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Every so often I see these horror stories from Canadians complaining about how a flood of Indians has absolutely raped the commons. Their beaches flooded with creepy leering men, people shitting in public, massive nepotism and scams, services falling off a cliff as they get staffed up by Indians. It made me wonder what would happen if 50% of the extant population in my county was supplemented with Indians like Canada has seen.
There is this cute little nature preserve down the road from me. In the summer kids like to play in the river at a shallow. There is only parking for like 8 cars, enforcement is nonexistent, and it's honor system to clean up after yourself and not destroy the commons. It's hard to imagine that surviving. If the stories of off the boat Indians shitting in bodies of water like it's just what you do are true, it's fucked. To say nothing of the more disturbing and obnoxious light sex pestery. Akaash Singh had this great bit about what it's like being leered at by a hundred Indian men on a train in India that I can't find now, but his predominantly Indian-American crowd was laughing their asses off at how much they recognized it, so I assume it was based in some kernel of truth. The "You can't make me go back! Anything but that!" attitude of second generation Indian-Americans is profound. But it's not the weather or the land they want to be away from. It's other Indians.
The kid's parks here have these great little "take a book, leave a book" bins that my daughter has loved, and they've done a lot to get her excited about exploring books. It's hard to imagine these not being stripped bare or otherwise ruined given the stories of almost purposeless pillaging for the sake of pillaging the commons that I've heard out of Indian over run areas of Canada. Taking for the sake of taking just becomes expected. Maybe it has less to do with Indians specifically and more the low trust aspects of multiculturalism. I don't know. I only know it happens.
And then there is the shameless nepotism and scamming. It's more or less known that if you make the mistake of putting an Indian in charge of hiring, suddenly your company is hiring only Indians. That most resumes from Indians and credentials from institutions that service mostly Indians are completely fake and can't be trusted. I've seen repeated stories out of Canada that local education institutions which have leaned into servicing Indians have become so overrun with fraud, employers have begun just chucking applications from those institutions in the garbage. Been burned too many times.
Everyone has dealt with the completely detached from the outcome attitude of Indian call centers. When we lived in a major city, we had similar experiences with Indian doctors we visited. There is just this overwhelming sense they don't care. They don't have any duty to service. Any investment in outcomes. There is a script, they get paid, what more do you want? My wife constantly struggled with lingering issues that several Indian doctors (why were they so dominant?) just made scattershot prescriptions for, before finally getting in with an Asian American doctor who was actually invested in solving her problems.
Now my wife constantly has to work the phones because of my daughter's health issues and the vagaries of our insurance. Luckily, she's usually talking to actual employees at the local doctors office, lab office, insurance company, etc. It's already a frustrating, opaque process where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, and often neither of them know anything. But generally the people want to be helpful, and so even though the system is fucked up and frustrating and a pain in the ass, it ends up being a moderately collaborative effort and even though it takes my wife 4 hours of working the phones and being on hold constantly, things get accomplished. Now I'm not going to say something dramatic like my daughter would be dead if all these people were replaced by Indians, her issues aren't that serious. But somebody's probably would be if past experience is any indicator. I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.
I've complained before about my own experiences working with Indians. The Vivek's of the world speak in broad terms that these Indian workers are just better than me. They work harder, longer, for less pay, and they're probably smarter than me to boot. People here, when I've complained about the fecklessness and passive aggression I'm met with when trying to get an Indian to actually complete their task, respond with things along the lines of "They're just being smart, avoiding work and getting paid all the same." Seems like some sort of merited impossible to me. It's not happening, and also when it does it somehow still proves they're better than me.
I often struggle with notions of where I will flee to when America is ruined. My way of life is disappearing, my culture is being squeezed out, my history is being erased, my co-ethnics aren't reproducing. But where would even have me? Could I even blame them for not letting me in, for fear of Americans ruining their country the way we ruined our own? Sometimes you see Japan pop up as an option. A lot of embarrassing weebs think they know what Japan is like because they've digested a lot of Japanese media. Sometimes they even move to Japan and get on...ok. I remember watching this old video by Super Bunnyhop before every video he did was somehow SJ adjacent. He was talking about how these Americans were setting up bars where you could play a library of old games on consoles. In theory, this should be legal in Japan. But they were sued by the companies that owned the rights to those games all the same. They decided to fight this in courts, as is their right. But the native Japanese viewed this with scorn, it's just not what you do. Damned Americans and getting all legal about shit. Whatever it is about Japan that makes it so attractive to American's, I'm 99% certain we'd ruin if even 1m of us moved there. Especially if we just formed insular expat communities or overran certain areas. I can only imagine how obnoxious an American ghetto would be in Japan.
I've seen very little self awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from, or what makes them different. And to whatever degree self_made_human thinks he "knows" America and wants to live here, it just seems like an embarrassing strain of weebism to me. He imagines there is some mechanism by which he could come here, but that very same mechanism wouldn't play a part in destroying America, just the same way I'm certain 1m Americans would seriously fuck up Japan. There is almost no mechanism you could devise that would filter the "bad" Americans out of Japan, because our culture will ruin theirs. You let in the top 1m Americans, and they'll just serve as the vanguard for the next 10m even worse Americans because they'll be sympathetic for, and even long for, the shitty culture they fled from.
It's probably all inevitable. Civilizations rise and fall. It's just such an existential horror to know yours is falling and may not even survive your posterity.
I agree with your overall point and share your general sentiment. Which isn't to say that I think cjet is wrong; I respect his opinion as well.
But on the topic of doctors: German doctors aren't one whit better than the Indian doctors you describe. The doctors themselves blame the buerocracy, and I'm sympathetic to that complaint, but somehow it feels like they aren't all that unhappy to minimize their time with their annoying, idiotic patients.
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I've posted about this extensively on TheMotte. But here it goes again.
Since the 70s, Canada has imported India's lowest-skilled. While Indians were considered model immigrants everywhere else, Canadian-Indians were busy committing 9/11-level terrorist acts. Canadian-Indian bad actors are part of a large web of criminal gangs, human trafficking rings, and drug distribution cartels. Trudeau turbocharged this problem by opening the floodgates. In India, the flight of uneducated and unskilled migrants to Canada was rampant enough to become a meme. Many among us (governments included) warned Canada that these channels were being exploited to facilitate crime. Trudeau did not heed our advice. The outcomes are a result of Canada's stubbornness.
Indian immigrants in other nations do not have the same demographics. They're well-integrated, peaceful, and high-earning versus conservative, uneducated, and of flexible morality. Of course, #NOTMOSTCANADIANS, but you get my point. Projecting Canada's problems with ethnic Indians onto other nations makes no sense, and the statistical differences prove my point (crime, earnings, education).
Ethnic Indians are 5% of Canada's population.
You're scared of the bogeyman. These people don't exist.
I have never met an Indian who shits in bodies of water. I've never seen it among people I know in India, let alone outside the country. The kind of Indian who does it can't speak one sentence in English, let alone get a passport or a visa to ever exit the nation. I don't want to laugh at their misfortune. Street-shitters are a desperate and downtrodden class of people. They're barely tolerated in AC restaurants in India, let alone a foreign nation.
Ah, I'll leave this for another day. The ABC vs. Chinese or ABCD vs. Indians conversation is strongly colored by insecurity, ungroundedness, and colonial mindsets. For now, I'll say that it has little to do with their dislike of India. India (and developing nations in general) run on survivalist mentalities based around class systems. Second-generation Indians are insecure about their place at the top of the survivalist-Indian hierarchy. Their actions should always be viewed with that fact in mind.
You have causality backward. White people are unwilling to work for wages that desperate Indians agree to. This makes it so that the only people who meet the hiring bar and are willing to accept the wages are Indian immigrants. Similarly, Tier 3 Canadian institutions start cash-cow programs with little educational, career, or prestige value. The only kind of person who sees value in such a program is someone with ulterior motives. The program gets fraud-friendly candidates because it’s structured to only draw fraud-friendly candidates.
While we're exchanging anecdotes, my experience has been the opposite. Doctors back in India are caring, invested, and treat you like a human. I've found American doctors to be cold and impatient.
My experience couldn't be more different. My Indian (and first-gen Chinese) coworkers clearly work harder and produce higher-quality outcomes than the natives. But the natives keep getting rewarded because the company can't afford to lose citizens.
Yeah, Vivek felt resentful and hurt in his comments. I don't agree with his comments, but I can see how your average white person would feel attacked by it. Fair enough.
Yeah, it has to do with your co-ethnics. Indians (among other first-gen immigrants) are more spiritual, family-oriented, and 90s-American-like than native 2025 Americans. Your complaints are rooted in Gen Z Americans rejecting classically American values. Don’t point to us immigrants. This is all you. If it is any solace, this seems to be a global problem. Everywhere, urban kids of the next generation are rejecting ideas that their 'elders' held close to their hearts. Time is ruthless.
I see your point. For every Indian who seeks integration, there are smart and educated Indians who ghettoize. It's how immigration works. Jews, Italians, Cubans, etc.—they all ghettoized in their first generation. In time, they integrate.
I don’t agree with your Japan analogy, though. America exported every part of its culture for a whole century. It forcefully molded workers at other English-speaking corporations into pseudo-Americans. America is a 'global' phenomenon. Irrespective of the truth, that’s the image it portrays and sells. If immigrants drink the Kool-Aid, then that’s on America for shoving it down our throats. You might argue that this was the doing of the filthy globalists, and it isn’t the will of 'true' Americans. But to me, that just sounds like you saying that you're a powerless normie who is angry about being powerless in their country. If you didn’t want to be flag bearers of globalism for 50 years, then you should've found your way to power and reversed the trend. Even in 2025, Trump may cosplay as a nativist, but he's as global coastal elite as they come.
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Look, I'd be just as against opening the floodgates of immigration to Indians as you are.
The worst part of being an Indian in India is being surrounded by other Indians, in much the same way the worst part about poverty is having to live with poor people. Indians have the dual misfortune of being both Indian and poor (usually).
Canada is a clear example of taking things too far. When you're excusing diploma-mills in the country that exist solely to provide a convenient pretext for people to come on a 'student' visa and then start driving taxis with their Punjabi uncle, you're doing skilled immigration wrong.
On the other hand, Indian immigrants in the US and UK are clear success stories. They are usually the richest demographic, often fighting Jews and the Chinese for pole position, and remarkably well assimilated and lacking criminal tendency. Whatever mechanism allows for this to happen is a good one, and at least in the UK, Indian migrants are far more respected than their Pakistani and Bangladeshi subcontinental brethren. They have not imported the same bad habits from their homeland.
I can't really argue that your personal experiences haven't happened. I can argue that they're not representative. I've been treated by Indian doctors most of my life, and I wouldn't say they were uncaring automata in it for just the amount of money they can squeeze out of you. I necessarily know more doctors, Indians, and Indian doctors than you do, and I think my opinion is more likely to hold true at scale.
I don't know if you ever noticed, but here I am, on this site, often handling out medical advice for the price of free. We could play games of Chinese Cardiologists all day if we had to. I know I've done more than the bare minimum for more people than I can count.
The mechanisms that would bring me there would be the same mechanisms that have brought existing Indians to America. And most people have positive opinions of those there. One mechanism that has worked for other Indian doctors is (hopefully temporarily) not an option for me at present. Another has been swung shut.
We strongly disagree on whether the status-quo is a good thing or not, and I don't expect to change your mind in that regard. I object to the status quo moving in a direction I think is worse for the country, and for skilled immigrants.
In fact, I respect your right to want to keep America the way it is, and preserve its culture. I think that I'm culturally American more than anything else, you can call me a Texaboo if you like, but can you deny that the average weeb loves Japan? Maybe I have more faith in the spirit of America than you do, it has assimilated tens of millions, it can take a million more, especially if they're a million like the ones who came before.
This is just bad in the other direction. Importing a new elite class to rule over the native middle and bottom isn't really an improvement. Many places already struggle with nepotism prone foreign elites with divided loyalties.
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There are challenges to assimilating into Japan that surprise even the weebiest: partly because what's shown in media is a very specific slice of everyday culture, partly because some aspects of the culture are so alien to Americans they have to live here for a few years before they even realise that those aspects exist.
In America, honesty and self-expression is a moral duty. In Japan, self-expression is (literally) selfishness.
You are expected to show the socially-appropriate face at all times. It doesn't matter if you disagree with your boss, it doesn't matter if you didn't mean to upset the person demanding an apology, it doesn't matter if you want to dress differently from other people, it doesn't matter if you think your parents are being stupid or overbearing. You are expected to do what is Done, and to uphold the harmony of the community.
Westerners in general and Americans in particular struggle with it hugely. They find it hard to behave appropriately, because they feel a moral duty to be honest and to push back against perceived unfairness. They also find it hard to feel comfortable around people who they think are putting on a fake face. Multiple American friends who've lived here for a long time tell me they feel like they're surrounded by aliens, or robots.
(For me it's easier because Britain also has a strong culture of 'what is Done', so I'm used to expressing different sides of myself in different roles and I have more ways to show my feelings without stepping out of bounds).
Then you have all the things that are necessary to maintain the cohesion that makes Japan work. Seniority is supreme: you can be fifty, sixty years old and your boss will still dress you down like a child in front of your colleagues to make sure you know your place. Your child is quite likely be bullied in school for being different (maybe, I don't have first-hand reports on this, just rumours). Often, your wife will expect absolute control over your bank account and your child, and may react to your attempts at co-parenting with jealousy at you muscling in on her turf (I've seen this).
Don't get me wrong, I love Japan. It's a great place to live and although I don't have many native friends I'm very fond of the ones I have. The depiction above is deliberately coloured as 'the other side' of what anime-lovers like me imagine before we come here. But assimilating, really assimilating, is very difficult. Maybe even impossible - I suspect the relevant personality traits are genetic. And after a few years, you look around and realise that you're living in a ghetto because it's just...easier to live around people like you.
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He love not necessarily idealized Japan, as by analogy @WhiningCoil reasons, but an Americanized one.
One which is like great you know, certainly not a shithole country, but man, think of how cool it would if it, like, ditched the "kanji" thing I read in the blog written by an American. Japanese hate it, you know, consider it the worst of their language, but their out-touch ultra-nationalist politicuans refuse to listen to them.
Or cartoons, man the ones for young boys are tight! Always action-packed! But there are some iffy ones, I've heard. Like a girl is still in high-school, but despite of that she is shown to feel love. And her classmate doesn't act like that is strange and sometimes even puts the moves on her. That is no bueno for me.
I've recently learned of great Black Japanese (two of the cloorst things ever!) hero of legends, Yasuke. He was the closest friend and advisor to Nobunaga. I had look up Nobunaga, he was apparently some sort of a head honcho in Japan. So anyay, Japanese not only know, they adore Yasuke.
Uh.. I'm not quite sure what point you're making, unless you're taking off entirely tangentially.
That being said:
My man, have you known many weebs? They can be racist as fuck, and are probably one of the demographic most ticked off by Assassin's Creed: Shadows, and their depiction of an African uberchad steamrolling underfed rice-eating Japs. Even Afro Samurai had the decency to set itself in the far future, with the character effectively being a LARPer.
There is a certain demographic in the west who identifies as being fans of Japan, but only likes the stuff "Japan as a variant of their home country", "Localized Japan" rather than "Japan as viewed by the Japanese". Not really an issue for you, as you do not see any alien-to-India elements in the US society as defects. But others might.
Buffet-line thinking. America's very common to it because they see themselves as picking and choosing the "best" and leaving out everything they don't like - it slots into their national ethos as a culture of "fair" competition.
So they only like the "best" things about Japan, the things they find icky or don't like they pretend don't exist.
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Thanks. I think I understand your argument now.
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You know, there is this thing called Paris Syndrome. Allegedly it's a thing Japanese tourist get when they expect to visit the glamorous Paris of the silver screen of old, and instead its a filthy crime ridden Muslim/African ghetto. I really do wonder what would happen to your perception of America if I showed you the dozen abject failures of assimilation in a 60 mile radius around me, especially with my color commentary of how they used to be. Maybe take you to all the areas where nobody will understand that American sounding English you are so proud of.
If nothing else it might take some of the shine off and ease your suffering for want of not being here. America has become more like the 3rd world, than all the 3rd world we've imported has become like America.
I would watch and support this podcast. Would you call it 'Decline and Fall', 'Managed Decline', 'Back When the Lights Were On'?
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Do you genuinely think I'm not aware of the failures of America? The fent addicts nodding off next to piles of human feces? Ghettos where everyone knows not to go, where shampoo and baby food is kept under lock? Rust Belt towns that have denizens so devoid of hope that they cling to welfare and opioid addictions?
How much of that is "3rd world imports"? Not much. A certain underclass in the country has ancestors who came over, rather unwillingly, several centuries back.
Did the Chinese, Korean and Indian immigrants, probably two or three generations in the country, who fled conditions as bad as the worst of the 3rd world today, show the same dysfunction? Did they fail to assimilate and live off the dole?
I expect to see a lot of awful things in the States. I also expect to see much more good. And of the awful I see, very little of it has anything to do with skilled immigrants. Hell, there are no end of people with kids and grandkids in the middle and upper class now who themselves came over destitute and unable to speak a word of English. Origin matters, and so does filtering.
I guess this is why we are just talking past each other. You see a dead America, corpse being picked clean and future kingdoms taking root, and think it's still a fantastic place to live. "That's it?" you think.
The only immigrants I'd want are ones who see what is become of America, and would prefer to fortify their own homeland from the rot.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. Those bemoaning the fall of the Roman republic would have been surprised to hear that Rome would endure for another five centuries (fourteen if we count the east) and that the height of her power and glory was yet to come. Tocqueville's America was killed by Lincoln, Lincoln's America was killed by FDR, and now FDR's America is being fed into the woodchipper by Elon Musk, but all of these struggles are orthogonal to the interests of prospective immigrants. What they care about is technological and material prosperity. Tanner Greer put it best:
The idea that an America that is head and shoulders above every other nation in technological innovation is in any way ruined (compared to whom?) is laughable to the billions that want to move here.
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That's laughable hyperbole at best. Seriously? Do you know what a truly dysfunctional, ethnically and politically divided nation looks like? You haven't even engaged with my rebuttals, or the clear evidence that I am aware of the warts on America's ass cheeks.
Well, you're a citizen, and I'm not, so you're entitled to that opinion. That Republic you consider a rotten corpse is still yours, provided that you can keep it. You don't even seem to want to.
I mean, you're a doctor. How would you react if summoned to a corpse squirming with maggots, and passers by went "Why aren't you trying to save it? Don't you ever care? Look, he's even still moving!" Yes, technically there is life (the maggots) that can be seen making parts of the body squirm, but the body is dead, and there is nothing to save.
A (hypothetical and not at all how real maggots work) maggot might walk by and say "Oh my god, how dare you declare them dead?! They're alive and thriving you monster." But they aren't talking about the same thing you are talking about, except to the extent it shares the same space as the thing you are talking about.
This pure rhetoric and hyperbole that is not worth addressing. I can only wish you well when you conquer your hangups and decide to move to Japan.
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