This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, there's some talk downthread about Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants and such. Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.
But, the interesting thing is the questions about "why" anybody puts up with them and well, at least according to local business owners, because they're more likely to show up to do the job and not fail a drug test than the righteous pure American's currently living there.
https://youtube.com/watch?si=nke3DETnGvcaAHE4&v=FA80DOcJnu8&feature=youtu.be - Youtube video
https://x.com/otis_reid/status/1833578554778374462 - Quote from the factory owner.
Of course, 2016 J.D. Vance would probably agree with this factory owner about the get up 'n' go of this socioeconomic group of people instead of defending them from economic competition from supposedly mentally deficient Haitians.
Now, to quote a lot of Twitter, it is true the Haitians are ruining that community's traditions, by actually getting to work and not showing up high.
Are you going to campaign on some Mega-Singapore ticket to remove birthright citizenship and deport anyone that fails a drug test? I could be convinced pretty easily.
Disparate impact means this is a non starter for them most likely
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you know much about the modern history of Lebanon? Seems like late-stage multiculturalism to me. Exhibit A in what happens when you have too many ethnic/religious groups and welcome a huge number of refugees.
More options
Context Copy link
The various European groups that migrated to the US in the past were and are more similar to each other in terms of political views & shared cultural history than they are to the populations that arrived post WWII. Concluding that current migration is going to work out favorably from past European migrants being able to form a coherent new identity under vastly different socio-economic circumstances is a reach. From surveys like the GSS or others, it seems pretty likely that adding more migrants from places like Haiti, Central America or Africa isn't going to result in a smooth temporal continuity of extant American cultural sentiments about various things like immigration, free speech or the economy like you seem to imply.
As an aside, I remember reading a similar argument by you in the past, and sure enough going through my post history this turns out to be the third time I post this objection to the same kind of argument put forth by you. I don't expect you to concede, but given that you've never responded so far to me or others pointing out more or less the same thing, it'd be interesting to hear where you think this counterpoint goes wrong.
1.) If you would've told a British person they were basically the same as a Serb or Bulgarian in I don't know, 1851, they likely would've punched you and called you some weird slur nobody knows anymore. But, also, the whole "these ethnic groups are all similar too each other so that immigration was OK, it's just these people won't be able to do it," is literally the same argument made against Italians, Jews, Slavs, and hell, the Swedes at one time. This weird 'we're all white and should have solidarity' is a thing that never existed. As I've might've said before, as the descendent of Pole's, it's actually far more likely some ancestor of current non-college educated half-German guy in rural Ohio did a bit of light war crimes of ancestors of mine, as far as nothing bad has been done to my ancestors by non-European immigrants, so why should I, as argued below, have solidarity with them on racial lines?
2.) I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary) will do it's work on Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and whomever else is the scary migrant group of the week. Yes, yes, the culture will change around that - welcome to being in the position of Bill the Butcher in 1863 upset the Irish were changing things or whatever. We're not some European country where people stay on the same patch of land for 9,000 generations. Things shift and change, and whatever you think was the perfect time that we globalists ruined was a time of ruin and destruction for some a generation or two older than you.
As far as imparting cultural sentiments, I don't know, Trump seems to be winning over Hispanic's fine. A little economic success leading to ladder pulling does not know color. It's an American tradition.
3.) Which is probably my inherent bedrock disagreement on where we don't agree - America's not getting worse to me. There are issues, as always, but in the long run, even with Trump, things continue to progress bit by bit.
Prior to the last few decades, assimilation resistance came from the minority.
Now it comes from the majority (or whatever we want to call the media blob that approximates the "majority" opinion regardless of what most people actually want), which is why people expect the process to not function like it did prior to Western liberalism's suicidal turn.
There is no such thing as assimilation resistance at least the way it actually matters in society, as opposed to being upset there's more aspects of cultural group x in American life. There's no evidence of the usual pattern changing - first gen speaking mother tongue, second gen speaking mixture, third gen speaking English and a little bit of the mother tongue, fourth gen not knowing the mother tongue. OK, the last part is a joke.
What exactly do you think assimilation is? Do you think that if these immigrants continue all of their normal cultural practices, but do them in English, that should be good enough for us to stop complaining?
I mean, seemed to work out for Irish, Italians, Jews, and all the other formerly high-crime low-wage ethnic groups. Even among Hispanics, there's a rising tide of 3rd & 4th generation who are now very successful and just like the white ethnics are starting to vote on cultural grievance and status protection, just like Archie Bunker and such started to do so.
Outside of that, there's no evidence that sort of issues, say, Europe is having with it's immigrant population is happening in the US at any large scale in the long run. Sixth and seventh generation Algerians and Turk's aren't considered fully French or German, and this just isn't an issue in America, outside of a rump 30% of which there has always been a population that's been upset since we started letting those swarthy Swedes in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa. Not true for Haitians or Chinese etc. Cultural similarity is now much higher because modernity wiped it out during 20th century.
None of these people are, on average genetically on par with anglo-saxons, germanics or even balkan slavs, who are believed to be the dumbest Europeans there are, with the possible exception of southern Italians. I'm talking about stuff like propensity for violence, polygenic scores for educational attainment and so on.
If they were really on par, Salvador or Venezuela wouldn't look like Salvador or Venezuela, but would look like Australia.
Also, it was British colonists who came up with the legal concept of the white race in the late 17th Century. I'm pretty sure no Briton in the 19th Century would take serious offense at the argument that they have more racial similarity with Serbs and Bulgarians than with Haitian or South African blacks.
More options
Context Copy link
It’s entirely plausible that Hispanics with good nutrition have IQ’s similar to Balkaners.
Famous US joke is that when math departments are trying to fill their Hispanic quota, they look around for Argentinian Jews.
More options
Context Copy link
Hispanics span everyone from (Italian) Argentinians to 100% indigenous Mayans from Yucatan to Dominicans of mixed white, black and indigenous ancestry.
German ancestry Argentinians do not count for Hispanics for US purposes?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Denizens of autistic phenotype forums are screaming right now
What I meant is there exist a number of not really typical people in each population who wouldn't raise an eyebrow in either place.
Obviously you can tell at glance which group of tourists are from where, you can even tell Brits from Germans if you look carefully enough, but still, there are people who can pass in both places.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?
Sub-saharan African-immigrant populations are largely assimilating in terms of average outcomes of crime, educational attainment, and earning (see here) and appear to be mostly being dragged down on group averages by Somali immigrants specifically. Kenyan immigrants, for example, out-earn US-born citizens on average ($70,000/household vs. $66,000/household). Cameroonians and Liberians similarly have lower poverty rates than either the migrant population as a whole or native-born Americans (9% each vs. 14% of the immigrant population and 12% of the native-born population).
The repeated discussion of whether or not the native-born African American population is genetically distinct and disadvantaged from the general African population, that is the losers of a historical fitness competition, seems to gain another data point in its favor.
Though of course it's something of a folly to group together Somalis with Yoruba with Hausa with Ngala, it's at least a data point.
It seems pretty obvious that this is a selection effect and nothing more. If those Kenyan immigrants were representative of their home country, then Kenya would be a very wealthy country. You see a similar thing in the UK, with Nigerians (very selected) outperforming Jamaicans (unselected). The latter have outcomes that are pretty similar to African Americans.
Of course, if African migration to the US continues to be hyper-selective, then those migrants probably will end up with similar or better outcomes to the current Americans. But the group of Haitians in Springfield do not seem to have been selected for their high IQs (most of the Haitian elite left during the Duvalier dictatorship, as I understand it).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd be real interested in an answer here too. Modern American culture is completely built around overlooking and/or excusing the miserable abject failure of generations worth of attempted uplift of the black population. So much so that progressives like @Outlaw83 seem completely unaware that this failure is anything they could even possibly be asked to account for.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Even if we accept the moderate estimate that we're talking about 12k immigrants in a county of 110k residents in a span of 2 yrs, I'm pretty sure we're talking about a population influx on a scale and in a timeframe that surpasses any similar example from the immigration wave between 1880-1914.
I mean, I guarantee there were parts of the country that accelerated a similar rate, when you account for a much bigger immigration wave nationally.
But putting that aside, once you're in the United States, you're allowed to live where you can get housing. That's it. The community doesn't get a veto.
I'm pretty sure you're aware that there used to be such a thing as freedom of association.
I mean, you still have freedom of association in your personal life - some people in fact, call that 'cancel culture' when some people don't want to associate with other people due to their personal views, but yes, if you want the privileges and success that can come with being a business owner in America and all the advantages that has thanks to centuries of work by men and women of all colors and creeds, you don't get to make that business a private club for your own kind.
Or to quote a current Presidential candidate, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.
You know perfectly well that is not at all what cancel culture is. You also know perfectly well that freedom of association as a concept traditionally present in American civic life applies to communities and groups, not individuals and private lives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And it's been a dead letter for 60 years. Sadly we did not have Switzerland's foresight to allow people to deny citizenship to their literal neighbors.
Tbh in Switzerland the cantons where almost all immigrants are (Zurich, Basel, Geneva) have a standard naturalization process that doesn’t really involve locals having that kind of say.
The process you’re referring to was more about rural Swiss-German communities being able to stop annoying Germans (often wholly useless professionals like doctors and engineers) being able to waltz in and ‘become Swiss’, sit on the local town council etc. it affected the occasional unlucky migrant family from further afield, but for the most part they don’t want to live in Inner Appenzell or Schwyz or whatever.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
19th century immigrants weren't getting flown in on taxpayer dime while being eligible for massive welfare and benefits. 19th century immigrants brought a lot of crime and ethnic mafias. Many of the worst ended up leaving America.
What do you mean?
Back in the periods of major European immigration to the USA a large number would return back to their home country, usually because they failed to make their fortune and America was rough if you were poor.
Also because that's what most of them were planning to do from the start i.e. to make some money in the US in order to return and pay off their debts and buy a house etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also the jobs of the 19th century were better suited to human fungibility. If there was still a widespread low-skilled manufacturing base in the West the immigration dynamic changes a lot, IMO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The idea that Haitians are superior to the people they replace fits the far left racial supremacist mythology but it is certainly not true. You would really love for places like Haiti and their people to be superior to white Americans.
I find it notable how far leftists like to push the myth of the native working class as degenerate, inferiors. Kind of shows an obvious downside of this migration since a core aspect of it is benefiting the foreigner, or those who benefit by lower labor cost, over the native, even in terms of actual redistribution, but also in terms of social freedom, community cost, two tier justice system, an agenda in favor of insufficient policing because of the desire not to police demographics like blacks such as the Haitians, and the desire to give a misleading picture, etc, etc.
Of course the American business elite who went along with the marxist BLM, and started discriminating against white Americans are not wise for what is the common good and we need to have a gatekeeping agaisnt far left capitalists, and hiring managers, CEO, just like we ought to against NGO, Bureaucrats, Politicians. Because these people abuse their power at the expense of society, to fulfill unethical and based on false premises and criminal, and racist anti-native and anti-white objectives. Additionally short term valuing of lower cost over other important concerns like, not destroying ones nation and community, not bringing populations to be favored over foreigners, violent crime, net welfare (obviously if you as a corporation use lower wage labor but the same labor gets paid by the goverment, there is a negative externiality and a tragedy of the commons).
Anyway, the attempt to destroy and replace a population while presenting them as inferior to the replacers and lying about it, is a completly treasonous and criminal agenda. Both to advocate, and of course far more so to do it. The remedy to this is to imprison and shut down the NGO and politician networks doing this and to make it a massive taboo for people to advocate this. Prioritize this as the moral issue for people to be condemned and suffer negative consequence, over the far right boogiemen. And of course business executives pushing for this, can themselves be targeted by the legal system as facilitating an invasion. Or being part of a criminal agenda to make the native Americans tm second class citizens. Or violating democratic representation by flooding communities that were never asked.
There is an enormous problem of too understated a reaction towards extremely destructive, hostile, treasonous agenda. Tied with also people who control institutions of influence and power, using censorship and trying to impose the respect towards a faction that defiles what ought to be sacred, and deserves in turn a proportionate harsh reaction. Trying to flood with foreigners in general is violating a sacred red line, but that is doubly so with violent ones from low IQ countries with massive problems. This is a red line that should not be breached, and severe consequences should follow for those who breech this norm. We need to reestablish a norm against such massive moral hazard and need to punish the obvious problem of massive racist oikophobia from the far left that joins in its attitude and in part invites for these purposes, foreign groups and foreign nationalists. In combination with this also promotes massive racial discrimination.
Anyway, Haitians if they are so good, should run Haiti well and even from a universalist perspective this is the superior course. Of course Haiti is not a success. But in any case good luck to them. The pretense of people who have it out against European Americans that they should replace the later because the Haitians are superior is nothing but a blatantly false excuse.
The sadistic hatred towards what ought to be your own people speaks for itself. Although it would be condemnable towards a foreign ethnic group as well because even towards foreigners you have a moral obligation not to support their destruction on the basis of their inferiority. In general but doubly so when you are distorting things. Of course, you have an even greater moral obligation towards your own people.
That this behavior exists with such predictability instead of people being too ashamed to display it, is precisely because people have failed to be sufficiently intolerant to it.
Another wall of text full of polemics directed at your outgroup and personal attacks directed at the person you are arguing with. You've been warned about this repeatedly and banned a few times. I'm going to leave this as a warning since sometimes you dial it back a bit after being warned, and you had an AAQC recently which is just barely mitigating, but the mods were split on warning or ban, so take the grace and dial it down more.
More options
Context Copy link
A pretty long time ago ('07) I've read a mfg company manager that finding a working class person who can come to work on time, pass a drug test is quite hard in the US. Because probably everyone from them who can do these things is already employed. Or worse, in college.
Murray made a case in his Coming Apart book that the working classes have been badly hit by the last 50 years. People with worse cognition aren't as flexible and need a more functional culture.
In many cases this is because they don't want to pay the going rate for good employees. They get fooled because with a lowball rate they can consistently get an employee who is good enough for a short while, and then the employee goes back on the sauce or gets in a barfight or some other such thing.
For machinists, as with the specific company here, specifically it's also just extremely unpleasant work -- loud, repetitive, lots of metal shavings and cutting fluid, just the wrong mix of boring and extremely dangerous, sometimes in really subtle ways.
For a while the pay made up for it when machinists could pull the sort of wages that 'skilled trades' like HVAC or assembly could (though even then, it wasn't popular), but right now the industry is pretty badly squeezed; if you aren't aggressively chasing pay and jumping up from operator roles, you're probably gonna be closer to a McDonald's worker than a specialized-skill one. And in turn, leaving the operator or setup roles to a true machinist seat requires a very broad set of problem-solving skills that... well, it isn't the same as IQ, and it's definitely not the same as college-readiness, but it's the sort of skillset where you have a lot of other options. Boosting pay would be the normal solution, but (excluding spheres where Made In America is mandatory) there's just not that much slack in the market, nor space for improved employee productivity.
There's a certain type of person that excels at it, because it's indoor work, not always on your feet, and kinda nice from a feeling productive bit, but there's not a ton of that type of person that wouldn't be better doing something else.
((Though I'd caveat the skills problem is more complicated. It's not just that the lower wage workers are nuts, though some are, but that we've spent nearly forty years putting massive selection pressures against conscientious people learning a lot of the physical skills necessary for these classes of jobs. I've seen engineering college graduates that don't know how to use Allen wrenches properly, or know the names for Phillips-head versus Torx, or how to use a proper set of wirestrippers. Not everyone who does has facial tattoos, to borrow a turn of phrase, but it's a serious dichotomy.))
Why.. metal shavings and cutting fluid are contained inside the CNC machines, you only encounter that while cleaning them, no ?
Cleaning completed parts is a not-trivial part of what operators do, and while they should be just a quick brush-and-dunk in degreaser by the end of an operation, 'should' is the operative word. Keeping your machine(s) clean and clear ends up taking a lot more time than you'd think. Deburring and material prep adds yet more, operations like tapping. It's not a literal swimming in grunge sorta problem, but especially if you're sensitive to it -- and I know more than one person that finds common aluminum cutting fluid to smell like bile when hot -- or the first time you put pressure down with bare skin on a surface that looked clean of chips, it gets really annoying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find many people in PMC circles compare legal educated immigrants (basically the best human capital of the donor countries) to the least educated working class proletariat in the host countries. It's never apples to apples of the worst educated proles from the donor countries. If you tried to compare the proles from western countries to proles from places like India and China it basically ends up looking like a /pol/ rant. Let alone comparing high human capital educated 'international' westerners to proles in places like Dubai or China.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People drunk on Twitter quips let out the friend enemy distinction once again.
The post cold war left has now abandoned the native working class for sexual and ethnic minorities for so long that calling their former constituency a bunch of hicks that deserve to be replaced by Haitians is not just a guilty pleasure, it's bog standard rhetoric.
Of course those same leftists will complain that those same hicks are too stupid to vote for them when it's "in their interest" and not only totally occult their contempt but attempt to justify the contempt through its consequences.
This is fine. It's normal politics, you can't be mad at people for trying to win. I think this is a terrible strategy and that the success of both Danish socdems and the Europeean far right show exactly why. But I'm cool with it. Let them eat their caps when white devils votes for the right wing chauvinists who actually promise getting rid of the scabs and protecting local industry.
It is amusing, however, that we have once again run into "you are not being replaced by Haitians but it is a good thing that you are".
This is one of those phrases that says more about the speaker than about the subject. If you can imagine having principles beyond selfishness and greed, then that objection rings hollow.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can believe that 30 (and many more) of the 20,000 are hard workers. But does that justify the movement of tens of thousands?
If you get 2x number of good low-wage workers, 10x number of welfare users + x number of bad low-wage workers (the ones who crash the truck into someone because they're bad drivers, or cause industrial accidents) + 2x number of petty thieves and drug dealers... Is that a good deal? It's a good deal for the business owner who has his workers - maybe he can distinguish between good and bad workers, maybe he knows what he's doing and isn't just racking up legible gains and ignoring tail risks. But it's probably not good for the community or the region.
I just made those numbers up, who can say what the ratios are. We can observe that Haiti is not a very well-run country. There is no reason to think that the numbers will be good.
I mean, one should be able to look at the crime rate of Springfield, Ohio over the next few years and see if things shift that much. Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down.
Why do progressives repeat this when the exact statistical mechanics of this have been known for years? No, history does not show that at all.
What’s the statistical mechanic, and source?
High crime parts of the US drag the average up, and while it's technically true immigrants have a lower-than-average crime rate, that's small consolation for communities that aren't in that dragging-the-average-upwards cluster.
Tell you what, how about you grab the stat that the claim is made on, and I look up the crime stats of Springfield, and we'll see how it would affect them.
Very well. That stat appears to come from the paper LAW-ABIDING IMMIGRANTS: THE INCARCERATION GAP BETWEEN IMMIGRANTS AND THE US-BORN, 1870–2020. On page 24 of the PDF, the chart appears to show an incarceration rate of
1,200 per 100k first generation immigrants in 2020, versus2,600 per 100k native born. (How the hell do you escape a tilde on this site?) The breakdown shows an incarceration rate of perhaps ~1,900 per 100k first generation Mexican and Central Americans (this would presumably be the closest category for Haitians).According to this page, Springfield hasn't been very safe lately:
Looking at the crime type breakdowns, assaults have gone way up since 2020, while rapes perhaps did a reversion to the mean. Other crimes don't appear to have meaningfully increased in volume.
Meanwhile, the demographics put it at 77% white and 1% Latino as of the 2020 population of 65k. Obviously, the demographics have changed quite a bit since then, with 15,000 Haitians settling there since 2020.
Overall, I don't know if we have enough data to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison. One specific type of crime rose from 2020 to 2022, but we don't know when most Haitians came in from 2020 - 2024, nor do we know the breakdown of those crimes by ethnicity over the years (it appears the town has had an economic downturn, so how would we know the crimes are because of the Haitians and not because of disgruntled native workers with nothing better to do?).
In any case:
I don't see how this invalidates the statistic. Are immigrants settling disproportionately in formerly peaceful areas that now have more crime than before? That would seem surprising to me, given that I mostly see immigrants in the metropolitan cities rather than in the rural countryside, and big cities have much higher crime rates. But by all means, if you have evidence that shows that the statistic is misleading, please do show it.
Well, to make it slightly more apples-to-apples, since the your link provides the incarceration rate, I did a quick search for Clark Country. Funnily enough, like you said, it's not the safest place, and it's actually one of those that drags the national average up. Still, comparing it to your link, it seems roughly on the same level as "all immigrants". If you take South and Central America, it's not even close, sending in more people from that region would increase the incarceration rate even more.
Looking at those charts, I have the feeling they're being misused. It seems they were set up to say something like " America's racist society is turning otherwise law-abiding people into criminals", but through some game of telephone people started retelling it as "immigrants are literally less criminal than average Americans", which is completely wrong.What do you mean? He literally said "Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down". How do you parse that data to come to that conclusion? Even if we go with "there's no data for a good apples-to-apples comparison, he's the one that's wrong for making the claim!
Am I missing something here?
Edit: There's something very weird going on in that source. Apparently the average incarceration rate in the US is 531 per 100K, I don't know how you get these numbers to work together with the study you linked. Do they per 100K of the prison population??
Maybe it's because of the age? My link gives the rate for 15-64s, while yours for 18-40's. God, I hate academia.
I took his claim to mean that overall crime rates as measured across the US would be lower than it’d be without immigrants. I’m not even parsing the data, I’m just not seeing how your claim — even if true, which it may well be — invalidates his claim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Presumably a combination of:
I don’t see how either of those invalidates the statistic
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Having seen the effects of recent migration to my city, the idea that 1st gen immigrants not committing more crime than the natives can only actually be true if there is a large black population in that place. Among crimes that can't be covered up by the community, like DUI, the Venezuelans we've gotten are massively overrepresented. We know there is a lot of sex crime being covered up by the community. As we see with this Springfield situation, authorities seem to be covering up immigrant crime at high rates as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If this X thread is to be believed, what is actually going on here is that a federally-funded labor arbitrage organization called Switchboard is providing extremely low-wage labor to these businesses, offering to link them up with “refugees” who can be paid dramatically less than native workers (who are not even considered for these job openings, nor even made aware of them) because their entire housing and healthcare budget are 100% subsidized by the very same government.
Twenty years ago, committed leftists would still have had the good sense to be highly skeptical of capitalist claims that immigrant labor is “just better” than native labor; see Bernie Sanders famously calling open borders “a Koch Brothers project.” They would have immediately smelled a rat and seen this for what it is: a way for employers to pay their employees as little as possible. Nowadays, however, leftists eagerly gobble up these businesses’ transparent excuses, because it flatters their fetish for diversity and population replacement. “Haha, of course the factory owners wouldn’t lie about this; white American workers are just a bunch of lazy entitled slobs, and the non-white scab labor is more virtuous!”
I can well believe that one of their major complaints- marijuana- about native white labor is 100% true. This is ubiquitous amongst the native born and dramatically less common elsewhere. I can easily believe that this is the one major problem Haitians are less prone to.
And marijuana use is often a problem for blue collar bosses, both for reasons stemming from observations of its effects and because insurance companies don't like it when your employees can't pass drug tests.
On one hand: yes to all points.
On the other hand: no employer of mine has ever dared drug test me. Somehow I get a pass but some guy whose job involves stacking and unstacking boxes must never touch cannabis on a day off work, unless he wishes to be fired.
I get firing people who show up to work high or drunk. Obviously. But checking if someone smoked weed at any point in the past few weeks is a craze for many employers. And I mean craze in a very negative sense.
At least some major employers are coming around. A few years ago Amazon stopped firing low level warehouse workers for pissing hot for weed. Because if someone wants to work in an Amazon warehouse and can hit their strict metrics, why would you fire them because they smoked weed at some point in the past few weeks?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm 0% bothered by the fact that a town can come up with incentives to get 20,000 people to move there (and grow by 25% or whatever). Even if they're immigrants, necessarily.
What's rather alarming is that it was not by the town's political process and that they somehow are all immigrants from Haiti? What's their legal status? And how did so many of them end up there? This requires a lot more light.
I certainly wouldn't want my town to grow by 30%, populated entirely by (e.g.) Sudanese refugees that are totally 0% ex-Janjaweed we swear, with no say in the process whatsoever.
More options
Context Copy link
My first thought is that the real reason employers are so happy to have the Haitians is because they can pay them less, but not having been to the Midwest I may be underestimating the degredation of the native human capital.
Haitian-Americans seem to be doing okay so far, though one always has to be concerned about selection effects. Maybe Haiti's abysmal situation is due to instability and mismanagement. If only there were some way for an outside force to provide order, political stability, and facilitate foreign investment...
UPDATE: WE HAVE GEESE! The Federalist claims to have obtained a police report and non-emergency call from August where a citizen reports a group of Hatians who "all had geese in their hands." Finally, some actual journalism.
Here's a story that's not going to play very well.
Woman saying that her 71 year old mother in law got killed by a reckless Haitian driver while taking out the trash. That no one was punished, not even for expired tags on the vehicle.
Honestly anyone taking a good look at Haiti could have bet that far, far worse stories are going to come out of this. The car insurance($420 insurance per month on 2 cars) and crime (doubled since '21) factoids are likely right.
Locals are saying they believe Haitians have 'amnesty' and cops can't touch them. A woman - and not a great looking one, complaining she was groped and saying she doesn't go out without her pitbull and her gun.
EDIT: local claims he saw police stop a van full of Haitians who were collecting cats.
EDIT 2: Interesting talk by people from a neighboring village of Tremont (just NNW) https://youtube.com/watch?v=YrCotATOgR4&t=665s
Police in Springfield ordered not to tow vehicles without licenses. 7+ car accidents every day in Springfield. Haitians get out of fines because they don't have translator(?). Second guy who's speaking says he's been crashed into twice, his mother once.
And therefore, it won't be played on the mainstream media at all.
If it's big enough on social media they're going to have to try to address it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, the US tried it. It was a shitshow. The US sucks at imperialism. Maybe Canada would like to try?
Who's still good at imperialism actually? The list has gotten pretty short.
Europe and the US are clearly out, one needs only to glance at Lybia and Irak. China's not exactly doing great. Free infrastructure with strings attached is a classic strategy, but they suck so much at diplomacy that everybody still hates their guts except maybe Iran.
It seems weird to say but I think Russia is the best we got here, and I wouldn't call them good. They're not afraid to go from the iron fist to the velvet glove, which gives them a leg up. But while turning the Chechens into loyalists was a feat, it was also a bloody mess.
No, they're quite (horribly) effective at imperialism. Remember that just because Chinese territory is contiguous doesn't mean it's not an empire; China proper, peopled by Han, looks like this. Xinjiang and Tibet, at least (I'm less sure about Inner Mongolia and Manchuria), are not very happy with being ruled by the PRC, but it's doing them little good because they're brutally occupied.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're right about massive population changes in our past, but they were not all positive.
Consider Detroit, for example. In 1910, Detroit had around 450,000 people, 99% of whom were white. Thanks to ample factory jobs, and the Great Migration, the population exploded to 1.8 million by 1950. Among the new citizens were 300,000 black people from the Deep South who filled valuable roles in the city's numerous factories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit
We all know what happened next. Today, Detroit's population has fallen to 600,000 give or take. The white population has fallen to just 10%. The factory jobs disappeared and today the median household income in Detroit is just $37,000 making it the poorest large city in the U.S. Much of the income comes from government transfer payments. Labor force participation is incredibly low.
https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/Detroit-Labor-Market-1213.pdf
Job shortages are temporary. Demographic change is forever. First, the white citizens of Springfield will leave. Then the Haitians will leave. And it will eventually end up like Cairo, Illinois - a ghost town.
Yeah, Detroit had a bad run with a combination of the capitalistic incompetence of the Big Three ownership + corrupt leadership + the general Sun Belt migration.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the most economically dynamic and innovative and growing regions of the US are far more diverse, with the places that are less diverse mostly slowly dying out. This includes red states too - Houston, Miami (weird how the amount of Haitians wasn't a worry for all the VCers and blockchainers a few years ago), etc. There aren't a ton of super-white areas of the country with massive growth. Even a place like Nashville is diversifying as it grows.
This seems to be suggesting the opposite causal direction to what you're claiming - that growth/dynamism causes diversity, rather than that diversity causes growth/dynamism.
More options
Context Copy link
The more black a place is, the more of a shithole it becomes. As far as I can tell this is an ironclad law of the universe, never to be thwarted by any amount of handouts or progressive apologetics. Pointing to a bunch of places full of Hispanics and intoning vaguely about "diversity" is a transparent dodge.
Springfield is fucked. In a few years everyone will have bars on their windows, ten years after that the town will be dead. Watching good progressives pretend that this time it'll be different is a comic spectacle at this point.
We have lots of discussion here all the time about the unfortunate state of black demographics. It is fine to "Notice" and comment on this. It is not fine to simply make blanket, very general assertions intended to be inflammatory, which you do all the time. Something about Haitians seems to be stirring up an unusual level of nastiness in the mod queue, but unlike the last few people I have warned, your record is nothing but shitty comments like this.
Banned for a week.
More options
Context Copy link
I've personally lived in an African village of about 1500 where I was literally the only white for about 200k, and it wasn't a shithole, except by shallow criteria such as relative poverty (many lived in literal mud huts). But these huts were swept clean, the interior stone floors regularly polished to a slippery sheen, the people's clothes, such as they were, were ironed (with a fucking iron heated over a fire) and generally it was a very pleasant place to live.
That's an interesting observation. I wonder whether it's something about village life that makes people care about their reputations (see C20th British housewives scrubbing their doorsteps to keep up appearances). African cities look pretty filthy from what I've seen.
That said, I assume somedude was more talking about crime. In that case, the relationship is much clearer.
There have been many studies and philosophical reasonings on this. Anonymity, Dunbar's Number, reputational importance, clan survival, reciprocity odds, etc...The reasons are multitude and it is only in WEIRD societies that we can have nice cities and large groups that all act like small groups.
"Among the most prominent features that make people WEIRD is prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with anonymous others. " https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/
A good reason to not import too many non-weird clannish people at once.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Houston actually does have really high crime rates, albeit not St Louis tier. Of course Texas racial dynamics are a bit less apologetic than elsewhere in the country, having white bosses over all-POC crews is totally normal.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And there's the rub.
Some immigration is good. Some is bad. I'll argue that the high skill immigrants Silicon Valley gets are good. And low skill immigrants from Haiti are bad.
Studies have shown that when people move within the U.S., people of all races migrate towards areas that are whiter.
Except some currently high skill American residents are the descendants of low skill immigrants and refugees. If you actually want long-term dynamism and growth, you actually have to roll the dice on people without the right papers and hope for the best. Worked pretty well the first 250 years or so.
Would you not consider the importation of millions of Africans during the slave trade to be a similar 'roll of the dice'? I would say these Haitain migrants (being quite literally African American, in the sense of being Africans who have lived in the Americas for hundreds of years) are much more similar to America's current AA population than they are to the Jews, Irish or Italians of yesteryear.
This isn't Reddit so we can say these things explicitly. Subsaharan Africans have very low IQs (85 for AAs, 76 for Haitians). This can be compared to European IQs of around 100 or East Asian/Ashkenazi IQs of around 110. With this knowledge, can you really say that importing tens of thousands of Haitians to be a 'roll of the dice'? It seems pretty obvious to me that we can predict what will happen.
More options
Context Copy link
Those people came from populations with average IQ's that wouldn't be literally retarded in civilized countries. We can expect Italian(average IQ upper nineties) and Chinese(average IQ vaguely above 100) peasants to occasionally produce a genius. This is unlikely from Haitians.
More options
Context Copy link
Sixty years of progressives failing miserably to budge the racial gap in... pretty much everything... and this guy thinks bulk import of Haitians is "rolling the dice" like this might just be the part where they suddenly start pulling it off.
More options
Context Copy link
Our nation is more diverse than ever and less dynamic than ever.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, the citizens of Springfield were already leaving. I don't like Haitians, wouldn't be happy to have them near me, and if a bunch of them were heading to my suburb I'd be on the phone with state elected officials demanding they be rounded up and shipped somewhere else. But in the long run this doesn't change the future of Springfield's white population. It was already dead.
The real victims here are the Haitians. In one generation they're going to be utterly wrecked by the US welfare state, VR porn, and fentanyl. They will be chewed up and spit out. Their birthrates will crash through the floor and that will be the end of them. They are now being thrust into the hedonic suicidal memetrap that is modern culture, and they are even less equipped to survive it than the whites they are replacing.
I don't disagree. Haitians should make something of themselves in Haiti. Their kids will masturbate to pornography until they get erectile dysfunction and smoke themselves out of having jobs, mostly milling about wondering who their dads are.
Native whites can recover(if they want to) by joining a religious community. Haitians don't know that, and the black church isn't as good at setting people on the straight and narrow.
Of course, it couldn't happen to better people. Literal devil worshipping jigaboos don't arouse much sympathy.
Really hating someone still isn’t license to ignore the rules.
Going with a one day ban to cool off a little.
You gonna apply that to outlaw83? I seriously doubt it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I broadly agree with this, springfield was already a declining shithole town, the type of place where anyone with ability leaves and doesn't look back. Haitians as a group may be low human capital but if all you need are manual laborers then just don't import too many men in their 20s, the group responsible for major issues, and you'll be fine. The one issue of course is whether the people of springfield were asked about whether they wanted mass migration - presumably the haitians did not all manage to end up in springfield of their own volition, some government agency or NGO must have set it up.
Sure they did. They got to vote in elections. They just got outvoted and we have free movement within this country, and it turns out, it's easier to resettle migrants in poorer places than richer places for obvious reasons. Less waste of government funding by NGO's placing them in a smaller city than San Francisco or New York.
More options
Context Copy link
20s is a bit on the older side for a troublemaker.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There’s certainly selection bias here. The miscreants are far less likely to bother trying to get a factory job than the Hard Workers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link