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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.

It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.

Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.

Painting Meloni as “far right” was always weird. Another contradiction - she’s an unmarried mother living ‘in sin’ and yet claims to be a good Catholic.

In general there is a sizable portion of the Italian right that runs vague apologetics for Mussolini and is semi-descended from postwar fascists the US tolerated in case of an Operation Gladio type situation where they’d be needed to keep the country from falling to communism. But these shouldn’t necessarily be considered “far right” by euro political standards, often they’ve been part of mainstream parties previously. It’s just that unlike Germany and France there wasn’t the same clear historical dividing line between what counted as ‘center’ and what counted as ‘far’ right that was as vigorously policed as it was in much of Northern Europe.

Lastly, I’m skeptical of the Polish Muslim immigration chart. Not because I don’t think PiS would do it, but because I can’t find any sources online that suggest those kinds of visa counts to citizens of Muslim majority countries are being granted. Which countries are they?

Painting Meloni as “far right” was always weird. Another contradiction - she’s an unmarried mother living ‘in sin’ and yet claims to be a good Catholic.

Mussolini did not lead a very conservative lifestyle yet I don't think anyone disputes that he was, well, a fascist. Admittedly, being a conservative and a fascist aren't the same things. But the "far-right" epithet contains multitudes, as it were. Someone's personal habits isn't always indicative of their political beliefs, at least stated ones.

I can’t find any sources online that suggest those kinds of visa counts to citizens of Muslim majority countries are being granted. Which countries are they?

These are being collated by a Polish-American who lives in Krakow. The source is the ministry of labour and the PiS government isn't even disputing them as far as I am aware. After all, why would they? It's their own ministry. These numbers are quite recent and haven't filtered in the wider Anglophone press, probably because of the language barrier. The dataset is in Polish, hence the translation. I've looked at Eurostat data and seen supporting evidence, though their methodology slightly differs and as such probably underestimates the number. Eurostat also hasn't released their 2022 numbers yet, that will only happen this autumn.

As for countries, it's places like Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Turkey etc. Lots of Uzbek cab drivers in Warsaw these days.

Admittedly, being a conservative and a fascist aren't the same things.

...admittedly?

Fascism proclaimed itself revolutionary and was opposed to conservatism. That people conflate them is just absurd.

Yeah, anything I searched on Polish immigration from Muslim countries was an order of magnitude lower than the numbers in that guy’s chart. Immigration is hard to stop, that’s the reality. Malaysia now has a large Nigerian population, a bunch of the Grab (Uber) drivers I had there last year were Africans, usually overstaying student visas. They almost all bring dependants obviously. In the end any government that isn’t explicitly opposed to mass immigration and takes big steps (like Denmark’s slowly developing ethnic preferences system that will largely limit migration to ‘Western’ countries) in that direction will see mass immigration.

Still, if you do find a source for the Polish figures, let me know - I’m curious.

What interests me most about the whole immigration rigmarole is what I can only describe a lack of will to power on the part of these right wing parties. Surely they don't expect these immigrants (or, more to the point, their kids) to actually vote for them, right?

This to me is the most baffling part of the Reagan-Romney era GOP, their seeming total lack of concern for preserving their power base. Reagan '84 lost the Hispanic vote by 28 points, he signs an amnesty in '86, and the GOP is rewarded by Hispanics voting for Dukakis by a 40 point margin. At this point the GOP was freshly sniffing power (never mind that they couldn't win the House) after having been wiped off the map by the Ellis Islanders for half a century. '92? Same story, 36 point loss. '96 was outright comical, a 52 point loss. Goodbye California! I bet Pete Wilson was regretting his vote for the '86 IRCA at that point. W in 2000? Another over 30 point loss. W '04, the best a Republican has ever fared with the Hispanic vote? A 9 point loss if you're optimistic, more like 20 points if you're not. Meanwhile, as refugees from Communism have become less represented in the Asian-American vote they've done nothing but trend left and now vote Democratic almost as strongly as Hispanics. From McCain onward, the story has been the same, 33-36 point losses in the ever-growing Asian and Hispanic vote. At no point in this time did the GOP above the House level see a problem with this.

Worse yet, the economic winners of Reagan/present-era neoliberalism and free trade have been blue cities while Republican-leaning interests constitute an ever-shrinking portion of the American economy. The Republicans conserved next to nothing (They did relatively well with gun rights, but IMO this is massive cope relative to everything else they lost.) and their voter base is now outnumbered and relatively poorer than their opponents. What was the point of it? They've converted precisely zero leftists and shit on their own voters so long that they are now hated and lose their own primaries to whatever populist loon rolls into town. I get that big business thinks they're winning and can just cozy up to the Democrats, but what happens when they no longer have credible opposition? Surely a half-century of being taxed and bullied by the FDR coalition wasn't the plan.

The only thing keeping the GOP going since 1988 is that their base has become more geographically efficient faster than it shrank, and REDMAP and Trump 2016 were probably as far as that was going to work. It's going to take an epic act of self-sabotage by the Democrats, one such that they outright lose the Mexican-American vote, to bail out the GOP, and I don't see it happening. Nixon/Reagan arguably only happened because the Irish and Italians hated black Great Migrants enough to start voting Republican, and there isn't another Great Migration in the cards.

Good points and I've wondered the same thing. Yet I think there's a certain kind of mildly autistic right-winger who keeps trying to show charts and tables to GOP functionairies saying "See! if you continue on this path, you'll be permanently out of power. Look at California!". The thing is.. they know and they've already heard that pitch 50 times. So ignorance cannot be the answer here.

So why don't they care? I suspect it may simply be due to donor influence. The rich people donating to the GOP want the gravy train to go on and ultimately the voters don't matter much.

Additionally, even very diverse states like Texas or Florida are now fairly red so the "demographics is destiny" argument is weaker today than in the past.

Texas and Florida are dealing with very particular situations enabled by the exact ethnic mixes(Cubans in Florida, or in Texas the ability to exploit the centraco/Mexican divide) showing up, quirks of the local economy(Texas in particular has a GOP that benefits strongly from being able to fearmonger about democrats enacting stringent oil and gas regulations), an absolutely incompetent opposition, ideologically compatible immigration, and probably on some level a willingness to play less than 100% fairly.

At this point the GOP was freshly sniffing power (never mind that they couldn't win the House) after having been wiped off the map by the Ellis Islanders for half a century.

FDR did much better in the old South than he did in those parts of the US which were most subject to immigration. For example, in 1940 he won about 85% of Alabama and Georgia but only about 50% of Massachusetts and New York. Ellis Islanders do not seem to have been the core of New Deal Democrat power. The immigrant / Democrat alignment seems to have come later than that.

It's not so much that the Ellis Islanders were the nationwide core of Democratic power, as that they were decisive for FDR in the northeast. The New Dealers are littered with the names of Ellis Islanders and their descendants, people like James Farley (who did much to build on Al Smith's strength in cities are solidify the Democrat/Immigrant marriage) and Robert Wagner. Al Smith got nominated in '28 for a reason, and it was that he'd flipped New York at the state level, very nearly took it in '28, and did take Massachusetts (something Woodrow Wilson failed to do in '16, and only did in '12 thanks to the Roosevelt/Taft split). Not bad against a popular almost-incumbent in the form of Herbert Hoover. You can't tell the story of 20th Century politics in Massachusetts without talking about James Curley any more than you can tell that of Michigan without Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Alabama, and whose brand of politics probably drove Michiganders to vote for another politician from Alabama in the '72 Democratic primary, the infamous George C. Wallace).

FDR (and Harry Truman) was wildly popular with Southerners and lavished much patronage on the region, such that contrary to popular conception the South remained Democratic-leaning long after their temper-tantrum over civil rights. IMO the strength of Nixon and Reagan's coalition gets somewhat overrated by big electoral victories against generally mediocre Democratic candidates when in fact neither ever won the House. The GOP would have to wait for all the Southerners who came of age under FDR and Truman to start dying of old age before they really took over the South.

Great comment.

DeSantis seemed to do well in Florida with Hispanics (granted Cubans as unique). Maybe covid changes things up?

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

How's this for drama: the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

I've been hearing about the automation makes work superflous for well over a decade now. It reached a crescendo in 2016-17 with Erik Brynjolfsson's book and subsequent forecasts by various institutions of a rapid job less. Never happened. Can AI be different? It could, but people are vastly overestimating AI progress. The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve. We're still a long away from that.

the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".

Alternatively, some capitalists prefer high immigration as a way to cheap out, reduce bargaining power for workers and saving on productivity-enhancing investments while pocketing the change in terms of dividends. To be clear, I think some on the left are driven by moralistic arguments but they aren't the ones driving policy. Capitalists are, but they are opportunistic enough to use the shield of leftist morality to bludgeon their political opponents. It has the added benefit of raising one's social status in the domestic arena and people care deeply about status, too.

The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve.

It's not the key. If AI was inacapble of self-improvement but could learn complex work at midwit level (115-125) and drive humanoid robots, it could displace like 80% of workers at the minimum.

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

Shifts in technology has already made huge reams of low-skilled immigration almost completely unproductive and a net drain. Western countries no longer have unskilled labor roles to stuff Refugees into, which exacerbates issues with assimilation and engaging with the new culture. I've got a lot of friends who are 1st/2nd-generation Australian-born Asian-descent, and the jobs their parents did upon arrival largely either do not exist any more in Australian Metros or are gated behind Bachelors degrees & English proficiency.

Especially now the classic Unskilled jobs have gone from requiring literal manual labor and little else, to increasingly being low-skilled service jobs which require a bunch of language skills and cultural awareness that make them difficult for fresh immigrants.

And has that caused a collapse in immigration?

Nope. Actually having jobs for the low-skilled immigrants seems uncorrelated with the desire to bring them in.

Market forces might seek cheap foreign labour but market forces do not always dominate. Markets want no minimum wage, child labour, slave labour, drug legalization, total freedom to hire and fire, free trade, world peace, unlimited working hours, no unionization, no social welfare for the unemployed...

It's ideology and society that decides what is and isn't permissible, where sliders should be set regardless of economic advantage or disadvantage. The Italians could tell business leaders to grow up, they're not going to lower the minimum wage to zero and let employers give workers amphetamines, that's just not a serious proposal worthy of consideration... They could do the same with regard to immigration.

Hey, if my employers offered me amphetamines, I'd take them.

Employers offer free amphetamines when they expect workers to use them on the job, and then they set up the job so that you need to use amphetamines to do it. The amphetamines are not optional, and you don't get to stop using them when you have health issues or other issues.

Sounds like a you problem, I have ADHD haha

I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.

selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want

No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion (e.g. I'd prefer moslem Indonesians over Christian Nigerians). There are many people willing to work for low wages as streetsweepers, garbage men, nurses etc. You're not just importing workers. You're importing a people with its own distinctive culture. And cultures are sticky (tied to ethnicity/race). Denying this is the blank slate approach which has failed and continues to fail.

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism

Some amount of racism is necessary, but it should be pragmatic/selective and not universal, e.g. you prefer some groups over others rather than penalising everyone with a darker skin color. There's no point in pussyfooting around this issue and the right should drop its naïve colorblind approach.

No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion

This is not too hard to fix---just do the salary sorting independently for each position after you've decided how much of each you want. Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race. Again, saying the first thing that comes to my head just to emphasize how close it comes and how easy the problem is, even just English proficiency might suffice. Knowing nothing else, would you prefer a natively English-proficient Christian Nigerians over random Muslim Indonesian? Seriously trying to come up with a filter would do dramatically better than just looking at race. Immigration officials have so much more information about prospectives and this completely overwhelms any evidence provided by race.

Saying this another way, filtering by race doesn't make sense unless you can somehow argue that race is actually a strong proxy for merit/cultural compatibility/whatever you want from immigrants. Even the most extreme HBD positions don't deny a huge overlap in distributions of whichever characteristic you care about, so such a position would seem ridiculous.

Race cannot be gamed (except for edge cases). The whole point of race is its inherence. Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.

even just English proficiency might suffice.

Why is having had British colonial masters a marker of cultural compatibility?

Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race.

Cursory, adj: hasty and therefore not thorough or detailed

Why "cursory"? Because you want it to be gameable? Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.

That said, I think racial profiling is indeed unfair if it goes beyond defining vague priors. It's desirable to filter immigrants for their comprehensive human capital.

It's just… Suppose you were not allowed into the world's richest country on grounds of your character, which was found wanting not through stereotyping you based on race, but through, de facto, systematic measurement and determination of your similarity to your predominant racial type and dissimilarity from natives.

Of course, this can be couched (and even understood by practitioners) in entirely non-racial terminology, like Harvard does – they would just have a holistic psychometric definition of a desirable immigrant, derived, say, from anonymous surveys of natives' evaluation of character and assimilation success.

Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?

Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?

Is this supposed to be a trap? I would definitely recognize any accurate judgement like this as fair! Race can't mean you refuse to judge people as bad in certain ways the exact same way it can't mean you refuse to judge people as good in certain ways. Now, the way the human brain works, there's a very strong bias towards seeing more of a stereotypical negative trait in a member of another racial group than actually exists. Therefore, for this judgement to actually be accurate, some care needs to taken to account for this bias in the exact same way you account for any other cognitive bias if you actually want to be right about the world.

Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.

Goodhart's law isn't an overwhelming force that overwhelms everything else. We still accept legible measures in deciding who gets positions in every other aspect of life and, while obviously not perfect since nothing is in the real world, they work far better than just deciding based on race. Your argument here seems to be a generalized counterargument to any kind of meritocracy at all. Even if you accept some worst-case, all-powerful Goodhart, you can just change the measure when you notice it's turned into something harmful---make it a moving target to keep ahead of Goodhart.

Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.

You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else? I'm very curious to hear what possibly gave you the impression that I'm particularly good at manipulating bureaucracies. Is this just your "vague prior" based on perceived race?

Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.

You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else?

I think this can also be interpreted as a general "you", somewhat awkwardly phrased. At least it didn't occur to me to be a personal attack until you wrote your reply, and as you observed, it would only make sense in a context where you'd be known as a beaurocratically savvy type.

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

The HBD answer for this is "regression to the mean". You actually do have to judge the race and genotype of the people showing up and immigrating to your country, because their children are going to be more like the average member of their ethnicity. When you allow someone to immigrate into your society, you're not just bringing in them but all of their descendants as well. If you take someone who had some rare, atypically high IQ and some hypothetical conscientiousness quotient that's great, but you have to be aware that chances are their children are going to be closer to the mean, and race is actually the best proxy we have for this afaik.

If you select a specific subgroup from a certain ethnic group as immigrants, their descendants will regress to the mean of that subgroup and not their entire ethnic group.

I don't think that's intrinsically much of a "HBD answer", and my impression as an - I should say at this point - "HBD reclaimer" is that regression to the mean is used too often as a thought-terminating cliché to allow that speaker to arrive at their preconceived conclusion. Clearly there is no perfect regression to the mean, because otherwise we would not have HBD/populations with temporally consistent different means at all.

A biased sample of a base population may well regress some part of the way to its mean - but it won't regress all the way, or evolution would be impossible. Do you know anything about how far it will regress, and how fast?

Breeder's equation (which, as Greg Cochran noticed, somehow doesn't have a wikipedia article)

is that regression to the mean is used too often as a thought-terminating cliché to allow that speaker to arrive at their preconceived conclusion.

or how does it look to people who don't understand regression to the mean?

Greg Cochran

Link for @4bpp

You can think of it this way. In the first case, the parents have 20 extra IQ points. On average, 50% of those points are due to additive genetic factors, while the other 50% is the product of good environmental luck. By the way, when we say "environmental,” we mean “something other than additive genetics.” It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects—the way in which you raise your kids, or the school they attend—contribute much to this "environmental" variance, at least for adult IQ. We know what it’s not, but not much about what it is, although it must include factors like test error and being hit on the head with a ball-peen hammer.

The kids get the good additive genes, but have average "environmental" luck—so their average IQ is 110. The luck (10 pts worth) goes away.

The 120-IQ parents drawn from the IQ-85 population have 35 extra IQ points, half from good additive genes and half from good environmental luck. But in the next generation, the luck goes away… so they drop 17.5 points.

The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on a friendly uninhabited island, they would eventually get around to mating—and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial.

A biased sample of a base population may well regress some part of the way to its mean - but it won't regress all the way, or evolution would be impossible. Do you know anything about how far it will regress, and how fast?

I actually don't, because there's a lot of variability in that kind of question. If you take someone who got starved of oxygen at some vital moment as a child and lost 20IQ due to some environmental insult, then the upwards regression of their children will be extremely dramatic. If you have someone who somehow lucked into getting a precise combination of alleles that end up with a 20 point IQ boost above the average, then you're going to get an extremely dramatic reversal.

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist. If filtering by wealth or education leads to disparate impacts, that might be racist but it also might just be a preference for rich, educated immigrants and the disparate impact on people from the Middle East or Africa is too bad. If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.

If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist.

As other point, you are just using the word "racist" as a conversation stopper. Many other types of "filtering" are also verboten and can make you a sexist, classist, islamophobe (or other phobe), ageist, ableist and so forth, and all it takes is to "prove" disparate effect. So in the end who cares if Skibboleth think it is racist, everything is racist of course.

Second, people are not playing by the same rules. Filtering by race (or sex or age or whatever) is okay if you point out to disparate outcomes. So under your definition, somebody who claims that black men are disproportionately target of police brutality is racist and sexist just by virtue of using such a filter, right? Moreover if one looks and sees that black or Hispanic people prefer to vote for black/Hispanic politicians, this means that they are themselves racist as well.

If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.

You're making the worst argument in the world.

The central example of 'racist' is a neo-nazi who yells racial slurs and innocent passers-by. You're purposefully conflating this (terrible) behaviour with the far more reasonable behaviour of having a preference over the type of immigrants ones country imports.

Am I? If anything, this seems the opposite - deflecting criticism by pointing to a more extreme example. The most extreme example of a racist is a neo-nazi who yells racial slurs and whatnot. This is not the typical example of a racist, and would have been pretty unusual even in the most racist historical environments. If someone holds strongly racially prejudiced views and those views motivate their politics and behavior, it is entirely fair to characterize them racist, even if they are polite in person to the object of their animus.

The actual policy we're discussing is an immigration policy that favours people who are similar to the existing (often native) ethnic group. In other words, a political manifestation of the preference for living near people who look like you.

And more or less everyone, from the immigrants themselves to the most full-throated supporters of multiracialism and immigration does prefer to live among people like themselves.

As far as I can tell, the only sin of the people you call racist is that they want more people to be able to act on the revealed preferences that we all share.

The actual policy we're discussing is an immigration policy that favours people who are similar to the existing

Is it? The comment I was replying was:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

which was in response to:

I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Which suggests an immigration policy that favors people from particular countries or regions. As @atokenliberal6D_4 noted, this is completely unnecessary. As far as I can tell, the most parsimonious explanation for this is a preference for racial discrimination over evaluating individual candidates (which is what we already do).

And more or less everyone, from the immigrants themselves to the most full-throated supporters of multiracialism and immigration does prefer to live among people like themselves.

I don't have a problem with the proposition that most people are racist (though only some people make racism central to their political preferences). Most people are liars, but I still think honesty is good.

The White Australia Policy was also a pretty central example of racism.

Fair enough. It is not just racism it is justified racism then. Chinese immigrants have proven they could assimilate and thrive all around the world. So are the other east Asians. So are the Indian upper classes, jews and whites. So if you have to choose immigrants - you choose from cultures with proven track record. If racism leads to better outcomes for my country - so be it.

If you need 1000000 workers today what would you choose - a million Koreans or a million Chechens?

A million Chechens, obviously, because Chechens are white and Koreans aren't.

Of course, this is a nonsense scenario for multiple reasons, but most prominently: we don't have to issue visas based on such crude measures as race or even nationality. We can and do discriminate amongst applications based on the qualities of individual applicants.

A million Chechens, obviously, because Chechens are white and Koreans aren't.

...and there in you demonstrate that the "uncharitable strawman" of HBD is not a strawman at all.

I'm not sure anything I say should be taken as indicative of HBD positions, since I am being facetious.

again, six or a half dozen regardless.

???

He was making an uncharitable strawman in order to take the piss out of HBDers, and you're saying it's evidence that it's not an uncharitable strawman?

More comments

...Pretty sure @Skibboleth is being sarcastic, not speaking plainly.

Six or a half dozen regardless.

  • -13

Arghhhh!!! The entire point is that it's not justified. If I needed to choose 1000000 workers I wouldn't arbitrarily straitjacket myself into needing all of then be from the same country/race---I would just pick the million best from everywhere the best way I can. There are so many other much more useful ways to distinguish people from each other. I am completely dumbfounded why this point is so hard for people to grasp.

And it’s worth noting that arguing that, say, whites assimilate to Italian culture better than southeast Asians, who assimilate better than Africans(or the same hierarchy for HBD) might be accurate, but it’s still racism. It’s just justified racism.

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism.

Finish that thought.

From a woke perspective those societies have deep-seated and incurable racism and xenophobia towards the differently-colored and differently-cultured. Seems cruel to inflict it on them when otherwise equivalent, lighter immigrants are available & won’t have to face such hardships.

When the immigrants are in the country, their race is all the woke talk about. But you want colour-blindness in admissions? I thought we didn’t do that anymore.

I can't speak for atokenliberal6D_4, but I want both colour-blind immigration criteria and colour-blind institutions.

Me too, in theory. IQ test the lot. But I have to make allowances for the fact that the woke will inevitably use them as props for their racial oppression obsession, and this isn't going to make integration or even peaceful cohabitation easy.

Most accurate ≠ most useful.

If I can select from two pools of people, one Asian with an average IQ of 100, one Middle-east/African, with an average IQ of 90, why should I spend time looking for candidates in the group with a lower average IQ?

Hypothetically I might be able to devise a mechanism to accurately sift through both populations that finds 100% of the qualified people from both groups. But given I know one population is just a better pool of candidates there is little utility in going for the lower IQ group so long as the higher IQ group has enough qualified candidates, which it does have. All you are doing is wasting time and effort.

In a real world scenario the situation is abundantly clear. You don't want to waste any time on a worse pool of candidates since your error margins are going to be wider with a pool where the unqualified outnumber the qualified. This error margin is not just relating to work performance but baseline function in society. These errors cost lives and I find it very hard to weigh the alleged 'economic benefit' of mass immigration with descriptions from little girls of how they were gang raped over years, pictures of little children torn to pieces after someone intentionally drove over them in a truck, or descriptions of teenagers tortured to death in their own homelands, that were much safer prior to these 'economic benefits' arriving.

As for your own argumentation, sidelining peoples instincts as racism does little to foster understanding between two differing viewpoints. I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa. I assume you have good intentions and that your tend and befriend instincts are a valuable part of your humanity that has great utility and benefit to those around you. But it's not for a lack of issues that your instincts cause others that I refrain from such insinuations. I'd appreciate if you could do the same.

I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.

I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.

Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.

If you select a specific subgroup from a certain ethnic group as immigrants, their descendants will regress to the mean of that subgroup and not their entire ethnic group.

Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.

Do you have any evidence to support the assertion that the children of successful immigrants tend to "revert to the (racial) mean"? That's not what I would naively expect to happen. My anecdotal experience is that people from successful families tend to be successful themselves.

reversion to the mean

Race is still only a rough proxy on what the "mean" is. There can and have been upper class elite sub groups within a race that consistently produce smarter kids than the rest of the racial group that they belong to.

I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.

You chose two horrible solutions, of course they sound terrible. And since you don't know what "mean" they are reverting to you could get a good estimate by testing two generations on an IQ test. Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent. Some set of scores are going to indicate that either the "mean" is very high for those particular people, or that you've got a three or four generations before it actually gets bad. And banning people for a problem they might create 60-90 years from now seems totally unnecessary.

Or if you don't want to do an IQ test. You can pick a set of reputable international and domestic universities, and require that two generations of family have degrees from those universities.

Or don't even set strict limits. Just say "prove to us that bringing your family here will make us better off, here is how some other people have done it".

I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.

Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent.

Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.

That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.

You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

Education, skills and employment are not the same country by country. You care about the box 'race' because it serves as a proxy for a whole lot of information. Hell, even within countries the difference in ability despite education level, like in the US, you have big differences between races. The first few paragraphs of this article demonstrates this point

On top of that, 'race' to some extent, and ethnicity and country of origin to a greater extent, serve as great proxies for the credibility of claims made by hopeful migrant laborers. I know from experience there exists great stigma around foreign laborers in construction work, often times for good reason. I've heard similar things from my programmer friends deriding 'Indian code'.

I, from experience, would conclude that a lot of the claims made by foreign laborers are lies. Getting your foot in the door is much more important than being true to your own abilities. Especially since most imported labor is not working high skill jobs for high pay, but working low skill jobs for low pay. And they know this.

The incredibly detailed applications that the potential immigrants submit. Which are then reviewed in detail via the staff hired with the very high fees the applicants pay.

We are talking about two separate things then. Where I am from immigration officials are not paid by the applicants. They work on the tax payers dime.

It's not a search through a pool! You process all the applications.

I don't know what point or to what end you are making with this assertion anymore. I explained what I meant by 'pool'. If that contextualization is still going over your head I can't help you.

A lot of them are pretty easy to verify. If someone claims to have a job offer in the US, you can track down the employer and check. TOEFL is a serious test.

Which is completely separate to the matter at hand. If all we needed to vet immigrants was a company willing to hire them this discussion would not exist. The question pertained to where immigration was being pooled from.

My argument is that we don't need to use proxy measures like race when we have actual measures. Look at the actual schools that people attended, or the actual employers that they had.

Like I already said, even with information like education, race still gives a lot of information. Which can be better than education. There is no reason to not factor that in.

The comment to which you were originally replying said

And that comment was replying to the suggestion that countries focus more on Asian countries than African for immigrants.

My whole point is that you don't need proxies when you can evaluate people individually, and since individuals give detailed checkable applications, and pay for them such that you can hire as many examiners as you need, you don't need proxies, and therefore don't need to pool.

Like I said before, pooling is not something you do. It's something that is. There is no reason to not use all the information available, which includes country of origin, when selecting applicants so long as you don't have a shortage of applicants. Country of origin is not a proxy any more than education is. Outside of a US context there is an extremely clear benefit to limiting your selection to higher IQ countries before you go for lower IQ ones. I don't understand why someone would be against it.

If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

It might be more efficient, but is the thing you're improving efficiency on really that much of a constraint in the first place?

Like it would take X amount of time for 100 immigration officials to thoroughly sift through 1000 applications. You're suggesting we save those 100 people a lot of time by implementing a race based admissions system, why not just double or triple the amount of immigration officials? It's not like they're a big item in any country's budget.

Where I am from the process is very expensive. But regardless of that, I would just kick the question back to you. Why have a more expensive less efficient immigration system? I don't get it.

Except it's not really a problem. The benefit I am pointing out still exists even with that accounted for so long as there is not a shortage of applications from higher IQ countries.

But besides that, your solution is much more restrictive than mine. I'm not sure why you are so eager to discriminate based on current wealth over race.

If I'm understanding you right you're arguing for race based admissions on the basis of efficiency. My counterargument is that efficiency isn't that an important factor if something is cheap in the first place, and so to answer your question this leads to the claim that it's unfair and unwise to exclude otherwise qualified people for the sake of saving some small amount of time and money when they would likely contribute much more to the country than that initial cost.

You're cutting costs when you streamline the immigration process, but you're also getting fewer quality migrants as a result (and there might be a separate argument for this being a good thing! But I don't think it'll hinge on the efficiency of the immigration process).

Your argument means less to me right away since I already said the process is expensive. But whatever.

I don't understand why the import country should care about 'fairness' or where you are getting the idea of 'fairness' from in this context. The process is at no stage fair to anyone. It's literally designed to be the opposite. The import country is picking and choosing to suit it's own need. Nor do I understand how it is unwise to have an exclusion criteria based on race/country of origin. So long as there is no shortage of applicants from higher IQ places there is no problem. And if that shortage ever comes about the economic landscape of the world would be so radically different from what it is now we would have to have a separate conversation, since this one is predicated on people actually wanting to come work in western countries.

You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100. What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.

I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa.

(Edited) This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else. I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100.

No dude, what you are doing became complete nonsense. It starts of with imagining a hypothetical that is antithetical to reality. We don't have a list of 1000 numbers, we have applications earmarked by a list of traits. Country of origin, country of residence, employment status, spousal status, education and so on. The point made by me was that accepting applications from countries with low IQ ends up wasting a whole lot more resources than applications from higher IQ countries. There is nothing nonsensical about this proposition. It is extremely simple.

Maybe this is a difference of governance, but where I am from the processing of any foreign born people, be it migrants or any other sort, is extremely costly. It takes time to go through the various bureaucracies to confirm the authenticity of the claims made. It's not picking 95 over 91.

What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half.

It's not random and the weighing is not "very slight".

It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.

From a purely mathematical perspective, picking from the higher number group is very obviously more optimal than picking from the lower number group as soon as you factor in that every pick has a cost and that sorting through the list of numbers is not as simple as your hypothetical makes it out to be.

This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else.

How mutual this feeling is.

I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.

This is not a discussion about racial differences. So far no one has gone off the deep end into denying IQ. So what we are left with is optimizing policy based on reality. Or making banal insinuations about biases whilst pretending we are immune to it ourselves.

Matter of limited resources. If in region A 8/10 are ok and in region B 3/10 it is better if you concentrate your capacity in A.

You're inventing practical constraints which don't exist in practice, in order to justify stark racism.

Immigration officials don't go out and search for potential immigrants. They wait for someone to come up and say "Hey, I want to immigrate, I meet all of the criteria you have set for the kind of immigrant you want, here is $10,000 to compensate your agency for the time it takes to check that I'm not lying."

You are constrained in "people in state department that are not complete morons". As is the case in every bureaucracy. And that is hard to scale.

Again, this is a non-problem that you are inventing to justify your racist preferences.

Processing visa applications is not rocket science. You have a set of criteria applicants have to meet, the applicant has to supply you with adequate proof that they meet that criteria, if they don't you reject them.

But ok, let's assume this is an especially cognitively demanding task that requires high quality public servants. So you hire those people, offering whatever wages you need to get them, and set application fees at a level that covers their wages. That might reduce application numbers, but that's not a real problem.

It's also not a problem that you're taking high quality workers from other sectors of the economy, because doing it allows you to import more high-quality workers to replace them. The Nigerian genius that would have been rejected under your preferred policy gets to come in and do good things.

There is no practical constraint that requires us to put a blanket ban on people of certain races.

Not at all. It seems that there are few assumptions that you make - like that there is universal right to apply to move to a country.

I come from the other way - there is need for additional X people in my country and there are different places from where we can pull them.

Of course it makes sense to dig where the vein is rich to get to X. If you overlook a nugget here or there - tough luck for the nugget.

You cannot be racist to non citizens that are outside of your country because there is no obligation to view them as equal.

More comments

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

If two groups are separated for so long that there are clear genetic differences they aren't going to be easy to integrate. First off there are differences between groups and they are to some extent biologically different. If they have been separated for that long their cultures will have almost no common points.

There are clear genetic differences between Germans and Italians, yet both have been successfully integrated into American society.

The US barely has public transport or walking streets. It is also a wildly divided country.

Do you know many Italian Americans? The ones I know are very aware that their name ends in a vowel and that they are distinct from regular Americans. I would have expected them to be more integrated, but Italian Americans are still quite distinct. German Americans barely know that they were originally German, in contrast. I think Poles fall into the same bucket as Italians, where they feel quite separate from mainstream America.

@ZorbaTHut, any idea why this looks so utterly cursed on my android device running chrome?

Pic included.

/images/16889584783924904.webp

Ugh, our comment rendering has been a problem from the beginning.

Added to the general comment preview megabug; this isn't quite part of that, but it basically is.

I had spaces between the >

and the quote.

too many spaces after the greater than sign, so it is doing both a quote and code block (I'm assuming). Looks like the line height for code is messed up.

Just quote:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Just code block:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Both:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Just the code block looks about as fucked to me.

Looks similarly cursed on firefox on my laptop

Same for me.

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Streetlight effect, skin color is something that it is easier for weird systemetizing types to measure rhan more abstract but predictive qualities like personality and cultural backgrounds so naturally the latter is dismissed in favor of the former.

We could just do IQ test to get in. But nobody proposes that besides me. And it would end up being 80%-90% immigrants not from the current countries going to Europe.

You're not alone, i support iq testing immigrants too

That’s here though. Probably popular here. Maybe in broader society until someone points out that all the immigrants are coming from certain countries and it’s racists it would be as popular.

What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism.

Funny that. A while ago I posted that you get the same policies no matter who's in power, and I was assured that you totally get different policies, it's just that no one cares about immigration, so you get 5 more years of Merkel. When it's turned out you get the same policies even if you vote for "far right Nazis", that's just capitalism, you see, and I wonder how the hell is anyone supposed to disprove that? Below we have yet another thread about how a totally capitalist corporation, totally just following profits, drove yet another franchise into the ground, and that too is totally mundane (though even the most hardcore mistake theorists don't sound convinced at this point).

What exactly would we need in order to disprove this line of thinking, short of a transmission from inside a volcano where someone explains their plans in detail while twirling their mustache?

There are two options for countries, go liberalism or the Iran route. Even Poland is opening up for mass immigration and the Ukrainian parliament is ramming through all sorts of LGBT stuff in the middle of a war. Either one cooperates with the neoliberal order or one takes the Iran/North Korea or Russia option and goes to war against it. China might be the exception simply because neoliberalism can't cut them off.

Italy is a deeply indebted country with a chronic unemployment problem. If the major financial institutions want them to increase their labour supply they either comply or they will get regime changed or have their economy crashed.

Few countries are actually sovreign, the majority of them are effectively controlled by finance.

PiS apparently backpedalled on the non-European migrant visa program.

Iran actually has a big problem with Afghan migrants, doesn’t it?

Aren't Russia, Iran, etc., and the rest mainly beneficiaries of the fact no one wants to immigrate to those countries in the first place? It's not like they have especially exclusionary migration policies... I'm not sure about Iran, but Russia is mired in demographic decline as well (probably accelerated a few years ahead by the R-U war: lots of dead young men there); why wouldn't they want immigrants?

Russia had positive net migration for most all post-1991 years, first a large fraction of that was ethnic Russians repatriating, now it's mostly Central Asian Muslims, both gastarbeiters and permanent setllers. ... of course, streams in and out are quite different in IQ etc.

The less is Russia connected to modernity, the higher the odds of them getting a better birth rate are.

At least for that the war is good.

I mean, if they have a major unemployment problem it seems like ‘increase the labor supply’ has a built in solution- all the people currently unemployed.

Italy is weird, especially in the South a lot of younger people do ‘odd jobs’ their whole lives and because of family property, the welfare state and cheap cost of living their standard of life isn’t that bad, certainly not by global standards.

Yeah but then you’d have to increase wages and benefits until those on the margins of the labor market return to a state of employment.

Which is exactly what was happening pre-pandemic under trump with that ultra tight labor market.

But firms don’t want to pay for that so they just pay people to call you a racist if you point this out.

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