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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29604 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Suella Bravermans Tory conference speech caught my attention as it seems to more bluntly come out anti-immigration

Suella is the home minister and under her watch the amount of student visas has gone up significantly. So has net migration. I personally never understood why right-wingers posing as populists talk as if they were in the opposition when they actually have the control of the government. Meloni is another character who speaks about what's happening in a worried passive tone even as she opens up the floodgates wider (legally!) while doing the bare minimum to stop the boats.

The end result of this would be a South Africanization of Europe

Probably, though the question is if AI will supercede all these demographic concerns. In an era of superhuman intelligence, even what we consider to be significant differences between humans may fade into a mere rounding error.

Coz Meloni recognizes she's looking at extinction-tier fertility rates in the native Italian population.

What is she supposed to do? Who's going to pay for the upkeep of all these aging Italians?

While it may be in vogue to treat people as fungible, it is unlikely that mass migration will result in these problems being fixed.

As to what to do, at the very least it would be nice to open a proper public debate about it. If Italians decide they don't want to reproduce and prefer to be replaced by immigrants, at least it will be their explicit choice, and not this "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is" nonsense.

I suspect sub-Saharan Africans and Arabs aren't as capable as Italians in maintaining an advanced industrial economy.

Ok, but that's not answering the question of what Meloni's course of action should be. If Africa is the only place with a booming population, then that's where the immigrants are going to come from.

If even a quasi-fascist like her did the numbers and saw this as the only option, what alternatives do you recommend?

I mean offering citizenship to Hong Kong or even Chinese citizens would be prefereble to sub Saharan African migration. You could even just move Taiwan to Italy (which would solve some geopolitical issues). Those places do have the city-state vibes of the renaissance.

Those are people capable of maintaining Italy as something.

Of course boosting native births would be preferable.

You could even just move Taiwan to Italy

While we're engaging in this level of fantasy, why not just import a bunch Numenoreans instead? They're importing Africans because they're the ones with excess population to spare and high fertility rates.

Again, I'll ask why you think a right-wing, nativist government isn't considering all these alternatives you guys are coming up with.

If even a quasi-fascist like her did the numbers and saw this as the only option, what alternatives do you recommend?

If the continuum for number of African migrants accepted is just a heuristic for "fascist", then I guess I would say that "quasi-fascist" isn't far enough on the continuum.

Perhaps the actual situation is that "fascism" (real or imagined) isn't really the determining factor for immigration policies though.

In 1992, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by former followers of Italian fascism. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), a post-fascist party that became the MSI's legal successor in 1995 and moved towards national conservatism.

If it's a continuum, she's a little further along it than those who don't happen to find themselves in fascist movements.

what alternatives do you recommend?

Some problems cannot be solved but only managed. I don't have any good (realistic) solutions - if we define solution as actually solving the issue once and for all. But that isn't an excuse for passivity and resigned fatalism. There are certainly things that can and should be done to manage the issue, e.g. making citizenship harder and akin to the Gulf model, rewriting asylum laws and possibly removing asylum courts. Making controversial practices such as pushbacks legal. Ban certain NGOs who engage in smuggling. And so on.

These things would make matters better but they would not fundamentally solve the underlying issue, which you alluded to (demographic disparities, who are only getting wider). People want easy solutions but I don't see any here, but at the same time it seems to me that the old very generous asylum model has to end.

Having a two-tiered society where the ones shut out of everything are much younger and increasingly more numerous is a recipe for disaster. You ironically need the Roman model, where the peoples subsumed by Rome came to view themselves as Roman.

You ironically need the Roman model, where the peoples subsumed by Rome came to view themselves as Roman.

This has been the standard policy for the past 50 years and I don't think it has worked well. It may be different in the US since most immigrants either come from a Westernised background (Latinx America) or are from the upper elites of Third World countries, which tend also to be fairly Westernised. Europe gets neither.

I agree that a two-tiered system is probably untenable in the long run, but this goes to my point about some problems not being able to be solved but merely managed. Besides, it also depends on the willingness of natives to enforce it. Gulf Arabs do it just fine, but I suspect Europeans are too soft. OTOH, the current status quo is a massive failure too. No easy answer here.

What is she supposed to do?

At the very least, she shouldn't do something she based her entire campaign on opposing!

Who's going to pay for the upkeep of all these aging Italians?

Germany, unless the EU disintegrates. But either way immigration isn't actually a solution to this problem any more than taking out another credit card to deal with your problem of too much credit card debt is - migrant fertility rates revert to the native mean within a generation or so. Instead you just pay a bunch of money to "integrate" them, pay more in policing costs, depress wages, increase real estate costs (further damaging native family formation), impose the various other costs of diversity (lowered social trust chief among them) and in exchange you get a few unqualified workers and a lot of dependents.

and in exchange you get a few unqualified workers and a lot of dependents.

You forgot the most important thing, which is that depressing wages and increasing real estate costs are things that affect the middle class of the nation disproportionately, and erasing them is just what the powerful naturally do.

The best time to form a bulwark against it was when the middle class was at the height of its political power but the fact they couldn't or wouldn't is kind of what makes the middle class the middle class.

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