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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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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.