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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14571 thread views

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.

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