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What I find most depressing about this problem is how irreversible it is. Unlike almost all other policy - monetary, taxation, spending, the criminal code, school curricula, you name it - this can't be undone. These immigrants are never, ever going away.
I don't understand how people who are in favor of mass-immigration can just so completely throw caution to the wind. Even with high confidence that mass immigration won't be a problem, if you're wrong, it's game over. The multiculturalism mind virus is unlike any other policy fad in history I can think of in how dangerous it is. Even fucking communism can, in principle, be reversed and healed from. The fact that a policy so potentially suicidal as mass immigration just sails through without meaningful resistance just blows my fucking mind.
I was lucky enough to get out of Canada and move to a decent sized American city, near a major metro, that is 97% native-born. But so many millions of Canadians are stuck and helplessly watching their country and communities decay into a sort of rootless cosmopolitan economic zone - an unimportant physical space that is meaningless but for its capacity to facilitate the existence and economic productivity of equally meaningless and mutually-unintelligible people-tokens like yourself.
Well, there's the Nathan Smith "How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity?" position — from people often given to repeating Milton Friedman's comment about mass immigration and the welfare state and, like him, arguing for picking the former over the latter — which holds that the pressures of mass immigration will force the system to adapt (in ways these sorts of people find personally favorable) to keep functioning. While Smith makes analogy to Rome, the better point of comparison is the UAE.
And, I think it was back on Twitter a few years ago, I remember Bryan Caplan making similar "the system will have to adapt" arguments, and someone pushed back, pointing to our politicians and asking what happens if they don't make the changes open borders libertarian types ask for. He gave the same response he's given some other times: mass immigration is ultimately a self-limiting problem. Immigrants tolerate the language barrier and cultural difference issues because they're outweighed by the economic benefits of living in a country like America or Canada. Thus, if the effects of this immigration become increasingly detrimental, the economy and quality of life will decline, reducing that incentive to keep coming. Once America is reduced to a level near Mexico, Latin American immigration will stop, and perhaps even reverse (and similarly with Canada versus the sources of its immigrants).
Sure, someone argued back, but then you've still wrecked the country, even if the process eventually stalls out. That, Caplan replied, is just another reason to support immigration — because if that does happen, well, English is enough of a lingua franca in academia that a famous economist like him can get a job teaching at pretty much any university anywhere on Earth. (And as for those who aren't famed econ professors like him? That's their problem.)
And I think it was Tyler Cowen who made the point that "3rd world countries" aren't uniformly terrible; that in the cities you can find pockets where the elites live in "1st world" conditions with the added bonus of cheap personal servants — you just have to be able to afford it. But, much in line with Smith's position, if you're one of those who isn't in job competition with immigrant labor, but instead positioned to benefit from it, then your economic gains will allow you to pay for the gated community, the private security, etc. to let you maintain your 1st world lifestyle even if most the rest of the country ends up immiserated, with the added benefit of affordable personal servants and cheap chalupas.
So, IME, a lot of "f— you, got mine" attitude, and confidence that no matter how bad it gets, the consequences will only fall on the little people beneath them.
Well, that and a lot of "bleeding heart" types who simply don't think about long-term or large scale consequences, and who, at their worst, deny that unintended and second-order consequences are even a thing.
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The problems with immigration in Canada (which is, unlike many other countries, doing a good job of selecting positive-value, long-term-assimilable immigrants) that the parent post referred to are all to do with growing the population while not building enough housing. Those problems are entirely reversible - slow the immigration while you catch up on housebuilding.
Yes, the problem of there being insufficient housing to house all these immigrants is a separate and solvable problem from the problem all these immigrants, I agree.
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Only if you believe there's a finite supply of "racial purity" (when did it appear, by the way? The Neanderthals?) and brown immigrants permanently dilute it. Otherwise, it's just cultural change. That is no less reversible than communism.
Even if racial divergence may have ended, on net, around the Neanderthal age, the trend towards total racial homogenization was very slow up until recently. You probably could have had visually distinct races indefinitely if travel technology stopped with pre-Columbean tech. The future mongrelization of humanity is merely another aspect of the bug-man future we're all looking forward to. It's maximum entropy, maximum simplification, degradation to increasingly robust physical states.
What is your basis for this claim? That is do you have stats, human diversity measures, genetic maps, local histories to back it up?
An evolving system will always be diversifying (that is what the mutation does) and there's also surely a lot of racial mixing. Are the Sumerians a distinct racial, ethnic, cultural grouping now? Are the famous English local rivalries really between Picts, Angles, Saxons, Norman's, Vikings?
Please enlighten me.
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I do happen to think that races differ on average. But even if they didn't, cultural change is absolutely irreversible. For example, American culture irreversibly changed with the introduction of Irish, German, Italian, and Latin American immigrants. And even if cultural change could be reversed, real people have to live real lives over decades while enduring this change.
It is little consolation to those experiencing the soul-crushing pain of watching their communities deteriorate to be told, "It's okay, you only have to put up with this every single day for a few more decades, because then you'll die. Oh, you have descendants who will outlast you and you care about what your country and community is bequeathing them? Don't worry, the Multicultural New Economic Zone is all they'll ever know. They won't know what could have been. (We'll make sure of it.)"
What kind of world do you imagine where cultural change doesn't happen? Even if all migration was completely halted worldwide, the internet is constantly transmitting culture worldwide. The kind of world you seem to want to live in would require a literal return to the dark ages. And of course cultural mixing was still happening back then too. The reason we're speaking a language without gendered nouns is because Viking settlers "corrupted" English. The reason I used the word "do" in the first sentence of this post is because Celtic languages "corrupted" English.
Obviously some change is inevitable. That doesn't mean that we should favor any and all change that we have the power to mitigate. Unless you think immigration as it currently exists produces precisely zero additional cultural change compared to a world with no/little immigration, then we have the power (through curtailing immigration) to mitigate some of the inevitable cultural change.
I'm so perplexed by this line of argument that keeps popping up in immigration debates which is essentially "This thing [cultural change or immigration specifically] happened in the past, therefore it's a good thing, or therefore we can't/shouldn't do anything about it".
Do you think the communities that were ravaged by the Vikings - the men killed, the women taken as sex slaves, and the land occupied by essentially murderous rapist barbarians - would have had a thing or two to say about whether that "change" was desirable? And most important: If they could have stopped the Vikings, should they not have?
You're misunderstanding my point. I'm saying whatever it is you like about "American culture" or "Anglo-Saxon culture" or whatever specific culture it is that you're trying to preserve, that culture only exists because of cultural mixing and change. "Your culture" came about as a result of the Angles and the Jutes and the Danes and the Celts all mixing together.
If you're saying that cultural mixing is always bad, then why do you want to preserve "your" culture? If you're being logically consistent then you should also conclude that your own culture is bad because it is a "corrupted" admixture of other cultures.
If they could have stopped the Vikings from raping and pillaging, absolutely. But it's not clear why it would have been a good thing for them to stop the cultural admixture. If they had prevented the mixture from occurring, then the culture that you're trying to preserve wouldn't exist. So presumably you agree that this cultural mixing was good if you believe that your own culture existing is good.
Because it's my culture. Just like I would care about a different family if I had been born in a different family. I wasn't, so I don't.
Yes, all cultures came into being by mixture/corruption from various forces throughout history. So what? If I was a member of those cultures pre-mixture/corruption, I'd probably have advocated resisting that change. I wasn't, so I'm not. I'm not, because I don't care. I don't care, because I'm not a member of those past cultures.
I don't understand what's so complicated about this. I feel like I'm explaining to a Martian why we humans care about our families more than we care about other families.
If you care about your family, then you probably don't want your kids to grow up to marry their siblings or cousins. You want them to marry members of different families. Loving your family necessarily implies that you want your grandchildren to have fewer of your genes than your children, and for your great-grand-children to have fewer of your genes than your grandchildren. The long term health of your bloodline depends on it being mixed with other bloodlines. Trying to keep your bloodline unchanged for generations is a profoundly bad idea. Also, it's probably impossible without significant coercion. People generally don't want to marry their family members unless they are forced to do so.
The same is true of your culture. It was produced through a process of mixture, and it will only continue to exist and re-produce itself through a process of mixture. Trying to arrest this process will not preserve your culture, it will cause it to wither and die. And it is impossible to do this without extreme levels of coercion; you would need to ensure that your culture remains completely closed off from the outside world, which is a nearly impossible task.
If your ancestors had been effective at doing this, your culture wouldn't exist. The fact that you love your culture implies you are glad your ancestors didn't successfully prevent cultural mixing. Perhaps you should consider whether there is anything you can learn from your cultural ancestors.
Do you believe that all cultural elements are equal, or are some elements good and some bad?
If the latter, then you yourself do not want "a process of mixture". You want the right mixture, which delivers results in keeping with your core values, and you absolutely do not want those core values to change.
Or am I wrong, and you would accept our culture "mixing" with openly-genocidal racial supremacism, hardline blood-sacrifice-based theocracy, slavery, etc, etc, such that their practices became our practices?
A better metaphor might be the human body. To keep the body alive, you can't just eat sugar, or salt, or protean. You need water, fats, protean, vitamins and minerals, some of this and some of that. You need different foods at different times, depending on age or circumstance. What you don't need is a heaping plate of lead, crushed glass, or radioactive cobalt.
One might even extend the metaphor further: people adapt to their local environment. Everyone needs water, but water is often not perfectly clean. People living in an area acquire immunity to the local pathogens, such that they can safely drink water that would make a foreigner desperately sick. Even things that might seem identical on the face of it, might conceal hidden incompatibilities.
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Genetic problems from incestuous relations is a problem. There is no comparable problem for people of one culture interacting with people from that same culture.
And I'd probably care about whatever culture I would have ended up having. Just like if I was born into a different family, I would care about the family I was born into and not the one I have in the reality we live in.
At this point, I am convinced this conversation with you is not worth my time, sorry.
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