Bingbong
7d ago
Yeah. Massive Baumol effect makes arguing about relative GDP per capita frequently silly. QOL in most developed countries is not 4x the QOL that it is in upper-middle tier countries, despite the pay disparity. There are certainly poor countries in the world, but even then a rising tide in technology and developed world investments means that a lot of the benefits in living conditions have spread down the stack.
Bingbong
7d ago
I'm on a Spousal PR at the moment in a country that essentially offers me zero path to citizenship. I wouldn't mind a Passport if it fell into my lap (though I'd have to trade my stack of other passports for it, which is probably a bad deal) but I'm also prettymuch fine with the deal as it is.
Bingbong
7d ago
(Quick Google search, on that matter, suggests that annual number of spousal visas issued is about 15% the number of annual naturalisations in the US, so it can't be that big a factor.)
I'd also imagine it'd fall even further when you filtered for people of Multi-generational US ancestry bringing in partners, versus recent immigrants bring in diaspora spouses.
Bingbong
7d ago
I feel like a lot of migration policy was set and ideated during the days were there was a Destiny to Manifest, social spending was negligible and Western countries had industrial jobs that needed bulk labor. Being a lot looser made more sense on those terms. Also the transition of University from something that only elite people did, to being widely available, means that a lot of educational Visas are just not really doing what they originally were intended to do.
These days it's pretty clear any common-sense program that's established will be eroded by the courts and politicians till even the tightest Genius-only Immigration policy inevitably gets used to import Deliveroo Enthusiasts 50 years later.
Bingbong
7d ago
Plenty of countries don't allow massive runaway chain migration. A wife is probably fine, but when it's 20 years later and a swarm of everybody who she's even tangentially related to are trying to get into the West then it's clearly massively destructive of limited resources.
Bingbong
9d ago
True but the sheer size of some countries makes it impractical to be super competitive. Australia had a similar attempt at raking the Grocery Duopoly over the coals, and one of the common retorts was that they needed to bake in some margin else about 95% of the country is completely impractical to service due to sheer size, remoteness and lack of density.
Bingbong
10d ago
Even in those areas I'd argue the average man on the street would understand with the spirit of the regulations. 'Planes stay up in air, good' and 'Banks are doing complicated financey shit but need to keep a certain fraction inside to mitigate turbulence' are things that most people would like broadly agree with, I'd imagine?
Bingbong
10d ago
Of course, mid-2026, being worried about immigration feels like being worried about palace intrigues in Constantinople in 1453. I am a software developer, so I am first in line for getting replaced by the machines, but I certainly will not be the last. All white collar work is up for grabs. Blue collar work might still be around for a decade (present rate, no singularity and all that), but even before demand might crash. Unlike the PMC, the data centers will not need a lot of people to fix their cars.
Massively increasing the scale of the welfare state for random refugees who could become a significant voting bloc/force preferential treatment for the scarce jobs left might not be a great idea even if automation is ripping along?
Bingbong
10d ago
Also laundering large sums of crypto is a gigantic pain in the ass compared to most other assets since it's all public on the blockchain. North Korea isn't bad at it since they've got a very long time horizon to slowly drip the money out through certain protocols, but if you're the average hacker on the block and you manage to grab 200M off an exploit you're going to struggle to get much of that into spending money.
Bingbong
11d ago
They were settler-colonialists upon Indigenous British land and the duration of their stay is completely irrelevant.
Bingbong
12d ago
How much better are the conditions of the sort of mobile, young, typically-male 'asylum seeker' who has the resources and gumption to chain migrate halfway across the world. There's not that many countries left where there's genuine daily mortal peril, even if there's a lot where the local economy is Ennui and meh.
Morocco is currently in the news for the Spanish invasion. I've been to Morocco, I've got Moroccan friends (albeit heavily filtered to upper class/resources to get to Asia) and like I sympathize with the complaints of the average working class Moroccan 20 year old that they feel minimal hope, corruption is rife and it's hard to work within the domestic system. However, they're also not desperately poor (outside of a few marginal outlying areas where the attempted immigrants are decidedly not coming from), they have food and they have a reasonable life expectancy. They might be way behind in terms of GDP per capita but the difference between $12k PPP and $60k PPP is not a 5x life quality improvement.
Bingbong
12d ago
Upon the first Western ship arriving at the Chagos Islands there had been no prior inhabitation. The British randomly dropped a few Indians there as they are wont to do, but they are introduced by the British.
Bingbong
12d ago
Sort of a similar pathology to true TERFs, that is, those who are simultaneously hardcore feminists and hardcore anti-trans.
How is that at all contradictory? If anything hardcore feminists should be true TERFs and not give a shit about nonsense males wandering into their spaces. Trans stuff being wedged next to Feminism and Sexuality issues (and Islam half the time on top of it) does produce a bunch of contradictory stuff but I don't see how anybody can find TERFs contradictory to Feminism if they can just reject the femininity/possibility of transition.
Bingbong
13d ago
Agreed, it seems like it was conquered in 1415. If Ceuta is a colonial holding, then so are Wales or Istanbul.
True, but there's regularly pressure these days for Westerners to abandon areas like the Falklands and the Chagos where there was absolutely zero prior human habitation on vague anti-colonialist grounds.
Bingbong
13d ago
Especially when the forces in Spain that are prompting them to have conflicts with Israel have high overlap with the forces around 'no human is illegal' and the policies thereof.
Bingbong
13d ago
I think Jews are overrepresented in the top echelons of a lot of business and intellectual fields, partly due to intelligence and partly due to a bunch of ingroup factors. However, I've always felt that people assume that these Jews are way more monolithic and unified than they actually are. 'There are Jews who are hardcore zionists who want to drive the Palestinians into the Med' and 'There are Jews who laid the groundwork for a lot of modern international moralizing' are both true but I think the actual overlap is minimal and those groups both don't get on particularly well.
Bingbong
13d ago
I think saying Israel doesn't care about Islam whatsoever is a bit of a misnomer. They've got obvious reasons to not want hardcore Islamism to get much of a foothold in the region (since Jew purging is always gonna be a top 5 cause for hardcores), but they're also capable of negotiating sensibly with Islamic states that are willing to compromise on Koranic conduct for commercial reasons.
Bingbong
17d ago
Also the whole Comedy Festival loop is incredibly activist and will purge you for wrong think very happily. Atleast based on being into the Melbourne Comedy Festival scene for a couple years and knowing there's a high overlap with the Edinburgh talent pool. Melbourne famously renamed their 'best act of the show' award a couple years ago from Barry Humphries (Better known as Dame Edna) to a generic one due to him making fairly milquetoast anti-trans comments.
Bingbong
17d ago
'In a 2019 study, in a sample meant to be representative of the Israeli Jewish population, about 44.9% percent of Israel's Jewish population were categorized as Mizrahi (defined as having grandparents born in Asia or North Africa)'
Also Jews are mobile enough just using grandparents' birthplace seems like it's insufficiently informative. The Wikipedia article reads like if an Ashkenazi family moved circa 1945 and managed to have kids around then that their descendants would now be classified as Mizrahi even if they were palpably Ashkenazi. Also Sephardic erasure.
Bingbong
17d ago
The recent norms flip where antizionism is increasingly just a common position amongst the youth has led to a bunch of people just randomly ingesting a few basic slogans and not really having any full-formed ideas on the subject. It's getting towards anticolonialism territory where there's a lot of people who just think in terms of 'Israelis are not being nice, they should be nice and if they were nice we'd all get along' or 'Jews sacrificing babies to Cthulhu' level stuff.
Bingbong
17d ago
It's not like this is even particularly unique as a concept. The jarringness of the Islam/Pride coalition is silly, but like we've come off decades of 'Without the British colonializing SOCIETY WITH WIDESPREAD HUMAN SACRIFICE, they would have been natural progressives. They were progressive on gender due to SHAMEFUL EUNUCH CLASS being a third gender' takes
Bingbong
17d ago
Ever since antisemitism became appropriate in the social consciousness for every day conversation in the West, there's been a drift towards people going way over the top on it. I've got some problems with how Israelis and Jews operate, but also on the whole think that it's an admirable culture and that people 'Rabbis sacrificing 3 year olds to Moloch'posting are retarded.
Yeah they've transitioned into a University wealth in exchange for Visas program, but the initial idea behind gating immigration behind degrees was fomented when a degree was a top 10% thing to have.
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