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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I would be very happy to be proven wrong here---for example, do you have examples of anti-skilled immigration posts that aren't the caricature of "we want to do this because it's important to us that the US stays more white"?

I'm not one of those people who saves links of past posts to refer to in the future, but the topic of skilled immigration has come up before, and there have been people who are against it on the basis that it lowers the market value of skilled labor for citizens. Agree with this or not, it is not just about "keeping America more white."

Sorry, I should have taken more time with the reply and qualified what I was asking for more---specifically, an argument that is plausible enough to be the true reason for support for a significant number of people in this forum. Also it's not always just whiteness---many times it's just a preference for people with a deep ancestry in the country (which is just as bad for meritocracy!)

The competition argument is not plausible. It's naked selfishness asking that the rest of the country sacrifice to protect a well-off class from competition, not to mention very anti-meritocratic. Also, since the competition relevant to posters here is likely to be for tech jobs, it's almost certainly not even true given how many tech founders are immigrants. Probably Sergey Brin and Jensen Huang by themselves more than make up for any wage pressure in tech from skilled immigration.

many times it's just a preference for people with a deep ancestry in the country (which is just as bad for meritocracy!)

If this is your standard for meritocracy, then approximately 0 countries in the entire history of the world have been meritocratic and approximately 0 ever will be.

And yet I'm posting this from a country where the literal first founding words are "All men are created equal" and whose founders hated hereditary privileges so much that titles of nobility are constitutionally banned.

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