past, and blacks.
It’s 3:30am and this is taking a lot of time, so rather than trying to research this one I’ll just remark that this also doesn’t sound like it’s about “objecting to immigration”, it’s about defending the Nazis. (I don’t know whether what he said about black people was immigration-related, though.)
I’m going to leave it there; as already mentioned it’s late and this is taking a while. But my main takeaway so far is that this doesn’t look to me like a lot of cases of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration; some of the cases don’t seem to have had much to do with immigration at all, and even where the immigration link is clear the complaint was (in reality, not merely as a fiction where what’s actually just not liking immigration is portrayed as hate) about attempts to stir up large-scale hate against immigrant groups.
Again, it may well be that laws against stirring up hatred against racial / national / religious groups are bad laws. That isn’t what I’m disputing. What I’m disputing is that there’s any truth to speak of in your original claim, that objecting to immigration exposes one to any real risk of legal consequences. That’s just not what’s going on in any of these cases.
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something.
does not leave room for “it doesn’t count because they’re prosecuted for the wrong thing”.
At the point when I said “Regardless of the merits …” the nearest you had come to providing actual examples of prosecutions was gesturing vaguely towards an article neither of us had read, the information about which we had gave us no information about any prosecutions. I concede that in some sense this constituted evidence for the proposition “some people have been prosecuted for something”, but it did not tell us anything of the form “someone was prosecuted for X” where X could credibly be “objecting to immigration”.
Then I found the actual paper (note: I did, you didn’t; all of the actual intellectual work in this discussion is being done by me) and now the situation is no longer “we don’t have any examples of anyone prosecuted for anything”.
It turns out that this doesn’t actually help your case, since the examples in the paper don’t appear to include anyone who can credibly be described as having been prosecuted for objecting to immigration. But it does mean that my previous simpler objection (no examples of prosecutions provided, nothing else to say) needed to be replaced by something more complicated (now we have some examples of prosecutions, so let’s see what they are).
Yes, I change what objections I’m making when the argument I’m addressing changes. In this case it changed because I discovered I was able to perform a part of your job that you hadn’t bothered to do, namely finding some concrete examples.
So. Got any specific examples of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration, yet? Or any specific examples of hate-speech laws for which you can explain how they would criminalize objecting to immigration, as opposed to attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants?
(For the sake of explicitness: if you wish to scale your claim back to ”… now you get people prosecuted for attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants”, I will readily agree that that happens, but not that there’s no real difference between forbidding that and forbidding objecting to immigration. But I think you are still attempting to claim that there are prosecutions for things that a reasonable person would describe only as “objecting to immigration”, and that these happen because hate-speech laws are broad enough to cover some such things. This could be true! But you haven’t given any examples, and the things you have presented as examples all seem to be non-examples. In these circumstances a reasonable person updates away from the claim you’re declining to give examples of.)
But I think you are still attempting to claim that there are prosecutions for things that a reasonable person would describe only as “objecting to immigration”, and that these happen because hate-speech laws are broad enough to cover some such things.
The “only” is about the reach of the law, not the person’s actions.
It’s like having a law that criminalizes breathing, and the law is being used to prosecute a thief. Even though the person’s actions were not only breathing, I’d still call that “prosecution for breathing”.
The law in this case criminalizes stirring up hate (at least, that is what “hate speech” laws generally do, and you have not seen fit to clarify what specific laws you have in mind).
Your analogy would be valid if there were laws against objecting to immigration and they were being used to prosecute someone who is stirring up hatred. That is not the case.
Rather, it’s as if there were a law against theft, and they were used to prosecute people who were breathing, and you said “look, people are getting prosecuted for breathing”. If the anti-theft laws were broadly enough drafted, or being applied in an unprincipled enough way, you might have a case, but the onus would very much be on you to show that that was what was happening, because prima facie there’s a law against theft and it’s being used to prosecute a thief. (In this case: prima facie there are laws against stirring up hatred and they’re being used to prosecute people who are stirring up hatred.)
I was initially going to reply to Jiro’s last comment to me, but you grasped the nettle so firmly that I think I’d be just superfluous here, so I just wanted to say I almost completely agree with everything you write and that it’s awesome you put in so much effort.
It turns out that this doesn’t actually help your case, since the examples in the paper don’t appear to include anyone who can credibly be described as having been prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
As I keep pointing out, who counts as being prosecuted for immigration depends on whether prosecuting someone selectively under a broad law, while officially calling it something else, counts as prosecuting them for immigration. We haven’t settled that yet, and you shouldn’t be acting as though we’ve settled that.
If I say “there are people being prosecuted for being black”, and present as evidence a bunch of black people prosecuted for theft, fraud, murder, etc., and claim that this justifies my claim because the laws against theft, fraud, murder, etc., are too broad, then it is my responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s race rather than their actual behaviour.
If you say “there are people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and present as evidence a bunch of anti-immigration politicians prosecuted for hate speech, and claim that this justifies your claim because the laws against hate speech are too broad, then it is your responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s opinions on immigration rather than the incendiariness of their rhetoric.
But you aren’t doing any of the work required to justify your (prima facie implausible) claim. You’re behaving as if everyone’s default assumption should be that (1) the hate speech laws are so broad that they make basically everyone who objects to immigration a criminal, and that (2) what on the face of it are prosecutions for hate speech are really motivated by wanting to punish everyone who objects to immigration. I do not think either of those is a reasonable default assumption. I think both are implausible, and I think that if you want us to believe them you should give some evidence for them.
However, I’m kinda losing hope of your ever producing any evidence for any of the claims you make, so I guess I’ll have to do your job again.
Consider four possible worlds.
In world A1, hate-speech laws are extremely broad and criminalize a lot of things that don’t really involve stirring up hate and resentment and whatnot. This fact is exploited by the law-enforcement system to persecute people who object to immigration, so that such people are likely to get arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and punished.
In world A2, the hate-speech laws are just as broad as in world A, but there is no particular attempt to persecute people who object to immigration. What gets you prosecuted under hate-speech laws is behaving in ways that seem to be stirring up hatred and resentment; because the laws are very broad, some people get in trouble despite not intended to stir up hate and/or not actually succeeding in doing so, but the distinguishing feature of people who get in trouble is something like “incendiary rhetoric” or “throwing broad sweeping insults at large groups of people” rather than “objecting to immigration”.
In world B1, the laws are not so broad, but as in world A1 the law-enforcement system is keen to persecute people who object to immigration. So those people are extra-likely to get arrested and prosecuted. Most of them will then be acquitted because the laws don’t really criminalize what they’ve done, but sometimes the persecution is sufficient to get the laws misapplied too and they get convicted.
In world B2, the laws are not so broad and there is no attempt at persecution. The people who get in trouble under hate-speech laws are pretty much the people who are, or would seem to a reasonable person to be, trying to stir up hate and resentment. No system is perfect and some people may get in more or less trouble than the lawmakers intended, but on the whole what happens is that serious efforts to stir up hate get you into trouble and (as far as these laws are concerned) other things don’t.
(So A/B is about breadth of laws and 1⁄2 is about exploitation of the laws to try to persecute people who object to immigration.)
Being good Bayesians, let’s now ask how plausible these worlds are a priori and what sort of evidence we might expect to see to distinguish them.
Prior expectations on A/B: it’s common for laws to be somewhat too broad, but usually not absurdly so; “hate speech” is naturally a thing with fuzzy edges; I would expect the laws to leave substantial room for discretion (so that e.g. abuse would certainly be possible) but to be drafted in such a way that most things that aren’t actually attempts at stirring up hate and resentment would not seem to a reasonable person to be forbidden by the laws. Depending on your overall level of cynicism about how laws are made, you might reasonably have different priors on this one.
Prior expectations on 1/2: the bulk of any such persecution would have to be done by police, public prosecutors, and judges. It looks to me as if these are all groups whose tendencies run much more anti-immigrant than pro-immigrant. So I would be a little more surprised by 1 than by 2.
On either of these, you might disagree (and in fact I bet you do), but what seems clear to me is that there isn’t any sort of overwhelming prior reason to anticipate A over B or 1 over 2.
What about evidence?
The clearest evidence for A and 1 would be that people who object to immigration in ways that aren’t particularly hate-fomenting suffer actual arrests, prosecutions, convictions and penalties which is why I keep asking you to provide some examples of these. In the A-worlds we should expect actual convictions. In B1 we should expect lots of arrests and some prosecutions but fewer convictions and penalties.
From the things I’ve looked at so far, it does not seem that this happens. E.g., I gave a number of examples of politicians being vigorously anti-immigration and not getting into any sort of legal trouble for it, and the examples you have gestured towards don’t seem to include any where people have got into legal trouble for clearly-not-hate-fomenting objections to immigration.
We might also see, especially in the 1-worlds, that among people who are in fact trying to foment hate there are disproportionately many arrests/prosecutions/convictions/penalties for people who are also anti-immigration. This may be tricky to assess because if someone hates a particular group we should confidently expect them to oppose immigration by that group. But e.g. racism is often broad, so we might look to see whether people getting into trouble for racist “hate speech” are being hate-speech-y about racial groups that don’t do a lot of immigrating to their country.
Tricky to assess, as I said. But e.g. note that two of the four examples (France and Germany) in that paper about anti-immigration politicians getting prosecuted for hate speech seem to be mostly about antisemitic or pro-Nazi speech rather than anti-immigrant speech. That doesn’t look to me like what we should expect if these laws are actually functioning as tools for punishing people for objecting to immigration.
We could look at the actual laws; that should help to distinguish A from B.
Since it’s so central to your argument, I’d have expected that by now you’d have given some examples of over-broad hate-speech laws; but you haven’t.
I took a look at the UK’s law, as an example (the UK’s because English is my native language; I think the UK is less immigrant-friendly than some mainland European countries so its laws may be less stringent). I think the relevant thing is the Public Order Act 1986, as amended on various later occasions. It has a section on “racial hatred” which seems like the thing we want here. The language it uses repeatedly goes like this: ”… he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby”. (And “racial hatred” is defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”.
On the face of it, this prohibits exactly the things that a law against stirring up racial hatred is supposed to prohibit. On the other hand, it’s not hard to see how it could be abused; anyone could argue that anything is likely to stir up racial hatred having regard for all the circumstances. But that feels like it’s just a fundamental difficulty with any law of this type, which I think is shared with e.g. laws against slander or libel or fraud.
I don’t see any way in which a reasonable person could hold that this law makes it criminal to say “there should be less immigration, because more-homogeneous societies are more stable” or “there should be less immigration, because typically immigrants cost the country more than they bring in economic gains” or “there should be less immigration, because our population density is already too high”. So it definitely isn’t a law that criminalizes objecting to immigration as such.
Arguments along the lines of “immigrants from the US are disproportionately criminal, so we should stop accepting them” or “Chinese people tend to be communists and communism is bad, so we shouldn’t accept immigrants from China” come on a spectrum of incendiariness, depending not only on what the argument actually is but how it’s expressed. I would expect almost all reasonable people to feel that some things along these lines are perfectly legal according to these laws and some aren’t, though I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree on where the boundary is.
On the whole, this seems more B than A to me.
We could look at how actual prosecutions have gone: whether the arguments made in court focus on the tendency of any given statement to stir up hate, or on whether it opposes immigration. We could look for signs that arguments nominally about stirring up hate are really trying to draw juries’ attention to opposition to immigration. That would need us to look at actual transcripts of court sessions, or something. I’m not sure whether those are available, but I know I haven’t seen any and I am betting you haven’t either. (So, in particular, it is not plausible that your position is based on evidence of this kind.)
So, anyway, my assessment of the evidence known to me is that this looks more like a B-world than like an A-world, and more like a 2-world than like a 1-world. If you disagree, what would you expect to see that’s different in a B-world, and what would you expect to see that’s different in a 1-world?
So far the nearest things to a positive argument you’ve offered are:
that the hate-speech laws are broad. I don’t really see how they could be much less broad while still being hate-speech laws; are there any possible worlds in which (1) there are laws against stirring up racial hatred but (2) you would not say that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and if so what do those worlds look like?
that some anti-immigration politicians have been prosecuted for hate speech offences. As I’ve said, on the face of it what they’re being prosecuted for is in fact “stirring up hate” rather than “objecting to immigration”; are there any possible worlds in which anti-immigration politicians are prosecuted for hate speech offences but you wouldn’t view it that way, and if so what do those worlds look like?
That’s like saying “I wanted an example of someone being put in jail for just marijuana possession, and also not being arrested.”
Not everyone objecting against immigration legally commits hate speech (or is claimed by the police/prosecution to commit hate speech), while everyone who is put in jail has been arrested.
It’s something you guys made up in order to stop free speech.
The legal concept of hate speech is made up, of course (just like all legal concepts), but the phenomenon of hate speech is very, very real. (Or maybe you mean that xenophobic hate speech is made up but other kinds of hate speech aren’t, in which case I have to say that specific kind of hate speech is, unfortunately, very real as well.)
To hopefully be a little clearer: Calling something hate speech, and banning it for that reason, is the method by which Europe bans this kind of speech. Saying “it doesn’t count because they’re just banning hate speech” is equivalent to “it doesn’t count because they’re banning it in the way they usually do”.
If the typical method of doing X automatically makes it not count—just because it’s using the typical method—then of course you’ll have trouble finding examples of X.
So hate speech is real (independently of whether someone puts the phrase “hate speech” into law or not), and the typical way of being anti-immigration involves hate speech. I agree. I don’t see what the problem is—it’s up to the anti-immigration activists to find a way to protest that wouldn’t be hate speech. The fact that until now, they usually used hate speech, is purely their problem, and purely their fault.
Alternatively, what you’re saying could also be interpreted as claiming that Europe abuses the phrase hate speech to ban non-hate-speech discourse (which becomes “hate speech” upon the speech being legally banned)… but that’s not true.
The first two are identical. The third is a xenophobic portal and the fourth is, in fact, transphobic (not merely “against transgender politics”).
What I had in mind was speaking up against immigration and also not being hate speech.
That’s like saying “I wanted an example of someone being put in jail for just marijuana possession, and also not being arrested.”
“Hate speech” is the excuse used by Europe to prosecute people for objecting to immigration. It’s something you guys made up in order to stop free speech.
Obviously green_leaf’s claim is not merely that the people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration are being accused of hate speech, but that they are doing things that a reasonable person would consider hate speech rather than merely “objecting to immigration” and that the latter, if done not-hatefully, doesn’t get anyone prosecuted.
The paywalled article at your first and second links proves that some people are objecting to immigration and getting prosecuted for hate speech, but (at least on this side of the paywall) doesn’t make it clear exactly what they’re saying, hence doesn’t let us tell whether they’re just “objecting to immigration” as opposed to, say, calling immigrants vermin or suggesting that they should be thrown into the sea or something.
The third link gives several purported examples but again doesn’t do much to clarify exactly what was said in each case.
Markos Vasilakis: I don’t have the text of his sermon or anything, but the Gatestone Institute article about it links to a Greek-language article that quotes some fragments and (from Google’s translation, whose accuracy I can’t vouch for) it doesn’t seem as if the Gatestone Institute is being very honest when e.g. it says that he merely “express[ed] accurately the percentages of refugees and illegal migrants entering the country”. Also, was he actually prosecuted? The GI article says that the government “asked the district attorney to prosecute” Vasilakis, but that doesn’t seem like it’s the same thing.
British man arrested “for tweeting about a conversation he had with a Muslim woman about terrorism”: he tweeted that he had “confronted” a Muslim woman and demanded that she “explain” the terrorist attacks that had recently happened in Brussels, and followed it up by saying “Britain is for Britain’s” (presumably he meant “Britons”) and “Who cares if I insulted some towelhead?”. Whatever you might think about that, I don’t think “objecting to immigration” is a reasonable description of what he did. Also, “arrested” and “prosecuted” are two very different things.
German police raiding homes over online hate postings: their cited source says: “The operation focused in particular on the German state of Bavaria, where according to police sources, a secret Facebook group had posted messages glamorizing National Socialism, which is illegal in Germany. The police said that this group and others spread xenophobic, anti-Semitic and other radical far-right content.” Again, this is not about “objecting to immigration”.
Dutch police threatening someone over a tweet: their cited source is an article that’s been taken down, but I found something that seems to quote it; it points to a dw.com article that begins: “In rare instances, Dutch police are knocking on social media users’ doors and asking them to be careful writing posts about refugees that could lead to real-life violence and, ultimately, to charges of online incitement.” Certainly seems heavy-handed, but again this is a long long way from prosecuting anyone for objecting to immigratiion. (Also, we don’t know what else this chap tweeted, and it might be relevant.)
US attorney threatening to prosecute people for writing about rape by refugees: another article that’s been taken down, and this time I haven’t found its text elsewhere. But the “remarkable statement” they quote seems pretty unremarkable to me, and despite their language “threatened to prosecute” it doesn’t look to me as if anyone is threatening any specific other person with prosecution. This seems like a nothingburger.
So far, I am seeing zero examples of people “prosecuted for objecting to immigration”. That doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any, of course, but if it’s a thing that actually happens then I am a little surprised you haven’t been able to provide more convincing examples.
If you think it’s possible to object to immigration in Europe in a manner similar to other political views, in a way which can’t easily be painted as ‘hate speech’, I’d like to know some examples of things which can be said, without watering down objections to immigration.
Well, since your earlier claim was that people are being prosecuted “for objecting to immigration” and so far as I can tell none of the people in the FairUS article were actually prosecuted, one answer to that would be “all the things the people you used as examples said”.
But here are a few other concrete examples of people saying anti-immigration things without being prosecuted. The examples I’ve given are of politicians because they tend to be the people who say these things very visibly and get reported on. They’re mostly from the UK because that’s where I am and English is the language I know best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoieBSjNpqA Nigel Farage: “I think that if you have an immigration rate that runs too high, with people who speak different languages, have a totally different culture, and in particular attitudes towards women and their place in society, then I think you’re storing up for yourself an enormous problem which then leads to cities with divided communities.” Complains that after a period with ~30k immigrants per year “Blair opened the doors, the Tories have kept them open, and that’s why this has now become a big political issue”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63466532 Suella Braverman (the UK’s “Home Secretary”): “The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not. Some 40,000 people have arrived on the south coast this year alone, many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs.” She got some criticism for this, unsurprisingly, but equally unsurprisingly she did not face prosecution or official censure by the House of Commons or losing her job near the top of the UK government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNeV_Wo0SNE Richard Tice of the “Reform Party” talking about a “betrayal of Brexit” represented by current levels of immigration to the UK. “They’ve betrayed us on taking back control of lawful immigration, they’ve betrayed us on the legal immigration … outside healthcare we need a pause, we need zero lawful immigration until there’s a catchup”. So he’s calling for zero net immigration other than healthcare workers. He is not in any sort of legal trouble for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZh5oOzOfao French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour calls for forcible “remigration” of 100k illegal immigrants per year. Zemmour has had (repeated) legal trouble for some other things he has said about immigrants; for instance, in 2020-09 he said that Pakistani immigrants to France “have nothing to do here. They are thieves, they are murderers, they are rapists, that’s all they are. They must be sent back and they must not even come”. It seems to me that there’s a pretty clear difference between that and merely “objecting to immigration”.
They don’t seem especially watered-down. But I’m not really sure what you mean by “without watering down objections to immigration”. If what you’re now saying is simply that some things some people want to say about immigration may get them into legal trouble, then I completely agree that that’s true and I’m sure green_leaf does too. I took you to be claiming something more than that. Perhaps you might clarify, e.g. by listing a few specific things people have been prosecuted for that an impartial reasonable person would classify as merely “objections to immigration” and not, e.g., “attempts to stir up anti-immigrant hatred”.
(I am not claiming that attempts to stir up anti-immigrant hatred should necessarily get you prosecuted; not everything bad needs to be illegal, freedom of speech has value, etc. I don’t know what the best tradeoffs are. But I don’t think you should say “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration” if what’s actually happening is that people are prosecuted for promoting anti-immigrant hatred.)
That’s not what I asked for. What I asked for was
And there’s a reason why. “Hate speech” censorship works by having vague, broad, rules that let the governments censor anything they want related to the subject. The fact that the government hasn’t actually chosen to use this unlimited discretion all the time, yet, doesn’t mean that they don’t have it.
Are you claiming that not only were those statements not prosecuted as hate speech, but they can’t be prosecuted as hate speech?
If he wanted to claim that such immigrants are merely disproportionately criminals, thus not using the literally false word “all”, would he be permitted to do that? Would it matter if they actually are disproportionately criminals?
This seems like obvious goalpost-moving.
What you originally said is that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
I think you should provide some examples of people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration. I looked at the things you cited, and not one of them seems to be that.
But now you’re demanding examples of anti-immigration sentiments that can’t possibly be painted as “hate speech”, that couldn’t possibly result in prosecution. That seems like an obviously impossible demand; if I give what I claim is an example, you can just say “nah, they’d totally call that hate speech” or “so it didn’t get prosecuted this time, but it totally could have”.
Do you have examples of people being prosecuted just for objecting to immigration? Or did you claim that that’s happening without having any evidence?
Reminder: what you said was:
I think you should (1) show us some compelling examples where the thing you claimed happens has actually happened, preferably enough and clear enough to show that it’s an actual pattern and an isolated weird one-off; or (2) explain what good reason you have for believing that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration” that doesn’t enable you to provide a compelling list of examples; or (3) admit that you made that claim without actual grounds for thinking it to be true.
As for the weaker claim you are making now: it may well be true that laws around “hate speech” are too vague and too broad. However, I invite you to show me a law valid in (let’s say) the UK, France, or Germany, that makes it a criminal offence for someone to say, for instance, “In my opinion, societies with high immigration rates are less stable, and I therefore think that my country should reduce its immigration rate by a factor of 10″ or “Immigration is expensive and many immigrants cost the country they move to more than any economic benefit they provide, and I therefore think my country should only permit immigration by people with demonstrably marketable skills”.
They are. A subset of them prosecuted is still people being prosecuted. Using “hate speech” as an excuse to prosecute them doesn’t mean it doesn’t count, since “hate speech” is so broad it can apply to anyone.
The original claim is directly related to the “weaker” claim, because if “hate speech” is broad, prosecuting them for it is just an excuse for prosecuting them for something else; they’re really being prosecuted because they don’t like immigration.
But that waters down the previous statement. It no longer claims that immigrants have high crime rates, and uses the vague term “stable”. If you were asked to clarify and you said “by stable I mean low crime, since immigrants are disproportionately criminals”, that’s still hate speech.
(And of course the government could say “he said ‘stable’, but that’s a dogwhistle for ‘high crime’. Illegal hate speech.”)
Suppose I say “these days there’s so much racism that you can get arrested for being black”. You express some slight skepticism about this. I present five examples of black people getting arrested. You point out that they were arrested for assault, tax fraud, libel, and theft. I say “A subset of them arrested is still people being arrested”. You would, I take it, not be impressed.
If you say that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration, you need to show us some examples where that is what they are being prosecuted for. (Though … a first step would be showing us some people being prosecuted at all, for anything, which so far you haven’t bothered to do.)
No, it’s completely separate from the previous statement. The two anti-immigration propositions I mentioned are not intended to be equivalents of any other anti-immigration things that have been discussed elsewhere in the thread. They are examples of ways in which one could “object to immigration” while facing no, zero, none, zilch, zip, nada, risk of prosecution for it. Which (if I am right about the risk being negligible) shows that it isn’t true that objecting to immigration puts you at risk of prosecution. It’s other things that do that.
You made the claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”. You have presented no examples of this. You have in fact presented no examples of people getting prosecuted at all, and it’s not clear that any of the examples you’ve (indirectly) given are of people who were merely “objecting to immigration”. You have given no specific examples of relevant laws. You have given no specific examples of things someone could do that (1) could reasonably be described as merely “objecting to immigration” and (2) would pose any real risk of prosecution.
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It is not my job to give you examples of people who couldn’t be prosecuted. You claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”. Show us.
I’d respond “is assault defined in such a way that it can be used against most black people, and it just isn’t because of government whim? If so, then being arrested for assault could be described as being arrested for being black.”
Of course, you would answer “no, assault isn’t defined that way”. Then I’d say that since assault has a narrow definition, a black person who’s arrested for assault was arrested specifically for assault, not arrested for being black with assault as the excuse.
Needless to say, I’d answer the corresponding question differently for hate speech.
So far you have given zero evidence that “hate speech” is defined in such a way that it can be used against most people who want less immigration. And, I repeat, you’ve shifted the goalposts (from “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration” to “people could be prosecuted for objecting to immigration”) and not acknowledged having done so.
Note: I’m not sure that’s actually the right way to operationalize the distinction you’re trying to make. Suppose there’s some drug, let’s call it cake, that 51% of people use. Then a law against using cake could be used against most black people, but I think it would be wrong to say that it means people can be arrested for being black. (For the avoidance of doubt, I also think it would be a bad law even if cake is very harmful; laws that criminalize very large sections of the population usually are; in that case the laws should target the dealers.)
Those two things are connected.
The fact that the laws are broad enough that they could be used to prosecute almost anyone opposed to immigration implies that, for the subset of people who are prosecuted, “violated the law” is an excuse and “arrested for opposing immigration” is what’s actually going on.
If most people use cake, but aren’t arrested for it, then it’s entirely plausible that the people who get arrested “for using cake” are really being arrested for some other reason with cake as the excuse.
Governments love to do this—create laws that lots of people violate, and selectively prosecute when politically expedient.
Of course they’re connected and no one has suggested otherwise, but they are not the same and you started claiming one and have switched to demanding that I disprove the other.
Do you have any intention of giving any actual examples of the thing you claim is happening?
The examples from before are actual examples.
The vagueness of the laws makes them examples of people arrested for opposing immigration, rather than people arrested for hate speech only.
They are not actual examples.
You said:
You offered three links in support of this. One is behind a paywall and from your own description it doesn’t sound as if you have read the paper any more than I have, so we don’t know what the people in question were actually prosecuted for (other than that officially it was “hate speech”). The second is the same paper as the first. The third is the thing we have already discussed, which so far as I can tell includes no examples of anyone being prosecuted for anything. (And only one example of anyone suffering any consequences for “objecting to immigration”, where (a) the consequence was police warning him that if he stirs up violence he could be legally responsible, and (b) the police allegedly referred to “your tweets” but we were only shown one tweet, so we don’t know whether there was more and if so what, and (c) so far as I can tell we only have that one person’s word for what happened.)
(I do not know for sure that the Greek bishop was never actually prosecuted. But I do know that the article says only that someone in government had asked for him to be prosecuted, and that six years later I cannot find any sign on the internet that any such prosecution ever happened. But I don’t know Greek well enough to e.g. search for possibly relevant Greek-language terms to find local news that might have covered it, so maybe it did happen?)
You have (without acknowledging that it’s a change) shifted from “prosecuted” to “arrested” but it doesn’t appear that any of the people involved in these stories were arrested any more than they were prosecuted.
You keep talking about “the vagueness of the laws” but this is another thing you have been curiously unwilling to give examples of. Show us some actual examples of hate-speech laws that could be used to punish people for objecting to immigration.
It seems as if you feel that
you don’t need to give examples of people actually being punished for objecting to immigration, because as we all know the laws are so vague that all there will ever be is examples of people being punished for hate speech when all they were really doing was objecting to immigration
you don’t need to give examples of hate-speech laws that permit people to be punished merely for objecting to immigration, because as we all know it’s happening all the time, so no need to waste our time looking at the details of the laws
the net result of which is that you are making claims that the thing is happening without feeling any need for actual evidence. Maybe I’m wrong and you do have evidence. But in that case it seems strange that you haven’t shown any of it.
That’s the whole point fo having a vague law—so you can selectively prosecute with plausible deniability.
So show us the vague laws, and how they’re vague, and what scope they give for that sort of selective prosecution. And show us some specific cases where people have been prosecuted for doing things that clearly shouldn’t be illegal and that got them in trouble only because the laws are too vague.
None of which you’ve done, even though it seems like minimal epistemic hygiene around this mindkilling stuff, and even though I’ve politely asked for examples several times.
Less and less politely, I admit, because it’s becoming harder and harder to believe that you’re actually making any sort of honest effort to distinguish truth from untruth on this topic. Can’t you see how your mode of argumentation here insulates your position from all actual contact with empirical observation? You’ve apparently found a way of believing that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration” that isn’t actually causally linked to whether or not people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration.
It’s not hard to falsify empirically at all. Take a broad set of anti-immigration arguments that people actually use, and see whether the laws can be twisted to cover them. If they can’t, they’re not vague (in a relevant way).
I suspect the real answer is that you think that most anti-immigration arguments are hate speech anyway, so using the laws to cover them isn’t twisting them. What exactly do you think is hate speech?
For instance, if the example about criminals was modified so he just said that too many immigrants are criminals, would that be hate speech? What if he mentioned specific crimes, or said that the immigrants are poorly educated, or even low IQ? What if he said that immigrants should be kept out based on his personal bad experiences with them, without being able to prove that those experiences are representative?
And does being true matter for whether something is hate speech?
I don’t think falsification is nearly as straightforward as you’re trying to argue. I can already see how it would go.
“Here’s an argument. I don’t think it could reasonably be called hate speech according to typical hate speech laws.” “Of course it could! Those laws are so vague, anything can count as hate speech.”
And, I repeat for what seems like the dozenth time but probably isn’t actually more than the sixth, you made a specific claim which you have so far neither given any evidence at all for nor retracted, namely that people are being prosecuted for objecting to immigration. If they are being prosecuted for attempting to stir up hatred of immigrants, maybe that’s a good thing or maybe it’s a terrible thing, but it is not the same thing as being prosecuted for objecting to immigration. And even if you claim that the laws are drafted in a way that could in principle have someone going to prison who hasn’t actually attempted to stir up hatred, I think we need to ask who is actually getting prosecuted, and who is actually getting convicted, under these laws, and so far as I can tell it is generally people that any reasonable person would agree were trying to stir up hatred.
I haven’t looked carefully into this. I am willing to be corrected. By actual evidence.
Now, on to your latest attempt at distraction, which asks: am I arguing against you only because actually I think that objecting to immigration is generally hate speech?
I do not think that most anti-immigration arguments are hate speech. I do think some anti-immigration arguments as actually made can reasonably be called hate speech; I do think some opponents of immigration are in fact motivated by something akin to hate, and some people arguing against immigration are doing so in a fashion that they intend to stir up hatred against immigrants. But certainly not all.
I gave, above, four examples of European politicians saying very negative things about immigration for which they have not been prosecuted and are not likely to be. They were not cherry-picked as being particularly inoffensive or anything like that. I do not think any of the specific things they said and were not prosecuted for are things that they should have been prosecuted for. (By which I mean 1. I don’t think existing hate-speech laws make the things they said criminal, and 2. I would prefer not to have hate-speech laws that make the things they said criminal.) All those people have said other things about immigration on other occasions [citation needed] and for all I know some of those other things may have been worse; I am not claiming that they haven’t said other things that deserve legal sanction.
For each of the five more specific things you ask about, my answer would need to be a fairly lengthy paragraph saying “well, if they said X in way Y then I’d think Z, but …”. I know this because I originally wrote those paragraphs and decided that my comment was too long even without them. But the general answer to all of them is: it depends; many of the things you describe are things that I think are usually said with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred, and I don’t know that I approve of that being illegal but it definitely isn’t just a matter of “objecting to immigration”, but it’s surely possible to say them in a way that doesn’t have that intention and isn’t likely to have that effect. And most of them, most of the time, are bad arguments against immigration, but making bad arguments should probably not be criminal.
Saying “haven’t given evidence” over and over again doesn’t make it true. I gave evidence; you just didn’t like it. The argument about the vague laws determines whether the evidence is good, and you haven’t settled that yet. You can’t say I haven’t provided evidence when we’re still arguing something that determines whether the evidence counts.
I would agree that the law isn’t vaguer than that standard of hate speech, but that’s just because they’re equally terrible and equally prone to abuse.
“Banning hate speech” according to your standards—that is, making something illegal because it’s said “with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred”—grants unbridled discretion to the law. Anyone opposing immigration could be found guilty under that standard. It’s an example of the kind of vagueness I was talking about. (That’s why your example of “less stable” doesn’t work—if the law claimed that the word “stable” was trying to insinuate something that foments hatred, you have no defense.)
The claim you originally made, once again:
Regardless of the merits of your arguments about how we should decide what someone has really been prosecuted for, it seems obvious that evidence for this would have to be evidence of people actually being prosecuted for something. Could you please tell me, let’s say, two people you have shown us were prosecuted for something at any point in this discussion?
It seems to me that however vague the laws about “hate speech” are—and I remind you that this is another thing for which you have given no actual evidence: not one instance of a specific law that is vague in a specific way and permits some specific sort of abuse—you cannot reasonably claim to have supported your original claim without showing us someone prosecuted for something.
I am not claiming that hate-speech laws—either any specific ones that actually exist, or the broad concept—are good laws. I am only pointing out that if the actual situation is that “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration in ways designed to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants” then it is not correct to describe that situation as “people are prosecuted for objecting to immigration”.
(For clarity: I was not claiming that “with the intention of fomenting resentment and hatred” is language suitable for writing into law. It might not be, even if one wanted to criminalize fomenting resentment and hatred. Vagueness in my description of an action does not equate to vagueness in the actual laws that apply to such actions. Maybe the actual laws are in fact too vague, but let’s see some examples.)
You keep making claims about what hate-speech laws permit. I doubt those claims. (I repeat: that does not mean that I endorse those laws. They might be bad laws. But I am not convinced that you are describing their consequences accurately.) Could you please give some examples of particular countries’ hate-speech laws, and of things that don’t go beyond “objecting to immigration” that they criminalize?
(But, I reiterate: no matter what is in those laws, nothing you can say about just the laws can be justification for your claim that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, because you have not shown any examples of people who were prosecuted for anything.)
Come on. One of the links’ titles is “Prosecuted, yet popular? Hate speech prosecution of anti-immigration politicians in the news and electoral support”.
I admit that the summary (which is all I can read, since it’s in a paywall) doesn’t contain names, but it’s pretty obvious that such people exist.
Nope. It makes it obvious that some people are anti-immigration and have been prosecuted for hate speech. Very likely the things they were prosecuted for aren’t independent of their opposition to immigration, but we don’t know anything about what those things were.
Oooh. You can get the actual paper (or maybe it’s an earlier pre-publication version of it) here. Let’s take a look at the first few concrete examples in it, assuming there turn out to be some.
This looks like it might be informative—it seems as if we have two cases near the borderline between what gets actual legal penalties and what doesn’t. (For the avoidance of doubt: I appreciate that merely getting prosecuted is unpleasant, time-consuming, potentially expensive, etc. I think there are a few key thresholds: what do you have to do to get prosecuted, what do you have to do to get convicted, and what do you have to do to get a substantial sentence imposed?)
2009-2011. I think this document quotes the things he said that got him in trouble. (Though not enough trouble for an actual hate-speech conviction.) A few I-hope-representative samples: “Islam wants to control, subdue and is out for the destruction of our Western civilization.” “The demographic composition of the population is the biggest problem of the Netherlands. [...] We must stop the tsunami of the Islamisation.” “The core of the problem is the fascist Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as laid down in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Quran.” “One out of five Moroccan youngsters is registered with the police as a suspect.” “Former chief of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that the Third World War has already started. I am not putting these words in my mouth, but it is correct though.” “I have had enough of the Islam in the Netherlands: no more Muslim immigrants. I have had enough of the adoration of Allah and Mohammeed in the Netherlands: no more mosques. I have had enough of the Quran in the Netherlands: prohibit this fascist book.”
I am on the whole glad that Wilders was not convicted of any crime for saying these things. But I think it is clear that, even though immigration is one thing he mentioned, this was not about “opposition to immigration”, it was about going allegedly-too-far in criticizing Islam and Muslims.
2014-2016. (Note: his conviction in 2016, for which no penalty was imposed, was overturned in part in 2020.) In this case I haven’t found actual documents. News articles mention a rally at which he asked the crowd whether they want “fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands”, the crowd chanted “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”, and Wilders said “we’re going to arrange that”. It seems like the rest of what he said is relevant, but no one seems to be quoting that or providing the text of the actual charges he faced.
The specific thing alleged in the news articles doesn’t sound to me like something one should face legal penalties for, but again it seems like this isn’t just about “objecting to immigration”. If he’s going to make there be fewer Moroccans then it sounds like, in the best case, he’s proposing to start deporting them. And, going out on a limb, I’m going to guess that the complaints were about whatever he said leading up to his question about “fewer or more Moroccans” as well as the question itself and its aftermath, and that that probably wasn’t just “objecting to immigration”. But I’ve found it frustratingly difficult to determine exactly what he was accused of doing in this case.
I think this is describing one prosecution that went on for 4 years, not two separate incidents. I haven’t found documents from the trial itself, but Feret went to the European Court of Human Rights complaining that his right to freedom of expression had been violated, and their judgement has some useful information. And there’s a little bit of information in this BBC News article. The documents at issue here were election pamphlets, and e.g. one of them featured a cartoon showing “the brown plague” and “the black international” (represented by a couple of Africans with bones through their noses). Again, whatever you might think of the merits of the laws involved, this case was not about “objecting to immigration” and I don’t think one can reasonably deny that Féret, or more precisely his party, was trying to incite hatred.
“Numerous times” isn’t very helpful. Most of what I found in a web search for “Jean-Marie Le Pen prosecuted” was about two things: calling the Nazis’ gas chambers “a detail of history”, and saying that the Nazi occupation of France wasn’t particularly inhumane. Neither of these is particularly about “objecting to immigration”.
It’s 3:30am and this is taking a lot of time, so rather than trying to research this one I’ll just remark that this also doesn’t sound like it’s about “objecting to immigration”, it’s about defending the Nazis. (I don’t know whether what he said about black people was immigration-related, though.)
I’m going to leave it there; as already mentioned it’s late and this is taking a while. But my main takeaway so far is that this doesn’t look to me like a lot of cases of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration; some of the cases don’t seem to have had much to do with immigration at all, and even where the immigration link is clear the complaint was (in reality, not merely as a fiction where what’s actually just not liking immigration is portrayed as hate) about attempts to stir up large-scale hate against immigrant groups.
Again, it may well be that laws against stirring up hatred against racial / national / religious groups are bad laws. That isn’t what I’m disputing. What I’m disputing is that there’s any truth to speak of in your original claim, that objecting to immigration exposes one to any real risk of legal consequences. That’s just not what’s going on in any of these cases.
You are shifting between objections.
does not leave room for “it doesn’t count because they’re prosecuted for the wrong thing”.
At the point when I said “Regardless of the merits …” the nearest you had come to providing actual examples of prosecutions was gesturing vaguely towards an article neither of us had read, the information about which we had gave us no information about any prosecutions. I concede that in some sense this constituted evidence for the proposition “some people have been prosecuted for something”, but it did not tell us anything of the form “someone was prosecuted for X” where X could credibly be “objecting to immigration”.
Then I found the actual paper (note: I did, you didn’t; all of the actual intellectual work in this discussion is being done by me) and now the situation is no longer “we don’t have any examples of anyone prosecuted for anything”.
It turns out that this doesn’t actually help your case, since the examples in the paper don’t appear to include anyone who can credibly be described as having been prosecuted for objecting to immigration. But it does mean that my previous simpler objection (no examples of prosecutions provided, nothing else to say) needed to be replaced by something more complicated (now we have some examples of prosecutions, so let’s see what they are).
Yes, I change what objections I’m making when the argument I’m addressing changes. In this case it changed because I discovered I was able to perform a part of your job that you hadn’t bothered to do, namely finding some concrete examples.
So. Got any specific examples of people prosecuted for objecting to immigration, yet? Or any specific examples of hate-speech laws for which you can explain how they would criminalize objecting to immigration, as opposed to attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants?
(For the sake of explicitness: if you wish to scale your claim back to ”… now you get people prosecuted for attempting to foment hatred and resentment against immigrants”, I will readily agree that that happens, but not that there’s no real difference between forbidding that and forbidding objecting to immigration. But I think you are still attempting to claim that there are prosecutions for things that a reasonable person would describe only as “objecting to immigration”, and that these happen because hate-speech laws are broad enough to cover some such things. This could be true! But you haven’t given any examples, and the things you have presented as examples all seem to be non-examples. In these circumstances a reasonable person updates away from the claim you’re declining to give examples of.)
The “only” is about the reach of the law, not the person’s actions.
It’s like having a law that criminalizes breathing, and the law is being used to prosecute a thief. Even though the person’s actions were not only breathing, I’d still call that “prosecution for breathing”.
The law in this case criminalizes stirring up hate (at least, that is what “hate speech” laws generally do, and you have not seen fit to clarify what specific laws you have in mind).
Your analogy would be valid if there were laws against objecting to immigration and they were being used to prosecute someone who is stirring up hatred. That is not the case.
Rather, it’s as if there were a law against theft, and they were used to prosecute people who were breathing, and you said “look, people are getting prosecuted for breathing”. If the anti-theft laws were broadly enough drafted, or being applied in an unprincipled enough way, you might have a case, but the onus would very much be on you to show that that was what was happening, because prima facie there’s a law against theft and it’s being used to prosecute a thief. (In this case: prima facie there are laws against stirring up hatred and they’re being used to prosecute people who are stirring up hatred.)
I was initially going to reply to Jiro’s last comment to me, but you grasped the nettle so firmly that I think I’d be just superfluous here, so I just wanted to say I almost completely agree with everything you write and that it’s awesome you put in so much effort.
Thank you for the kind words!
It seems that Jiro has lost interest, though.
As I keep pointing out, who counts as being prosecuted for immigration depends on whether prosecuting someone selectively under a broad law, while officially calling it something else, counts as prosecuting them for immigration. We haven’t settled that yet, and you shouldn’t be acting as though we’ve settled that.
If I say “there are people being prosecuted for being black”, and present as evidence a bunch of black people prosecuted for theft, fraud, murder, etc., and claim that this justifies my claim because the laws against theft, fraud, murder, etc., are too broad, then it is my responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s race rather than their actual behaviour.
If you say “there are people being prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and present as evidence a bunch of anti-immigration politicians prosecuted for hate speech, and claim that this justifies your claim because the laws against hate speech are too broad, then it is your responsibility to show how broad the laws are, and how policing and prosecution are effectively looking at people’s opinions on immigration rather than the incendiariness of their rhetoric.
But you aren’t doing any of the work required to justify your (prima facie implausible) claim. You’re behaving as if everyone’s default assumption should be that (1) the hate speech laws are so broad that they make basically everyone who objects to immigration a criminal, and that (2) what on the face of it are prosecutions for hate speech are really motivated by wanting to punish everyone who objects to immigration. I do not think either of those is a reasonable default assumption. I think both are implausible, and I think that if you want us to believe them you should give some evidence for them.
However, I’m kinda losing hope of your ever producing any evidence for any of the claims you make, so I guess I’ll have to do your job again.
Consider four possible worlds.
In world A1, hate-speech laws are extremely broad and criminalize a lot of things that don’t really involve stirring up hate and resentment and whatnot. This fact is exploited by the law-enforcement system to persecute people who object to immigration, so that such people are likely to get arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and punished.
In world A2, the hate-speech laws are just as broad as in world A, but there is no particular attempt to persecute people who object to immigration. What gets you prosecuted under hate-speech laws is behaving in ways that seem to be stirring up hatred and resentment; because the laws are very broad, some people get in trouble despite not intended to stir up hate and/or not actually succeeding in doing so, but the distinguishing feature of people who get in trouble is something like “incendiary rhetoric” or “throwing broad sweeping insults at large groups of people” rather than “objecting to immigration”.
In world B1, the laws are not so broad, but as in world A1 the law-enforcement system is keen to persecute people who object to immigration. So those people are extra-likely to get arrested and prosecuted. Most of them will then be acquitted because the laws don’t really criminalize what they’ve done, but sometimes the persecution is sufficient to get the laws misapplied too and they get convicted.
In world B2, the laws are not so broad and there is no attempt at persecution. The people who get in trouble under hate-speech laws are pretty much the people who are, or would seem to a reasonable person to be, trying to stir up hate and resentment. No system is perfect and some people may get in more or less trouble than the lawmakers intended, but on the whole what happens is that serious efforts to stir up hate get you into trouble and (as far as these laws are concerned) other things don’t.
(So A/B is about breadth of laws and 1⁄2 is about exploitation of the laws to try to persecute people who object to immigration.)
Being good Bayesians, let’s now ask how plausible these worlds are a priori and what sort of evidence we might expect to see to distinguish them.
Prior expectations on A/B: it’s common for laws to be somewhat too broad, but usually not absurdly so; “hate speech” is naturally a thing with fuzzy edges; I would expect the laws to leave substantial room for discretion (so that e.g. abuse would certainly be possible) but to be drafted in such a way that most things that aren’t actually attempts at stirring up hate and resentment would not seem to a reasonable person to be forbidden by the laws. Depending on your overall level of cynicism about how laws are made, you might reasonably have different priors on this one.
Prior expectations on 1/2: the bulk of any such persecution would have to be done by police, public prosecutors, and judges. It looks to me as if these are all groups whose tendencies run much more anti-immigrant than pro-immigrant. So I would be a little more surprised by 1 than by 2.
On either of these, you might disagree (and in fact I bet you do), but what seems clear to me is that there isn’t any sort of overwhelming prior reason to anticipate A over B or 1 over 2.
What about evidence?
The clearest evidence for A and 1 would be that people who object to immigration in ways that aren’t particularly hate-fomenting suffer actual arrests, prosecutions, convictions and penalties which is why I keep asking you to provide some examples of these. In the A-worlds we should expect actual convictions. In B1 we should expect lots of arrests and some prosecutions but fewer convictions and penalties.
From the things I’ve looked at so far, it does not seem that this happens. E.g., I gave a number of examples of politicians being vigorously anti-immigration and not getting into any sort of legal trouble for it, and the examples you have gestured towards don’t seem to include any where people have got into legal trouble for clearly-not-hate-fomenting objections to immigration.
We might also see, especially in the 1-worlds, that among people who are in fact trying to foment hate there are disproportionately many arrests/prosecutions/convictions/penalties for people who are also anti-immigration. This may be tricky to assess because if someone hates a particular group we should confidently expect them to oppose immigration by that group. But e.g. racism is often broad, so we might look to see whether people getting into trouble for racist “hate speech” are being hate-speech-y about racial groups that don’t do a lot of immigrating to their country.
Tricky to assess, as I said. But e.g. note that two of the four examples (France and Germany) in that paper about anti-immigration politicians getting prosecuted for hate speech seem to be mostly about antisemitic or pro-Nazi speech rather than anti-immigrant speech. That doesn’t look to me like what we should expect if these laws are actually functioning as tools for punishing people for objecting to immigration.
We could look at the actual laws; that should help to distinguish A from B.
Since it’s so central to your argument, I’d have expected that by now you’d have given some examples of over-broad hate-speech laws; but you haven’t.
I took a look at the UK’s law, as an example (the UK’s because English is my native language; I think the UK is less immigrant-friendly than some mainland European countries so its laws may be less stringent). I think the relevant thing is the Public Order Act 1986, as amended on various later occasions. It has a section on “racial hatred” which seems like the thing we want here. The language it uses repeatedly goes like this: ”… he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby”. (And “racial hatred” is defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”.
On the face of it, this prohibits exactly the things that a law against stirring up racial hatred is supposed to prohibit. On the other hand, it’s not hard to see how it could be abused; anyone could argue that anything is likely to stir up racial hatred having regard for all the circumstances. But that feels like it’s just a fundamental difficulty with any law of this type, which I think is shared with e.g. laws against slander or libel or fraud.
I don’t see any way in which a reasonable person could hold that this law makes it criminal to say “there should be less immigration, because more-homogeneous societies are more stable” or “there should be less immigration, because typically immigrants cost the country more than they bring in economic gains” or “there should be less immigration, because our population density is already too high”. So it definitely isn’t a law that criminalizes objecting to immigration as such.
Arguments along the lines of “immigrants from the US are disproportionately criminal, so we should stop accepting them” or “Chinese people tend to be communists and communism is bad, so we shouldn’t accept immigrants from China” come on a spectrum of incendiariness, depending not only on what the argument actually is but how it’s expressed. I would expect almost all reasonable people to feel that some things along these lines are perfectly legal according to these laws and some aren’t, though I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree on where the boundary is.
On the whole, this seems more B than A to me.
We could look at how actual prosecutions have gone: whether the arguments made in court focus on the tendency of any given statement to stir up hate, or on whether it opposes immigration. We could look for signs that arguments nominally about stirring up hate are really trying to draw juries’ attention to opposition to immigration. That would need us to look at actual transcripts of court sessions, or something. I’m not sure whether those are available, but I know I haven’t seen any and I am betting you haven’t either. (So, in particular, it is not plausible that your position is based on evidence of this kind.)
So, anyway, my assessment of the evidence known to me is that this looks more like a B-world than like an A-world, and more like a 2-world than like a 1-world. If you disagree, what would you expect to see that’s different in a B-world, and what would you expect to see that’s different in a 1-world?
So far the nearest things to a positive argument you’ve offered are:
that the hate-speech laws are broad. I don’t really see how they could be much less broad while still being hate-speech laws; are there any possible worlds in which (1) there are laws against stirring up racial hatred but (2) you would not say that “you get people prosecuted for objecting to immigration”, and if so what do those worlds look like?
that some anti-immigration politicians have been prosecuted for hate speech offences. As I’ve said, on the face of it what they’re being prosecuted for is in fact “stirring up hate” rather than “objecting to immigration”; are there any possible worlds in which anti-immigration politicians are prosecuted for hate speech offences but you wouldn’t view it that way, and if so what do those worlds look like?
Not everyone objecting against immigration legally commits hate speech (or is claimed by the police/prosecution to commit hate speech), while everyone who is put in jail has been arrested.
The legal concept of hate speech is made up, of course (just like all legal concepts), but the phenomenon of hate speech is very, very real. (Or maybe you mean that xenophobic hate speech is made up but other kinds of hate speech aren’t, in which case I have to say that specific kind of hate speech is, unfortunately, very real as well.)
To hopefully be a little clearer: Calling something hate speech, and banning it for that reason, is the method by which Europe bans this kind of speech. Saying “it doesn’t count because they’re just banning hate speech” is equivalent to “it doesn’t count because they’re banning it in the way they usually do”.
If the typical method of doing X automatically makes it not count—just because it’s using the typical method—then of course you’ll have trouble finding examples of X.
So hate speech is real (independently of whether someone puts the phrase “hate speech” into law or not), and the typical way of being anti-immigration involves hate speech. I agree. I don’t see what the problem is—it’s up to the anti-immigration activists to find a way to protest that wouldn’t be hate speech. The fact that until now, they usually used hate speech, is purely their problem, and purely their fault.
Alternatively, what you’re saying could also be interpreted as claiming that Europe abuses the phrase hate speech to ban non-hate-speech discourse (which becomes “hate speech” upon the speech being legally banned)… but that’s not true.
The typical way of being anti-immigration “involves hate speech” because “hate speech” is so broadly defined that it’s just about impossible not to.
European governments get to define hate speech, so activists can’t find such a way, if the governments don’t want them to have one.