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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32315 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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The problem isn't that immigrants don't assimilate, the problem is that they do. Fruit pickers keep their native culture, their kids assimilate into the underclass. Indian Brahmins keep their native culture, their kids fit in effortlessly in the PMC. When we talk about "immigration", we are really talking about a variety of different groups assimilating at different speeds into different cultures.

"Immigration" is thus a motte and bailey. The motte is people who want to contribute, from Elon Musk to the seasonal agricultural workers. The bailey is welfare state clients.

Immigration of engineers isn't controversial, and never has been. Immigration of people without much skill and work ethic is very controversial.

American welfare state apparatchiks have managed to define "immigration" in the public debate as either everybody or nobody. Given that choice, "nobody" is a pretty good choice. In the Canadian discourse, "immigration" is "migrants screened for skills, health, and criminal propensity", and thus immigration is popular.

Immigration of engineers isn't controversial, and never has been

This isn't true. Even here I've gotten disagreement on that, and in politics generally republicans resist it because foreign culture, support our people before foreigners, etc. I don't think dems have any direct disagreement with it, but as you say they care much more about letting poor POCs come.

I'd strongly support 'anyone of any color who scores >125 on an IQ test* OR demonstrates gets a visa instantly and citizenship after they stay for X years, anyone who scores >140 gets citizenship and $100k after they stay here for two years, and said test scores are made available to all potential employers'. (And yes, IQ isn't everything, but there's a tradeoff - and >125 I'm pretty certain the benefits outweigh the negatives)

*people would try to game / train for the test but you can deal with that

People here might resist immigration of engineers, but only because they tend to be engineers. The AMA is against immigration of doctors for the same reason.

Your immigration proposal is fine, but doesn't address the meat of the issue: the Blue Tribe has managed to hold skilled immigrants hostage in return for importing more welfare state clients and creating more welfare state sinecures.

Immigration of engineers isn't controversial, and never has been.

Unless the imported engineers depress wages for native engineers and reduces investment in native engineering development capacity.

If those imported engineers are capable of producing the same output for lower wages, then the privileged whites whom they displace have simply been competed out of the market.

Foreign governments mismanage their country. Engineers, because their country is mismanaged and creates bad living conditions at home, find that even poor living conditions in America are acceptable. They then immigrate to America and compete based on being willing to take a low salary and live in poor living conditions.

The end result is that the living conditions of American engineers go down because of the foreign government's actions, at several steps removed. I don't get to vote for the foreign government, so the only way to prevent this problem is to keep the engineers from immigrating.

If someone comes from a country where engineers can't afford air conditioning, I don't want him coming here and accepting salaries that make it so that nobody in the industry here can afford air conditioning.

If those imported engineers are capable of producing the same output for lower wages, then the privileged whites whom they displace have simply been competed out of the market.

Is the United States a country or a geographically defined economic zone?

That's the 64,000 dollar question isn't it.

Blue tribe views it as a the former and red tribe views it as the latter and there in lies a solid two-thirds or so of conflict underpinning the culture war. This is also the reason that anything that's unapologetically "Pro-America" gets coded as "red."

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