What is wrong with the argument that people simply prefer to live with others like them? I mean, why don’t standard preference satisfaction arguments win out here?
Well, you can still move wherever you want. Most of your fellow Americans though are disgusted by white nationalism, so you're going to have to infringe on all of their rights if you want to shape the demographics of the country in your preferred direction.
The list of places to move tends to shrink. Or as Obama put it to a reporter from the Atlantic: "every year, the situation improves."
Revealed preferences trump survey responses. The idea that the only alternative to extinction is to violently expel everyone of all other groups is a false dichotomy.
As for infringing on people's rights: what was the majority view in America in 1965 on the "ethnic mix of the country being upset" and on whites becoming a distinct minority? That wasn't a popular opinion, but policymakers did it anyway. What was the popular opinion in Britain on reducing themselves to a minority one generation ago? Again, probably not a mainstream view but policymakers just went ahead and did it. Brexit voters expected a reduction in immigration but nope, we're just going to keep doing it.
Can conservative whites reverse this? Probably not, but the idea that profound social and cultural changes are negligible next to hard metrics like GDP and IQ is soulless and misguided.
"As for infringing on people's rights: what was the majority view in America in 1965 on the "ethnic mix of the country being upset" and on whites becoming a distinct minority? That wasn't a popular opinion, but policymakers did it anyway. " This is silly. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 polled very well, passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities, and was signed by a then-popular president. No one, including the people who passed it, foresaw the demographic changes that would follow.
By the 1990s, it was clear that the United States would become majority-minority, and Bill Clinton was saying how great it was. I don't recall anyone of consequence disagreeing. The funny thing is, immigration and immigrants were pretty unpopular in the 1990s, but by 2015 immigrants had become much more popular, even though demographic change was completely impossible to miss by then. From the same link:
"In the 1990s, by wide margins, Americans saw immigrants as burdens on society rather than as strengthening the country through their hard work. Also, many thought that the growing number of newcomers would threaten traditional American values and customs."
"But slowly, opinions have begun to change over the course of the past two decades. By 2014, a healthy 57% majority had come to the opposite point of view, saying that immigrants strengthened the country through their hard work; and just 35% now say that the increasing number of immigrants is threatening American values. (As of January 2019, 62% say immigrants strengthen the country, while 28% say they burden the country by taking jobs, housing and health care.)"
As you said, it polled well because nobody expected this to happen. And public opinion about immigration policy tends to improve as you continue to admit immigrants and poll them about it.
If you are going to argue that a majority of whites always approved of becoming a small minority from the moment it became a logical and foreseeable outcome, that is highly dubious--but there is no sense in arguing about it, since the point is that governments shove foreseeable things down the population's throats against popular opinion all the time. Most Brits have wanted less immigration for a while, but it has no effect on policy. The idea that you'd be "violating people's rights" to agitate against top-down changes is patently ridiculous. People have no idea what's going on. Their opinions start to change quite a bit once you give them slightly more information (Vox: "telling people the immigration numbers makes them racist") or expose them to the consequences of the policies.
Sure, most Americans are disgusted by white nationalism, quite rightly. But they're not disgusted by border controls, they seem keen on them. And in terms of revealed preference, people with more liberal attitudes to diversity move away from diverse areas at the same rate as people with less liberal attitudes. (That's according to Eric Kaufmann's research.)
The argument that you can move wherever you want is not a strong one! It's well known among economists that moving has externalities, and hence that Tiebout-style arguments ("just vote with your feet") fail in general. (See e.g. Bewley's 1981 paper "A critique of Tiebout's theory...")
You can make a more general argument that freedom to move within a country is widely accepted. Yes it is, but only in the context of strict restrictions at national borders.
Lastly, I didn't say anything about my personal preferences. I'm not even American!
You are declaring peoples' preference to live among and near people like themselves to be an overriding preference. But all evidence (and Bryan Caplan) suggests that this is a relatively trivial preference. The immigrants themselves clearly gain by moving, likes/dislikes aside (and the immigrants themselves may not necessarily like the people amidst whom they are moving). The dislike that the hosts may feel initially because of stupid and irrational reasons (or propaganda in the regular or social media) may dissipate very soon after real interactions with the immigrants. Their kids may not even share that antipathy in the first place.
As Richard pointed out literally in his opening paragraph, some people dislike immigration just because they are tribal. Likes and dislikes are a tribal, and not a rational, preference. People with influence in public policy should consistency ignore these preferences while paying lip service to them just to keep the peace. Things will smoothen out over time.
I've been hitting google scholar for something like "revealed preferences for diversity" - have you got any relevant evidence?
I don't agree with your second paragraph. At least, that's not how economists usually think. A preference is a preference is a preference. Liking grapes, or having a low discount rate, is not more rational than the opposite. Why should preferences over fellow citizens be different? Maybe there are good theories of what preferences ought to count (Bob Goodin talks about "laundering preferences"). But if so you've got to clarify that theory. Otherwise it becomes too easy to say "oh, the preferences I agree with are the rational ones".
In particular, it's not legitimate to say "there's no evidence that immigration reduces wages, so being against immigration is irrational". That's like saying "chocolate is bad for you, so eating chocolate is irrational." Maybe I understand the health risks and still just like the taste!
it wasnt really a widespread population choice to have mass migration from 60s onwards. That was an elite inflicted policy on the 90% white america, and for decades almost without change gallup polls showed most americans wanted FEWER migrants. The people passign the mass mgiration in 60s lied and said it wouldnt affect demographics, etc.
So youre whole argument is nonsense. This change in the mindset of population was one that came top down from people with a very different view of what america should be (and became). So similarly, if we have a different view of hwat america should or could be then top down decisions that push towards that are perfectly reasonable, and the argument should be around what that vision is: continued Brazilfication, or perhaps holding the line and *gack* through policy measures pushing for increasing the white % of the population de facto.
since say the 1960s there are 3 (at least) policies that the elites pursue regardless of the voters, that is to say, that are beyond the reach of democratic accountability: 1) endless war; 2) affirmative action (social engineering via race); and 3: massive immigration.
The ruling elites of both parties consider these sacred charges and nothing short of a violent overthrow of our govt can change this.
And much of America's wealth is based on centuries of being largely homogenous. Also, the idea that a constantly declining national IQ will not impact wealth is unworthy of any serious consideration. But Richard throws out some ideas I like.
"simply prefer to live with others like them" = "white nationalism"
i see what you did there!
and what do you call it when the Japanese prefer to keep their country Japanese? When people in Harlem don't want whites colonizing their neighborhood? When gay people prefer to live in and maintain their own enclaves?
To live among your own is a natural, universal preference, not bigotry or Nazism.
Yeah they're disgusted by it thanks to Social leftists and fiscal conservatives like you who make sure people are this way because it benefits the social left politically and it benefits the fiscal conservatives economically.
Infringe on who's rights? The founding fathers set up a naturalization system that only allowed white people to become citizens. I think if anything you're infringing on their rights of having a sovereign society? Why should they be obligated to allow in new people into their society?
Diverse neighbourhoods aren’t so bad as long as “diverse” doesn’t just mean majority black. Multiple races are OK, it means the neighbourhood is generally attractive, not just popular because rents are cheap and crime isn’t punished.
I can only speak on personal anecdotes, but I've personally worked with several immigrants (mostly illegal) from Mexico. They are some of the most entrepreneurial people I've met, certainly some of the hardest working, and tend to praise America as a place to prosper. The two biggest complaints I've heard are about prices and "welfare for the lazy". They're fairly conservative, but this is also TX.
Sailer has explicitly argued against white nationalism in his debate with Jared Taylor, with one of his arguments being that white people dislike white nationalism. But immigration restrictionism has appeal even in countries with majority non-white electorates.
I used to read Sailer a lot (until the Trump election) but haven't read him much lately. Honestly, I found little daylight between his opinions and ideology and "white nationalism". Just that he didn't want to label it white nationalism because he was trying to be politically correct and actually create an impact (which he did; I think Trump's election win was at least partially seeded on Sailer's blog).
"Citizenism" applies to any country, regardless of race. People of all races think their governments should prioritize them over non-citizens, which is why Trump could get votes from people who aren't white. African-Americans are Americans, which to Sailer means we have an obligation toward them that we don't have to Africans. He has said that both AAs & NAs really were screwed over by the US in the past, so it makes sense to limit affirmative action to them and not apply it to any immigrants (currently a lot of the slots go to descendants of African/Caribbean immigrants).
Why white nationalism and not black nationalism or any other? Have you assumed the race of the questioner? If they are black would it change your answer? Why do people move to form communities with people like themselves in whatever country? You seem to be focusing on one "race" and possibly ignoring similar impulses in others.
What does it mean to live with people like you? Do you mean racially? Or having the same values? Would you rather live with a White liberal that talks about "White fragility" and "smashing capitalism", versus a conservative immigrant that loves America?
I feel like white liberals are a group that would be amazing if they just had diversity taken away from them. In a homogeneous society, that white liberal wouldn't even know the concept of white fragility, and would probably be pro-capitalism because there would be no black people for capitalism "to fail." They are naturally inclined to believe all the right things because they're smart and naturally open to new ideas. The source of white liberal craziness is purely the existence of other nonwhite groups in their presence (specifically black people) that warps their thinking on everything else.
So I'm going to go with white liberal here, under the assumption that it's in an all-white world.
"In a homogeneous society, that white liberal wouldn't even know the concept of white fragility, and would probably be pro-capitalism because there would be no black people for capitalism 'to fail.' "
And yet...the Nordic countries. Some of the most white and homogenous on earth, and they gave us extreme government intervention in the economy, the cradle-to-grave welfare state, universally-implemented feminist and queer pedagogies, some of the most obnoxious "green" movements, and *still* managed to find downtrodden brown people to simp over by bringing in large numbers of refugees in the 2010s (though they show signs of realizing their mistake at this point).
Empirically, your feelings have been shown to be, if not necessarily universally incorrect, then at least very capable of being very mistaken.
Their economic system worked great though intill they imported all these nonwhites. It was not only one of the safest regions in the world but also the happiest with the highest standard of living. Not to mention doing very well in education.
The antiwhite education that all western countries receive after ww2 is what lead to them supporting the mass importation of people. However the system of Scandinavia was always supposed to be a very soft version of national socialism. Mixed economy with homogeneous population. However with a socially left push boiling below the surface. That eventually took over unfortunately. I don't think i need to tell you the group of people who controlled funded and took part in the Frankfurt school. That's where all this antiwhite so called education came from
Sorry, I should have been more clear: I'm talking about a world in which Africans were never brought over as slaves to the Americas. The Nordic countries are culturally colonies of the US, so whatever starts here makes its way over there.
I think if race-based civil rights never caught on, we wouldn't have trans/queer movements like we have; they're predicated on the success of the race-based ones. Without black people in America, welfare wouldn't have become nearly as large as it has, as it was intended largely as a form of reparations, etc.
>I feel like white liberals are a group that would be amazing if they just had diversity taken away from them.
I don't think you know white liberals very well then. I'm almost thankful that they have supposed "racism" to complain about, if not for that, they could easily come up with a much more dangerous cause to put all their weight behind.
Any of the above, right? Government exists to maximize the utility of the population. If the population is homophilic, and there's a public goods aspect which means markets don't solve it, then the government should step in to limit immigration. Public economics 101.
I like this way of looking at things because it steps back a bit from what seems like a false dichotomy: "being anti-immigration is either about economic threat from lower wages, or it's irrational xenophobia".
It's perfectly obvious that at the group level racial differences express themselves in the sorts of societies that are built. African countries are radically different from east Asian countries and there would be no possibility of either converting to live like the other.
At a low level diversity works quite and probably generates wealth. But it is quickly the law of diminishing returns.
I was responding to the wording of the comment, I don’t necessarily agree with it. That said, most people in the US live among racially similar people...and increasingly politically similar people.
The reality is that most people in the US do live with people like them. The fact that maybe 5, 8, 10 million (or however many) illegal immigrants live in a country of 330 million people doesn’t really change the demographics of most neighborhoods.
I laughed out loud when I saw 10 million as the *high* range of his post. Boomers, man. It'll come for us all one day but when peoples' mental model freezes like this it's a sight to behold. It's like an elderly grandma giving a kid a nickel for candy, seeing some of the figures these people believe.
People who argue for the second-order effects of immigration (like a less populist electorate or whatever) can at least point to a benefit that may outweigh the cost of replacing the population, but that may (or may not!) be scant consolation to those dispossessed.
It's weird because everyone can kind of understand this when they look at the former Little Italies in the urban US. As some got richer they moved out to the suburbs, as others remained poor they were gentrified out or, in some cases, fled the burnt-out husks of the 1960s Civil Rights era. It's not exactly romanticism to say something was lost there. If, in the eye of the beholder, increased GDP or a more open society or more diversity or whatever *outweighs* that, that's a fine argument. But I think the argument needs to be made (as Richard, to his credit, does here. Many others do not.)
We are Americans and we get to decide how much immigration we want, where from and what their motivations are. Richard’s views are wonderful clickbait but have near zero public support.
I want people who come to America to be Americans. I am pro immigrant (coming from a family of immigrants) but we are playing a dangerous game setting immigration policy designed to create an immigrant mono-culture (Latino).
A melting pot (many countries/cultures/languages of able bodied, self-supporting immigrants in limited amounts is the way to go. The current policy prioritizes wards of the public, because of the way we anticipate they’ll vote - insanity.
The unlimited, pro-immigration case breaks down the minute one visits Africa. There are many hundreds of millions of people there who would be here tomorrow (nothing against Africans, they are generally productive immigrants). We are better off developing and investing in other countries than doubling or tripling our population with the world’s poor.
They’re right there in the preamble: “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty”. All of those can plausibly be applied to numerous externalities, and “the general welfare” would cover all of them. Common practice in the US and elsewhere is just that.
Are you referring to race? I've always felt like that's such a low brow attachment. I would much rather associate with a black person who was more similar to me in personality and education and income than a white person who differed from me on those dimensions. I can't understand why there's such an importance places on physical looks.
Apologies if race is not what you are talking about.
It appears to be low brow because it is so obviously true. East Asian countries and African countries are radically different and complex arguments about why that is the case do not bear the weight placed on them and the simplest explanation (people are different at a population level) is most likely to be true. It is only when value judgements are attached to these differences that problems arise. When one is critical of say Asian or African countries for not living like European ones. If diversity is to mean anything it is diverse ways of living that have grown up over Millenia
Hello Wyclif's Dust, this may be of interest to you:
"Mere months after record layoffs, a trade group representing Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other technology giants is pressuring President Joe Biden’s administration to allow more temporary foreign workers to work in the United States through the H-1B visa program for people with specialized skills."
“Like them” is very subjective and multi dimensional, no? It means something very different for an American born and bred in New York compared to one born and bred in rural Vermont. Moreover, places like New York have been a salad bowl of immigrants for over a century. What we now call Middle America was one for Germans and Scandinavians in the 19th Century.
If you propose somehow severing the country that we have into homogenous blocks, I would like to see your plan.
You’re correct. But that’s because homophily really is multidimensional! For example, if you went to university, probably all your friends went to university as well. Ethnicity, nationality and culture are just some possible dimensions.
I didn’t propose anything, I just asked a question! I asked it because I think answering it can help to clarify how you think about this issue. Why aren’t people’s preferences over their neighbours, or fellow citizens, the same as their preferences for iPhones, maple syrup or clean air?
I grew up in an area where I was one of the only people who was not an immigrant, I have visited many such places, and there are many such places near me. While I've encountered a lot of white people who enjoy having diversity on tap, I've noticed that none of them actually decide to move into places like the one I grew up in.
I can't wait to a be a very small minority in a country that has laws on the books about the burning scourge of whiteness. Sounds great. White people don't view themselves as a cohesive group, but people of most other people groups do.
Many of us move to places like NYC, where whites are under a third. Immigration won’t result in overwhelming majority of non-white with only a few whites. Blame your parents
Moving to NYC and patting yourself on the back is exactly what I meant by diversity on tap.
The fertility rate is 1.5, so yes, the overwhelming majority will be non-white so long as immigration continues. It will happen a bit slower in the US than some places, but it's not far off.
As a foreigner, I’m asking because I don’t know. Do you think laws about the burning scourge of whiteness are likely if <I>any</i> non-white group gains ascendancy, or only likely if urban blacks gain ascendancy? (This latter could happen if blacks become numerically greater or if they continue to exert outsized influence on the Democratic Party because of their bloc/machine voting patterns.). If you believe the former, then restricting immigration—almost all immigration to western countries now is non-white—would be wise. But if you believe the latter, then immigration would be a good thing because it would dilute the importance of urban black native-born people, who are the real burning scourge.
Western countries are already swimming in stuff like that, mostly because white people put it there. I'm just predicting that it will be left in place, and it will become more consequential as time goes on.
I can’t accept that. If blacks gain ascendancy they will defenestrate the Jews as they have wanted to do since the days of Martin Luther King, to punish them for being early sympathizers in civil rights. (/sarc) Or for succeeding in the face of discrimination where blacks have so abjectly failed even when given every race preference and indulgence. Jews have been slow to recognize that black politicians and rabble-rousers are not their friends but I can’t see Jews actively promoting a white-fragility narrative. That would be their suicide.
That’s one anecdote. I live in a place where most people are immigrants and the children of immigrants, and there are plenty of white non-immigrants trying to move here..
n.b. I share your hatred of ever metastasizing group identitarianism - I just extend my hatred not just to word salad du jour identitarianism but also to white identitarianism, Christian identiarianism, heterosexual identarianism, Southern (US) identitarianism, Nieuw Yawk identitarianism, ... I have been the only (sometimes) out atheist in an evangelical heavy milieu and it was not pretty. Of course I could and usually did "pass", but that option generally exists (and is often taken) by non-woke whites too.
and FWIW, I agree that, to paraphrase Reagan, in "the present crisis" left identitarianism is a more significant threat than right identarianism; I'm far from convinced that immigration restrictionism is a useful policy to reduce the relative power of the identitarians.
Also not getting into country of origin limitations for industrial base natsec/corporate espionage concerns - that one gets complex fast.
Curious where you grew up and what years, if you don't mind sharing.
Not directly on point, but in 1971, at age 13, as a result of a custody change (divorced parents) I moved (between 7th and 8th grade) from:
a suburban public middle school, where the median student's parents were probably at least 80th percentile SES, that had three nonwhites (two ethnically Japanese, one black - I strongly suspect but don't know for a fact that all were born in the US; I don't know about their parents ) out of 700 students (n.b. my best friend at that school was born in the US to immigrant parents from Finland; I think all his older siblings had been born in Finland)
to:
A public school that had a bit over 100 white students out of 1400 (it was about 80% Chinese, of whom minimum 80% were children of immigrants - I would guess that over half of the kids were also born overseas, mostly in Hong Kong). Yes, as you probably guessed, that was San Francisco.
I learned vastly more and was far happier in the San Francisco school. Probably mostly for two reasons:
1) It had academic stratification, so I was not bored silly in class (the parents at the suburban school were intensely opposed to any sort of stratification - even afterschool G&T had to be done cautiously).
2) Academic performance carried roughly equal status to athletic performance (still not as important as social clique navigation).
Again, I was just a kid, so it's not like I had control over where I lived, but in high school I did make friends who lived in dominantly white, largely working class neighborhoods (yes, San Francisco still had such neighborhoods in the 70s - not any longer, of course), and when I later did get to choose where I lived, I did pick one of the higher ethnic diversity, rather more crime ridden areas.
Yes, _I_ agree, but see ** below. I just think that racial/ethnic and sexual orientation/gender identity diversity is probably sucking up too much of the oxygen (yeah, I have a not too shallow understanding of some of the path dependency behind *why* - there are still a reasonable number of living Americans who grew up with Jim Crow, for one thing).
Hence for example hard lefties like Freddie DeBoer or Ross Barkan who are (correctly in my view, given their priors) despairing of the identitarian left.
For an example of a different kind of diversity, my general position on political hot button topics tends to be anti-identitarian neoliberaltarian - like Matt Yglesias or Bryan Caplan or Scott Alexander. But in spite of that I'm not unhappy to have ACB on SCOTUS, even though she is further to the right on most things I care about than the median Trump justice (geometric mean of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh), because she's not quite as much from the intense Ivy (counting Stanford as Ivy for most purposes)/Acela/Federal background as the other justices.
** I and probably most of the readers of Richard's substack are probably well above median SES and IQ, and probably at least one standard deviation toward BAP (broad autistic phenotype). So at the emotional level I completely get his subhead "Immigration destroys social cohesion. Good.". But social cohesion has a lot of externalities that we depend on.
Gentrification is white people moving into a non-white neighborhood until it becomes a white one. And the more white it becomes, the more they like it, judging by the house prices.
Nope, in my experience, white gentrifiers keep pushing further and further, block and block, expanding the area of gentrification. The neighborhood becomes red hot while the white people are still a minority, not after they become a majority. Keep in mind the gentrifiers are of all races, so to racialize them as all white is not always accurate
The gentrification process occurs precisely because a physically decent location becomes cheap, and as more white people move in, more white people are willing to move in. Which is the point. The majority of white people are not chasing the dream of living in a neighbourhood that is 95% Chinese.
What? It is the only plausible scenario. The fertility rate is 1.5 and immigration will continue straight up. If you mean "I'll be dead before I have to think about that," then yes.
I agree with most of this but you still exhibit the same two colossal blind spots that so many others talking about immigration do.
1) you make no distinction whatsoever between legal and illegal immigrants, and of the enormous social consequences of throwing the southern border open to everyone without performing any sort of selection for the people coming here being educated, law-abiding, economically productive, English-speaking, etc.
2) you overlook the fallacy of the shifting denominator committed by all economists who conclude that “Americans” will be economically better off by letting in low-skilled immigrants even if per capita GDP goes down, because you are already counting the would-be immigrants as pre-Americans and including them in the collective whose good is being calculated. There is a serious and negative economic impact on a class of Americans whom the elite educated class of Americans tend to think about as little as possible: those who must survive on a below-median wage and have below-median IQs but ARE AMERICANS DAMMIT!
Point 2 is very correct, of course. Steve Sailer has been banging this drum for years. I think it's because the kind of people who immigrated to the US (like me) just basically see it as our property - we were temporarily embarrassed Americans at home - so it's not really a problem for us to be an n+1 to any given hypothetical America, nor is it a problem for those who come after.
Where is the evidence for this serious and negative impact on the low-waged? There’s been a lot of research on wage impacts of immigration on native workers. Most of it comes up with effects that are zero or at worst tiny.
Honestly, I don’t think many policymakers care much about #2, or at least the people it would affect. They aren’t generally a pleasant hang unless you want to discuss football
Canada allows legal immigration only to people who speak English (or French, the other official language.). It is hard to get here illegally and with universal state healthcare you need proof of legal residence in the country for your doctor to get paid. Unlike in the U.S. where uncompensated care is just a cost of doing business, most Canadian doctors won’t look at you if you aren’t registered with the provincial insurance monopsony...unless you can pay cash of course.
But the point is you shouldn’t let anyone in who can’t speak English. They will never assimilate and will spend all their time plotting against Anglos.
But if they are born into households where no one speaks English, and hang out in enclaves where the native language is widely used, they will struggle if their first exposure to English is in school at age 5. School assumes that the children are fluent native speakers of English. ESL is a different kettle of fish.
Now granted, most immigrants who don’t speak English will work hard to learn it but it hampers their work success if they don’t become fluent quickly.
Most nations, including my own, are not nations of immigrants. The people who make up the population of the country are the same as those who occupied the land a thousand years ago. We all share the same history, have our own unique phenotype, language and culture. Many of us actually appreciate our nations and are not going to destroy them for the opportunity to damage social cohesion in the hope that people will be less likely to support gov assistance policies.
Which nation is that? Your name sounds Anglo, which makes me question you. Do you live on the Isles have a pure pre-Roman Celtic bloodline?
History shows that most great accomplishments of man were done within relatively narrow windows of history by nations which embraced a mixture of functioning markets (usually with access to ports and trade routes) and relative tolerance for free thought. Newton's work on optics was build on studying texts produced during the Islamic golden age. The Islamic golden age was only a thing thanks to relatively heterodox moderates willing to study Ancient Greek texts. The Greeks remarked that much of what they learned was on the backs of earlier Persians. All of that is great, and is at the cornerstone of why such cultures/histories are still revered today.
By contrast, Jews stayed relatively homogeneous and insular for most of their dismal 2000+ year history history until the late 19th century, and they contributed nothing but child penis mutilation and chicken sacrifice until a few began to reform and become great scientists/artists/etc. Spinoza, basically the only great Jew of those near-two millennia, despised Orthodox Jewish culture and embraced the early burgeoning liberalism of the Dutch. Nationality on the basis of language/phenotype is great if you want to produce a bunch of inbred incestuous madmen scribbling on ancient tomes, but it doesn't produce great civilization.
Yes, well the romans actually had remarkably little genetic influence on the British population. But that is beside the point. Limited migration has always occurred between neighbouring populations, so what? You seem to be implying that people cannot learn from or collaborate with people of different cultures unless they have mass migration? This obviously doesn't follow, I'm not sure I understand your point. We created the industrial revolution, contributed enormously to the enlightenment and conquered a quarter of the globe pre mass immigration. Since the 90's we have had enormous inflow to the extent that more than a quarter of our population are non British within a couple of decades. I can tell you that we have not had a technological or economic renaissance as a result.
What I was trying to get across, which I think many people with recent migration history miss, is that what makes a country desirable to many who live within it is much more than a simple policy position or minor fluctuations in GDP growth. It is the fact that the country is theirs. Their people, their traditions, their language etc. I would happily accept a government with more welfare policies elected for a few years than a right wing government which irreversibly changes the demographics of the country, but had less public spending during their time in office.
I'm more saying that nations themselves, defined along ethnohistorical lines, are not inherently important for the things that actually improve the human experience. Ethnically/culturally-driven societies at best tend to stagnate and benefit by osmosis from the technological innovations of their neighbors.
Some meme about the Holy Roman Empire not being any of those three things but then gloss over how an unstable patchwork of tiny cultures by way of free travel managed to start the Printing Revolution and created grand scientific figures. One funny and illustrative example is Copernicus, a man who barely moved from his birth place yet knew several languages to best communicate, a man around whom borders changed and whose own ethnocultural identity is debated among scholars.
I don't have any problem with people of ethnic groups wanting to only live among those of their own, and I certainly agree that the mass importation of uneducated and unskilled non-European migrants into your country is suicidal in the long run. But even then, it was only made possible by an overwhelmingly-white ruling class initiating it, and a complacent population ultimately accepting it (even if Enoch Powell had the support of the majority initially).
Personally, as someone descended from Appalachian Baptists who were kicked out by Pennsylvania Quakers who were kicked out by the British, and as someone whose family tends to move regularly in pursuit of better employment, I would happily abandon many of the traditions of my forefathers, just as they did theirs. The Roman Empire wasn't great because of a singular distinct ethnic Roman tradition/peoples, it was great because it oversaw the construction of great infrastructure, the utilization of great mines and quarries, and a thriving trans-Mediterranean trade network. I don't look forward to a future in America where whites are universally hated by a resentful growing minority, but if I have to continue the family tradition by fleeing to Asia, I'll do what I have to.
“The worst performing country relative to IQ is easily North Korea. It’s probably the most socially cohesive nation in the world too. Had they had some diversity, perhaps it would’ve been harder to form a totalitarian state based on a socialist ideology that starved its own people. There would’ve been too much discord and instability for one family to turn everyone into slaves.”
1) The USSR had plenty of non-Russian ethnic groups, and its most notorious totalitarian dictator was a Georgian, whose serial-killer enforcer was a Georgian Jew. Tito’s Yugoslavia also managed to combine ethnic diversity with one-party rule; once one-party rule ended, Yugoslavia fell apart.
2) Is North Korea a lot less diverse than South Korea? Not really. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan all manage to combine democracy with ethnic homogeneity. If anything, it’s ethnically mixed Singapore which has to “manage” its democracy. While North Korea is a despicable hell-hole, and I wouldn’t recommend Juche as a political system, the country has managed to develop its own nuclear bomb, which requires a certain amount of IQ brainpower.
3) Non-democratic government may actually be appealing for multi-ethnic societies, because there are plenty of minority groups with a justified fear of winner-takes-all majoritarian politics. This is one reason the Assad family has held onto dictatorial power in Syria; the alternatives all seem worse. The constitution of Lebanon - which mandates that the President must be a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni, and the Speaker a Shia - goes against the secular democratic ideals of most western societies. But it’s a realistic attempt to deal with Lebanese diversity. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland deliberately seeks to reduce straight-up majoritarian democracy, in favour of a Lebanese-type arrangement which guarantees that parties which lose elections still get government jobs. Even that’s coming under strain, as demographics change.
4) If we’re determined to go full-on with diversity, we should actually study previous attempts to deal with it, such as the Ottoman Millet system or Dutch Pillarization.
This is why I say fiscal conservatives are no better than social leftists. They want to replace white people too. Not just that but they dont believe in the idea of a nation state either. They believe America should just be an economic zone. Because all that matters to them is GDP
“It’s not impossible, but one might also think that more diversity will increase social tensions, enough to continue making new expansions of the welfare state impossible. It seems that, historically, people either focus on class or they focus on other forms of identity. Some leftists think that emphasizing class is better, so will criticize wokeness for being a distraction, arguing that poor people of all backgrounds need to come together and fight the rich. From my perspective, class based politics is much worse. Affirmative action is a tax that market economies can afford to pay, while trade unionism, anti-competitive regulations, and redistributionist policies are fundamentally larger threats to systems that produce wealth. “
During the time period when whites are still a majority, but the minority share of the population was growing, dumb economic preferences took a backseat to aversion to minority crime, affirmative action etc.
But when nonwhites can demographically and politically inundate whites, they will have no moral scruples with using them as a cash cow. Reduced social cohesion among nonwhite groups has not and will not prevent them from viewing whites as arch villains, and expropriating their wealth and property.
The project of tearing down civil rights laws and affirmative action becomes that much harder as the social and financial beneficiaries of those policies grow in number and political power. You characterize affirmative action as a sustainable drag on productive economies (blithely ignoring the situation of the white minority who will be dispossessed under this regime), but the situation will look different when a majority of the population is entitled to racial spoils.
Increasing the low iq segments of the population undermines both the average iq and the smart fraction. More resources and money will have to be spent babysitting low iq third worlders. (Hispanic crime tends to increase as a large portion of the children of immigrants assimilate to black norms, and in any event you still refuse to come out against subsaharan African immigration, which will be horrific for the crime situation).
You ignore zach goldberg’s data on builtin nonwhite racial resentment towards whites. You ignore decades-long efforts of compassionate conservative hispandering. (Bizarrely in your diversity good for markets piece you criticize a california proposition criticize off welfare!
yeah each of the policy proposals they float to mitigate the negative effect of low iq third world immigration are politically fanciful as is (restrictions on the vote etc), and will become still more unlikely as they grow in number.
This place already exist it’s called California. California is majority Mexican and Mexicans even if they don’t like blacks they dislike whites even more. There is no such thing as a natural Mexican conservative. Also always the same argument cubans and Cubans. Cubans are majority white, they are mainly fair skin , they share few things in common with most Mexicans and Central Americans the 1980s gop white family ads appealed to them and still does. Most anti left South Americans coming to Florida are white middle to upper class people. Is not the same brown migration from Mexico. And actually yes the whole point of a party is to win elections , not a single state got more republicans Bc Mexicans and Asians moved in. Also every evidence point when whites were the majority the dems were more socially moderate , when did wokeness turned off Mexicans ? Gay marriage wasn’t a big deal for them. Even today most anti woke people are whites. A 1980s demographic would crush dems electorally. Also even the average white democrat is still more pro cop and anti crime than most immigrants and their kids. Data proves u wrong. I don’t think letting america becoming like California with the Hopes it becomes moderate (with the gop losing every election) it’s a competent way to tell conservatives immigration and diversity it’s good
Interesting thoughts, but you’re missing the enormous impact of various forms of Affirmative Action / DEI. These are a race to mediocrity.
The idea that brain evolution was similar / identical for people whose cultures never left the Stone Age or early Bronze Age, when compared to Europe culturally, morally, tangibly is, of course, absurd. (And similar to the idea that a million years of sex roles and their impact on brain evolution are irrelevant because of suffrage.)
Simply, those who could never envision, and so could never build modernity cannot maintain it. See Zimbabwe & South Africa.
As we push away those whose cultures - and so intellectual evolution - created the modern world while pretending those who did not can both maintain what they could not build and further scientific / tech progress, those not paying attention will be surprised by the negative results. Those of us paying attention will not be.
As a native-born 75-y.o. male of Slovak-Irish heritage living in one of the most immigrant-heavy cities in the country (Glendale, California), I must say that some of the “whitest” people I encounter are Armenians, Asians, Mexicans (conservative, regular churchgoers, often anti-LGBT), while some of the least “white” people are malcontent younger (self-hating?) whites with piercings/tattoos etc. and Bernie/BLM-type allegiances. If I’m not mistaken that’s the way it is in most urban areas around the country. This relatively rapid assimilation of most immigrants becoming “normal Americans” with relatively normal voting patterns seems to me to be grossly overlooked by those worried about a decline of “White” America.
Richard, the current immigration situation in Europe deserves a chapter. What you write may be true for the US, but I have yet to meet a professional who has written about the positive social impact of Somali migrants coming to Europe. If you search. You will find Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch analyses that the average Somali migrant costs the taxpayer 1-1.2 million euros net over a lifetime - and that's not even mentioning their over-representation in violent crime! Because somehow Richard, writing from gated communities, the deterioration in the average person's sense of security is not apparent. Another thing, if you use ethnically homogeneous North Korea as an example of how bad life is without migrants, how can you forget Japan? Or the Republic of South Africa, which is currently moving from being a developed industrial country to a carcass republic thanks to its great diversity. So Richard, you should be a bit more modest about the positive effects of migration...
Why is preventing your governments from instituting special policies and requirements for immigrants-but-not-yet-citizens? Keep them on probation periods where they must find work (or if they can't, be assigned to something to do by the state) AND behave impeccably. If they don't, they get deported. The US green card system (and, I believe, similar systems in other Anglo countries) has all these kinds of riders and more.
My sense (which could be wrong) is that Europeans regard such immigrants (i.e., all but the most high-skilled ones) with distaste, if not contempt, because they don't behave in a culturally appropriate manner, and find it hard to do so. So there is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach, pushing immigrants into ghettos and throwing money at them in a rather pointless way.
"Here’s one poll of many showing that, when it comes to basically everything government does, the vast majority of the population wants to either increase spending or spend the same amount. There is no substantial constituency for small government."
I believe it was Brian Caplan who once said, "The Left is anti-market, and the Right is anti-Left". Very true, only hardcore Hayekians really care about the free-market stuff.
I love Caplan (and Niskanen more broadly, and Hayek too).
"Small government" and "pro-market" aren't orthogonal, but neither are they synonyms.
I know a reasonable number of what might be reasonably called market social democrats (they'd probably be OK with ordoliberal if they knew the term) who at least believe they would be happy with the Nordic model.
I think Caplan's problem is that he's an economist so he sees the Left defined by something salient to him. Richard notes above that the welfare state hasn't changed as much since LBJ, and he attributes that to Republican backlash... but Dems have held political power, and their energies have shifted toward social policy.
- division is good as it avoids socialist policies which reduce wealth
- immigration good because it causes division and immigrants communities have unpredictable pathways but often positive (eg Asians)
This fails to consider why Australia, Canada and New Zealand have been so successful to date. Pretty homogenous until a few decades ago, relatively strong cultural and institutional homogeneity still. Anglo institutions matter, have not led to socialism (although more than US maybe) and still led to great GDP per capita outcomes
Hanania seems unable to grasp that a high trust and racial homogeneous society are *highly valued* consumer goods. When these goods are destroyed, economic welfare declines even if GDP goes up.
Evidence? What is your Malthusian mechanism? I don’t see any clear correlation among countries between density and arable land and low income. Check Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan.
Anyone who gets out of their house and travels to any of these places is less likely to feel they are poorer than someone at home looking at GDP per capita. Further, the US punches below many of these countries in international statistics comparing measures of well being, like longevity, crime, etc. as Steven Pinker has well noted.
Though I don't live there, I have numerous ties and am pretty familiar with AL and I would say that it's a much better place to live than Japan and (especially) SK, even if the sources of its productivity aren't quite what Richard is saying and have more to do with low population density and Federal dollars.
There's actually a natural experiment in this as there are many Koreans living in Southeast Alabama. For example Auburn, AL is 10% Asian, mostly Korean, these are Koreans who moved there for the Korean auto plants which stretch from Montgomery to the vicinity of Columbus, GA. If you talk to most of these Koreans, they will tell you that their lives are better in AL despite the challenges of being strangers in a strange land. Because they can just afford so much more.
The fact of the matter is that one can buy a large house with a large yard in the best neighborhood in the best city of any of AL's regions with a household income of like $125k (or at least you could when interest rates were low). That's the lifestyle that educated professionals ought to compare themselves to. Nowadays you can even do this by having a mostly-remote job in Atlanta or Nashville.
The antics of AL's autochthonous underclass (both white and black) are basically irrelevant to the upper-middle-class day-to-day. The police are oriented towards maintaining this reality.
Higher Ed is a way that AL differs from WV. Both U. of Alabama and Auburn are major draws and have actually grown in this respect (see that recent documentary on Alabama sororities, pulling girls from as far afield as CA). North Alabama, near Huntsville, can also be a more regional draw, particularly for anyone who wants to work in the defense/aerospace industries in Huntsville.
Of course, as you highlight, all of this is empowered by Federal dollars. But I do think, if you live in a backwater of a major empire, this problem actually cuts both ways. Because without the center pushing resources back out to the provinces, the brain drain from the provinces to the center is overwhelming, which leaves those places much more dilapidated than they would be as independent countries with closed borders. This is the challenge the EU's poorer countries now face; the EU's Core subsidizes them but not to the degree the US Core subsidizes its provinces, because Poland doesn't get a vote in the Bundestag.
"Some people are naturally tribal and don’t like immigration. So they’ll use whatever justifications they can come up with to argue against it."
This is a spot-on observation. I read Sailer's website for many years, and saw people throw kitchen-sink kind of arguments. They would start with one grievance. If that didn't stick, they would go to another. And another. And then eventually they would circle back to the original one. Ad nauseum.
Margaret Thatcher once said something like "there's no such thing as society". Social cohesion can be good and produce good effects. Sometimes it can produce mass delusion too. Religion...nationalism....wokism.... As Hanania says, adherence to markets requires high IQ. Social cohesion in many ways lowers public IQ as people effectively suspend the rational parts of their brains in order to avoid looking and feeling anti-social.
"I think that the IQ and income data suffers from the basic problem that people see an average change and focus too much on that, instead of whether people are actually better or worse off."
Great point, but you make this same mistake constantly. You are *hyper-focused* on GDP usually. Even if I accept that homogeneous countries are poorer than diverse ones because they are homogeneous, living in a homogeneous country just feels qualitatively so much better. Have you ever been to a European city without a large immigrant population? Miles better quality of life than, say, LA , even though not everyone might have clothes dryers.
Europe, even nice countries like France, is stagnating. Young people can’t get permanent jobs because of sclerotic labour laws, their universities produce little except bureaucrats, crippling taxes, energy prices skyrocketing, no one’s having children (except African immigrants on welfare, who hate white Europeans, especially cops.). No one seems committed to doing anything about it, just sit back until the USSR invades was the plan. And now that there is no USSR, and maybe soon no Russia, Europe doesn’t even have anyone to capitulate to. Except Allah. Lots of issues that tourists don’t see unless they can talk to the natives in their language. Free healthcare and state pensions aren’t everything.
I never said Europe didn't have its problems---it certainly does. I'm just saying that the day-to-day life of homogeneous European cities is more pleasant than that of a typical American city, and this should count for something when doing cost-benefit analysis.
And I don't buy the argument that Richard is trying to make that homogeneous nations are innately disinclined to dynamism and market economies. Hell, it was all-white nations that even invented modern market economies in the first place. Maybe his argument is that in this particular moment in time, you need a diverse population to prevent further descent into social democracy. That's a better argument, but I still have issues with it. Anyway...
I don’t think that has much to do with demographics. American city policy has been a disaster since the 1950s. Ever gone to a rich NJ suburb? Big middle class, really nice to live in. It’s more rich vs poor than demos imho. What do you think?
It's very hard to know what your quality of life will be before you move, and I don't think day-to-day quality of life is necessarily the reason Europeans immigrate to the US nowadays. I, for example, at some point moved to a place I absolutely hated because of a unique career opportunity.
I honestly don't know why more Europeans don't own clothes dryers specifically---they could certainly afford one.
Hanania is correct that a homogeneous white population might embrace socialism but Sweden was never full-on socialist and engaged in market reforms in the 90s. It has all the hallmarks of a high IQ capitalist society. All of this can happen without mass non-white immigration and elite whites can still do an end run around the economic ignorant masses.
"Might"? White populations invented socialism and spread it throughout the world. There is no ethnic group more prone to post-free market socialism than whites. Sweden is substantially less pro-market than non-white China or a number of non-white* Arab states
*I consider Arabs to be white but have a feeling you don't
East Asians actually seem the most prone to communism. And I disagree on Sweden being "substantially less pro-market than non-white China". Sweden has a welfare state, but aside from that is fairly free-market. China is run by the Communist party and has nationalized big chunks of its economy.
Although they are phenotypically white, Jews are highly collectivist and were/are very influential in Western societies. They were possibly a necessary factor in the Russian Revolution. (Of course, Shaker and other Christian collectivist societies preceded the Jews.) But it is still the case that no Western nation is actually socialist as meant by socialists in the 19th C. In spite of the New Deal, the US remained the premier capitalist nation long before mass non-white immigration. Perhaps in an indirect fashion the Jews were necessary for this, too, as the USSR showed by example what you get when you go communist and the vastly disproportionate communist Jews in the US caused a strong backlash against this ideology. China might be more capitalist than Sweden (I doubt it), but look where they rose up from. But it remains true that whites have to fight against their inherent egalitarian tendencies, especially white women. This tendency expresses itself with regard to attacks on ethnocentrism.
What is wrong with the argument that people simply prefer to live with others like them? I mean, why don’t standard preference satisfaction arguments win out here?
Well, you can still move wherever you want. Most of your fellow Americans though are disgusted by white nationalism, so you're going to have to infringe on all of their rights if you want to shape the demographics of the country in your preferred direction.
The list of places to move tends to shrink. Or as Obama put it to a reporter from the Atlantic: "every year, the situation improves."
Revealed preferences trump survey responses. The idea that the only alternative to extinction is to violently expel everyone of all other groups is a false dichotomy.
As for infringing on people's rights: what was the majority view in America in 1965 on the "ethnic mix of the country being upset" and on whites becoming a distinct minority? That wasn't a popular opinion, but policymakers did it anyway. What was the popular opinion in Britain on reducing themselves to a minority one generation ago? Again, probably not a mainstream view but policymakers just went ahead and did it. Brexit voters expected a reduction in immigration but nope, we're just going to keep doing it.
Can conservative whites reverse this? Probably not, but the idea that profound social and cultural changes are negligible next to hard metrics like GDP and IQ is soulless and misguided.
"As for infringing on people's rights: what was the majority view in America in 1965 on the "ethnic mix of the country being upset" and on whites becoming a distinct minority? That wasn't a popular opinion, but policymakers did it anyway. " This is silly. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 polled very well, passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities, and was signed by a then-popular president. No one, including the people who passed it, foresaw the demographic changes that would follow.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/09/20/in-1965-majority-of-americans-favored-immigration-and-nationality-act-2/
By the 1990s, it was clear that the United States would become majority-minority, and Bill Clinton was saying how great it was. I don't recall anyone of consequence disagreeing. The funny thing is, immigration and immigrants were pretty unpopular in the 1990s, but by 2015 immigrants had become much more popular, even though demographic change was completely impossible to miss by then. From the same link:
"In the 1990s, by wide margins, Americans saw immigrants as burdens on society rather than as strengthening the country through their hard work. Also, many thought that the growing number of newcomers would threaten traditional American values and customs."
"But slowly, opinions have begun to change over the course of the past two decades. By 2014, a healthy 57% majority had come to the opposite point of view, saying that immigrants strengthened the country through their hard work; and just 35% now say that the increasing number of immigrants is threatening American values. (As of January 2019, 62% say immigrants strengthen the country, while 28% say they burden the country by taking jobs, housing and health care.)"
As you said, it polled well because nobody expected this to happen. And public opinion about immigration policy tends to improve as you continue to admit immigrants and poll them about it.
If you are going to argue that a majority of whites always approved of becoming a small minority from the moment it became a logical and foreseeable outcome, that is highly dubious--but there is no sense in arguing about it, since the point is that governments shove foreseeable things down the population's throats against popular opinion all the time. Most Brits have wanted less immigration for a while, but it has no effect on policy. The idea that you'd be "violating people's rights" to agitate against top-down changes is patently ridiculous. People have no idea what's going on. Their opinions start to change quite a bit once you give them slightly more information (Vox: "telling people the immigration numbers makes them racist") or expose them to the consequences of the policies.
Sure, most Americans are disgusted by white nationalism, quite rightly. But they're not disgusted by border controls, they seem keen on them. And in terms of revealed preference, people with more liberal attitudes to diversity move away from diverse areas at the same rate as people with less liberal attitudes. (That's according to Eric Kaufmann's research.)
The argument that you can move wherever you want is not a strong one! It's well known among economists that moving has externalities, and hence that Tiebout-style arguments ("just vote with your feet") fail in general. (See e.g. Bewley's 1981 paper "A critique of Tiebout's theory...")
You can make a more general argument that freedom to move within a country is widely accepted. Yes it is, but only in the context of strict restrictions at national borders.
Lastly, I didn't say anything about my personal preferences. I'm not even American!
You are declaring peoples' preference to live among and near people like themselves to be an overriding preference. But all evidence (and Bryan Caplan) suggests that this is a relatively trivial preference. The immigrants themselves clearly gain by moving, likes/dislikes aside (and the immigrants themselves may not necessarily like the people amidst whom they are moving). The dislike that the hosts may feel initially because of stupid and irrational reasons (or propaganda in the regular or social media) may dissipate very soon after real interactions with the immigrants. Their kids may not even share that antipathy in the first place.
As Richard pointed out literally in his opening paragraph, some people dislike immigration just because they are tribal. Likes and dislikes are a tribal, and not a rational, preference. People with influence in public policy should consistency ignore these preferences while paying lip service to them just to keep the peace. Things will smoothen out over time.
I've been hitting google scholar for something like "revealed preferences for diversity" - have you got any relevant evidence?
I don't agree with your second paragraph. At least, that's not how economists usually think. A preference is a preference is a preference. Liking grapes, or having a low discount rate, is not more rational than the opposite. Why should preferences over fellow citizens be different? Maybe there are good theories of what preferences ought to count (Bob Goodin talks about "laundering preferences"). But if so you've got to clarify that theory. Otherwise it becomes too easy to say "oh, the preferences I agree with are the rational ones".
In particular, it's not legitimate to say "there's no evidence that immigration reduces wages, so being against immigration is irrational". That's like saying "chocolate is bad for you, so eating chocolate is irrational." Maybe I understand the health risks and still just like the taste!
it wasnt really a widespread population choice to have mass migration from 60s onwards. That was an elite inflicted policy on the 90% white america, and for decades almost without change gallup polls showed most americans wanted FEWER migrants. The people passign the mass mgiration in 60s lied and said it wouldnt affect demographics, etc.
So youre whole argument is nonsense. This change in the mindset of population was one that came top down from people with a very different view of what america should be (and became). So similarly, if we have a different view of hwat america should or could be then top down decisions that push towards that are perfectly reasonable, and the argument should be around what that vision is: continued Brazilfication, or perhaps holding the line and *gack* through policy measures pushing for increasing the white % of the population de facto.
since say the 1960s there are 3 (at least) policies that the elites pursue regardless of the voters, that is to say, that are beyond the reach of democratic accountability: 1) endless war; 2) affirmative action (social engineering via race); and 3: massive immigration.
The ruling elites of both parties consider these sacred charges and nothing short of a violent overthrow of our govt can change this.
And much of America's wealth is based on centuries of being largely homogenous. Also, the idea that a constantly declining national IQ will not impact wealth is unworthy of any serious consideration. But Richard throws out some ideas I like.
"simply prefer to live with others like them" = "white nationalism"
i see what you did there!
and what do you call it when the Japanese prefer to keep their country Japanese? When people in Harlem don't want whites colonizing their neighborhood? When gay people prefer to live in and maintain their own enclaves?
To live among your own is a natural, universal preference, not bigotry or Nazism.
Yeah they're disgusted by it thanks to Social leftists and fiscal conservatives like you who make sure people are this way because it benefits the social left politically and it benefits the fiscal conservatives economically.
Infringe on who's rights? The founding fathers set up a naturalization system that only allowed white people to become citizens. I think if anything you're infringing on their rights of having a sovereign society? Why should they be obligated to allow in new people into their society?
They say they are, but where do they move?
White flight is still a thing. Nobody wanna live in the so called diverse utopia
Diverse neighbourhoods aren’t so bad as long as “diverse” doesn’t just mean majority black. Multiple races are OK, it means the neighbourhood is generally attractive, not just popular because rents are cheap and crime isn’t punished.
I can only speak on personal anecdotes, but I've personally worked with several immigrants (mostly illegal) from Mexico. They are some of the most entrepreneurial people I've met, certainly some of the hardest working, and tend to praise America as a place to prosper. The two biggest complaints I've heard are about prices and "welfare for the lazy". They're fairly conservative, but this is also TX.
Sailer has explicitly argued against white nationalism in his debate with Jared Taylor, with one of his arguments being that white people dislike white nationalism. But immigration restrictionism has appeal even in countries with majority non-white electorates.
I used to read Sailer a lot (until the Trump election) but haven't read him much lately. Honestly, I found little daylight between his opinions and ideology and "white nationalism". Just that he didn't want to label it white nationalism because he was trying to be politically correct and actually create an impact (which he did; I think Trump's election win was at least partially seeded on Sailer's blog).
"Citizenism" applies to any country, regardless of race. People of all races think their governments should prioritize them over non-citizens, which is why Trump could get votes from people who aren't white. African-Americans are Americans, which to Sailer means we have an obligation toward them that we don't have to Africans. He has said that both AAs & NAs really were screwed over by the US in the past, so it makes sense to limit affirmative action to them and not apply it to any immigrants (currently a lot of the slots go to descendants of African/Caribbean immigrants).
Are you the only serious person?
Why white nationalism and not black nationalism or any other? Have you assumed the race of the questioner? If they are black would it change your answer? Why do people move to form communities with people like themselves in whatever country? You seem to be focusing on one "race" and possibly ignoring similar impulses in others.
I guess then you can have open borders when segregation and restrictive covenants become legally protected.
Most of those leaving have enough money to live anywhere they want. The majority of expatriates are 2%ers.
What does it mean to live with people like you? Do you mean racially? Or having the same values? Would you rather live with a White liberal that talks about "White fragility" and "smashing capitalism", versus a conservative immigrant that loves America?
I feel like white liberals are a group that would be amazing if they just had diversity taken away from them. In a homogeneous society, that white liberal wouldn't even know the concept of white fragility, and would probably be pro-capitalism because there would be no black people for capitalism "to fail." They are naturally inclined to believe all the right things because they're smart and naturally open to new ideas. The source of white liberal craziness is purely the existence of other nonwhite groups in their presence (specifically black people) that warps their thinking on everything else.
So I'm going to go with white liberal here, under the assumption that it's in an all-white world.
"In a homogeneous society, that white liberal wouldn't even know the concept of white fragility, and would probably be pro-capitalism because there would be no black people for capitalism 'to fail.' "
And yet...the Nordic countries. Some of the most white and homogenous on earth, and they gave us extreme government intervention in the economy, the cradle-to-grave welfare state, universally-implemented feminist and queer pedagogies, some of the most obnoxious "green" movements, and *still* managed to find downtrodden brown people to simp over by bringing in large numbers of refugees in the 2010s (though they show signs of realizing their mistake at this point).
Empirically, your feelings have been shown to be, if not necessarily universally incorrect, then at least very capable of being very mistaken.
Their economic system worked great though intill they imported all these nonwhites. It was not only one of the safest regions in the world but also the happiest with the highest standard of living. Not to mention doing very well in education.
The antiwhite education that all western countries receive after ww2 is what lead to them supporting the mass importation of people. However the system of Scandinavia was always supposed to be a very soft version of national socialism. Mixed economy with homogeneous population. However with a socially left push boiling below the surface. That eventually took over unfortunately. I don't think i need to tell you the group of people who controlled funded and took part in the Frankfurt school. That's where all this antiwhite so called education came from
Sorry, I should have been more clear: I'm talking about a world in which Africans were never brought over as slaves to the Americas. The Nordic countries are culturally colonies of the US, so whatever starts here makes its way over there.
I think if race-based civil rights never caught on, we wouldn't have trans/queer movements like we have; they're predicated on the success of the race-based ones. Without black people in America, welfare wouldn't have become nearly as large as it has, as it was intended largely as a form of reparations, etc.
Aren't they still considered highly desirable places to live?
>I feel like white liberals are a group that would be amazing if they just had diversity taken away from them.
I don't think you know white liberals very well then. I'm almost thankful that they have supposed "racism" to complain about, if not for that, they could easily come up with a much more dangerous cause to put all their weight behind.
Any of the above, right? Government exists to maximize the utility of the population. If the population is homophilic, and there's a public goods aspect which means markets don't solve it, then the government should step in to limit immigration. Public economics 101.
I like this way of looking at things because it steps back a bit from what seems like a false dichotomy: "being anti-immigration is either about economic threat from lower wages, or it's irrational xenophobia".
Nothing is more rational than so called xenophobia
The latter, for me.
It's perfectly obvious that at the group level racial differences express themselves in the sorts of societies that are built. African countries are radically different from east Asian countries and there would be no possibility of either converting to live like the other.
At a low level diversity works quite and probably generates wealth. But it is quickly the law of diminishing returns.
I was responding to the wording of the comment, I don’t necessarily agree with it. That said, most people in the US live among racially similar people...and increasingly politically similar people.
The reality is that most people in the US do live with people like them. The fact that maybe 5, 8, 10 million (or however many) illegal immigrants live in a country of 330 million people doesn’t really change the demographics of most neighborhoods.
You should probably look up the stats on what percentage of US population is foreign born and compare it to historical trends
I laughed out loud when I saw 10 million as the *high* range of his post. Boomers, man. It'll come for us all one day but when peoples' mental model freezes like this it's a sight to behold. It's like an elderly grandma giving a kid a nickel for candy, seeing some of the figures these people believe.
People who argue for the second-order effects of immigration (like a less populist electorate or whatever) can at least point to a benefit that may outweigh the cost of replacing the population, but that may (or may not!) be scant consolation to those dispossessed.
It's weird because everyone can kind of understand this when they look at the former Little Italies in the urban US. As some got richer they moved out to the suburbs, as others remained poor they were gentrified out or, in some cases, fled the burnt-out husks of the 1960s Civil Rights era. It's not exactly romanticism to say something was lost there. If, in the eye of the beholder, increased GDP or a more open society or more diversity or whatever *outweighs* that, that's a fine argument. But I think the argument needs to be made (as Richard, to his credit, does here. Many others do not.)
We are Americans and we get to decide how much immigration we want, where from and what their motivations are. Richard’s views are wonderful clickbait but have near zero public support.
I want people who come to America to be Americans. I am pro immigrant (coming from a family of immigrants) but we are playing a dangerous game setting immigration policy designed to create an immigrant mono-culture (Latino).
A melting pot (many countries/cultures/languages of able bodied, self-supporting immigrants in limited amounts is the way to go. The current policy prioritizes wards of the public, because of the way we anticipate they’ll vote - insanity.
The unlimited, pro-immigration case breaks down the minute one visits Africa. There are many hundreds of millions of people there who would be here tomorrow (nothing against Africans, they are generally productive immigrants). We are better off developing and investing in other countries than doubling or tripling our population with the world’s poor.
Gordon did say *illegal* immigrants specifically.
It boils down to the government being allowed the decision of what like others look like.
We usually expect governments to address externalities, no?
Only if they are mandated in the Constitution.
I'm not familiar with any that are.
They’re right there in the preamble: “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty”. All of those can plausibly be applied to numerous externalities, and “the general welfare” would cover all of them. Common practice in the US and elsewhere is just that.
>others like them?
Are you referring to race? I've always felt like that's such a low brow attachment. I would much rather associate with a black person who was more similar to me in personality and education and income than a white person who differed from me on those dimensions. I can't understand why there's such an importance places on physical looks.
Apologies if race is not what you are talking about.
It appears to be low brow because it is so obviously true. East Asian countries and African countries are radically different and complex arguments about why that is the case do not bear the weight placed on them and the simplest explanation (people are different at a population level) is most likely to be true. It is only when value judgements are attached to these differences that problems arise. When one is critical of say Asian or African countries for not living like European ones. If diversity is to mean anything it is diverse ways of living that have grown up over Millenia
I meant just exactly what I said - see my other comment above.
Hanania: Whites are disgusted with white nationalism
Also Hanania: A decline in social trust prevents socialism
Hello Wyclif's Dust, this may be of interest to you:
"Mere months after record layoffs, a trade group representing Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other technology giants is pressuring President Joe Biden’s administration to allow more temporary foreign workers to work in the United States through the H-1B visa program for people with specialized skills."
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/diversity-really-is-our-strength
“Like them” is very subjective and multi dimensional, no? It means something very different for an American born and bred in New York compared to one born and bred in rural Vermont. Moreover, places like New York have been a salad bowl of immigrants for over a century. What we now call Middle America was one for Germans and Scandinavians in the 19th Century.
If you propose somehow severing the country that we have into homogenous blocks, I would like to see your plan.
You’re correct. But that’s because homophily really is multidimensional! For example, if you went to university, probably all your friends went to university as well. Ethnicity, nationality and culture are just some possible dimensions.
I didn’t propose anything, I just asked a question! I asked it because I think answering it can help to clarify how you think about this issue. Why aren’t people’s preferences over their neighbours, or fellow citizens, the same as their preferences for iPhones, maple syrup or clean air?
I grew up in an area where I was one of the only people who was not an immigrant, I have visited many such places, and there are many such places near me. While I've encountered a lot of white people who enjoy having diversity on tap, I've noticed that none of them actually decide to move into places like the one I grew up in.
I can't wait to a be a very small minority in a country that has laws on the books about the burning scourge of whiteness. Sounds great. White people don't view themselves as a cohesive group, but people of most other people groups do.
Many of us move to places like NYC, where whites are under a third. Immigration won’t result in overwhelming majority of non-white with only a few whites. Blame your parents
Moving to NYC and patting yourself on the back is exactly what I meant by diversity on tap.
The fertility rate is 1.5, so yes, the overwhelming majority will be non-white so long as immigration continues. It will happen a bit slower in the US than some places, but it's not far off.
As a foreigner, I’m asking because I don’t know. Do you think laws about the burning scourge of whiteness are likely if <I>any</i> non-white group gains ascendancy, or only likely if urban blacks gain ascendancy? (This latter could happen if blacks become numerically greater or if they continue to exert outsized influence on the Democratic Party because of their bloc/machine voting patterns.). If you believe the former, then restricting immigration—almost all immigration to western countries now is non-white—would be wise. But if you believe the latter, then immigration would be a good thing because it would dilute the importance of urban black native-born people, who are the real burning scourge.
Western countries are already swimming in stuff like that, mostly because white people put it there. I'm just predicting that it will be left in place, and it will become more consequential as time goes on.
I can’t accept that. If blacks gain ascendancy they will defenestrate the Jews as they have wanted to do since the days of Martin Luther King, to punish them for being early sympathizers in civil rights. (/sarc) Or for succeeding in the face of discrimination where blacks have so abjectly failed even when given every race preference and indulgence. Jews have been slow to recognize that black politicians and rabble-rousers are not their friends but I can’t see Jews actively promoting a white-fragility narrative. That would be their suicide.
That’s one anecdote. I live in a place where most people are immigrants and the children of immigrants, and there are plenty of white non-immigrants trying to move here..
n.b. I share your hatred of ever metastasizing group identitarianism - I just extend my hatred not just to word salad du jour identitarianism but also to white identitarianism, Christian identiarianism, heterosexual identarianism, Southern (US) identitarianism, Nieuw Yawk identitarianism, ... I have been the only (sometimes) out atheist in an evangelical heavy milieu and it was not pretty. Of course I could and usually did "pass", but that option generally exists (and is often taken) by non-woke whites too.
and FWIW, I agree that, to paraphrase Reagan, in "the present crisis" left identitarianism is a more significant threat than right identarianism; I'm far from convinced that immigration restrictionism is a useful policy to reduce the relative power of the identitarians.
Also not getting into country of origin limitations for industrial base natsec/corporate espionage concerns - that one gets complex fast.
Curious where you grew up and what years, if you don't mind sharing.
Not directly on point, but in 1971, at age 13, as a result of a custody change (divorced parents) I moved (between 7th and 8th grade) from:
a suburban public middle school, where the median student's parents were probably at least 80th percentile SES, that had three nonwhites (two ethnically Japanese, one black - I strongly suspect but don't know for a fact that all were born in the US; I don't know about their parents ) out of 700 students (n.b. my best friend at that school was born in the US to immigrant parents from Finland; I think all his older siblings had been born in Finland)
to:
A public school that had a bit over 100 white students out of 1400 (it was about 80% Chinese, of whom minimum 80% were children of immigrants - I would guess that over half of the kids were also born overseas, mostly in Hong Kong). Yes, as you probably guessed, that was San Francisco.
I learned vastly more and was far happier in the San Francisco school. Probably mostly for two reasons:
1) It had academic stratification, so I was not bored silly in class (the parents at the suburban school were intensely opposed to any sort of stratification - even afterschool G&T had to be done cautiously).
2) Academic performance carried roughly equal status to athletic performance (still not as important as social clique navigation).
Again, I was just a kid, so it's not like I had control over where I lived, but in high school I did make friends who lived in dominantly white, largely working class neighborhoods (yes, San Francisco still had such neighborhoods in the 70s - not any longer, of course), and when I later did get to choose where I lived, I did pick one of the higher ethnic diversity, rather more crime ridden areas.
Yes, _I_ agree, but see ** below. I just think that racial/ethnic and sexual orientation/gender identity diversity is probably sucking up too much of the oxygen (yeah, I have a not too shallow understanding of some of the path dependency behind *why* - there are still a reasonable number of living Americans who grew up with Jim Crow, for one thing).
Hence for example hard lefties like Freddie DeBoer or Ross Barkan who are (correctly in my view, given their priors) despairing of the identitarian left.
For an example of a different kind of diversity, my general position on political hot button topics tends to be anti-identitarian neoliberaltarian - like Matt Yglesias or Bryan Caplan or Scott Alexander. But in spite of that I'm not unhappy to have ACB on SCOTUS, even though she is further to the right on most things I care about than the median Trump justice (geometric mean of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh), because she's not quite as much from the intense Ivy (counting Stanford as Ivy for most purposes)/Acela/Federal background as the other justices.
** I and probably most of the readers of Richard's substack are probably well above median SES and IQ, and probably at least one standard deviation toward BAP (broad autistic phenotype). So at the emotional level I completely get his subhead "Immigration destroys social cohesion. Good.". But social cohesion has a lot of externalities that we depend on.
Gentrification is white people moving into a non-white neighborhood until it becomes a white one. And the more white it becomes, the more they like it, judging by the house prices.
Nope, in my experience, white gentrifiers keep pushing further and further, block and block, expanding the area of gentrification. The neighborhood becomes red hot while the white people are still a minority, not after they become a majority. Keep in mind the gentrifiers are of all races, so to racialize them as all white is not always accurate
The gentrification process occurs precisely because a physically decent location becomes cheap, and as more white people move in, more white people are willing to move in. Which is the point. The majority of white people are not chasing the dream of living in a neighbourhood that is 95% Chinese.
What? It is the only plausible scenario. The fertility rate is 1.5 and immigration will continue straight up. If you mean "I'll be dead before I have to think about that," then yes.
I agree with most of this but you still exhibit the same two colossal blind spots that so many others talking about immigration do.
1) you make no distinction whatsoever between legal and illegal immigrants, and of the enormous social consequences of throwing the southern border open to everyone without performing any sort of selection for the people coming here being educated, law-abiding, economically productive, English-speaking, etc.
2) you overlook the fallacy of the shifting denominator committed by all economists who conclude that “Americans” will be economically better off by letting in low-skilled immigrants even if per capita GDP goes down, because you are already counting the would-be immigrants as pre-Americans and including them in the collective whose good is being calculated. There is a serious and negative economic impact on a class of Americans whom the elite educated class of Americans tend to think about as little as possible: those who must survive on a below-median wage and have below-median IQs but ARE AMERICANS DAMMIT!
Point 2 is very correct, of course. Steve Sailer has been banging this drum for years. I think it's because the kind of people who immigrated to the US (like me) just basically see it as our property - we were temporarily embarrassed Americans at home - so it's not really a problem for us to be an n+1 to any given hypothetical America, nor is it a problem for those who come after.
Where is the evidence for this serious and negative impact on the low-waged? There’s been a lot of research on wage impacts of immigration on native workers. Most of it comes up with effects that are zero or at worst tiny.
Honestly, I don’t think many policymakers care much about #2, or at least the people it would affect. They aren’t generally a pleasant hang unless you want to discuss football
Canada allows legal immigration only to people who speak English (or French, the other official language.). It is hard to get here illegally and with universal state healthcare you need proof of legal residence in the country for your doctor to get paid. Unlike in the U.S. where uncompensated care is just a cost of doing business, most Canadian doctors won’t look at you if you aren’t registered with the provincial insurance monopsony...unless you can pay cash of course.
But the point is you shouldn’t let anyone in who can’t speak English. They will never assimilate and will spend all their time plotting against Anglos.
“ They will never assimilate and will spend all their time plotting against Anglos.”
Paranoia in full display. You don’t know many immigrant families, do you? Yes, hard to
immigrate as an older adult in any society and totally blend in culturally and linguistically, but children of immigrants end up as American as apple
pie.
Are there any native born Americans who don't speak English?
Did I say there were?
But if they are born into households where no one speaks English, and hang out in enclaves where the native language is widely used, they will struggle if their first exposure to English is in school at age 5. School assumes that the children are fluent native speakers of English. ESL is a different kettle of fish.
Now granted, most immigrants who don’t speak English will work hard to learn it but it hampers their work success if they don’t become fluent quickly.
Most nations, including my own, are not nations of immigrants. The people who make up the population of the country are the same as those who occupied the land a thousand years ago. We all share the same history, have our own unique phenotype, language and culture. Many of us actually appreciate our nations and are not going to destroy them for the opportunity to damage social cohesion in the hope that people will be less likely to support gov assistance policies.
Which nation is that? Your name sounds Anglo, which makes me question you. Do you live on the Isles have a pure pre-Roman Celtic bloodline?
History shows that most great accomplishments of man were done within relatively narrow windows of history by nations which embraced a mixture of functioning markets (usually with access to ports and trade routes) and relative tolerance for free thought. Newton's work on optics was build on studying texts produced during the Islamic golden age. The Islamic golden age was only a thing thanks to relatively heterodox moderates willing to study Ancient Greek texts. The Greeks remarked that much of what they learned was on the backs of earlier Persians. All of that is great, and is at the cornerstone of why such cultures/histories are still revered today.
By contrast, Jews stayed relatively homogeneous and insular for most of their dismal 2000+ year history history until the late 19th century, and they contributed nothing but child penis mutilation and chicken sacrifice until a few began to reform and become great scientists/artists/etc. Spinoza, basically the only great Jew of those near-two millennia, despised Orthodox Jewish culture and embraced the early burgeoning liberalism of the Dutch. Nationality on the basis of language/phenotype is great if you want to produce a bunch of inbred incestuous madmen scribbling on ancient tomes, but it doesn't produce great civilization.
Yes, well the romans actually had remarkably little genetic influence on the British population. But that is beside the point. Limited migration has always occurred between neighbouring populations, so what? You seem to be implying that people cannot learn from or collaborate with people of different cultures unless they have mass migration? This obviously doesn't follow, I'm not sure I understand your point. We created the industrial revolution, contributed enormously to the enlightenment and conquered a quarter of the globe pre mass immigration. Since the 90's we have had enormous inflow to the extent that more than a quarter of our population are non British within a couple of decades. I can tell you that we have not had a technological or economic renaissance as a result.
What I was trying to get across, which I think many people with recent migration history miss, is that what makes a country desirable to many who live within it is much more than a simple policy position or minor fluctuations in GDP growth. It is the fact that the country is theirs. Their people, their traditions, their language etc. I would happily accept a government with more welfare policies elected for a few years than a right wing government which irreversibly changes the demographics of the country, but had less public spending during their time in office.
I'm more saying that nations themselves, defined along ethnohistorical lines, are not inherently important for the things that actually improve the human experience. Ethnically/culturally-driven societies at best tend to stagnate and benefit by osmosis from the technological innovations of their neighbors.
Some meme about the Holy Roman Empire not being any of those three things but then gloss over how an unstable patchwork of tiny cultures by way of free travel managed to start the Printing Revolution and created grand scientific figures. One funny and illustrative example is Copernicus, a man who barely moved from his birth place yet knew several languages to best communicate, a man around whom borders changed and whose own ethnocultural identity is debated among scholars.
I don't have any problem with people of ethnic groups wanting to only live among those of their own, and I certainly agree that the mass importation of uneducated and unskilled non-European migrants into your country is suicidal in the long run. But even then, it was only made possible by an overwhelmingly-white ruling class initiating it, and a complacent population ultimately accepting it (even if Enoch Powell had the support of the majority initially).
Personally, as someone descended from Appalachian Baptists who were kicked out by Pennsylvania Quakers who were kicked out by the British, and as someone whose family tends to move regularly in pursuit of better employment, I would happily abandon many of the traditions of my forefathers, just as they did theirs. The Roman Empire wasn't great because of a singular distinct ethnic Roman tradition/peoples, it was great because it oversaw the construction of great infrastructure, the utilization of great mines and quarries, and a thriving trans-Mediterranean trade network. I don't look forward to a future in America where whites are universally hated by a resentful growing minority, but if I have to continue the family tradition by fleeing to Asia, I'll do what I have to.
“The worst performing country relative to IQ is easily North Korea. It’s probably the most socially cohesive nation in the world too. Had they had some diversity, perhaps it would’ve been harder to form a totalitarian state based on a socialist ideology that starved its own people. There would’ve been too much discord and instability for one family to turn everyone into slaves.”
1) The USSR had plenty of non-Russian ethnic groups, and its most notorious totalitarian dictator was a Georgian, whose serial-killer enforcer was a Georgian Jew. Tito’s Yugoslavia also managed to combine ethnic diversity with one-party rule; once one-party rule ended, Yugoslavia fell apart.
2) Is North Korea a lot less diverse than South Korea? Not really. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan all manage to combine democracy with ethnic homogeneity. If anything, it’s ethnically mixed Singapore which has to “manage” its democracy. While North Korea is a despicable hell-hole, and I wouldn’t recommend Juche as a political system, the country has managed to develop its own nuclear bomb, which requires a certain amount of IQ brainpower.
3) Non-democratic government may actually be appealing for multi-ethnic societies, because there are plenty of minority groups with a justified fear of winner-takes-all majoritarian politics. This is one reason the Assad family has held onto dictatorial power in Syria; the alternatives all seem worse. The constitution of Lebanon - which mandates that the President must be a Maronite, the Prime Minister a Sunni, and the Speaker a Shia - goes against the secular democratic ideals of most western societies. But it’s a realistic attempt to deal with Lebanese diversity. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland deliberately seeks to reduce straight-up majoritarian democracy, in favour of a Lebanese-type arrangement which guarantees that parties which lose elections still get government jobs. Even that’s coming under strain, as demographics change.
4) If we’re determined to go full-on with diversity, we should actually study previous attempts to deal with it, such as the Ottoman Millet system or Dutch Pillarization.
This is why I say fiscal conservatives are no better than social leftists. They want to replace white people too. Not just that but they dont believe in the idea of a nation state either. They believe America should just be an economic zone. Because all that matters to them is GDP
“It’s not impossible, but one might also think that more diversity will increase social tensions, enough to continue making new expansions of the welfare state impossible. It seems that, historically, people either focus on class or they focus on other forms of identity. Some leftists think that emphasizing class is better, so will criticize wokeness for being a distraction, arguing that poor people of all backgrounds need to come together and fight the rich. From my perspective, class based politics is much worse. Affirmative action is a tax that market economies can afford to pay, while trade unionism, anti-competitive regulations, and redistributionist policies are fundamentally larger threats to systems that produce wealth. “
During the time period when whites are still a majority, but the minority share of the population was growing, dumb economic preferences took a backseat to aversion to minority crime, affirmative action etc.
But when nonwhites can demographically and politically inundate whites, they will have no moral scruples with using them as a cash cow. Reduced social cohesion among nonwhite groups has not and will not prevent them from viewing whites as arch villains, and expropriating their wealth and property.
The project of tearing down civil rights laws and affirmative action becomes that much harder as the social and financial beneficiaries of those policies grow in number and political power. You characterize affirmative action as a sustainable drag on productive economies (blithely ignoring the situation of the white minority who will be dispossessed under this regime), but the situation will look different when a majority of the population is entitled to racial spoils.
Increasing the low iq segments of the population undermines both the average iq and the smart fraction. More resources and money will have to be spent babysitting low iq third worlders. (Hispanic crime tends to increase as a large portion of the children of immigrants assimilate to black norms, and in any event you still refuse to come out against subsaharan African immigration, which will be horrific for the crime situation).
You ignore zach goldberg’s data on builtin nonwhite racial resentment towards whites. You ignore decades-long efforts of compassionate conservative hispandering. (Bizarrely in your diversity good for markets piece you criticize a california proposition criticize off welfare!
Very sinister and mendacious piece
*criticize a california proposition cutting off welfare
yeah each of the policy proposals they float to mitigate the negative effect of low iq third world immigration are politically fanciful as is (restrictions on the vote etc), and will become still more unlikely as they grow in number.
This place already exist it’s called California. California is majority Mexican and Mexicans even if they don’t like blacks they dislike whites even more. There is no such thing as a natural Mexican conservative. Also always the same argument cubans and Cubans. Cubans are majority white, they are mainly fair skin , they share few things in common with most Mexicans and Central Americans the 1980s gop white family ads appealed to them and still does. Most anti left South Americans coming to Florida are white middle to upper class people. Is not the same brown migration from Mexico. And actually yes the whole point of a party is to win elections , not a single state got more republicans Bc Mexicans and Asians moved in. Also every evidence point when whites were the majority the dems were more socially moderate , when did wokeness turned off Mexicans ? Gay marriage wasn’t a big deal for them. Even today most anti woke people are whites. A 1980s demographic would crush dems electorally. Also even the average white democrat is still more pro cop and anti crime than most immigrants and their kids. Data proves u wrong. I don’t think letting america becoming like California with the Hopes it becomes moderate (with the gop losing every election) it’s a competent way to tell conservatives immigration and diversity it’s good
Interesting thoughts, but you’re missing the enormous impact of various forms of Affirmative Action / DEI. These are a race to mediocrity.
The idea that brain evolution was similar / identical for people whose cultures never left the Stone Age or early Bronze Age, when compared to Europe culturally, morally, tangibly is, of course, absurd. (And similar to the idea that a million years of sex roles and their impact on brain evolution are irrelevant because of suffrage.)
Simply, those who could never envision, and so could never build modernity cannot maintain it. See Zimbabwe & South Africa.
As we push away those whose cultures - and so intellectual evolution - created the modern world while pretending those who did not can both maintain what they could not build and further scientific / tech progress, those not paying attention will be surprised by the negative results. Those of us paying attention will not be.
As a native-born 75-y.o. male of Slovak-Irish heritage living in one of the most immigrant-heavy cities in the country (Glendale, California), I must say that some of the “whitest” people I encounter are Armenians, Asians, Mexicans (conservative, regular churchgoers, often anti-LGBT), while some of the least “white” people are malcontent younger (self-hating?) whites with piercings/tattoos etc. and Bernie/BLM-type allegiances. If I’m not mistaken that’s the way it is in most urban areas around the country. This relatively rapid assimilation of most immigrants becoming “normal Americans” with relatively normal voting patterns seems to me to be grossly overlooked by those worried about a decline of “White” America.
Richard, the current immigration situation in Europe deserves a chapter. What you write may be true for the US, but I have yet to meet a professional who has written about the positive social impact of Somali migrants coming to Europe. If you search. You will find Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch analyses that the average Somali migrant costs the taxpayer 1-1.2 million euros net over a lifetime - and that's not even mentioning their over-representation in violent crime! Because somehow Richard, writing from gated communities, the deterioration in the average person's sense of security is not apparent. Another thing, if you use ethnically homogeneous North Korea as an example of how bad life is without migrants, how can you forget Japan? Or the Republic of South Africa, which is currently moving from being a developed industrial country to a carcass republic thanks to its great diversity. So Richard, you should be a bit more modest about the positive effects of migration...
Why is preventing your governments from instituting special policies and requirements for immigrants-but-not-yet-citizens? Keep them on probation periods where they must find work (or if they can't, be assigned to something to do by the state) AND behave impeccably. If they don't, they get deported. The US green card system (and, I believe, similar systems in other Anglo countries) has all these kinds of riders and more.
My sense (which could be wrong) is that Europeans regard such immigrants (i.e., all but the most high-skilled ones) with distaste, if not contempt, because they don't behave in a culturally appropriate manner, and find it hard to do so. So there is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach, pushing immigrants into ghettos and throwing money at them in a rather pointless way.
"Here’s one poll of many showing that, when it comes to basically everything government does, the vast majority of the population wants to either increase spending or spend the same amount. There is no substantial constituency for small government."
I believe it was Brian Caplan who once said, "The Left is anti-market, and the Right is anti-Left". Very true, only hardcore Hayekians really care about the free-market stuff.
I love Caplan (and Niskanen more broadly, and Hayek too).
"Small government" and "pro-market" aren't orthogonal, but neither are they synonyms.
I know a reasonable number of what might be reasonably called market social democrats (they'd probably be OK with ordoliberal if they knew the term) who at least believe they would be happy with the Nordic model.
Hanania conflates this throughout the article.
I think Caplan's problem is that he's an economist so he sees the Left defined by something salient to him. Richard notes above that the welfare state hasn't changed as much since LBJ, and he attributes that to Republican backlash... but Dems have held political power, and their energies have shifted toward social policy.
GWB launched endless wars, not Reagan/Clinton.
Government expenditures have also greatly increased under "deficits don't matter" Republicans.
I read this as:
- division is good as it avoids socialist policies which reduce wealth
- immigration good because it causes division and immigrants communities have unpredictable pathways but often positive (eg Asians)
This fails to consider why Australia, Canada and New Zealand have been so successful to date. Pretty homogenous until a few decades ago, relatively strong cultural and institutional homogeneity still. Anglo institutions matter, have not led to socialism (although more than US maybe) and still led to great GDP per capita outcomes
Are they letting you guys out of the house yet down there?
More seriously, every one of those countries is significantly poorer than the US.
They are poorer, yes.
They also have lower homicide rates, longer lifespans, and better quality of life.
Maybe that’s fair, although hard to know how much is sheer scale, resource endowment, etc
Trade off seems to be crime and dysfunction - we don’t have the favelas and townships of the US (except remote aboriginal communities I guess)
Hanania seems unable to grasp that a high trust and racial homogeneous society are *highly valued* consumer goods. When these goods are destroyed, economic welfare declines even if GDP goes up.
Don't they also have less arable land? The UK has long been poorer than the US for purely Malthusian reasons.
Evidence? What is your Malthusian mechanism? I don’t see any clear correlation among countries between density and arable land and low income. Check Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan.
Colonial Americans were taller than Europeans, and more fecund, because they had plenty to eat.
Anyone who gets out of their house and travels to any of these places is less likely to feel they are poorer than someone at home looking at GDP per capita. Further, the US punches below many of these countries in international statistics comparing measures of well being, like longevity, crime, etc. as Steven Pinker has well noted.
I think this is a pretty good analysis.
Though I don't live there, I have numerous ties and am pretty familiar with AL and I would say that it's a much better place to live than Japan and (especially) SK, even if the sources of its productivity aren't quite what Richard is saying and have more to do with low population density and Federal dollars.
There's actually a natural experiment in this as there are many Koreans living in Southeast Alabama. For example Auburn, AL is 10% Asian, mostly Korean, these are Koreans who moved there for the Korean auto plants which stretch from Montgomery to the vicinity of Columbus, GA. If you talk to most of these Koreans, they will tell you that their lives are better in AL despite the challenges of being strangers in a strange land. Because they can just afford so much more.
The fact of the matter is that one can buy a large house with a large yard in the best neighborhood in the best city of any of AL's regions with a household income of like $125k (or at least you could when interest rates were low). That's the lifestyle that educated professionals ought to compare themselves to. Nowadays you can even do this by having a mostly-remote job in Atlanta or Nashville.
The antics of AL's autochthonous underclass (both white and black) are basically irrelevant to the upper-middle-class day-to-day. The police are oriented towards maintaining this reality.
Higher Ed is a way that AL differs from WV. Both U. of Alabama and Auburn are major draws and have actually grown in this respect (see that recent documentary on Alabama sororities, pulling girls from as far afield as CA). North Alabama, near Huntsville, can also be a more regional draw, particularly for anyone who wants to work in the defense/aerospace industries in Huntsville.
Of course, as you highlight, all of this is empowered by Federal dollars. But I do think, if you live in a backwater of a major empire, this problem actually cuts both ways. Because without the center pushing resources back out to the provinces, the brain drain from the provinces to the center is overwhelming, which leaves those places much more dilapidated than they would be as independent countries with closed borders. This is the challenge the EU's poorer countries now face; the EU's Core subsidizes them but not to the degree the US Core subsidizes its provinces, because Poland doesn't get a vote in the Bundestag.
The opening line, after a subhead "Immigration destroys social cohesion. Good"
"Some people are naturally tribal and don’t like immigration. So they’ll use whatever justifications they can come up with to argue against it."
I dunno but it feels like Hanania is digging his own grave, I mean in so far as being taken seriously as a pundit and a thinker.
"Some people are naturally tribal and don’t like immigration. So they’ll use whatever justifications they can come up with to argue against it."
This is a spot-on observation. I read Sailer's website for many years, and saw people throw kitchen-sink kind of arguments. They would start with one grievance. If that didn't stick, they would go to another. And another. And then eventually they would circle back to the original one. Ad nauseum.
Margaret Thatcher once said something like "there's no such thing as society". Social cohesion can be good and produce good effects. Sometimes it can produce mass delusion too. Religion...nationalism....wokism.... As Hanania says, adherence to markets requires high IQ. Social cohesion in many ways lowers public IQ as people effectively suspend the rational parts of their brains in order to avoid looking and feeling anti-social.
For the opposite view, here is an article I wrote about why more mexicans in the USA will make the USA more like Mexico, and why that is a bad thing:
The Taco Truck Delusion
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-taco-truck-delusion/
"I think that the IQ and income data suffers from the basic problem that people see an average change and focus too much on that, instead of whether people are actually better or worse off."
Great point, but you make this same mistake constantly. You are *hyper-focused* on GDP usually. Even if I accept that homogeneous countries are poorer than diverse ones because they are homogeneous, living in a homogeneous country just feels qualitatively so much better. Have you ever been to a European city without a large immigrant population? Miles better quality of life than, say, LA , even though not everyone might have clothes dryers.
Europe, even nice countries like France, is stagnating. Young people can’t get permanent jobs because of sclerotic labour laws, their universities produce little except bureaucrats, crippling taxes, energy prices skyrocketing, no one’s having children (except African immigrants on welfare, who hate white Europeans, especially cops.). No one seems committed to doing anything about it, just sit back until the USSR invades was the plan. And now that there is no USSR, and maybe soon no Russia, Europe doesn’t even have anyone to capitulate to. Except Allah. Lots of issues that tourists don’t see unless they can talk to the natives in their language. Free healthcare and state pensions aren’t everything.
Especially if there are no clothes dryers.
I never said Europe didn't have its problems---it certainly does. I'm just saying that the day-to-day life of homogeneous European cities is more pleasant than that of a typical American city, and this should count for something when doing cost-benefit analysis.
And I don't buy the argument that Richard is trying to make that homogeneous nations are innately disinclined to dynamism and market economies. Hell, it was all-white nations that even invented modern market economies in the first place. Maybe his argument is that in this particular moment in time, you need a diverse population to prevent further descent into social democracy. That's a better argument, but I still have issues with it. Anyway...
I don’t think that has much to do with demographics. American city policy has been a disaster since the 1950s. Ever gone to a rich NJ suburb? Big middle class, really nice to live in. It’s more rich vs poor than demos imho. What do you think?
It's very hard to know what your quality of life will be before you move, and I don't think day-to-day quality of life is necessarily the reason Europeans immigrate to the US nowadays. I, for example, at some point moved to a place I absolutely hated because of a unique career opportunity.
I honestly don't know why more Europeans don't own clothes dryers specifically---they could certainly afford one.
It is, but I wouldn't classify it as "day-to-day" quality of life
Hanania is correct that a homogeneous white population might embrace socialism but Sweden was never full-on socialist and engaged in market reforms in the 90s. It has all the hallmarks of a high IQ capitalist society. All of this can happen without mass non-white immigration and elite whites can still do an end run around the economic ignorant masses.
"Might"? White populations invented socialism and spread it throughout the world. There is no ethnic group more prone to post-free market socialism than whites. Sweden is substantially less pro-market than non-white China or a number of non-white* Arab states
*I consider Arabs to be white but have a feeling you don't
East Asians actually seem the most prone to communism. And I disagree on Sweden being "substantially less pro-market than non-white China". Sweden has a welfare state, but aside from that is fairly free-market. China is run by the Communist party and has nationalized big chunks of its economy.
Although they are phenotypically white, Jews are highly collectivist and were/are very influential in Western societies. They were possibly a necessary factor in the Russian Revolution. (Of course, Shaker and other Christian collectivist societies preceded the Jews.) But it is still the case that no Western nation is actually socialist as meant by socialists in the 19th C. In spite of the New Deal, the US remained the premier capitalist nation long before mass non-white immigration. Perhaps in an indirect fashion the Jews were necessary for this, too, as the USSR showed by example what you get when you go communist and the vastly disproportionate communist Jews in the US caused a strong backlash against this ideology. China might be more capitalist than Sweden (I doubt it), but look where they rose up from. But it remains true that whites have to fight against their inherent egalitarian tendencies, especially white women. This tendency expresses itself with regard to attacks on ethnocentrism.