I don't think the result of your poll is "deranged" at all. Would Israeli Jews prefer a country with 40 million people that was 75% Jewish or a country with 100 million people that was 50% Jewish?
If they would take tens of millions of fewer Jews in the world to accomplish it, yes. I’ve seen some people on the internet argue that prominent Zionists welcomed the Holocaust because it would get people to come to Israel. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is everyone would acknowledge it’s evil.
Now there may be a complication here as Jews in Israel have a higher birth rate, so maybe you’ll get more and better Jews in the long run through getting them all to buy into Zionism. But I don’t think anyone foresaw that.
The problem with that thinking though is it ignores how a democratic states' policies are affected by its demographics.
50% Jewish and democratic Israel loses the Law of Return. So even if there are more Jews now in your higher population example, that same example may result in fewer absolutely in a few decades.
The most extreme Jews, the Haredim, are overwhelmingly anti-Zionist, on account of Israel being a secular state founded in large part by atheist socialists. But given just how many Continental Europeans participated willingly in the Holocaust, many survivors had no desire to stay anywhere north of the Mediterranean, and so compromised their political beliefs for practical reasons. A decent number also immigrated before the Holocaust because they knew what was coming, and even more would've left had not both immigration quotas stopped them in their tracks, and had the Nazis not also stopped them in their tracks. (The Dominican Republic was willing to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees in the late '30s, but the Nazis had no desire to see that many Jews flee extermination. Less than a thousand made it to Hispaniola.)
The Haredim are largely despised by the rest of the Israelis for being awful, draft-dodging welfare parasites. There are also American Haredim, who are also awful welfare parasites, but there aren't enough of them to pose a national security risk, and national security is a totally different ballgame for a continent-spanning empire with peaceful, significantly less powerful neighbors versus a state slightly smaller than New Jersey surrounded by tens of millions of people who believe six million wasn't enough, and whom only fail to finish the job because they're significantly less competent, and said competency gap has only grown ever since Reagan -- blessedly -- bribed the Israelis into abandoning socialism:
The Holocaust analogy is changing what your poll asked. Your poll did not ask if they would prefer to murder 200million existing people. Lowering/increasing some future birthrate is not morally equivelant to murdering or not murdering living people. Thus the evilness of being pro Holocaust does not map onto the poll question.
As for the OPs argument, the case could made that a majority Jewish Israel gives more security for Jews than if there was no such country, thus the long term expectation for number of Jews is larger for the smaller country.
It's not totally clear to me that they didn't foresee that. People knew that Jews in developed countries in Europe (in places like Germany and Hungary, it was higher in Poland) had low fertility and high intermarriage, and Jews in the Yishuv had high fertility and no intermarriage. Jews were super overrepresented among scientists and intellectuals, and a lot of Jewish scientists and intellectuals supported Zionism and the founding of Israel, predicting (correctly) that it would do great things for the future of the Jewish people and for scientific progress. Herzl talked about a state that did a lot of great science, etcetera. Of course, the Zionists were also very motivated by Jewish persecution, they understood that a lot of people always hate the Jews (mostly because of their success), and so it's good for Jews to have power and to defend themselves, to have a state and an army and so on. The actions of the Nazis, wokes, Hamas etc shows that they were right.
Anything is possible. But this is the logic that keeps people in caves. “We restricted some freedoms so we have to restrict more freedoms.” Maybe we should restrict free speech because it could lead to restrictions on markets? Maybe we should stop people from eating what they want as long as we have government supported healthcare? Everything depends on everything else. The solution to restricting freedom in one area of life is to fight that restriction, not restrict other freedoms.
Unfortunately Israelis do lean against high skill non-Jewish immigration. It’s 51-42 though which is quite modest. I’m sure Richard supports the 42%, and I’m sure the corresponding figure in Palestine is way worse.
To be fair pollster doesn’t specify how much skill, and whether the people are hostile to the country or not.
Anyway I would also wager the 42% is more secular and includes a critical majority of the elite liberals and the people in tech who actually set the policy. If 42% of Palestinians or white nationalists, including a big majority of the influential elites, supported high skill immigration, Richard would probably drop all his grievances.
There are certainly high skill immigrants in Israel with 0 Jewish family ties. It’s allowed.
I know of at least one high skill non-Jewish guy (a Polish gentile) with no Jewish family ties at all who has a tenured job at a university in Israel. He doesn’t have citizenship yet but I think he will get it at some point.
Anyway I think eligibility for citizenship is not so relevant to Richard’s point. Richard would never criticize Emirati nationalists for their 10% Emirati citizens 90% non citizens open immigrant policy. He would praise them.
Damn, people would prefer to live in a more homogeneous environment regardless of the global repercussions? Thank God we've got Hanania to point out the inconsistencies of basic human desires.
Why is it crazy to prefer to live among a larger percentage of your co-ethnics than wanting to expand the absolute number of co-ethnics? I find it understandable that people would rather live among a higher percentage of people similar to themselves than to increase the absolute number of their co-ethnics, most of whom they will never come into contact with. This is especially true in places that are already too densely populated.
Think of a village. You can either live with 200 people like yourself or 201 people like yourself plus 100 Roma, 100 Albanians, 100 Palestinians and 100 black people. Why is it crazy to prefer the former?
“ I find it understandable that people would rather live among a higher percentage of people similar to themselves than to increase the absolute number of their co-ethnics, most of whom they will never come into contact with”
Well I was assuming for the most part nationalists at least care about their nation. I criticized them for being parochial, but this is an even more parochial position, “I only care about the things I literally see with my own eyes.”
But I think the article addresses this too. You’ll never come into contact with 99.99% of your nation. Why then do nationalists sit around worrying about national demographics? People in West Virginia are glued to Fox News getting mad at immigrants flooding into California. You should support creating a wealthy country with freedom of association and then you can build the community you want.
When you say 'nation' do you mean tribe, as in the Apache Nation, or is it a near synonym of 'country'?
I would say that nationalists care about their country just so long as they see it as 'their' country. Once that is no longer the case, they probably care less.
Yes, the nationalist view is perhaps a bit parochial and mine no doubt more so. But some of us like parochial, especially when the alternative is to be swamped with mass immigration from very different cultures. I say this as someone who was born in a city that was 99% white British at the time and is now around 30% white British. I'm willing to concede that this might have made us economically wealthier, though the jury is still out on that. Whether one thinks this slight putative economic gain was worth turning our societies upside down for depends on your priorities.
'You’ll never come into contact with 99.99% of your nation. Why then do nationalists sit around worrying about national demographics? '
Because they often DO come into contact with large numbers of other ethnic groups?
'People in West Virginia are glued to Fox News getting mad at immigrants flooding into California.'
Because they can see this creeping tide slowly advancing towards them? Because they can see the writing on the wall? Because they don't like what has happened to their co-ethnics in California and feel sorry for them? Which doesn't immediately suggest that to be logically consistent they should push for a white baby boom.
Also, basically no one believes, or has ever believed in freedom of association (Goldwater lost!), which means that if you don't want to associate with someone your only chance to do so is to stop them from entering.
Hey Richard, let's say having children makes you happy. Does the fourth add as much to your happiness as the first or second? Given the choice between 1) a guarantee of 2 wonderful future children and 2) five children, but one of them will be a total psychopath, and there's no way you'll be able to dispose of him, which one would you choose?
"Why then do nationalists sit around worrying about national demographics? People in West Virginia are glued to Fox News getting mad at immigrants flooding into California."
Because as California goes, so goes the nation. I can't believe your this stupid, so it must just be dishonesty. Why would I want to bring in a bunch of people to my country who do not share my values, especially in a democratic system?
25% of children born in West Virginia (more or less the whitest state) today are non-white, and that number will only grow. You are completely ignorant if you think demographic change has been limited to border states and major cities.
You may not come into contact with 99% of the white people of your nation, but those who care about their homeland will often not be able to go anywhere without coming into contact with non-whites. If the anti-discrimination laws had never been passed, and there had been (and existed even now) a full comprehension that all roads, streets, parks, etc. are de facto owned by natives (not the world, i..e., communism) and held in trust by the state (see libertarian Jan Lester’s article below), then mass non-white immigration never would have succeeded on the level it has if the state were not PC and/or anti-white. The irony is that those who are anti-PC and pro-immigration classical liberals overlook the extent to which their pro-immigration views hinge on PC discrimination laws and PC statist control of the streets, etc. to make it possible. Another irony is that even though they stress the economic aspects of immigration, they ignore the massive externalities of destroying a homeland. Why? Again, for PC reasons. https://philarchive.org/rec/LESIAL
Nationalists hate the idea that you COULD encounter someone different. They want to elimate that possibility and any possible stresses or inconveniences around diversity
But it’s possible that (1) governments will not let the market work to build more housing, so supply will continue to lag population growth, (2) freedom of association laws and norms will not improve. You are saying in theory we can fix 1 and 2 so mass immigration is net good, but in practice the housing issue in many major cities is intractable, and many reasonable people are not hopeful. I know you are fighting to improve freedom of association, but we have seen things move in the opposite direction in recent years. It’s not insane that some have lost hope in these things, and in that context, you could view anti-immigration as an inferior solution by those that see a lack of practical likelihood for better ideas.
I agree with the comments defending the poll respondents but still think they’re missing the elephant in the room: in a decade when housing and food are unaffordable on two professional salaries, and when cities are overcrowded with ten buyers for every home and ten qualified applicants for every job, most Americans are terrified of the idea of tripling the population. Richard is free to disagree, but this strikes me as a very common and natural intuition. Leave the ethnic stuff to the side: surely the population density thing overrides everything else posed in that poll.
This whole post is pretty incoherent to be honest. One of Richard’s misfires.
It’s just run of the mill socialism to think like this. Now if I was arguing with a regular socialist I can point out their economics is wrong. But nationalists except market logic in most instances but then use socialist logic here, socialism is not their motivation.
The way you solve all these things is markets and prices. Charge for the national parks, build more housing. But again, conservatives don’t just worry about crowding as a general matter. They support a higher birth rate!
> conservatives don’t just worry about crowding as a general matter. They support a higher birth rate!
Not sure this is correct as a historical matter. Malthus was no liberal reformer; I would guess that he has been cited approvingly by more conservatives than socialists over the centuries. Conservatism generally embraces a tragic, constrained view of the world, in contrast to the utopian, ponies-for-everyone views of socialists. Surely a “conservative” in any meaningful sense would look at a graph of global population over the last 10,000 years and say, “wow, we seem to be hurtling toward a future in which resources will be stretched thinner than anything we’ve ever seen, which at every time in the past has meant famine, war, and chaos — maybe we should slow down”.
But the argument we’re having here is really not about conservatism but “conservatism”, which by your terms seems to mean a sort of pro-business, libertarian Silicon Valley optimism in our ability to overcome what look right now like hard constraints, and faith that we’re all headed toward a bright future of fusion-powered AI robot servants for all. That is not really what “conservatives” have generally believed throughout history, in my view.
But in any event: you don’t need to argue with me, I’m just the messenger telling you what respondents read when they answered your poll. Are they “socialists”? Maybe. Most people are, somewhat, sometimes. They mostly haven’t read Matt Yglesias or aren’t convinced by his argument that the US can give a billion people a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Don’t argue with me, argue with them.
I think there is no contradiction between wanting SOME AREAS to be less crowded while at the same time wanting white people to have more children. These people don't want to fill up every available space in America with whites. They just want to ensure they don't become so demographically weak that they lose control of a country they once saw as theirs. In a democracy it's not absolute numbers that are everything but percentages.
Build more housing and have more freedom of association is good in theory but has proven extremely unsuccessful in practice. Maybe some promote anti-immigration because they view that issue as more malleable than improving housing and freedom of association, even if they agree with you that those improvements would be preferable to nationalism.
Would you rather live in a white socialist country or a mixed race capitalist democracy? Rural Hispanics are more likely to vote with Republicans to maintain free markets than big city whites, so I don't really understand the idea of demographic power in this context. Not without abandoning the other principles at least. I guess there's no contradiction if the New Right also doesn't set a high priority on individual rights and free markets.
You’re preaching to the choir: I live in Ontario. Housing and food prices are astronomical, not to mention electricity, gasoline, and telecommunications services (the most expensive in the world baby!). Like many social democracies, Canada was doing okay until about 2010, when it became clear that it was never going to join the grown-ups table of advanced value-add economies but would simply fall back on the only real sources of wealth it has: mining, oil and gas, and lumber. Now the deal is broken: we still pay 50%+ of our income in taxes, but instead of the working healthcare system and social safety net we had as recently as 15 years ago, we now get year-long wait lists to get a family doctor and assisted suicide if we fall through the cracks.
We’re like a much colder version of the Congo, only with absurd pretensions to being something more civilized.
That number was likely chosen because Richard reads Matthew Yglesias and MY wrote a book called One Billion Americans where he makes a nationalist pitch for population growth and increased immigration. Did you know that if the entire worlds population moved to the US we would only have the population density of Japan? Stuff like that.
I don’t really have strong opinions about whether a billion Americans is a good idea. But it appears that Richard’s Twitter followers do. And they were likely expressing that opinion in their poll responses, rather than anything having to do with ethnicity etc. That’s all I’m saying.
Japan has a far higher population density and their housing is so cheap it's almost worthless. Unaffordable housing was a policy choice (the choice being to reject free market principles in favor of land use laws and central planning), not an inevitablility of population density or growth. And Americans have never spent less of their income on food. In 1960, households spent around 17% of their income on food, today it's less than 10%, despite the fact that we eat more at restaurants than ever before. You have basic facts wrong.
I was trying to characterize what was going through the heads of the poll respondents. Perhaps I should have made that more clear. I don’t have a dog in this fight; I just thought that the interpretation of the poll results was wrong because it’s a bad poll that confounds two questions, namely: 1. Do you want a billion people in the US? and 2. Something something white people, and the results then get interpreted as though only the second question was what was being answered.
The problem is how you draw the distinction. I have more in common with a first generation Indian kid that grew up around the corner than I do with someone that looks like me that is from Dublin. The core problem is drawing the line at "black" "white" or "Palestinians." It's not a genetic thing it's culturally conditioned and we should be aiming to live pluralisticly not keep others out arbitrarily
I sort of agree. I get on much better and have more in common with my Punjabi neighbours than I do with the loud, annoying white British family across the road. But here's the thing; it probably is true that on average I have more in common with white British people than with the majority of our ethnic population. I say this as a (lower) middle-class English teacher who went to university and has spent about 35 years living in various countries. Working class whites would probably have even more in common with other British whites.
I don't actually buy the idea that there is no genetic component to a society's culture. For example, I don't think it's pure coincidence that Japan has both a high national average IQ and a well-functioning, peaceable society. If you think people are so interchangeable that they can simply be shipped en masse from one culture to another with no deleterious effects on the receiving culture then I'd have to disagree with you.
And your point is that the Japanese still have the same genes? Okay, let me rephrase what I wrote. It's more likely that a well-functioning, peaceable society will appear in a high IQ society than in a low IQ society. Are all high IQ societies peaceable? No, Nazi Germany wasn't. Do all high IQ societies function well? No, North Korea doesn't.
If you like I can water things down even more. I think the kind of culture likely to arise in a population is not unrelated to genes. Better?
This is just arguing bias with the cover of science. He made a legitimate point - you pointed to a cultural current that is a very recent inversion with the exact same stock. You then go further to admit that high IQ societies can entail violence and failure. All you're really saying is that IQ (race, or ethnicity, or essentialist element x,y,z) makes violence and failure accidental components when it's possessed but essential when it's absent. This is just standard prejudiced thinking.
I wouldn't go that far. I think he's saying that there is a correlation, not that one is assured based on the other.
I do think that it's total selection bias though. IQ test scores have gone up so much that our great-grandparents would be considered mentally retarded today based on their test scores (they restandardize the curve every so often and have always had to adjust downward as average scores went up). More advanced societies produce people who think in ways that match higher IQ scores. As often happens, he's looking at a correlation and choosing which one caused the other, but probably the wrong one.
Yes, you could be right. However, I wasn't trying to claim that high IQ countries are never violent or commit atrocities. That is quite obviously not the case and clearly the more efficient you are, the more people you are able to kill. I would still say that high IQ countries are more likely to be peaceable than low IQ countries, for the same reason that high IQ people within a polulation are less likely to commit crimes. (IQ85 is the average IQ for criminals in the US, though this could simply reflect the fact that half of prison inmates are African-Americans).
Japan was an incredibly insular society for almost all of its history. It was only in the early to mid-20th century that they wanted to get in on the colonialism game.
That is a complete lie. Despite experiencing some of the world's most extreme isolation for a nation of its size, the Meiji Era saw it immediately industrialize and by the time of WW1 became a highly respectable developing economy on par with mid-level European economies.
Imperial Japanese violence during the Meiji Era was fairly minimal and mostly concerned the power struggle between itself and China over Korea and the maintenance of open trade between Japan and Korea. It was very mild in action and justifiable in self-interest relative to what the West did during the Boxer Rebellion, let alone the entire century to follow of Anglo-Judeo exploitation of Asia and the Middle East. If that wasn't a peaceful society, our current neocon period certainly is not.
"I have more in common with a first generation Indian kid that grew up around the corner than I do with someone that looks like me that is from Dublin."
"most immigration restrictionists I’ve read support a higher birthrate for native born Americans of all classes, which directly contradicts the arguments they sometimes make about the supposed negative effects of immigration in relation to wages, resource depletion, and overcrowding. Similarly, many nationalists are anti-free trade but in most other contexts pro-market, as if the laws of economics change based on the nationality of the person you’re interacting with."
The MAGA crowd also takes this false zero-sum worldview. They seek to restrict immigration to “protect local jobs” (Lump of Labor fallacy) but then encourage a larger native population.
They seek free markets but then throw up arbitrary tariffs and barriers to international trade.
As I explore at Risk & Progress, as also demonstrated here, the policies advocated by nationalists actually perversely weaken the very nation they claim to care about.
Both. I'm referring to all restrictions of the movement of people behind the norm. Beyond customs checks, passports..etc... So yes, I would include the MAGA advocated travel bans and immigration restrictions.
Okay, let's say allowing in large numbers of immigrants from the developing world made Americans on the whole richer. I think that's a reasonable position and it's probably true. However, even with this knowledge there may still be those who preferred their towns when everyone looked like them, spoke the same language and understood the same cultural references. These people may be financially worse off, wanting to live in their ethnically homogenous state, but to claim that they are thereby 'perversely weakening the nation they claim to care about' is a claim too far. Unless, of course, the only measure of a nation's strength is its GDP.
Really this is just a replay of the Brexit debate where all in favour of EU membership argued in terms of the economy while those who wanted out were arguing about things like sovereignty and control of borders. The first group could only think in terms of money and couldn't comprehend that not everyone's priorities were the same as theirs.
What you say makes sense, but we are seeing this play out in small homogenous towns all over the country and the people living there don't seem particularly thrilled about it. All we hear from them is how sad their little towns are and how bleak their opportunities are. They could move to places with better opportunities(as I did), but as you say they prefer to live in their small homogenous towns. But they don't actually sound very happy about that, they keep constantly complaining about how poor they are.
Certainly people can choose to have worse economic outcomes for better homogeneity, but no nationalist is out there actually making the case precisely because it sounds unattractive. It certainly isn't rational and it doesn't seem to make them very happy
"However, even with this knowledge there may still be those who preferred their towns when everyone looked like them, spoke the same language and understood the same cultural references. These people may be financially worse off, wanting to live in their ethnically homogeneous state,"
Right, there are people like this. But there are other people who wouldn't mind being around people who looked and behaved differently than the median person while appreciating the increased economic opportunities (and perhaps diversity in cuisine and other stuff); i.e., having diametrically opposite preferences.
The question is: why should the former group of people and their preferences be privileged and even treated as morally superior to the latter, as immigration restrictionists keep advocating?
The whole underlying point is caring more about your countrymen than someone in another country. Why is this so fucking hard for your autistic idiots to get this through your thick skulls?
You're still missing the point. If you care about your home country, then it is to your advantage to grow it. More people, more labor, more ideas, more technology, more business, more development. The economic, innovation, and historical literature is VERY clear on this point; close your borders and watch the nation you care about shrivel away.
Not that anyone is going to change your mind "autistic idiot" and "thick skulls" is a dead giveaway that you aren't here to consider any viewpoint other than your own.
If you put a bunch of British convicts on an island you get Australia. If you put a bunch of African slaves on an island you get Haiti. If you put 50/50 on an island you get something in between - the null hypothesis should be linear scaling of results with admixture. As it is very preferable to live in Australia than to live in Haiti (by revealed preference of immigrants) we should selfishly prefer random Australian immigrants to random Haitian immigrants, because it is better for us to make the country incrementally more like Australia than incrementally more like Haiti. The best countries to take immigrants from are the countries that people want to immigrate to, if the population of the country makes it what it is.
Current immigration systems have a lot of de facto filters that limit the damage of immigration from undesirable countries (maybe only Haitian elites could afford to emigrate) and this produces some study results that look like neutralish impact on the recipient county but wouldn’t scale to a system of actual open borders.
Have you ever heard of a little country called the USA? Kind of blows your theory out of the water. We are one of the least homogenous nations in the world and we have the greatest economy, military, everything. We have more black people and Hispanics and Asians than any European country and we are bigger and better than all of them put together. If a mixture of higher and lower races produced an in-between result than this shouldn't be possible.
We were the greatest economy in the world when we were 90% white as well. Our black people are not the reason for our success; in fact, they exist at the bottom of nearly every measurable metric (other than white suicides and Hispanic pedophiles). You also completely missed his point that most non-Hispanic immigration over the last 50+ years has been meritocratic. Selecting the top 1% of Nigerians is great; open borders with a country of 200 million people and a oil-economy less diverse than Saudi Arabia, not so great.
The USA was at its peak in the immediate post-WW2 era, when we had almost no immigration, were super majority white, and ruled our only substantial nonwhite population with an iron fist.
The USA has higher economic freedom, higher oil/resource endowment, economies of scale due to the size of its single market, and seigniorage from printing the world’s reserve currency. Genetics are but one of many factors determining the wealth of nations. But it is obvious that Ceteris paribus incrementally substituting median Australian genetics for median African genetics among the US population would incrementally improve everyone else’s wages there (not only the substituent’s) by making it a richer country.
Not to mention a great smart fraction due to having like half the world’s Jews and having the best graduate schools brain draining the rest of the world of its star students
'Of course, immigration restrictionists will try to make more complicated arguments, like this hurts low-wage workers in the receiving country, or makes the poorer nation suffer from “brain drain.” There are good reasons to just see this as motivated reasoning.'
It may indeed be motivated reasoning but as far as I can tell it is also true!
Not sure how your comment relates to mine. Surely increasing the supply of workers depresses wages? Okay, the labour market is dynamic and there isn't a fixed number of jobs. Even so, in general if you increase the supply of something it will lose value. And surely syphoning off the best and brightest from the developing world does indeed negatively effect those poor countries, unless remittances outweigh the brain drain effect. All Richard is saying is that these are mere rationalisations, made up after the fact to cover for a dislike of brown-skinned people. I don't necessarily disagree. I'm just saying the cover happens to be true.
Yep. In western developed countries during the late 19th century-early 20th century, the left actually was the first to implement immigration restrictions for this very reason
Why are you comparing Western nationalists to Palestinians, when the vision of Western nationalists is far closer to that enjoyed by the Israelis. Who have a society that is prosperous, liberal, AND nationalist.
I have a feeling that you’re the kind of nationalist who would click “show results” on Richard’s Twitter poll.
The title of this article is silly and misleading. I think Richard was referring to hardcore white nationalists like Keith Woods or Nick Fuentes who don’t want any sort of liberalism or any non white immigration. Not all nationalists.
Well sure but those sort of nationalists are also well represented in Israel, including in the current government. Obviously not in the trollish youtube sense but in the fact that someone like Ben-Gvir is in no way a liberal. So how about 'Western nationalists as Otzma Yehudit supporters' as an alternative article title.
Even if one considers Ashkenazim Western, about 60% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim. They're the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews that migrated to Israel in some cases by choice and in others by compulsion after the country was founded. Neither they nor their ancestors have ever lived anywhere outside the Middle East.
> And no native born American woman becomes less free because of new arrivals who make their daughters dress modestly and avoid unrelated men. What exactly is the concern here?
I'm pretty sure that a large element of the concern is the risk that, as the new arrivals accumulate, over time the native-born American women will become less free. This is not exactly a crazy idea.
It’s pretty crazy in the American context. Immigration restrictionists often have vivid imaginations about such things, which I think is explained by them just looking for excuses to oppose immigration.
Huh, I wonder why restrictionists might have vivid imaginations about liberals ceding all their principles the second browns are involved and allowing them to do whatever the fuck they want with my child. Clearly this never happens. The writer of the following account must have hallucinated it.
""I got my first experience with liberals in the flesh when I went off to college. I took a few years of Arabic. It seemed as if everybody in the classes were either those hoping for careers in the Army or CIA or Islamophiles, including white girls who had converted to Islam and were wearing the hijab. I must’ve met more white converts to Islam in my college days than I did believing Christians.
Interestingly, I saw the same professors and students who foamed at the mouth at the “Christian Fundies” treating these confused coeds like they had made a wise and sober decision. (My Arabic professor, a secular Moroccan, was just as disgusted and baffled with the girls as I was.)""
I mean, I had my own mother (American, deeply leftist) explain to me that criticizing Mohammed shouldn't be allowed because we needed to avoid offending Muslims.
It's important to explain what "allowed" means in this context. If she's saying you should abide by common manners and decency then that's pretty spot on. I don't like hearing Hollywood actors disparaging my religion and I certainly wouldn't wish that on my Muslim neighbors. If she's saying you should go to jail for criticizing Mohammed, that's obviously contrary to the principles of liberalism.
Italian and Irish immigrants were a major component of FDR's coalition, and since you allegedly are a libertarian instead of a troll I would guess you would agree that was not a good development? Immigrants and their immediate progeny always vote for the bigger government party.
You can make whatever arguments you want. If you just want a place to pat yourselves on the back for being racist without making any arguments at all there’s the Unz Review.
>Imagine two states, where Country A has a GDP per capita of $60K a year and Country B is at $10K. An individual who is making $20K a year in Country B moves to Country A, where his salary increases to $40K a year. A nationalist will argue that both states became poorer. But all we did was make one individual better off, while leaving everyone else the same.
If the quality of life in country A cost $50K/year to maintain in the form of infrastructure, services, law enforcement, healthcare, schooling, etc, then letting a $40K/year immigrant in means the current population has to foot the bill for him. That problem is probably less salient in the US, but the welfare states of western europe feel the pain heavily.
>Last year, I did an X poll and found that white nationalists would prefer by over a 6:1 margin a country with 400 million Americans that is 75% white over one with 1 billion Americans that is 50% white, even though the latter would have 200 million more white people.
GDP is downstream to political power. Nobody in his right mind would give up the latter to increase the former, when it's obvious any gain could/would be reversed a few years or decade under new rules. How much GDP increase would you accept if it meant living under the rule of a Mugabe?
That doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that rural Hispanics and Asians are more likely to vote Republican than big-city whites. The idea that race is the primary factor in voting patterns doesn't match reality (except for native born black people, the exception that proves the rule).
If Republicans were smart and wanted to increase political power they would import as many Christian Hispanics as they could. Instead they are diminishing their political power as well as GDP in pursuit of homogeneity.
The only way your logic holds is if you somehow compel those new immigrants to stay in rural areas(assuming the effect is causal and not a selection effect), but of course supporting such a rule would make your party extremely unpopular among those very same immigrants.
I think in answering your poll people are just viewing it as a proxy for culture/values. They assume a nation with a higher percentage of whites will have more people who think like them. It's reasonable to value proportion over absolute population size in this case. A small nation that votes the right way 75% of the time will be a better place to live than a large nation that only gets it right 50% of the time.
If you specify a nation that is 100% white but entirely feminist/liberal with worship of LGBT and communism and so on, versus a nation that is only 50% white but very conservative and religious, you may get different results. Likewise I'd ask you: Would you prefer a nation that is 75% white and 25% Asian, or one that is 50% white and 50% African-American? Given some of the views you've shared about these racial groups.
The most sophisticated critique is Garett Jones’. Cultural persistence and the fact the the median voter defines institutional quality in liberal democracies. Are institutions endogenous or exogenous? That’s the big question. My prior is that open border activists are deeply wrong about this and could cause a Bronze Age-like collapse if they are able to overturn the institutions that made our prosperity. Practically all the demographic growth of the coming decades is from Africa and I’m pretty confident that turning the US into South Africa importing a billion Bantus isn’t in humanity’s interest.
If we were living in the late 1800s I'm sure you would be saying that turning the US into Italy isn't in humanity's interest. In the early 1800s you'd be saying that turning the US into Norway wasn't in humanity's interest. They used to be shitholes. Have you ever met an African immigrant? I would take them over the average American any day. They tend to be very sincere and diligent. The ones who work their asses off to get here are exactly the kind of people we want.
Nah, we already have the tools to measure their potential, see the Deep Roots literature. African immigrants to the US are a pretty selected sample and not representative of their general population. Next
The Italian immigration was a huge drag on our population for generations. They brought crime and tended to vote for bigger government. Recent European immigrants were a huge part of FDR's coalition.
It’s not irrational to prefer a country of 400 million to a country of a billion, regardless of the ethnic composition. Have you been to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park or Yellowstone lately? Traffic jam! There is a point where you need population to achieve economies of scale, but there are diminishing returns.
Certainly there are rational preferences to be made there, but most of those preferences are made in ignorance. The US has a population density of 91 per sq mile while in South Korea it is 1,340 per sq mile. South Korea still has parks and big open spaces for hiking. In Israel it's 1,080. In Jamaica it's 670 and that's still a place people go specifically to enjoy the outdoors in peace and quiet.
I don't think most Americans are actually aware of the difference, they just don't like the idea of change. People in South Korea don't yearn for a smaller population so they can have shorter lines at Starbucks. For them it's normal.
Yes you are right. The US has low population density compared to some other countries. That would be relevant if desirable places to live, work, and travel were evenly distributed across the land. But nice beaches and places like Yellowstone and Yosemite are very crowded. Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco have heavy traffic, etc.
People don't like the idea of *negative* change. Obviously the Indians that over-fill trains on their commute to work don't notice a problem, but I doubt those who manage to immigrate to America miss that aspect of India. Also, Jamaica? lmao most of the country is completely unlivable for tourists, go off the beaten path and you have a very high chance of being robbed, raped, or murdered. Your simplistic analysis also ignores the fact that a lot of America's land is unoccupied and not suitable for settlements; Los Angeles County has double the density of those countries, and the city itself is infamous for its horrible traffic and expanding ghettos.
I think the nationalist argument comes down to something like this. Societies are governed by norms. Some norms are more objectively successful others. People are social animals. Norm maintenance depends on a critical majority embracing and following those norms. We don’t know what that critical threshold is but it’s probably way north of 50% but somewhat less than 100%. People who don’t believe this view but believe in value of diversity will therefore definitionally opt for a different optimal social composition which in the view of the nationalist would be suboptimal. Therefore beware of skipping your social balance past a tipping point - fill in the blank for the argument of the day re which norm matters - secularism work ethic beliefs about future intersocial trust etc.
That’s my sense of what’s implicit. If true (and if logic actually matters), you can structure an argument which will likely prove that the tipping point may not exist, if it exists can be variable depending on a lot of other things in society, and probablistically is a lot further away.
Not sure if that hangs together but that’s my sense of the debate.
It’s not just norms--we live in a democracy! One conservative Muslim family moving in next door can’t change things--which is why I support limited immigration. But for those who support unlimited immigration, I totally fail to see what is stopping people from countries with very different values moving here in sufficient numbers to vote their values into law and erase mine. This is the issue Israel is facing; they already have a minority population of relatively moderate Muslims and have no problem with them, but if they let Israel become majority radical Muslim their values (and also almost certainly they themselves) will be eliminated.
"But even most liberals don't actually believe in unlimited immigration."
In theory you may be right. But most liberals scoff at any attempt to police our southern border, look at our existing immigrations policies to see if they're beneficial, etc. If what you said was true then they would be working with the GOP to come to a solution with illegal immigration.
Detroit, for example. My hometown became, um, "suboptimal" during the late 1960s for going to school, working, and maintaining safe and well-ordered neighborhoods and consequent high property values. Also becoming suboptimal were the hitherto sky-high trust levels that supported free-range kids, leaving bikes outside, cars unlocked, and moms watching over neighborhood kids out playing, etc. All about culture and tipping points...and immigration/emigration.
The free-range kids and other trust stuff changed everywhere in the US, even in communities that are near 100% white. Partly it was the crime wave of the 80s, but partly it was just media scaring people. Children have never been safer to wander around but parents are still terrified, and the most terrified parents are the white ones. Communities of colored people have a culture that's far closer to what you remember from the 60s. Not because their children are actually safer, but because their parenting style is more similar (they still spank their kids) and because they don't go through life scared of every little thing.
Hanania's immigrant insecurity complex strikes again! A lot of his arguments here are rather poorly thought through. Previous responses have already pointed out that the "deranged" poll outcome is actually more rational than Hanania's expectation.
Take Denmark. Say the Danes are fond of their culture and want to preserve their ethnicity. Doubling their population and diffusing it among India would guarantee their extinction in little more than a generation. The fact that the population is larger is irrelevant. Unless their was strict segregation, they will be absorbed into the Indian population without a trace. The percentage is clearly more important.
What H cannot seem to fathom, is that 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 a supposed minor gdp bump. Besides, I'm highly doubtful that immigration is as wonderful for the economy as Hanania seems to believe. To repeat a previous post I made: "I'm from the UK. 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."
Even putting aside culture and crime, his argument fails even when analyzed according to his GDP autism. Refugees are extremely unemployed in Western Europe, they contribute no net value to those economies.
Yes the UK has a proud history and has been of enormous benefit to humanity. And now this nation of immigrants makes it look like an ant.
You are certainly correct about the passing on of a culture and heritage, it's just very different than what we have in the US. When we say "our founding fathers" we don't mean that those people are related to us in any way. My ancestors came here long after they were all dead. Yet I inherited their cultural heritage and I would never feel closer to the Norwegian kings of the past than to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
That kind of proves your point about one culture absorbing another, but I see it as a specifically good thing. Gathering around shared ideas is clearly superior to gathering around shared DNA.
You should learn about Norwegian Americans. We are more likely to eat traditional Norwegian food than actual Norwegians. At one point, Norwegian professors had to come to the US to relearn ancient woodworking arts because no one in Norway still practiced them. There are Sons of Norway clubs all over the US. We've been absorbed but I don't think we've been destroyed. And obviously being a stateless minority didn't mean the end of Jewish culture. If a culture is important enough to people they will keep it alive no matter what. If they don't have that dedication then maybe it wasn't worth holding on to in the first place.
There were two things I was trying to get at there. One is that Hanania's myopic view of what makes a society valuable to those living in it. Skyrocketing the population through immigration may grow the countries GDP. My point is it comes at the expense of many things that people care a great deal about.
Over the course of my life so far, I have observed the fate of small villages and towns in my environs. A rich tapestry of dialects descended from from dark-age kingdoms, vikings or saxon invasions. Traditions that have been passed directly from generation to generation. It is hard to describe to people of immigrant backgrounds in settler states like the US, the greater sense of belonging and unity you get from not only sharing customs but also knowing that everything built around you was created by your ancestors and the ancestors of those around you. The traditions aren't just a quirky gimmick like you see at St patricks day in the US but what you've grown up with, what your grandfather grew up with and his before him. This is shared by every one, all of whom are also proud of their society and want to maintain and advance it, even if there are better opportunities elsewhere. What I'm talking about here has very little relevance to values shared around constitutions or forms of governance.
The only reason the sons of Norway clubs exist in the US, is that a large body of Norwegians settled that area and formed their own society. Norwegians who valued the fact that they were Norwegian. After a generation or two of the region becoming 95% mexican, it is unlikely that these traditions will continue.
The second thing I was getting at, is questioning the supposed benefits of population replacement level immigration that H is a fanatical advocate of. I have seen beautiful towns with polite productive populations turned into soulless, crime ridden shitholes with not a British person in sight. The general rule of thumb is the more immigration the location has, the worse off and less desirable it is.
I would also add that his mercenary view of nationality and advocacy for a rootless existence would be catastrophic if people followed it on mass. If a foreign force is trying to take over your land? Screw your people, abandon them and just move elsewhere. You're a small nation that has built up a successful society? Don't you dare try and stop half a billion uneducated and desperate Africans taking over! It's racist, and after all, when it starts going to hell, you can just up sticks and move. You're a doctor, trained at great expense to your society in burkino faso? Do you have any obligation to build up your nation and give back to the society that funded your education? Of course not, that's antiquated nationalism. You could get paid more in Canada as a delivery driver. Move.
I don't think the result of your poll is "deranged" at all. Would Israeli Jews prefer a country with 40 million people that was 75% Jewish or a country with 100 million people that was 50% Jewish?
If they would take tens of millions of fewer Jews in the world to accomplish it, yes. I’ve seen some people on the internet argue that prominent Zionists welcomed the Holocaust because it would get people to come to Israel. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is everyone would acknowledge it’s evil.
Now there may be a complication here as Jews in Israel have a higher birth rate, so maybe you’ll get more and better Jews in the long run through getting them all to buy into Zionism. But I don’t think anyone foresaw that.
Richard please explain your emphasis on absolute numbers, because it is far from self evident.
If I live in a country of 300 million that is 75% white or 600 million that is 75% white, my day today individual life doesn’t change much.
If I live in a country that is minority white at either population figure, my personal life changes drastically.
The problem with that thinking though is it ignores how a democratic states' policies are affected by its demographics.
50% Jewish and democratic Israel loses the Law of Return. So even if there are more Jews now in your higher population example, that same example may result in fewer absolutely in a few decades.
The most extreme Jews, the Haredim, are overwhelmingly anti-Zionist, on account of Israel being a secular state founded in large part by atheist socialists. But given just how many Continental Europeans participated willingly in the Holocaust, many survivors had no desire to stay anywhere north of the Mediterranean, and so compromised their political beliefs for practical reasons. A decent number also immigrated before the Holocaust because they knew what was coming, and even more would've left had not both immigration quotas stopped them in their tracks, and had the Nazis not also stopped them in their tracks. (The Dominican Republic was willing to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees in the late '30s, but the Nazis had no desire to see that many Jews flee extermination. Less than a thousand made it to Hispaniola.)
The Haredim are largely despised by the rest of the Israelis for being awful, draft-dodging welfare parasites. There are also American Haredim, who are also awful welfare parasites, but there aren't enough of them to pose a national security risk, and national security is a totally different ballgame for a continent-spanning empire with peaceful, significantly less powerful neighbors versus a state slightly smaller than New Jersey surrounded by tens of millions of people who believe six million wasn't enough, and whom only fail to finish the job because they're significantly less competent, and said competency gap has only grown ever since Reagan -- blessedly -- bribed the Israelis into abandoning socialism:
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/three-nations-tried-socialism-and-rejected-it
The Holocaust analogy is changing what your poll asked. Your poll did not ask if they would prefer to murder 200million existing people. Lowering/increasing some future birthrate is not morally equivelant to murdering or not murdering living people. Thus the evilness of being pro Holocaust does not map onto the poll question.
As for the OPs argument, the case could made that a majority Jewish Israel gives more security for Jews than if there was no such country, thus the long term expectation for number of Jews is larger for the smaller country.
It's not totally clear to me that they didn't foresee that. People knew that Jews in developed countries in Europe (in places like Germany and Hungary, it was higher in Poland) had low fertility and high intermarriage, and Jews in the Yishuv had high fertility and no intermarriage. Jews were super overrepresented among scientists and intellectuals, and a lot of Jewish scientists and intellectuals supported Zionism and the founding of Israel, predicting (correctly) that it would do great things for the future of the Jewish people and for scientific progress. Herzl talked about a state that did a lot of great science, etcetera. Of course, the Zionists were also very motivated by Jewish persecution, they understood that a lot of people always hate the Jews (mostly because of their success), and so it's good for Jews to have power and to defend themselves, to have a state and an army and so on. The actions of the Nazis, wokes, Hamas etc shows that they were right.
Anything is possible. But this is the logic that keeps people in caves. “We restricted some freedoms so we have to restrict more freedoms.” Maybe we should restrict free speech because it could lead to restrictions on markets? Maybe we should stop people from eating what they want as long as we have government supported healthcare? Everything depends on everything else. The solution to restricting freedom in one area of life is to fight that restriction, not restrict other freedoms.
We have some data.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/01/22/majority-of-u-s-public-supports-high-skilled-immigration/
https://m.calcalistech.com/Article.aspx?guid=3755386
Unfortunately Israelis do lean against high skill non-Jewish immigration. It’s 51-42 though which is quite modest. I’m sure Richard supports the 42%, and I’m sure the corresponding figure in Palestine is way worse.
To be fair pollster doesn’t specify how much skill, and whether the people are hostile to the country or not.
Anyway I would also wager the 42% is more secular and includes a critical majority of the elite liberals and the people in tech who actually set the policy. If 42% of Palestinians or white nationalists, including a big majority of the influential elites, supported high skill immigration, Richard would probably drop all his grievances.
There are certainly high skill immigrants in Israel with 0 Jewish family ties. It’s allowed.
But can they become citizens? I doubt it
https://lawoffice.org.il/en/how-to-become-an-israeli-citizen/
https://www.gov.il/en/service/request_for_citizenship_of_a_person_who_holds_pemanent_residency
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_citizenship_law
I know of at least one high skill non-Jewish guy (a Polish gentile) with no Jewish family ties at all who has a tenured job at a university in Israel. He doesn’t have citizenship yet but I think he will get it at some point.
Anyway I think eligibility for citizenship is not so relevant to Richard’s point. Richard would never criticize Emirati nationalists for their 10% Emirati citizens 90% non citizens open immigrant policy. He would praise them.
Damn, people would prefer to live in a more homogeneous environment regardless of the global repercussions? Thank God we've got Hanania to point out the inconsistencies of basic human desires.
Why is it crazy to prefer to live among a larger percentage of your co-ethnics than wanting to expand the absolute number of co-ethnics? I find it understandable that people would rather live among a higher percentage of people similar to themselves than to increase the absolute number of their co-ethnics, most of whom they will never come into contact with. This is especially true in places that are already too densely populated.
Think of a village. You can either live with 200 people like yourself or 201 people like yourself plus 100 Roma, 100 Albanians, 100 Palestinians and 100 black people. Why is it crazy to prefer the former?
“ I find it understandable that people would rather live among a higher percentage of people similar to themselves than to increase the absolute number of their co-ethnics, most of whom they will never come into contact with”
Well I was assuming for the most part nationalists at least care about their nation. I criticized them for being parochial, but this is an even more parochial position, “I only care about the things I literally see with my own eyes.”
But I think the article addresses this too. You’ll never come into contact with 99.99% of your nation. Why then do nationalists sit around worrying about national demographics? People in West Virginia are glued to Fox News getting mad at immigrants flooding into California. You should support creating a wealthy country with freedom of association and then you can build the community you want.
When you say 'nation' do you mean tribe, as in the Apache Nation, or is it a near synonym of 'country'?
I would say that nationalists care about their country just so long as they see it as 'their' country. Once that is no longer the case, they probably care less.
Yes, the nationalist view is perhaps a bit parochial and mine no doubt more so. But some of us like parochial, especially when the alternative is to be swamped with mass immigration from very different cultures. I say this as someone who was born in a city that was 99% white British at the time and is now around 30% white British. I'm willing to concede that this might have made us economically wealthier, though the jury is still out on that. Whether one thinks this slight putative economic gain was worth turning our societies upside down for depends on your priorities.
'You’ll never come into contact with 99.99% of your nation. Why then do nationalists sit around worrying about national demographics? '
Because they often DO come into contact with large numbers of other ethnic groups?
'People in West Virginia are glued to Fox News getting mad at immigrants flooding into California.'
Because they can see this creeping tide slowly advancing towards them? Because they can see the writing on the wall? Because they don't like what has happened to their co-ethnics in California and feel sorry for them? Which doesn't immediately suggest that to be logically consistent they should push for a white baby boom.
Also, basically no one believes, or has ever believed in freedom of association (Goldwater lost!), which means that if you don't want to associate with someone your only chance to do so is to stop them from entering.
The political preferences of the newcomers--who will overwhelm you in numbers--will make freedom of association impossible
Hey Richard, let's say having children makes you happy. Does the fourth add as much to your happiness as the first or second? Given the choice between 1) a guarantee of 2 wonderful future children and 2) five children, but one of them will be a total psychopath, and there's no way you'll be able to dispose of him, which one would you choose?
"Why then do nationalists sit around worrying about national demographics? People in West Virginia are glued to Fox News getting mad at immigrants flooding into California."
Because as California goes, so goes the nation. I can't believe your this stupid, so it must just be dishonesty. Why would I want to bring in a bunch of people to my country who do not share my values, especially in a democratic system?
25% of children born in West Virginia (more or less the whitest state) today are non-white, and that number will only grow. You are completely ignorant if you think demographic change has been limited to border states and major cities.
You may not come into contact with 99% of the white people of your nation, but those who care about their homeland will often not be able to go anywhere without coming into contact with non-whites. If the anti-discrimination laws had never been passed, and there had been (and existed even now) a full comprehension that all roads, streets, parks, etc. are de facto owned by natives (not the world, i..e., communism) and held in trust by the state (see libertarian Jan Lester’s article below), then mass non-white immigration never would have succeeded on the level it has if the state were not PC and/or anti-white. The irony is that those who are anti-PC and pro-immigration classical liberals overlook the extent to which their pro-immigration views hinge on PC discrimination laws and PC statist control of the streets, etc. to make it possible. Another irony is that even though they stress the economic aspects of immigration, they ignore the massive externalities of destroying a homeland. Why? Again, for PC reasons. https://philarchive.org/rec/LESIAL
Nationalists hate the idea that you COULD encounter someone different. They want to elimate that possibility and any possible stresses or inconveniences around diversity
But it’s possible that (1) governments will not let the market work to build more housing, so supply will continue to lag population growth, (2) freedom of association laws and norms will not improve. You are saying in theory we can fix 1 and 2 so mass immigration is net good, but in practice the housing issue in many major cities is intractable, and many reasonable people are not hopeful. I know you are fighting to improve freedom of association, but we have seen things move in the opposite direction in recent years. It’s not insane that some have lost hope in these things, and in that context, you could view anti-immigration as an inferior solution by those that see a lack of practical likelihood for better ideas.
I agree with the comments defending the poll respondents but still think they’re missing the elephant in the room: in a decade when housing and food are unaffordable on two professional salaries, and when cities are overcrowded with ten buyers for every home and ten qualified applicants for every job, most Americans are terrified of the idea of tripling the population. Richard is free to disagree, but this strikes me as a very common and natural intuition. Leave the ethnic stuff to the side: surely the population density thing overrides everything else posed in that poll.
This whole post is pretty incoherent to be honest. One of Richard’s misfires.
It’s just run of the mill socialism to think like this. Now if I was arguing with a regular socialist I can point out their economics is wrong. But nationalists except market logic in most instances but then use socialist logic here, socialism is not their motivation.
The way you solve all these things is markets and prices. Charge for the national parks, build more housing. But again, conservatives don’t just worry about crowding as a general matter. They support a higher birth rate!
> conservatives don’t just worry about crowding as a general matter. They support a higher birth rate!
Not sure this is correct as a historical matter. Malthus was no liberal reformer; I would guess that he has been cited approvingly by more conservatives than socialists over the centuries. Conservatism generally embraces a tragic, constrained view of the world, in contrast to the utopian, ponies-for-everyone views of socialists. Surely a “conservative” in any meaningful sense would look at a graph of global population over the last 10,000 years and say, “wow, we seem to be hurtling toward a future in which resources will be stretched thinner than anything we’ve ever seen, which at every time in the past has meant famine, war, and chaos — maybe we should slow down”.
But the argument we’re having here is really not about conservatism but “conservatism”, which by your terms seems to mean a sort of pro-business, libertarian Silicon Valley optimism in our ability to overcome what look right now like hard constraints, and faith that we’re all headed toward a bright future of fusion-powered AI robot servants for all. That is not really what “conservatives” have generally believed throughout history, in my view.
But in any event: you don’t need to argue with me, I’m just the messenger telling you what respondents read when they answered your poll. Are they “socialists”? Maybe. Most people are, somewhat, sometimes. They mostly haven’t read Matt Yglesias or aren’t convinced by his argument that the US can give a billion people a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Don’t argue with me, argue with them.
I think there is no contradiction between wanting SOME AREAS to be less crowded while at the same time wanting white people to have more children. These people don't want to fill up every available space in America with whites. They just want to ensure they don't become so demographically weak that they lose control of a country they once saw as theirs. In a democracy it's not absolute numbers that are everything but percentages.
Build more housing and have more freedom of association is good in theory but has proven extremely unsuccessful in practice. Maybe some promote anti-immigration because they view that issue as more malleable than improving housing and freedom of association, even if they agree with you that those improvements would be preferable to nationalism.
Would you rather live in a white socialist country or a mixed race capitalist democracy? Rural Hispanics are more likely to vote with Republicans to maintain free markets than big city whites, so I don't really understand the idea of demographic power in this context. Not without abandoning the other principles at least. I guess there's no contradiction if the New Right also doesn't set a high priority on individual rights and free markets.
This is essentially how Canada is right now.
Canadians are having fewer kids because they can't afford houses.
They can't afford houses because there is too much demand caused by a large increase in immigration.
Our immigration rates are increasing because we don't have enough workers here.
We don't have enough workers because Canadians don't have enough kids.
Round and around we go.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canadas-birth-rate-has-dropped-off-a-cliff-and-its-because-nobody-can-afford-housing
You’re preaching to the choir: I live in Ontario. Housing and food prices are astronomical, not to mention electricity, gasoline, and telecommunications services (the most expensive in the world baby!). Like many social democracies, Canada was doing okay until about 2010, when it became clear that it was never going to join the grown-ups table of advanced value-add economies but would simply fall back on the only real sources of wealth it has: mining, oil and gas, and lumber. Now the deal is broken: we still pay 50%+ of our income in taxes, but instead of the working healthcare system and social safety net we had as recently as 15 years ago, we now get year-long wait lists to get a family doctor and assisted suicide if we fall through the cracks.
We’re like a much colder version of the Congo, only with absurd pretensions to being something more civilized.
I'm in Manitoba.
Housing is a bit more manageable here, but not by much, especially when you factor in our far weaker provincial economy.
My thoughts exactly. When looking at the poll question, I immediately focused on the “one billion”.
That number was likely chosen because Richard reads Matthew Yglesias and MY wrote a book called One Billion Americans where he makes a nationalist pitch for population growth and increased immigration. Did you know that if the entire worlds population moved to the US we would only have the population density of Japan? Stuff like that.
I don’t really have strong opinions about whether a billion Americans is a good idea. But it appears that Richard’s Twitter followers do. And they were likely expressing that opinion in their poll responses, rather than anything having to do with ethnicity etc. That’s all I’m saying.
Japan has a far higher population density and their housing is so cheap it's almost worthless. Unaffordable housing was a policy choice (the choice being to reject free market principles in favor of land use laws and central planning), not an inevitablility of population density or growth. And Americans have never spent less of their income on food. In 1960, households spent around 17% of their income on food, today it's less than 10%, despite the fact that we eat more at restaurants than ever before. You have basic facts wrong.
> You have basic facts wrong.
I was trying to characterize what was going through the heads of the poll respondents. Perhaps I should have made that more clear. I don’t have a dog in this fight; I just thought that the interpretation of the poll results was wrong because it’s a bad poll that confounds two questions, namely: 1. Do you want a billion people in the US? and 2. Something something white people, and the results then get interpreted as though only the second question was what was being answered.
Japan also has a declining population, and their average dwelling is much smaller than ours.
The problem is how you draw the distinction. I have more in common with a first generation Indian kid that grew up around the corner than I do with someone that looks like me that is from Dublin. The core problem is drawing the line at "black" "white" or "Palestinians." It's not a genetic thing it's culturally conditioned and we should be aiming to live pluralisticly not keep others out arbitrarily
I sort of agree. I get on much better and have more in common with my Punjabi neighbours than I do with the loud, annoying white British family across the road. But here's the thing; it probably is true that on average I have more in common with white British people than with the majority of our ethnic population. I say this as a (lower) middle-class English teacher who went to university and has spent about 35 years living in various countries. Working class whites would probably have even more in common with other British whites.
I don't actually buy the idea that there is no genetic component to a society's culture. For example, I don't think it's pure coincidence that Japan has both a high national average IQ and a well-functioning, peaceable society. If you think people are so interchangeable that they can simply be shipped en masse from one culture to another with no deleterious effects on the receiving culture then I'd have to disagree with you.
And your point is that the Japanese still have the same genes? Okay, let me rephrase what I wrote. It's more likely that a well-functioning, peaceable society will appear in a high IQ society than in a low IQ society. Are all high IQ societies peaceable? No, Nazi Germany wasn't. Do all high IQ societies function well? No, North Korea doesn't.
If you like I can water things down even more. I think the kind of culture likely to arise in a population is not unrelated to genes. Better?
This is just arguing bias with the cover of science. He made a legitimate point - you pointed to a cultural current that is a very recent inversion with the exact same stock. You then go further to admit that high IQ societies can entail violence and failure. All you're really saying is that IQ (race, or ethnicity, or essentialist element x,y,z) makes violence and failure accidental components when it's possessed but essential when it's absent. This is just standard prejudiced thinking.
Actually no, I was not trying to make the cast iron case, 'if this then this' that you are trying to make out. I was making two points:
1. Culture is not independent of genes
2. The kind of civilisation most people want to live in is more likely to arise in a high IQ population than in a low IQ population.
Now, without turning my clear explanation into a mathematical formula, tell me which of these propositions you disagree with?
I wouldn't go that far. I think he's saying that there is a correlation, not that one is assured based on the other.
I do think that it's total selection bias though. IQ test scores have gone up so much that our great-grandparents would be considered mentally retarded today based on their test scores (they restandardize the curve every so often and have always had to adjust downward as average scores went up). More advanced societies produce people who think in ways that match higher IQ scores. As often happens, he's looking at a correlation and choosing which one caused the other, but probably the wrong one.
Yes, you could be right. However, I wasn't trying to claim that high IQ countries are never violent or commit atrocities. That is quite obviously not the case and clearly the more efficient you are, the more people you are able to kill. I would still say that high IQ countries are more likely to be peaceable than low IQ countries, for the same reason that high IQ people within a polulation are less likely to commit crimes. (IQ85 is the average IQ for criminals in the US, though this could simply reflect the fact that half of prison inmates are African-Americans).
Japan was an incredibly insular society for almost all of its history. It was only in the early to mid-20th century that they wanted to get in on the colonialism game.
That is a complete lie. Despite experiencing some of the world's most extreme isolation for a nation of its size, the Meiji Era saw it immediately industrialize and by the time of WW1 became a highly respectable developing economy on par with mid-level European economies.
Imperial Japanese violence during the Meiji Era was fairly minimal and mostly concerned the power struggle between itself and China over Korea and the maintenance of open trade between Japan and Korea. It was very mild in action and justifiable in self-interest relative to what the West did during the Boxer Rebellion, let alone the entire century to follow of Anglo-Judeo exploitation of Asia and the Middle East. If that wasn't a peaceful society, our current neocon period certainly is not.
"I have more in common with a first generation Indian kid that grew up around the corner than I do with someone that looks like me that is from Dublin."
In what ways?
"most immigration restrictionists I’ve read support a higher birthrate for native born Americans of all classes, which directly contradicts the arguments they sometimes make about the supposed negative effects of immigration in relation to wages, resource depletion, and overcrowding. Similarly, many nationalists are anti-free trade but in most other contexts pro-market, as if the laws of economics change based on the nationality of the person you’re interacting with."
The MAGA crowd also takes this false zero-sum worldview. They seek to restrict immigration to “protect local jobs” (Lump of Labor fallacy) but then encourage a larger native population.
They seek free markets but then throw up arbitrary tariffs and barriers to international trade.
As I explore at Risk & Progress, as also demonstrated here, the policies advocated by nationalists actually perversely weaken the very nation they claim to care about.
'the policies advocated by nationalists actually perversely weaken the very nation they claim to care about.'
They may weaken them economically but then not everything in life is about economics, though economists find this very hard to believe.
What is strengthened by travel bans and tariffs?
By 'travel bans' I take it you mean what most people call 'immigration restrictions'? Or were you referring to vacations?
Both. I'm referring to all restrictions of the movement of people behind the norm. Beyond customs checks, passports..etc... So yes, I would include the MAGA advocated travel bans and immigration restrictions.
Okay, let's say allowing in large numbers of immigrants from the developing world made Americans on the whole richer. I think that's a reasonable position and it's probably true. However, even with this knowledge there may still be those who preferred their towns when everyone looked like them, spoke the same language and understood the same cultural references. These people may be financially worse off, wanting to live in their ethnically homogenous state, but to claim that they are thereby 'perversely weakening the nation they claim to care about' is a claim too far. Unless, of course, the only measure of a nation's strength is its GDP.
Really this is just a replay of the Brexit debate where all in favour of EU membership argued in terms of the economy while those who wanted out were arguing about things like sovereignty and control of borders. The first group could only think in terms of money and couldn't comprehend that not everyone's priorities were the same as theirs.
What you say makes sense, but we are seeing this play out in small homogenous towns all over the country and the people living there don't seem particularly thrilled about it. All we hear from them is how sad their little towns are and how bleak their opportunities are. They could move to places with better opportunities(as I did), but as you say they prefer to live in their small homogenous towns. But they don't actually sound very happy about that, they keep constantly complaining about how poor they are.
Certainly people can choose to have worse economic outcomes for better homogeneity, but no nationalist is out there actually making the case precisely because it sounds unattractive. It certainly isn't rational and it doesn't seem to make them very happy
"However, even with this knowledge there may still be those who preferred their towns when everyone looked like them, spoke the same language and understood the same cultural references. These people may be financially worse off, wanting to live in their ethnically homogeneous state,"
Right, there are people like this. But there are other people who wouldn't mind being around people who looked and behaved differently than the median person while appreciating the increased economic opportunities (and perhaps diversity in cuisine and other stuff); i.e., having diametrically opposite preferences.
The question is: why should the former group of people and their preferences be privileged and even treated as morally superior to the latter, as immigration restrictionists keep advocating?
The whole underlying point is caring more about your countrymen than someone in another country. Why is this so fucking hard for your autistic idiots to get this through your thick skulls?
You're still missing the point. If you care about your home country, then it is to your advantage to grow it. More people, more labor, more ideas, more technology, more business, more development. The economic, innovation, and historical literature is VERY clear on this point; close your borders and watch the nation you care about shrivel away.
Not that anyone is going to change your mind "autistic idiot" and "thick skulls" is a dead giveaway that you aren't here to consider any viewpoint other than your own.
To steel man restrictionism succinctly:
If you put a bunch of British convicts on an island you get Australia. If you put a bunch of African slaves on an island you get Haiti. If you put 50/50 on an island you get something in between - the null hypothesis should be linear scaling of results with admixture. As it is very preferable to live in Australia than to live in Haiti (by revealed preference of immigrants) we should selfishly prefer random Australian immigrants to random Haitian immigrants, because it is better for us to make the country incrementally more like Australia than incrementally more like Haiti. The best countries to take immigrants from are the countries that people want to immigrate to, if the population of the country makes it what it is.
Current immigration systems have a lot of de facto filters that limit the damage of immigration from undesirable countries (maybe only Haitian elites could afford to emigrate) and this produces some study results that look like neutralish impact on the recipient county but wouldn’t scale to a system of actual open borders.
Have you ever heard of a little country called the USA? Kind of blows your theory out of the water. We are one of the least homogenous nations in the world and we have the greatest economy, military, everything. We have more black people and Hispanics and Asians than any European country and we are bigger and better than all of them put together. If a mixture of higher and lower races produced an in-between result than this shouldn't be possible.
We were the greatest economy in the world when we were 90% white as well. Our black people are not the reason for our success; in fact, they exist at the bottom of nearly every measurable metric (other than white suicides and Hispanic pedophiles). You also completely missed his point that most non-Hispanic immigration over the last 50+ years has been meritocratic. Selecting the top 1% of Nigerians is great; open borders with a country of 200 million people and a oil-economy less diverse than Saudi Arabia, not so great.
The USA was at its peak in the immediate post-WW2 era, when we had almost no immigration, were super majority white, and ruled our only substantial nonwhite population with an iron fist.
The USA has higher economic freedom, higher oil/resource endowment, economies of scale due to the size of its single market, and seigniorage from printing the world’s reserve currency. Genetics are but one of many factors determining the wealth of nations. But it is obvious that Ceteris paribus incrementally substituting median Australian genetics for median African genetics among the US population would incrementally improve everyone else’s wages there (not only the substituent’s) by making it a richer country.
Not to mention a great smart fraction due to having like half the world’s Jews and having the best graduate schools brain draining the rest of the world of its star students
'Of course, immigration restrictionists will try to make more complicated arguments, like this hurts low-wage workers in the receiving country, or makes the poorer nation suffer from “brain drain.” There are good reasons to just see this as motivated reasoning.'
It may indeed be motivated reasoning but as far as I can tell it is also true!
MAGA has no choice but to make stupid economic arguments, for reasons that Richard knows better than anyone-- he wrote the book on it a week ago!!
Not sure how your comment relates to mine. Surely increasing the supply of workers depresses wages? Okay, the labour market is dynamic and there isn't a fixed number of jobs. Even so, in general if you increase the supply of something it will lose value. And surely syphoning off the best and brightest from the developing world does indeed negatively effect those poor countries, unless remittances outweigh the brain drain effect. All Richard is saying is that these are mere rationalisations, made up after the fact to cover for a dislike of brown-skinned people. I don't necessarily disagree. I'm just saying the cover happens to be true.
Yep. In western developed countries during the late 19th century-early 20th century, the left actually was the first to implement immigration restrictions for this very reason
Why are you comparing Western nationalists to Palestinians, when the vision of Western nationalists is far closer to that enjoyed by the Israelis. Who have a society that is prosperous, liberal, AND nationalist.
I have a feeling that you’re the kind of nationalist who would click “show results” on Richard’s Twitter poll.
The title of this article is silly and misleading. I think Richard was referring to hardcore white nationalists like Keith Woods or Nick Fuentes who don’t want any sort of liberalism or any non white immigration. Not all nationalists.
You haven’t been listening to more mainstream conservatives who call themselves nationalists.
Well sure but those sort of nationalists are also well represented in Israel, including in the current government. Obviously not in the trollish youtube sense but in the fact that someone like Ben-Gvir is in no way a liberal. So how about 'Western nationalists as Otzma Yehudit supporters' as an alternative article title.
Sure but Israel isn't Western either, though it's more Western than Palestine.
Even if one considers Ashkenazim Western, about 60% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim. They're the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews that migrated to Israel in some cases by choice and in others by compulsion after the country was founded. Neither they nor their ancestors have ever lived anywhere outside the Middle East.
That’s like an NBA player showing up to dunk in guys playing pickup. Wignats are retards unworthy of arguing with.
> And no native born American woman becomes less free because of new arrivals who make their daughters dress modestly and avoid unrelated men. What exactly is the concern here?
I'm pretty sure that a large element of the concern is the risk that, as the new arrivals accumulate, over time the native-born American women will become less free. This is not exactly a crazy idea.
It’s pretty crazy in the American context. Immigration restrictionists often have vivid imaginations about such things, which I think is explained by them just looking for excuses to oppose immigration.
Huh, I wonder why restrictionists might have vivid imaginations about liberals ceding all their principles the second browns are involved and allowing them to do whatever the fuck they want with my child. Clearly this never happens. The writer of the following account must have hallucinated it.
""I got my first experience with liberals in the flesh when I went off to college. I took a few years of Arabic. It seemed as if everybody in the classes were either those hoping for careers in the Army or CIA or Islamophiles, including white girls who had converted to Islam and were wearing the hijab. I must’ve met more white converts to Islam in my college days than I did believing Christians.
Interestingly, I saw the same professors and students who foamed at the mouth at the “Christian Fundies” treating these confused coeds like they had made a wise and sober decision. (My Arabic professor, a secular Moroccan, was just as disgusted and baffled with the girls as I was.)""
But this is just play-acting right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
I mean, I had my own mother (American, deeply leftist) explain to me that criticizing Mohammed shouldn't be allowed because we needed to avoid offending Muslims.
It's important to explain what "allowed" means in this context. If she's saying you should abide by common manners and decency then that's pretty spot on. I don't like hearing Hollywood actors disparaging my religion and I certainly wouldn't wish that on my Muslim neighbors. If she's saying you should go to jail for criticizing Mohammed, that's obviously contrary to the principles of liberalism.
She was saying it should be impossible to publish books that might offend Muslims.
Italian and Irish immigrants were a major component of FDR's coalition, and since you allegedly are a libertarian instead of a troll I would guess you would agree that was not a good development? Immigrants and their immediate progeny always vote for the bigger government party.
ex-Soviet Jews in the US overwhelmingly vote Republican even as the rest of the Jews vote (even more) overwhelmingly Democrat.
I believe the figures I saw were that American Jews overall vote 90% Democrat, but the Soviet immigrants vote 75% Republican.
Immigrants vote based on what sounds good to them.
It already happened, as you well know. Starting with FDR.
Going to block comments like this from now on. They contribute nothing.
You can make whatever arguments you want. If you just want a place to pat yourselves on the back for being racist without making any arguments at all there’s the Unz Review.
>Imagine two states, where Country A has a GDP per capita of $60K a year and Country B is at $10K. An individual who is making $20K a year in Country B moves to Country A, where his salary increases to $40K a year. A nationalist will argue that both states became poorer. But all we did was make one individual better off, while leaving everyone else the same.
If the quality of life in country A cost $50K/year to maintain in the form of infrastructure, services, law enforcement, healthcare, schooling, etc, then letting a $40K/year immigrant in means the current population has to foot the bill for him. That problem is probably less salient in the US, but the welfare states of western europe feel the pain heavily.
>Last year, I did an X poll and found that white nationalists would prefer by over a 6:1 margin a country with 400 million Americans that is 75% white over one with 1 billion Americans that is 50% white, even though the latter would have 200 million more white people.
GDP is downstream to political power. Nobody in his right mind would give up the latter to increase the former, when it's obvious any gain could/would be reversed a few years or decade under new rules. How much GDP increase would you accept if it meant living under the rule of a Mugabe?
That doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that rural Hispanics and Asians are more likely to vote Republican than big-city whites. The idea that race is the primary factor in voting patterns doesn't match reality (except for native born black people, the exception that proves the rule).
If Republicans were smart and wanted to increase political power they would import as many Christian Hispanics as they could. Instead they are diminishing their political power as well as GDP in pursuit of homogeneity.
The only way your logic holds is if you somehow compel those new immigrants to stay in rural areas(assuming the effect is causal and not a selection effect), but of course supporting such a rule would make your party extremely unpopular among those very same immigrants.
"Rural Asians" bro where are you even getting this stuff from
>rural Hispanics and Asians are more likely to vote Republican than big-city whites.
First, Hanania wasn't asking about specifically Latinos & Asians, he was asking about "non-whites", which include blacks.
Then, Hanania wasn't asking "what if the 50% non-white magically align with your ideal scenario?" either. He was asking about non-whites, period. And according to the first evidence I find (https://www.vox.com/2021/5/10/22425178/catalist-report-2020-election-biden-trump-demographics), Asians & Latinos are twice as likely to vote dems than rep.
"Less likely to vote dem than wealthy urban whites" is as useful as "run slower than usain bolt".
That poll result was only 'deranged' if you see people as numbers.
I think in answering your poll people are just viewing it as a proxy for culture/values. They assume a nation with a higher percentage of whites will have more people who think like them. It's reasonable to value proportion over absolute population size in this case. A small nation that votes the right way 75% of the time will be a better place to live than a large nation that only gets it right 50% of the time.
If you specify a nation that is 100% white but entirely feminist/liberal with worship of LGBT and communism and so on, versus a nation that is only 50% white but very conservative and religious, you may get different results. Likewise I'd ask you: Would you prefer a nation that is 75% white and 25% Asian, or one that is 50% white and 50% African-American? Given some of the views you've shared about these racial groups.
The most sophisticated critique is Garett Jones’. Cultural persistence and the fact the the median voter defines institutional quality in liberal democracies. Are institutions endogenous or exogenous? That’s the big question. My prior is that open border activists are deeply wrong about this and could cause a Bronze Age-like collapse if they are able to overturn the institutions that made our prosperity. Practically all the demographic growth of the coming decades is from Africa and I’m pretty confident that turning the US into South Africa importing a billion Bantus isn’t in humanity’s interest.
If we were living in the late 1800s I'm sure you would be saying that turning the US into Italy isn't in humanity's interest. In the early 1800s you'd be saying that turning the US into Norway wasn't in humanity's interest. They used to be shitholes. Have you ever met an African immigrant? I would take them over the average American any day. They tend to be very sincere and diligent. The ones who work their asses off to get here are exactly the kind of people we want.
Nah, we already have the tools to measure their potential, see the Deep Roots literature. African immigrants to the US are a pretty selected sample and not representative of their general population. Next
The Italian immigration was a huge drag on our population for generations. They brought crime and tended to vote for bigger government. Recent European immigrants were a huge part of FDR's coalition.
The main difference between Norway and the US in 1800 was scarcity of fertile land.
It’s not irrational to prefer a country of 400 million to a country of a billion, regardless of the ethnic composition. Have you been to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park or Yellowstone lately? Traffic jam! There is a point where you need population to achieve economies of scale, but there are diminishing returns.
Certainly there are rational preferences to be made there, but most of those preferences are made in ignorance. The US has a population density of 91 per sq mile while in South Korea it is 1,340 per sq mile. South Korea still has parks and big open spaces for hiking. In Israel it's 1,080. In Jamaica it's 670 and that's still a place people go specifically to enjoy the outdoors in peace and quiet.
I don't think most Americans are actually aware of the difference, they just don't like the idea of change. People in South Korea don't yearn for a smaller population so they can have shorter lines at Starbucks. For them it's normal.
Yes you are right. The US has low population density compared to some other countries. That would be relevant if desirable places to live, work, and travel were evenly distributed across the land. But nice beaches and places like Yellowstone and Yosemite are very crowded. Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco have heavy traffic, etc.
People don't like the idea of *negative* change. Obviously the Indians that over-fill trains on their commute to work don't notice a problem, but I doubt those who manage to immigrate to America miss that aspect of India. Also, Jamaica? lmao most of the country is completely unlivable for tourists, go off the beaten path and you have a very high chance of being robbed, raped, or murdered. Your simplistic analysis also ignores the fact that a lot of America's land is unoccupied and not suitable for settlements; Los Angeles County has double the density of those countries, and the city itself is infamous for its horrible traffic and expanding ghettos.
I think the nationalist argument comes down to something like this. Societies are governed by norms. Some norms are more objectively successful others. People are social animals. Norm maintenance depends on a critical majority embracing and following those norms. We don’t know what that critical threshold is but it’s probably way north of 50% but somewhat less than 100%. People who don’t believe this view but believe in value of diversity will therefore definitionally opt for a different optimal social composition which in the view of the nationalist would be suboptimal. Therefore beware of skipping your social balance past a tipping point - fill in the blank for the argument of the day re which norm matters - secularism work ethic beliefs about future intersocial trust etc.
That’s my sense of what’s implicit. If true (and if logic actually matters), you can structure an argument which will likely prove that the tipping point may not exist, if it exists can be variable depending on a lot of other things in society, and probablistically is a lot further away.
Not sure if that hangs together but that’s my sense of the debate.
It’s not just norms--we live in a democracy! One conservative Muslim family moving in next door can’t change things--which is why I support limited immigration. But for those who support unlimited immigration, I totally fail to see what is stopping people from countries with very different values moving here in sufficient numbers to vote their values into law and erase mine. This is the issue Israel is facing; they already have a minority population of relatively moderate Muslims and have no problem with them, but if they let Israel become majority radical Muslim their values (and also almost certainly they themselves) will be eliminated.
See Hamtramck, Michigan (historically Polish, now Muslim) and the horrified LGBT "community" in the area. Whoda thunk such a thing could ever happen!
Agreed. But even most liberals don't actually believe in unlimited immigration.
The people Richard is talking about here are people who do not agree with you about the benefits of limited immigration.
"But even most liberals don't actually believe in unlimited immigration."
In theory you may be right. But most liberals scoff at any attempt to police our southern border, look at our existing immigrations policies to see if they're beneficial, etc. If what you said was true then they would be working with the GOP to come to a solution with illegal immigration.
Detroit, for example. My hometown became, um, "suboptimal" during the late 1960s for going to school, working, and maintaining safe and well-ordered neighborhoods and consequent high property values. Also becoming suboptimal were the hitherto sky-high trust levels that supported free-range kids, leaving bikes outside, cars unlocked, and moms watching over neighborhood kids out playing, etc. All about culture and tipping points...and immigration/emigration.
The free-range kids and other trust stuff changed everywhere in the US, even in communities that are near 100% white. Partly it was the crime wave of the 80s, but partly it was just media scaring people. Children have never been safer to wander around but parents are still terrified, and the most terrified parents are the white ones. Communities of colored people have a culture that's far closer to what you remember from the 60s. Not because their children are actually safer, but because their parenting style is more similar (they still spank their kids) and because they don't go through life scared of every little thing.
Hanania's immigrant insecurity complex strikes again! A lot of his arguments here are rather poorly thought through. Previous responses have already pointed out that the "deranged" poll outcome is actually more rational than Hanania's expectation.
Take Denmark. Say the Danes are fond of their culture and want to preserve their ethnicity. Doubling their population and diffusing it among India would guarantee their extinction in little more than a generation. The fact that the population is larger is irrelevant. Unless their was strict segregation, they will be absorbed into the Indian population without a trace. The percentage is clearly more important.
What H cannot seem to fathom, is that 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 a supposed minor gdp bump. Besides, I'm highly doubtful that immigration is as wonderful for the economy as Hanania seems to believe. To repeat a previous post I made: "I'm from the UK. 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."
Even putting aside culture and crime, his argument fails even when analyzed according to his GDP autism. Refugees are extremely unemployed in Western Europe, they contribute no net value to those economies.
Yes the UK has a proud history and has been of enormous benefit to humanity. And now this nation of immigrants makes it look like an ant.
You are certainly correct about the passing on of a culture and heritage, it's just very different than what we have in the US. When we say "our founding fathers" we don't mean that those people are related to us in any way. My ancestors came here long after they were all dead. Yet I inherited their cultural heritage and I would never feel closer to the Norwegian kings of the past than to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
That kind of proves your point about one culture absorbing another, but I see it as a specifically good thing. Gathering around shared ideas is clearly superior to gathering around shared DNA.
You should learn about Norwegian Americans. We are more likely to eat traditional Norwegian food than actual Norwegians. At one point, Norwegian professors had to come to the US to relearn ancient woodworking arts because no one in Norway still practiced them. There are Sons of Norway clubs all over the US. We've been absorbed but I don't think we've been destroyed. And obviously being a stateless minority didn't mean the end of Jewish culture. If a culture is important enough to people they will keep it alive no matter what. If they don't have that dedication then maybe it wasn't worth holding on to in the first place.
There were two things I was trying to get at there. One is that Hanania's myopic view of what makes a society valuable to those living in it. Skyrocketing the population through immigration may grow the countries GDP. My point is it comes at the expense of many things that people care a great deal about.
Over the course of my life so far, I have observed the fate of small villages and towns in my environs. A rich tapestry of dialects descended from from dark-age kingdoms, vikings or saxon invasions. Traditions that have been passed directly from generation to generation. It is hard to describe to people of immigrant backgrounds in settler states like the US, the greater sense of belonging and unity you get from not only sharing customs but also knowing that everything built around you was created by your ancestors and the ancestors of those around you. The traditions aren't just a quirky gimmick like you see at St patricks day in the US but what you've grown up with, what your grandfather grew up with and his before him. This is shared by every one, all of whom are also proud of their society and want to maintain and advance it, even if there are better opportunities elsewhere. What I'm talking about here has very little relevance to values shared around constitutions or forms of governance.
The only reason the sons of Norway clubs exist in the US, is that a large body of Norwegians settled that area and formed their own society. Norwegians who valued the fact that they were Norwegian. After a generation or two of the region becoming 95% mexican, it is unlikely that these traditions will continue.
The second thing I was getting at, is questioning the supposed benefits of population replacement level immigration that H is a fanatical advocate of. I have seen beautiful towns with polite productive populations turned into soulless, crime ridden shitholes with not a British person in sight. The general rule of thumb is the more immigration the location has, the worse off and less desirable it is.
I would also add that his mercenary view of nationality and advocacy for a rootless existence would be catastrophic if people followed it on mass. If a foreign force is trying to take over your land? Screw your people, abandon them and just move elsewhere. You're a small nation that has built up a successful society? Don't you dare try and stop half a billion uneducated and desperate Africans taking over! It's racist, and after all, when it starts going to hell, you can just up sticks and move. You're a doctor, trained at great expense to your society in burkino faso? Do you have any obligation to build up your nation and give back to the society that funded your education? Of course not, that's antiquated nationalism. You could get paid more in Canada as a delivery driver. Move.