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Do you not think that the enfranchisement of women opened up new opportunities for men? Even if we discount the work female scientists did to advance technology and society (which admittedly wasn't huge), what about the work of male scientists who wouldn't have been scientists if women weren't in the workforce doing other more trivial work? Never mind how smart or empathetic they are, extra people means extra hands, making lighter work I thought. Which brings me to my point - I really don't think you could stop open borders if you fired half the workforce. In a few decades you could, but I doubt a modern society could make do with just its men and limited immigration for years let alone decades.
I think you are dead wrong about empathy, but I think you are being hyperbolic there for effect - human sacrifice is almost certainly more destructive for a society, likewise incest.
I think the ‘women in the workforce’ discourse overlooks something important:
The fifties were anomalous in how few women worked, and even then, 35% of married women and a majority of unmarried women worked. Now we can assume that these were mostly poorer women doing stereotypically feminine jobs(eg, seamstress).
Put that way, the discourse is about social values and what’s held up as ideal. And that’s not going to change the immigration situation that much.
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A great deal of jobs provide little benefit to anyone. Administration and marketing are often negative-sum, reducing efficiency. See Scott's recent article about how some evil bioethicist made up some rules that got a bunch of people killed and wasted enormous amounts of time for very limited gains.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill
Then there are the people who teach bioethics. I suffered the great misfortune of doing a university course on what I thought was philosophy of science but turned out to be bioethics. It was immensely tedious and cost me money. Much of university is wasteful or malign, university administration can be both.
Or all the regulatory approvals, environmental approval you have to do before you can build anything.
In Speer's Inside the Third Reich he makes a semi-serious joke about how he was pleased when Allied bombers blew up an archives building. Now, he thought, they could bring greater dynamism to their work. We could lose a lot of deadweight and be better off. That's before we even start cutting into all the duplicate brands of shoes or publishing of books that nobody ever reads, or the lawyers who invent laws and then work around them. Or the fast food scientists who cram more sugar into fat people, so that doctors and dieticians can work tirelessly to keep them alive. If they weren't all preventing eachother from doing their jobs, they'd have little left to do.
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The economy would tank and unemployment would surge, so that would take care of much of the immigration problem too. Eventually there would be a new equilibrium
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