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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25674 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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There's a strong scientific reason to be against H1B entirely, even if it increases GDP:

  1. Humans only developed the ability to form social groups because it benefitted gene proliferation. Community, society, and civilization are intrinsically tied to what benefits human gene proliferation.
  2. H1B and other forms of immigration actively damage the reproductive success of Americans because (a) our national fertility is low, (b) rival nations have a comparatively enormous population and take in few immigrants, (c) they take the highest wage jobs, (d) they take up physical space in the territory and (e) they accrue political power.
  3. H1B violates the only reason we are able, as humans, to form countries and organize socially at all, making it a rare case of an objectively bad evolutionary decision.

A funny hypothetical illustrates the point. Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success. We have lost in the deepest sense, because we have betrayed the whole purpose of cognition. Rather than making America competitive, we would have forever lost the evolutionary competition which designed our very minds. Probably because evolution selects for intuitive prosocial genes like empathy (flip-side: out-group prejudice) and not just raw abstract pattern recognition. We would have lost the game of life, and gained a small footnote in the future Hindi history of the world. We would have even reneged on the first words God ever spoke to us — “be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth”.

Obviously, 200 million is excessive for the point of a thought experiment. But this just means that the damage occurs to a lesser degree. Indian Americans are 1.5% of America, the highest paid group in America, and the fastest-growing demographic. Let’s say that a generous .1% are geniuses who have aided American military might. This reduces American reproductive success by at least 1.4%, arguably more because of the higher socioeconomic position. The greatest risk is that they begin to use their high earnings to lobby for more Indians, which seems to be happening presently.

I find it hard to believe that this arrangement is even in the evolutionary interests of “elite human capital”. If you are Elon Musk, you have more genes in common with the average American than the average Indian. If Elon is crowned Eternal King of India and begins the genetic proliferation that befits a medieval royal — along with a haram of beautiful nubiles — it’s doubtful that he would ever reach the level of similarity that he already has with Americans generally, and Northern European Americans specifically. So what is even the biological point? It makes no sense from a scientific point of view. It is a form of biological self-harm.

It’s weird that no one actually brings up the science in these discussions, only the economic studies. But the economic studies are only valuable when subordinated to and weighed by biology. Okay, economists are saying that if we add the Indians then the CEO gets another ski home… but the biology is quite clear that this is ultimately not in anyone’s interest, even the CEOs, and goes against natural design (both evolution and God). If you guys really want the ski homes then we can invade the Himalayas.

Bullshit, I offer a counterpoint:

The JD Vance strategy

Seriously though, admixture is human. Europeans are full of Neanderthal genes, heck my DNA report shows that I have Inuit genes and it's likely because my Viking ancestors stole women from everywhere they went.

It’s in our nature.

Fearing the loss of advanced pattern recognition because some people might hook up with Indians is silly, you’ll just end up with some little mixed Srinivasan Ramanujans running around.

Usha is already here. Usha is also not average H1B. She was a Supreme Court law clerk and her mother was a provost at UCSD. Also, people are likely to pair if they fall in love, and we are deciding a policy about whether or not to even invite Indians to the continent. I’m not trying to dictate whether people in love should marry or not.

admixture is human

Hahahah, tell that to Usha’s ancestors! Who for three millennia as Brahmins conserved as much indo-aryan DNA as they could by instituting a genetic caste system in which they have eternal control over society, which the Hindu religious system revolves around, which they created for that purpose. Are you curious why Brahmin IQ is high? Or why India’s Indo-Aryan DNA is exclusively patrilineal and your Inuit DNA is matrilineal? Men invade and conquer women because that is their genetic divine mandate, because that expands their genes, which at least Hinduism has the honesty to accept. Seriously, violating this is the nearest science has to violating the will of God: this principle is your creator, it is responsible for your very life and cognition, and you can appreciate it because this creator endowed you with thought, so that your reason can understand it if for some reason your instincts fail. Yes, you have the free choice to disobey your creator, in which case your genetic line will eventually lose eternal life.

Idk.

My ancestors are from northern Europe.

You know what that means?

I come from the people who more than any other group bred with a different freaking species than my own.

If admixture between races offends God than my lineage has already been damned since the last glacial maximum.

That's actually not what that means. The title for most archaic admixture currently belongs to Melanesians (especially Negritos), who have 4-6% Denisovan admixture on top of the 1-4% Neanderthal admixture of Eurasians.

I come from the people who more than any other group bred with a different freaking species than my own. If admixture between races offends God than my lineage has already been damned since the last glacial maximum.

Yes, or even the last deluge. We read this in Genesis 6.

There is pretty good evidence that immigration has next to no effect on wages. It may even be slightly positive. Everyone who complains about immigrants suppressing wages seems to think that labour demand is fixed. Growing the population increases the supply and demand for labour about equally.

The idea that immigrants take up too much physical space also seems absurd given that Americans congregate in places with higher density. Being around people is a net benefit. There is lots of empty space for those who disagree.

  • -10

immigration

We are talking about a very specific type of immigration which takes a somewhat higher income job. Which analysis did you read that focuses on H1B and first subtracts all of these immigrants from the “effect on wages”, eg the effect on non-H1B wages? When Elon hires H1-B for Tesla, do you really think that (checks net worth) he would not be able to spend 20k more on an American? It’s either H1-B or he closes shop? The profits and net worths of the highest H1B recipients prove that it is a way to hoard profit for owners and investors.

immigrants take up too much space is absurd

If humans tend to congregate around urban areas, which they do in both America and horribly dense India, then there is limited space for them, which means… they take up space. “Find a coding job in North Dakota” is not a real criticism here. The Indians can just as well find a job in the Himalayas.

Personally, I am against any politics that prevents me from fucking hot Indian women. Sorry white race, or America, or whatever... I care more about fucking hot women than I care about any of those things. As indeed I should. After all, the white race itself is the product of race-mixing thousands of years ago, as are all other races. I trust that my libido knows what the right thing to do is when it comes to these things.

hot Indian women.

Source?

This is all personal preference, which I readily admit. But, I'll take a mid white girl so long as she isn't over weight to a "10/10" Indian woman. I've never found them attractive.

Different strokes for different folks. I like their brown skin, the jet black slightly curly hair, the mix of a sharp almost aquiline nose with full sensuous lips, and their tendency to have large breasts. The ones I come across, probably because of selection pressures, also tend to be smart. It's probably similar to why I have a tendency to get with Jewish women - they tend to be smart and with a certain ethnic sensuousness to their looks. For whatever reason, I've never been super-drawn to the stereotypical Nordic blonde type of white woman. I find them attractive, but they don't do it for me on a deep level like Jewish girls, Indian girls, Italian girls, and so on.

You didn't need to reply to my comment, weeb, nobody cares.

"sensuous" is a made up word. John Milton hacked it together because he was an incel weirdo.

Returning to your comment, you've just told an internet cafe of strangers what you like about the things you like. Wasteful.

  • -23

@Goodguy's preemptive appreciation notwithstanding, what the hell is this post?

You write a lot of AAQCs, and then you apparently decide to "cash them in" with posts like this, and I've told you before to stop doing that.

Banned for 2 days so maybe you will believe me. No, this site does not need "petty bitching" and "spice" to improve the flavor.

"sensuous" is a made up word. John Milton hacked it together because he was an incel weirdo.

False, the word seems to have come about in the late 18th century.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Sensuous&year_start=1500&year_end=1800&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false

Opinion discarded.

Found in Milton's "Of Education", published 1644 (mid-17th century).

I guess I'll have to take the L on this one.

Ask pointless question.

Get pointless answer.

No! Not like this.

I like this kind of petty bitching. Without a bit of it to spice things up, this great site would be somewhat too flavorless.

Under the assumption the h1b visa program actually does that, go for it.

Ok, but the evolutionary argument applies to ellis island migration just the same- Italians aren't founding stock.

Some of my ancestors are of that, but the answer to this question is something along the lines of, "Yes And?"

Much of the things the anti-immigration advocates of that era did come to pass. We did have cities grow machines. We did have proliferation of crime. We did have expansions of ethnic tensions and permanent expansions of the federal government. The naysayers were fairly correct about the downsides. Did perhaps the upside of growing the labor pool fast enough that we could be the turning point in 2 world wars where our homeland went largely untouched thus making us the preeminent power in the world for over a half century outweigh that? Unknown. Perhaps it did, perhaps the other side of my family would have made up for all of that via some other force of will. I think this question is quite hard, but I still think a few of my ancestors and their kin should have voted against FDR more. They were stupid in at least that specific arena.

The same is true of the 1965ers. Most of the warnings have came to pass. Also America has continued to be the best (among, IMO a very weak selection of states on offer) larger power. Are we more bestest or less bestest (I think there is no scenario where America is not #1 without that immigration reform), obviously we cannot know. I say probably less. We continue to get richer mostly based on stepping on rakes less than other countries with the potential to be the best, not by outright excellence. This is why Peter Theil's idea of a new floating city state is absurd. If it was successful, America would nuke it. Well the regime would first try to destroy it by other means, but eventually it would be considered worse than Hitler and would be nuked.

The people against importing the Italians and Irish did have a point.

It was about religion, not genes. Otherwise, it would make no sense to complain about Irish immigration while pushing for more German immigration.

It applies at all scales from the family on up. Still, there is a threshold of distance between A and B in genetic space below which A and B perceive each other as partners and beyond which they perceive each other as competitors. All white Europeans are inside the genetic similarity threshold.

You do know that the bloodiest wars in world history* have been fought by white Christian Europeans against other white Christian Europeans, or by Han Chinese against other Han Chinese?

So was the bloodiest war in the history of the Americas (the American Civil War).

* Conquests of Genghis Khan being the possible exception.

So? You can fight wars against people on the "same" side of the same/other sociogenetic divide

But, why? Yes Italians are closer to the english midlands(where the WASPs came from) or the scottish marches(where southern Whites came from), genetically, than Indians. But they're still Indo-European. They're both closer than the west Africans who make up the single largest group in our founding stock.

Why draw the line there? What's special about white skin(and dot-Indians have more European than not features in other respects)? Literally.

I'm totally onboard with "Indian culture is bad and we shouldn't let them in because they're savages who worship cows/can't stop fucking close relatives/are awful scam artists/whatever". I'm onboard with "Their HBD is bad, Italians' wasn't". But there's no particular reason to draw the genetic similarity lines at the Bosporous and Gibraltar.

They're both closer than the west Africans who make up the single largest group in our founding stock.

Surely if we're going to reduce people to continent size blocks, then west Europeans are a larger part of our founding stock than west Africans.

This is rhetorical trick similar to saying "Mohammad is the most common name for baby boys in England" and leading people to inaccurately believe that a majority of boys born in England are Muslim.

/pol/ had the kill shot years ago. How are they good for us but not their home country?

If we answered that question truthfully we could have a serious discussion about exact numbers to allow, rather than having to "dance" around it with the sledgehammer of the elimination of all H-class Visas. We could say, biologically, there is a maximum and knowable quantity of immigration candidates from any given country with average standards of living below the West.

Then, if we were allowing more than that umber, we would know either our standards were slipping, or they were being gamed.

Europeans and certain other populations exhibit a high average level of civilized behavior, call that inclination h, following from g. Russia is very close to the US, in many ways more civilized, but I would still feel confident saying measured on the whole, Russia is one standard deviation below America in h value. One step of degradation below Russia is not India, so India must be at least two steps below Russia, which means it is no closer than three below the United States. In comparison, Iceland is probably one sigma above, and Japan two.

I think this is imprecise, that there are external factors to an extent, but there are such obvious differences looking from India, to the US, to Japan, that there's something intrinsic and gestalt that speaks broadly to the peoples, and that does feel close enough.

For an Indian immigrant to match, they would need come from a population at least 3 sigmas above India's average h. This rejects almost all Indians, from 1.4 billion to 1.9 million. It's less than that, though, because if you want to improve a country, you can't bring in people who are only average. So the actual line starts at 4 sigmas, and that reduces it to about 45,000.

I have no problem believing there are about 45,000 Indians who would contribute to the strength of America. It's math. Here's the problem, I would assume a minimum of half of those persons intend to live out their days as citizens of India, using their talents in their own country for their own gain. Also consider others in that population will have immigrated elsewhere, such as Europe. This means short of calamitous conditions wherein only America is a viable immigration target, we should have a soft cap of 20,000, to in no circumstances exceed the hard cap of 45,000.

We're well over that. In 2023 (Page 32) there were 279,386 H-1B issuances to Indian nationals. Ignore everything I just wrote, I know that number immediately as gross excess. The US isn't lacking, in anything, to the degree that it requires the importation of nearly 300,000 laborers from a single country. Especially when you remember, that's just the H-1B admissions.

Despite this, it is conceivable the number could exceed 45,000, but only if we instituted extremely strict requirements, ensured those requirements could not be gamed, abolished birthright citizenship including retroactive revocations, etc.

Who says they aren't good for their own country?

The immigrants say that when they leave and don't come back.

There are Mexican immigrants who would be good for Mexico even though they aren't good for the US. The Mexican government has built a dependence on those people leaving. They're dissatisfied and highly motivated compared to their remaining countrymen, they could be rallied by a populist like Bukele as he oversees a new and greater Porfiriato and grinds the cartels into the dirt. Years ago I wouldn't have thought it possible, and Bukele is in a different situation since El Salvador is so small and Mara Salvatrucha members have the most convenient habit of getting MS-13 tattooed on their faces, but a horrifically violent gang just bent over when a figure finally stood tall and said enough. The cartels are also horrifically violent, but as roughly as I know Mexican history, I know they're just the latest examples of Mexico's long history with caudillos, they are tolerated, and this is very important: the cartels exist because the Mexican government allows to exist. Porfirio repeatedly crushed such groups when they failed to acquiesce.

Bukele could be in the States, enjoying life in luxury as a highly successful private citizen. Strict immigration controls wouldn't stop a man like that, he'd find a way through or immigrate to some other highly civilized nation. But El Salvador was the violently shaking pressure cooker, primed for the arrival of Bukele, and Mexico would be that, too, if they didn't have the release valve of all the people who would historically be the greatest agitators for change instead just crossing a border. So that man might be in Mexico, but I think it unfortunately all too likely he's instead in the States, a private citizen doing very well for himself, but who could have been Mexico's Bukele or superior Porfirio.

India, with 1.4 billion people, is a little harder, and I'm not remotely qualified to speculate on what would improve it except that I know it's not 300,000 H-1Bs.

If anything they are the only thing preventing their country from going to the dogs. If you had Brunel +50 million chimps stranded on an island the average living quality and infrastructure will be chimp tier, even though Brunel on his own would be a massive positive contributor (but when all you have is chimps you really can't do much more than a few small bridges). America should take Brunel and leave the chimps behind and if the choice is between giving an engineering job to the foreign Brunel or a local chimp, well then Brunel should get it.

Who's Brunel?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who is considered "one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history", "one of the 19th-century engineering giants", and "one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, [who] changed the face of the English landscape with his groundbreaking designs and ingenious constructions". Brunel built dockyards, the Great Western Railway (GWR), a series of steamships including the first purpose-built transatlantic steamship, and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering.

In 2002, Brunel was placed second in a BBC public poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons".

If a modern Indian Brunel couldn't make comparably sweeping improvements to India then it would be absolutely true that he should be in the States, and it would also be absolutely true that the total immigration accepted from India would need to be moved even lower from 20,000 to a 5 sigma 400, so 200.

Have you been to Alabama?

Perhaps not a majority, but a lot of modern white Americans are an amalgamation of the most grotesque personal attributes imaginable, with obesity at the top of that list.

A controversial, but slightly upvoted comment from a large thread on /r/dataisbeautiful comes to mind. To paraphrase: Intended dunks on US southern whites are usually just unwitting/unintentional dunks on black Americans.

Have you been to Alabama?

Have you been reading his thread?

I'd put more value on the "human capital" of the median Alabaman than i would a lot of the users running thier mouths about "elite human capital" here.

My main take away from this bit downthread is that working class nieghborhoods in the south are just cleaner and nicer than anywhere the "high-castes" (be they Indians or Blue-tribe professionals) hold sway.

I've lived in Alabama my whole life. Spoiler alert: our second generation Indians are plenty fat themselves, my personal favorites being the one who talks endlessly about his bodybuilding/going to the gym (He's not fat now, but nowhere near as buff as you would expect for someone who allegedly puts that much effort into the gym.) but is so lazy that he refused to change his own tire for years and the professor's kid who had a master's in economics but couldn't quite hack delivering pizza (The latter also happens to be one of the most insufferably arrogant and patronizing people I've ever met. He once told me that delivering pizza burns 250 calories an hour and that sort of fat logic, my friends, is how you wind up morbidly obese.).

Uhh yes?

Its kind of the perfect sort of place to base such an argument on. They have a heavy base load of non-white descendants of slaves that drags down the whole state's performance, particularly that of the averagish whites who have to fend for themselves as the upper tiers enclave themselves away for safety purposes.

As for the remainder of your comments, I find even them incorrect aside from the weight comments, and again those only apply to those so afflicted by the spillover effects of the inadvisable policies of keeping slaves, and/or not deporting said when freed. The latter policy which might be considered intentional by those who enacted it, but has eventually spilled northwards to fairly negative effects.

The latter policy which might be considered intentional by those who enacted it, but has eventually spilled northwards to fairly negative effects.

I'm pretty sure the Radical Republicans did want to make the freed slaves go back to Africa or somewhere like Liberia, but were defeated on this point by the necessity of compromise, never mind the practical challenge of such after a costly civil war.

Compromise with who? They could easily have allied with the southern Democrats and gotten a supermajority for it.

As I understood it, "compromise" in the sense of "nobody is going to let you have this dream, give it up."

I agree in that liberals are disingenuous when they blame a lot of ‘bad stats’ in red states (crime, welfare usage etc) on white conservatives. I disagree in that the whites that are present are often clearly also lower performing than other groups of the same broad ancestral category.

Have you been to Alabama?

Many times. Huntsville Space Center, c'mon.

There are people who you could persuade with this weak anecdote, I'm the wrong guy. One, because you're talking about the general geographic region in which I live, and two, with rare exception those very rural areas still have functional uncorrupt county-level governments, running water, electricity, telecommunications, waste removal services, and facilitating the rest, good roads, because right now there are enough high h people to make up for the low h people. Those places are also orders of magnitude safer for a foreigner to walk through alone, especially a woman. Versus India, where "an amalgamation of the most grotesque personal attributes imaginable" might more Indians than there are people in North America.

But those insults are yours. My attitude on this is we are strengthened by immigration of truly the very best of anyone into this country. The very best. The chief problem of governance is the sociopaths and specifically the long-since suppressed immune response against the cancer that is those sociopaths. With enough time they always get in, and then they weaken and weaken the system, allowing more sociopaths to get in or otherwise game the system. There's well over a billion Indians, so it's just math that genetically-top-percentile-prosocial people from the subcontinent will be a massive raw number. Yet I look at pictures from India and I think, where the fuck are they? You wouldn't know it, and that's because what's also a massive raw number is those of top-percentile deceitfulness and other antisocial behaviors, and they've been allowed to build entire industries in India around their sociopathy, including gaming American immigration.

I like India, I like Indians, or I have a general affinity for them all, I imagine especially when comparing me to those who I share views with on this. With McCarthy's passing, the greatest living author is Salman Rushdie, he's Indian. One of the few actually deserving Booker Prize winners of the last now 20 years is Aravind Adiga, another Indian. Gukesh Dommaraju just became the youngest world chess champion, the second Indian of the last four champions. I've seen pictures, I've seen the beauty, I know there are brilliant people, there's just too goddamn many for the United States to practice anything less than brutal selectiveness about who of them gets to come. Most especially when Indians here show such nepotism in hiring, while pursuing corporate practices and legislative efforts to make it so their own can more easily get into this country.

Forget it Jake, it's theMotte.

This analysis assumes that there is a single Indian population whose traits are normally distributed, but it seems pretty clear that there are in fact dozens of genetically and culturally distinct subpopulations that differ in average g and h by at least 1 or 2 SD's. This plays havoc with any tail-end estimates and there is an unfortunate lack of data in this area.

I would say, and I did say, it seems reasonable to consider factor h civility of a nation something gestalt. If 150 million Indians truly abhor their living conditions, their h is nevertheless indicted for failing to effect change.

It's charitable anyway to consider it a collective trait of people from India, and that's because with so many ethnic groups of presumably differing h, the alternative is a general ban.

Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.

This would only be true if Indian immigrants and their descendants never married into the existing American population and remained a culturally and genetically distinct population indefinitely, which is clearly not the case. The children of elite Indian immigrants marry their White, Jewish, and East Asian peers all the time and have children who are about as Indian as Japanese curry powder. There are other countries where this is not so e.g. the UK where British-born Indian Muslims and Pakistanis seem to often get arranged marriages with peasant girls from back home, leaving their children in a perpetually unassimilated state, but even the few arranged marriages I know of in the US occur between two second generation immigrants who themselves are detached from the social networks that would allow them to continue the practice.

Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race? From the perspective of a single gene perhaps, but from that point of view the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all. I'm reminded of Roman naming conventions here, to wit: "The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever." With all due respect to the Romans, who I, like any man, remember fondly at least once per day, the mere thought of such stultifying monotony makes me want to fedpost.

Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%. Because Indian genes will still make up 99% of India if +200mil were dropped in America. American genes simply reduce their prevalence (if admixed) or ability to proliferate (if no intermarriage occurs). It makes no sense to do this given what we know about our design: with instincts to form groups exclusively for the purposes of gene proliferation. Who would ever form a group that specifically reduces their reproductive success?

Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race

If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.

the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all

Humans did not evolve to be cloned, they evolved to live in somewhat small bands where 3rd-4th degree cousin marriage was common.

If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.

Only if they're immigrants (who wouldn't otherwise have come, else they reproduce with each other) and fertility's perfectly elastic with population density (so that the home country reproduces more to replace the emigrants and the destination country reproduces less because of the immigrants). I don't think fertility's perfectly elastic with population transfer, though as I've previously noted it's not zero either.

Even if it is not elastic with density, these people are going to be in your territory forever, whereas the original people still maintain dominion over their territory. So they have thousands of years to change fertility in their country where they often make up 99% inhabitants, but you introduced genes that will stay in your territory forever.

White enough.

Heck i would argue that guys like Larry Elder and Clarence Thomas are "Whiter" culturally than a lot of the queer/non-binary grifters posting about "white supremacy" on X.

American genes

I'm an American. The past few generations of my family were Americans.

What on Earth is an "American gene"? I don't mean that as an obtuse "pretending I can't understand words" rhetorical trick. My ancestors are from Ireland. You mean my Irish genes were transformed into American genes? Like how most white Americans are predominantly some mix of English and German genes, now transformed into "American genes"?

I literally explained this in the parentheses of the first sentence. If you are an American, of literally any ancestry, then your reproductive success is harmed with the introduction of Indian genes. Your biological success is reduced by introducing H1B immigrants, especially as it makes eventual citizenship more likely. Because this is a new introduction at a time when every group is low TF. And so this applies to all non-Indian Americans. Are you American? You have genes and are affected.

I don't see how this harms my reproductive success. The presence or absence of such people is unrelated to me having kids. Unless I have children with one of them, in which case it is to my reproductive benefit.

We're missing some important point here to tie this together.

American population cannot growth infinitely and you are filling the land with far away genes. These people disproportionately take high income jobs. It deters the government and industries from problem-solving about our own fertility. Even nepotism aside, which is also an issue, it affects your reproductive success*. And you shouldn’t be sure that your descendants are going to forever mate in a separate sphere. Also, H1B is mostly men. Also, if you would only reproductive if you saw a woman who originates 8000 miles away, you are a genetic anomaly.

Those H1B men aren't taking all the women. Our reproductive success or lack of it doesn't hinge on half a million H1B workers hyper-concentrated in a few major cities. They're a small and irrelevant group in this matter. I've never been denied a relationship because an Indian guy took her first. That's not a problem for American men.

I know a number of American men who married immigrant women and have kids with them. Those particular immigrants were apparently to those men's reproductive advantage. Not to generalize too much from a few people I personally know.

There are some guys who appear to excessively like a certain sort of woman. Only dating Hispanics or Asians or something. I'm not that way, but I'm not going to judge them. If they are overcome with lust for women who traveled 5000 miles to live in the US, so be it. Now that I'm older, I know older couples and those guys typically married one of those women. I'm calling that success according to their preferences.

Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%

It's by no means an implausible mid-term future scenario for the US to have higher fertility than India; indeed, the USA being a top three developed world country for TFR(competing with France for #2) is very much in the cards and India's fertility is plummeting and already below replacement.

Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%. Because Indian genes will still make up 99% of India if +200mil were dropped in America.

Why should it matter to us how many total Indians there are in the world? There could be two or three billion people on the subcontinent and they would still be living in miserable squalor and unable to influence global affairs. Countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia have populations in the hundreds of millions and can be freely ignored or bullied by more powerful states a fraction of their size.

If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.

Given the fact that the urban areas where such people tend to live are fertility shredders, the proportion of Asian ancestry in their descendants will be lower than you might expect (cf. the mixed urban population of the Roman empire left hardly any genetic trace in modern Italians and yet they did leave behind many cultural and literary works of value).

Humans did not evolve to be cloned, they evolved to live in somewhat small bands where 3rd-4th degree cousin marriage was common.

That is true, and yet I am still different from a Papuan tribesman not simply by culture or upbringing, but because my ancestors underwent thousands of years of genetic pacification and adaptation to living in settled agricultural communities with higher population densities. The software may not yet be out of beta, but I have no desire to scrap it all and return to the jungle. Thankfully, there are no countries with millions of hunter-gatherers for mindkilled liberals to suggest we take in, but if there were I would oppose it in the strongest terms.

If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.

Your biological definition of success, especially keyed to some concept of the American "people" that's supposedly cached out to something biological (is it white people? Anglo-Amerocans, descendents of anyone present in 1776?) is just as constructed. You're begging the question on the question of immigration by defining success that way.

Okay, if we add a bunch of Indians and have the best economy on the world, I (a white American with pre-revolutionary ancestry) win in many ways: the technology of my country develops rapidly, I am able to buy many products for cheap and I have a high income, the value of my dollar is worth a lot globally, my physical security is backed by the mightiest military in the world, I have a vast selection of consumer goods, my kids get reach adulthood in a country with new and thriving businesses that they can be part of.

A thriving economy puts more options on the table for me and my kin. Why wouldn't I want that?

Okay, if we add a bunch of Indians and have the best economy on the world, I (a white American with pre-revolutionary ancestry) win in many ways:

Actually, the most likely outcome from this kind of immigration project would involve none of those things. While "the economy" in abstract would doubtless be doing extremely well, you are not an abstraction of a human being. These kinds of immigration policies have, everywhere they have been implemented, boosted "the economy" while in many cases having detrimental effects on the outcomes of individual workers. In the world you're proposing your income would not have kept pace with the rates of inflation imposed by such huge migrations of people - the pressure on housing, food, education etc would be immense. Your income would actually be substantially lower in real terms, because you've just introduced hundreds of millions of competitors for your labour. Your physical security would actually be substantially impacted - just go look at what happens to crime rates in areas with high levels of immigration. Your kids wouldn't exist, because you'd be unable to achieve the financial security required for family formation (unless you just dropped out and moved to the trailer park).

A thriving economy puts more options on the table for the actual power elite who run things, and allows the people who run tech companies to drive down wages. What is good for "the economy" in abstract is very often bad for the people who actually live in it - human prosperity and flourishing is not particularly advanced by having a gigantic population of incompetent and low-human capital peasants whose consumption of food, medical services and housing pumps up the GDP while suppressing wages.

Your physical security would actually be substantially impacted - just go look at what happens to crime rates in areas with high levels of immigration.

Areas with high concentrations of Indian tech workers in California or the northeast don't seem particularly prone to crime. I can't speak to whether there's more white collar crime going on, but that isn't particularly relevant to physical safety. Canada may be a different story, but they have a separate set of (idiotic) policies and problems they spawned.

Your income would actually be substantially lower in real terms, because you've just introduced hundreds of millions of competitors for your labour.

human prosperity and flourishing is not particularly advanced by having a gigantic population of incompetent and low-human capital peasants whose consumption of food, medical services and housing pumps up the GDP while suppressing wages.

For these immigrants to be meaningful competitors for the labor of anyone posting here, they would presumably have to be highly-skilled and therefore not incompetent and low human capital. I don't see how they could be both.

Areas with high concentrations of Indian tech workers in California or the northeast don't seem particularly prone to crime

Look back up at the post you're defending - the current program is excessive and causing huge issues already, but you're defending someone importing 200 million fresh new indians. At those numbers you are learning nothing at all by looking at places like San Francisco (not that I'd want to live there now) - you have to go look at the crime statistics for India itself if you want to get a real picture. And that picture isn't particularly flattering, especially not for women.

For these immigrants to be meaningful competitors for the labor of anyone posting here, they would presumably have to be highly-skilled and therefore not incompetent and low human capital. I don't see how they could be both.

Highly-skilled? I think you're confused - we're not talking about the O-1 Visa program. We're talking about the H1B Visa program, the program that brings in bakers, laborers and line-cooks. The reason they're a threat to the labor of anyone posting here is that they accept terrible pay and are essentially an indentured servant class who are unable to leave their employer. Sure, their quality is much worse and in the long run they're usually more expensive than hiring local, but that doesn't mean anything to a manager who can get a massive compensation payout for temporarily juicing their numbers at the expense of long term success (I'm sure you're familiar with the principal-agent problem). At the same time, the existence of this imported servant class has a downward pressure on income and expectation for every other sector of the job market too, as the impact spreads from the lower-income populations they're being used to suppress. One of the stories that got Trump to the white house in 2016 was how H1B immigrants replaced the IT workers at Disney after they were forced to train their replacements.

This happens when you make your people just an idea instead of actual people. People online are slowly more conscious of identitarian issues, the abuse of migration systems, legal or illegal and then publicly mocking the host nations people is explicitly asking for hostilities to be amped up.

There are some really good ones in India, many have gone to the US, some of them frequent this forum and are upstanding people, most h1bs are not and the arguments for the H1B cap removal has led to a meltdown in Indian image at least online. There is no way I can make a nuanced argument for this without having everyone my nation call me a sepoy or self hating despite them knowing what is up.

People do not want to bring up HBD, some people did and a person even claimed that top 1 percent of upper castes is way smarter than the same percentile of euros, something that is laughably untrue but represents what you are saying in a way. You cannot allow your young to have to compete away their reproductive abilities to have a decent life. Self-identification with your people is not downstream from HBD. The only good thing here perhaps is that now HBD is not as much of a taboo anymore due to Indians using stats to dunk on people but incorrectly making it even worse.

200 million Indians will wreck any nation, it wrecked India, the aryan remnants are few and far between. Still that is not why i would self-identify with my own group, HBD is an afterthought, the same way you love your family or your wife, because they are yours.

Let’s say that a generous .1% are geniuses who have aided American military might

what is funny is that you need to be a citizen to work in aerospace or the military, most h1bs are it workers, some are outstanding, most are average if they are lucky.

How are Indians not fulfilling the "be fruitful and multiply" mission, if they are more fruitful and multiply faster than Americans? As far as I'm aware, they also obey the same laws of evolution as Americans.

Man, it's a good reason no Irish or German immigrants ever came. They'd totally make the mission of the original WASP Americans a complete failure in the game of life. They'd probably have dissolved the community too.

The science of hybrid vigor is actually reasonably well settled as well -- your individual genes would (all other things being equal) be better off hitched onto a mate somewhat further away from you.

Of course, "all other things being equal" is doing a lot of work here -- you would genuinely have to find an Indian or East Asian of the same IQ and temperament as your hypothetical replacement mate. Given your point (2) though, it seems like you wouldn't find that too implausible.

Despite people wish-casting as such, hybrid vigor isn't really a thing in humans other than a guard against inbreeding depression. And inbreeding depression isn't a concern unless you come from a long line of cousin/niece-enjoyers, like in some cultures or regions.

I vaguely recall the risks of inbreeding depression falling with the square root of effective population size, so it doesn't take much non-inbreeding to not have any depressive effects. Kind of like how randomly selecting 10,000 stocks by market value gets you surprisingly little diversification benefit relative to 100 stocks.

Not that inbreeding necessarily wipes away traits like high IQ, as can be observed in the case of Ashkenazi Jews. Cheetahs are incredibly inbred, but if you want a faster feline than a cheetah, hardly would you expect a cheetah-${OtherFeline} cross to be faster than a cheetah.

Non-additive heritability (of which hybrid vigor would be a subset) as a whole isn't even a thing in humans for polygenic traits like height or IQ. In the usual circumstances in the West, children are basically the average of their parents, plus a little random noise and regression to the mean.

So if all kids are just the plain average of their parents, then finding a 110-115 IQ East Asian partner is probably net beneficial as compared to the median replacement mate.

Plus, given how desirable it is to migrate to the US, immigrants are positively selected. So it's basically a pre-filter.

Likely so, if the primary concern for your children is IQ and your median replacement mate has a materially lower IQ. However, still not hybrid vigor.

Certainly the scale of the immigration matters.

It's one thing to have 5% of your population be immigrants (1970, US). It's another thing for it to be 15-20% (US, today). And then there's Canada... (RIP).

And of course, the who matters just as much as the how many. Even though the Germans were assimilated into the US quite readily, African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.

This seems ridiculous to me. I was in high school with 3rd gen Mexican immigrants. They dealt drugs to send to people in Mexico still. The only team sport they even considered participating in was soccer. And they didn't even do that because they would fail classes.

Presumably, the ones who were still a "distinct ethnic group" in 1900 were not the ones that came over in 1800, but the ones that came over in 1890.

I think this is an important point.

The reason we have problems today is the same reason we had problems in 1910. The rate of immigration is just too damn high. Many pro-immigration people don't realize that U.S. immigration was not always high. Immigration was reduced to very low levels from roughly 1925-1965. The foreign born population fell from 15% to 5% during this period and all those hyphenated Americans became unhyphenated ones. Today the official % of immigrants is 15%, but the real number is likely more like 20%, marking a never before seen high water mark. We need to consolidate for a few decades. And it's going to take a lot longer to assimilate Somalians than it did Germans. Sorry, that's just the reality. Culture distance matters.

Note we needn't eliminate all immigration. Merely making our process less retarded will solve most of the issues.

African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.

African-American culture has it's problems but it's American as all get out. It's basically just a shittier version of southern culture with worse 'music' and some fifties leftover ideas the rest of us figured out were bad ideas.

African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.

It certainly hasn't been tried for 300 years though, considering forced segregation, Jim Crow and the like, it's maybe 60 years tops. You have to want to assimilate but also you have to be allowed to assimilate.

There's also the suggestion that they did absorb much of the culture around them hence the similarities with white Borderer culture.

I don’t know man. Italians who came over in 1910 were pretty damn assimilated by 1970. And black people in the north haven’t assimilated either despite centuries of opportunity.

Not really centuries though. If you are segregated you aren't going to assimilate into the culture you are segregated from.

"Restrictive covenants blocked black entry into many neighborhoods. Schools were openly segregated. Shopkeepers and theaters displayed “whites only” signs. Sugrue writes, “Even celebrities such as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge and Marian Anderson had a hard time finding rooms and faced Jim Crow in restaurants when they toured the North.”"

"In 1964, he tried to open public construction sites to black workers by suing New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, charging they were turning an unconstitutional blind eye on craft union discrimination. New York’s highest court, however, was unimpressed, ruling 7-0. But three years later, our office won a similar case in a federal trial court against Ohio’s Gov. James Rhodes."

Even now many northern cities are de facto segregated, even if it does not have any legal backing. You can only assimilate into a culture if you are spending time in that culture (and that culture is willing to spend time with you). As mentioned by other's Italian-American culture only began to assimilate as other groups shared space with them.

African-American culture is the result of assimilation, it just wasn't assimilation into the broader American culture, but one picking up what little came across from Africa, plus from the poor borderers and the like they were surrounded by. It certainly isn't much like actual African cultures (hence why you get clashes between newer African immigrants and ADOS).

So now to assimilate them, you would have to have them exposed on a daily basis in and around the culture you want them to take on, and undo the previous behaviors that have been internalized. But that does have costs to the broader culture and there will be frictions due to historical racial grievances. Or to put it another way, very few people progressive or otherwise want black kids bussed into their schools, for quite understandable reasons in many cases. So we're stuck.

My wife is black and when I got to family events, I am usually the only white person there, or perhaps one other at most. When I stayed at her mother's house I might see one or two other white people within a couple of blocks. You can't assimilate to a culture you barely experience.

ADOS had a very different path to where they are now than any voluntary group of immigrants. So we shouldn't expect them to integrate in the same way.

19th century immigration enhanced the fertility of Anglo-Americans because Germans and Irish began their life in the lowest economic position — indentured servants, apprentices, and some creating farming towns out of nothing. This at a time of zero public services, and obviously no DEI. Germany is also the origin of Anglo-Saxons (the angles and the saxons), and the Normans for that matter, and you can read the etymology of men like Washington and Lincoln to see where their forefathers originated. Meanwhile, Irish is so similar to non-Germanic British that DNA sites have difficulty distinguishing between them.

If hybrid vigor is our concern, then consider that India has a high rate of cousin marriage, whereas Europeans had consanguinity laws for much of their history. Look at the rate of genetic problems among Pakistanis in the UK. India has low hybrid vigor, whereas Europeans have a fair amount due to historical laws on >4th generation cousin marriages.

So if immigrants have high human capital, it's bad because they should start at the bottom. If they start at the bottom, it's bad because we're taking the worst from the rest of the world.

In actuality, the immigrants were those with enough money and sense to escape Europe, so like today's immigrants they were positively selected.

And finally, Pakistan is a very different place than India, not least for religious reasons.

We are no longer in a 7.0 TFR world, but a sub 2.0 world, meaning that any addition of immigrant either to the top or bottom is actively harmful. When TFR is high and the land is immense and farmable, then immigrants to the bottom may expedite the fertility of higher “classes”. The population of America in 1800 was only 5 million.

In a sub-2.0 world, it's ever more important to attract the best talent.

None of what you say is remotely internally consistent.

I think that depends on whether people are productive or one more body that shares in the spoils of your nations AI bounty.

Presumably a world in which people are not the majority of productivity is also one in which total fertility no longer really matters.

They'd totally make the mission of the original WASP Americans a complete failure in the game of life.

Without necessarily agreeing with the above post, yes, massive Irish, Italian, German etc immigration did irreparably change the character, culture and identity of the United States. Whether it was for better or worse is a question of opinion, but it did change.

Indeed. I don't at all dispute that it was a change, but it seems ridiculous to sit where the US is today and look back and see that as a failure.

Change is inevitable, static societies die. So too are societies that change too fast or in unwise ways.

the US as it was founded was killed, the Republic was killed, federalism was killed, and what was produced was Empire

no, it's not ridiculous to think this was "a failure"

Change is inevitable, static societies die. So too are societies that change too fast or in unwise ways.

trying to imply the US in <1850, pre mass german and irish immigration waves, was a "static society" is simply ridiculous

it's hard to think the US with its anglo stock and TFR >5 wouldn't have become a global juggernaut superpower without the mass immigration of Irish or Germans or the Ellis Islanders in 1890+, perhaps with a generation delay, but it's a counterfactual

no, it's not ridiculous to think this was "a failure"

If the current economic and cultural dominance of the US is a failure, then I cannot imagine what actual success might look like.

it's hard to think the US with its anglo stock and TFR >5 wouldn't have become a global juggernaut superpower without the mass immigration of Irish or Germans or the Ellis Islanders in 1890+, perhaps with a generation delay, but it's a counterfactual

A generation of delay would mean a generation too late to win WWII.

Germany would have formed a European empire if America didn’t halt the final progression of balance of power politics. Near-to-midterm utility would have probably been maximized but whose to tell the far term prognosis based on the butterfly effect.

Given how Germany did govern their (brief) empire, I suspect that isn't exactly a good thing.

WWI doesn't happen unless Britain thinks they have a US bailout. WWII doesn't happen without Americas WWI bailout...

Yeah, that's quite plausible. I regret getting into historical counterfactuals because the space of possibilities is too vast.

???

Britain doesn't think they have a US bailout in 1914. (The possibility doesn't come up until the Germans take up U-boat warfare.) All sides are expecting a war of maneuver similar to the Franco-Prussian war ended by a decisive battle within less than a year, which is a timescale where the US can't make a difference at all.

Regardless of who was influencing Britain in August 1914, we didn't start WW1 and couldn't have stopped it - based on the sequence of events in August 1914, the decision to fight is taken primarily by Russia and Germany, not Britain and France. Germany decides to go to war with Russia as a result of events following the Sarajevo assassination, and invades Russia's ally (France) first for tactical reasons. At the point where the British get to make a decision, it is a decision whether to join in the war or sit it out - German troops have already crossed the French border. You can claim that the French only go to war because they are expecting a British bailout (and had they had a choice, you would probably have been right), but France didn't get a choice in August 1914 either - they were invaded by Germany. Their choice had been taken when the Franco-Russian Alliance was signed in 1894, at a time when Britain was still (genuinely) neutral between the German-Austrian and Franco-Russian blocs.

If Britain doesn't join the Franco-Russian bloc, it isn't clear how this makes WW1 less likely. The basic logic that the decline of the Ottoman Empire was going to turn the Balkans into a zone of Great Power conflict was obvious since the early 19th century (the Crimean War was also fought over this issue) and the fact that this conflict would primarily be between Russia and Austria was already obvious by the time of the Crimean War in the 1850's (Austria doesn't join the Allies in the Crimean war because the Habsburgs' domestic position is still weak after the 1848 Hungarian Revolution). And the Franco-Russian and Austrian-German alliances, plus the Franco-German rivalry, mean that a Balkan war with Great Power involvement is expected to turn into a general European War, and all the Continental Great Powers made war plans on this basis. (The Schlieffen Plan for a German blitzkrieg against France while Russia is still mobilising is first drawn up in 1906, which is after the 1904 Entente Cordiale between Britain and France, but before the 1908 formal military alliance between Britain, France, and Russia.) If everyone expects a neutral Britain, Germany is more likely to win and therefor more likely to choose to invade France, not less. So the argument that anything Britain (or the US via their influence on Britain) could have done to prevent the war depends on the idea that we could have convinced Russia not to defend Serbia and de facto surrender the Balkans to Austria. (Britain did try to mediate between Russia, Austria, and Serbia, but Germany told Austria to reject this offer - the Central Powers were expecting to win and had very limited interest in a negotiated peace).

Amusingly, there is one American who definitely can be blamed for British involvement in WW1. Admiral Mahan wrote the seminal books on naval history which convinced the Kaiser to build a navy. Without a German navy, the British don't see Germany as hostile, and don't try to join an anti-German alliance.

I don't see a current world without US cultural and economic dominance given the population in the US, absent waves of Irish, German, or other Ellis Islanders, and the territory it conquered from the Atlantic to the Pacific (also before the waves of Irish, German, or other Ellis Islanders), and the context of their neighbors and large oceans on either side. You seem to think it's a necessary condition and I'm not sure why.

According to Americans at the time, success would likely look like a powerful and dominant nation of Americans which is full of Americans and their posterity under a particular social organization and a particular religion. The "America" as the Americans at the time thought of it was destroyed by the waves of mass European and especially Catholic immigration.

A generation of delay would mean a generation too late to win WWII.

you mean the generation which won WW1?

gosh, I wonder what would have been had the American generation which won ww1 not shown up and we didn't get the 1919 Treaty of Versailles

even if one views American involvement in WWII (or WWI) as a good thing, and I don't, I'm not sure what this short quip is supposed to show or support

even if one views American involvement in WWII (or WWI) as a good thing, and I don't, I'm not sure what this short quip is supposed to show or support

It's a fairly widespread view that the Germany and Japan of WWII were evil across a number of dimensions. Perhaps not universal, but almost so.

I am sympathetic to the view that perhaps the whole thing could have been avoided with a more statesmanlike resolution of WWI. To that extent that (perhaps) American involvement in the prosecution of WWI made a poor resolution more likely, I would be happy to say it was a bad thing.

The US coming to save the British Empire, the French Empire, and the Soviet Union puts that into context. Making the world safe for communism and plunging large portions of it under Soviet occupation was a bad thing and avoidable.

It's a fairly widespread view that the Germany and Japan of WWII were evil across a number of dimensions.

Oh, well I guess since it's a fairly widespread view then I guess that ends any thought or discussion about it.

More comments

What makes you think US TFR would've stayed high? Entirely possible a no-mass migration USA has a much, much smaller population, is majority minority(you know heritage americans are like forty percent black, right? Now add in the preexisting hispanics and natives in conquered territories), and has vast utterly undeveloped hinterlands.

TFR among Americans stayed high with mass migration because there was vast cheap land and no birth control. TFR among Americans remained high in areas of the country which didn't have big waves of immigration ( or at least that particular wave going to other parts at the same time). Pre-birth control and women's "liberation," I see no good reason to think mass migration had much of an effect on TFR of heritage Americans, let alone a significantly positive one. The US was regularly getting >30% population growth every 10 years before mass immigration (even removing immigrants), e.g., in the 1790-1820, the total number of new immigrants (not counting people who left), averaged around an estimated 180k total over 30 years while the total US population increased by over 5.5M, a gain of >245%.

Yes, it's entirely possible the US would have a lower population without the waves of immigrants in the 19th century. Maybe we'd have a population of only 200,000,000, still larger than the population the US had during WW2, and 1950, 1960, and 1970 when the US was hardly an undeveloped backwater.

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