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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter, which is a fairly surprising thing. I try to not post about India but this is kinda important and has to do with the US so here we go.

In the h1b debate, the point about country caps for skilled migration in the US recently picked up a lot of steam. Trump appointed Sriram as Senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and his tweets about the removal of h1b caps caused a lot of chaos. David Sacks and the entirety of the tech platoon was defending Sriram, the removal of country caps and ultimately sacks tweeted that Sriram will not control the vias issues since his department is AI.. Many also pointed out Srirams tweet where he openly advocates for active IQ Shredding. Spandrell who coined the term IQ shredders as an example makes a case against such migration as in the end both nations lose bio capital, sriram for instance believes America to be an idea over a people and is fine with all smart Indians leaving en masse which will drop the average iq permanently here. They won't have kids in the US either and the US will have to keep incentivising more people to join to keep up the rate of tech innovation.

India has the highest wait times for h1b visas due to having had IT sweatshops and plenty of fraudsters hustle the legal immigration route. You see most H1Bs coming from three states of 29 here and IT sweatshops which make the backbone of the Indian IT sector indulging in absolute fraud to the point of regular fines spanning more than a decade, fun fact, the founder of Infosys is Former English Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks Father in law. It is a difficult thing, India itself has had anti-migration sentiments within the country as the largest IT hub Bangalore has people routinely asking for fewer migrants as they are not Kannadigas, the local ethnic group.

The political class, however, was unanimously criticising it. Blake Masters, another Theil Capital person turned politician, even asked for the total removal of H1Bs and only keeping O1 visas. All factions of the right did this, including Andrew Torba, Zionists like Laura Loomer, dissidents like BAP, Captive Dreamer and ofc Groypers.

Full disclosure, I am an Indian guy who is in tech, I am still in my home country and cannot comment on this topic without being called a self-hating Indian. India has fat tails and a lot of Indians are not politically scheming migrants, at least not the competent ones. I can't lie about this on an anonymous forum here since I don't like lying but inevitably I also cannot say this publicly as I don't want decent people to get cornered. I am an Indian dude who very likely may migrate after all. It is far easier to simply generalise groups, Tutsis or Yorubas are simply seen as Africans. The Amerikaner is correct but if you are an upper-caste male here, you will never sniff political power, anyone who is smart will be made to live as a nerd and might as well be a nerd doing cooler stuff in a better society than live here and be treated like garbage.

Trump is unlikely to curb the h1b but the most likely outcome will still be more Telugus and other south Indian states having a small number of sweatshops gaming the migration in the US even harder like Gujarati and Punjabis in Canada and rest of the anglosphere.

I have half followed the discourse on this and it seems like there is an obvious solution that would appease both sides no?

America accepts roughly one million immigrants per year only a tiny fraction of which are H1B high-skill conversions. There are about 85,000 H1Bs granted and while most ultimately convert to Green card we’re talking about 5-10% of total immigration. The biggest category is still chain migration of low-skilled Asians and Latinos. Then of course there are high and highly variable flows of illegals.

So, clamp down on illegal and deport / self-deport and reduce the chain migration of legal migrants AND double H1B. We could get total immigration down to half a million or so and still get more best and brightest. There could also be better vetting and in-US testing so you don’t end up with ubiquitous Indian scamming like we have in Canada.

I dunno, doesn’t this seem obvious?

Things continue to escalate, with Musk now Tweeting:

The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.

Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

Truly at a crossroads. Not sure how Musk comes back from just valuing America as a repository for importing foreigners. Bridge is burned.

This makes me wonder why Musk even backed Trump in the first place. Surely he must have realized that the Democrats are the much more immigration-friendly party.

Did he think he'd be able to control Trump and the Republicans? if so, he's going to realize the limits of how much power money can buy you.

The Democrat administration is/was super hostile to Tech. Making MAGA more libertarian on Tech to get their support wasn't a bad idea. But in exchange the Tech Bros had to not try to flood the country with immigrants but they are going to insist on doing that so this Alliance is breaking before inauguration even begins.

but they are going to insist on doing that so this Alliance is breaking before inauguration even begins.

Ejecting Musk is not necessarily the same thing as breaking the alliance with Big Tech, Bezos or Zuckerberg have sent some signals they'd be willing to work with Trump. The question is if they can accept the "no mass-migration" position, or actually hold the same beliefs as Elon, except they'd work towards them via backroom deals instead of sperging out on Twitter.

how were the Democrats unfriendly to Tech? especially the American big tech sector. They wanted to ban TikTok (foreign competition) while giving big subsidies to Tesla and lots of nasa dollars to SpaceX. They allowed the Twitter buyout to go through and basically let Musk do whatever he wanted.

Besides what SS raised, there's been a few more government movements against Big Tech than was typical during Biden's admin. There's probably more examples.

The Biden Administration has been very hostile to Musk, with even MSM onlookers admitting there's political motivation behind the regulatory scrutiny. This was even before Musk went Republican.

California is hostile to tech/business in general, so Musk pulled out a lot of stuff from California.

Harris was proposing some tech unfriendly stuff as well like taxing unrealized capital gains.

It was a good opportunity for Republicans to gain support by opposing the tech unfriendly Democrat policies, but if Musk is going to draw a line in the sand at H1B then the alliance is not going to last long.

As an Indian I would want migration to exist given I want to git gud and not be in little leagues, as an american I would not.

I should write an essay on this

I am confused about the entire H1B debate.

Are there reasons Musk cannot just pursue cheap Indian labor on Indian soil? Software can be sent from India to USA without restriction, so what is the benefit of increasing H1B for him or any other tech company located in the US?

so what is the benefit of increasing H1B for him or any other tech company located in the US?

Musk genuinely believes in making America great, unlike the nativists who merely treat it as a slogan (see how they are trying to twist it into "make Americans great" and trying to elide the fact that there is a large contingent of Americans who are the main culprit holding America back- and yes there are lots of whites in this group). Cheap Indian labour on Indian soil doesn't propel America (and by extension, Humanity, since America is the current global hegemon) further. Plus you have networking effects from the best of the best being close to other best of the best.

I struggle to believe that bringing those into America is necessary to moving humanity forward, but I am an American who still believes in nativist superiority.

No because India has runs on n caste envy and very few are actually smart even within the smart groups, the rest just hate them.

As an Indian I like the h1b but if I were a citizen with schemes like h1b I'd have them shut down. I'll write in long form about this.

Elon Musk demands that Republican party be purged of “contemptible fools”, "hateful, unrepentant racists" because otherwise Indians won't vote for it (not that they were likely to anyway) and therefore it will fail.

He's certainly doubling down.

He already started banning accounts, all for h1b? I was always sketpical about his claims of being superman or super moral. They will purge accounts more now.

We need to import more Indians otherwise Indians won't vote for us. Big reminder to @Hoffmeister for how "model minorities" who commit no crime and cause no terrorism still irrevocably shift politics in a direction against White people.

If you’re going to tag me, do it right!

At no point have I denied that high-skilled minorities are liable to use their political and cultural power to shift the policy and culture toward their own interests and away from the interests of the legacy population. If you recall, that was exactly what I said was the crux of the argument against increasing “high-skilled immigration”. My whole point is simply that this is a distinct and separate issue from the issues caused by underclass immigrants. The model minorities are (at least potentially) bad, but not for the same reason the non-model ones are.

It's very remarkable, another reminder for how far "DR" has come, it is very well-represented in the most public policy debate since the election. The debate is obviously being followed by Trump and Vance and will most likely have real political implications. What they are remains to be seen. But it's the most I've ever seen the entire timeline dominated by a public policy debate like this.

I was 19 when I first got introduced to neoreaction and felt I was alone since no one else in the sane world would discuss identitarian or spiritual issues that plague people.

In half a decade, we finally have seen things change. Remains to be seen how thermidor is utilised.

Update - the situation has worsened with Laura Loomer and other conservatives losing thier verification status and Elon calling them all subtards.

Elon seems to be pushing this idea that Americans are retarded and need mass legal migration by Indians as happened in Canada and UK which is a stupid idea. It didn't even work economically.

It is interesting to see some themes reappearing:

Identity politics for the migrants and bashing the natives and their racial qualities. While Elon has already started changing policies.

I have also seen some downplayment of discrimination towards white Americans.

Multicultural nation destroying liberalism and the self serving agenda of foreign nationalists who align with it against the native group is at the center of the problems with the politically correct left. It is directly related to oppressing dissenters, and racist discrimination at the expense of natives, and of course the very act of destroying nations, is it self a massive moral problem to put it lightly. Allying with foreign nationalists who are racist is another facet of this and we saw the explosion of anti-white comentary from Indians. The multicultural liberal always sides with such people and tolerates, ignores, downplays, excuse if not persecute those who notice and opposite.

I expect to observe liberals who claim to be antiwoke to continue to share some of the worst qualities of the woke and to implement the kind of authoritarian double standard policies they claimed to oppose. The story of big business types who are looking for cheap labor aligning with this ideology and its anarchotyranical elements isn't a new thing neither. This also raises the issue of parasitism of such big business types since the migration comes with social, political and economic costs that are passed to the rest of society.

You can't have a nice "non woke" multicultural liberalism. Which is in fact the main liberalism that is on offer today.

Musk has shown what side he is on.

You mean the man who decided to make ICE cars obsolete, the man whose stated goal is taking the humanity to Mars is a progressive? What a surprising turn of events!

In all seriousness, it's sad that wokism has somehow become synonymous with progressivism. If Xavier Musk had invented a machine that unleased a swarm of nanobots rewriting him into a biological female, Elon would've been fucking elated to meet Vivian Musk.

He kinda reminds me of an ex-Soviet Jewish engineer, the one who arrives in New York or Jerusalem in 1988 and immediately starts suggesting ways of improving the situation by eliminating Negroes/Arabs. "What do you mean you can't just deport them to Alabama? According to my calculations, if you mobilize the National Guard of the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut you can completely encircle Harlem, eliminate any armed resistance and transport them in just X goods vans, which is just Y trains. I am sure the CSX has better signaling than the Soviet railways and can handle this short-term burst of traffic."

le based Elon turned out not to be very based™️ after all,

We clearly have very different definitions of Based. Displaying traits of Elite Human capital is based in my book, and Elon not wavering despite the wailing and gnashing of millions of Low Human Capital to me demonstrates a level of resolve few have.

  • -13

Weaponizing what is actually a very useful soft power tool against your new allies after one online disagreement is right up there with other "Elite Human Capital" moves like offering a solution to save some trapped kids, then calling someone closer to the situation a pedophile because he disagreed.

Can't believe Hanania has successfully sold "being an asshole on Twitter" as a sign of EHC.

Elon is a thin-skinned narcissist. Which is fine. But his new political project relies on maintaining an alliance with an even bigger one. Going around de-verifying Trump acolytes over some bullshit is not probably not a good play.

"Elite Human Capital" moves like offering a solution to save some trapped kids, then calling someone closer to the situation a pedophile because he disagreed.

What I've always found interesting about the insult is that I thought way more people knew what goes on in Thailand, but then a ton of people were bewildered about Musk "randomly" calling "some guy" a pedophile.

The man in question is a white expat living in Thailand, and white men don't move to Thailand for the diving.

exactly how high a percentage of child prostitution do you think is necessary to be justified in calling someone a pedo for moving to that country, with no other evidence?

Less percentage, though as the article says it's believed a minimum of 40%. Thailand is the sex tourism capital of the world, it's also the child prostitution capital of the world. Legal prostitution where almost half are children, very bad signaling from a white man living there not for obvious foreign professional reasons — such as being: a director or otherwise highly-compensated role in a multinational corporation; an entrepreneur on a temporary visit pursuing a deal; a journalist on assignment; a diplomat or attaché — and making it fair to suspect ill motive. It gets worse, the man, Vernon Unsworth, lives or lived in Chiang Rai, that's a city in Thailand's rural and mountainous north. So it's not just that he moved to the country that's the world capital of child prostitution, he moved to the region in that country where it's most prolific.

I wouldn't accuse him of being a pedophile on this alone but I would tell him honestly, the choices he has made have drastically increased the probability and consequently the reasonability of suspecting him of pedophilia. Enough he has forfeited fair indignation when someone calls him a pedo.

I would sooner suspect a man who has been to the sex tourism capital of the world than the one who chose to live there. The former man's motivation is scrutable, the latter's more complicated. I have not heard of many people who love brothels so much they'd live next door for the convenience.

That's why I find Musk's signaling worse, he went on the tangent of a largely baseless accusation in a personal spat.

More comments

I thought the child prostitution had moved to... Cambodia now? I'm not wise to the ways of the early access passport bros, but I do remember some BBC article about how the thai govt crackdown had pushed it to poorer countries.

"ping pong ball"

I think his actions are incredibly based but utterly lacking in 5D chess by not holding it together even until Trump is inaugurated.

Going to go wash my fingers after typing that.

Many South Asians are, of course, elite human capital, but I have yet to be persuaded that the average Infosys H-1B is. And again, I say that as someone who has no strong opinion on H1B numbers while so much unskilled immigration is a bigger priority, even though I think the current number of the former is likely too high and they should be auctioned rather than the subject of a lottery.

Absolutely agree on the auction thing, although I personally think the number of H1-Bs is too low. The lottery system is the product of yet another brain worm commonly found in Homo sapiens occidentalis where they are not content to merely pick all of the best because it would be oh so unfair if all the underdogs lose out just because there are better specimens them in the pool...

Would be interesting at the very least to see what the H1-B market clearing price is at different levels of visa availability. We could even have derivatives like H1-B futures which allow firms to hedge away the risk of prices spiking in future years and guarantee a certain steady level of supply years down the line if they know roughly how many people they'll be needing! And of course whereever there's a derivatives market there will be market makers and speculators! I can already sort of think of a simple trading strategy for pricing them...

I can’t speak for H1B specifically but the proper use of lotteries, like sumptuary laws, is preventing the expenditure of much blood and gold for objectively tiny gains. Putting your child through hours of cram school every week to increase their grades by 1%, say.

I think the auction would be the best system, and would probably also balance out migrant demographics because professionals in Europe would be more willing to apply if there was some certainty; right now the process is dominated by Indians not because nobody else wants to move to the US but because of the specific ‘spray and pray’ strategy that these big tech consulting / outsourcing firms use where they have all 100,000 engineers a year apply and 5,000 or whatever get it.

Lack of certainty is yet another thing which I find absolutely BS about many things in the US. For instance whether or not particular medical treatments are covered on insurance. I know people who were told their procedure wasn't covered but after multiple hours of calling their insurers and angry back and forth finally got told it was. This type of dithering is bad, either you the insurer cover something or you don't; what exactly you cover should be made available in an easy to access list and it should not be possible to argue with you about what the policy you are selling includes to get other treatments OK'd. That just benefits the time rich at the expense of the time poor, who are by and large people who's time is valuable and so those who likely actually contribute to society.

Pick a damn list of treatments, make it public and stick to it. If that list means people stop using you because your product is overpriced for what it offers well then it's your own fault which you can fix by making another product which covers more things at a similar price.

Of course this lack of certainty also extends to other places like College admissions etc.: I was decently (>50%) sure I would be given an offer by the Oxbridge college I applied to at the moment of application based on my assessment of my abilities, you can't say anything like that for any Ivy tier US university unless you're like a legacy athlete or something.

There’s an entire grifter set that I wish we could all just ban collectively (not really, but I wish people would stop falling for them). People like Laura Loomer, Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Kyle Kulinski, Saagar Enjeti, Milo Yionoppolus, and I’m sure many others seem to exist just to post and share comically misinformed takes about current events and rile people up.

What's next? Matthew Yglesias meeting with Trump to explain the benefits of his immigration program?

One billion Americans in a hundred years would be great. We could even call it Project 2125 or something...

it’s been a great few days for memes

Amazing. My (already high) opinion of musk has gone up two notches. These people are just as bad as the woke in trying to prevent humanity from achieving true Greatness. The woke were completely right that these people didn't dislike DEI, they only disliked who it was used to benefit, and btw, poor Blacks and Hispanics are a lot more sympathetic than by all accounts overpaid American white tech workers. Even the longshore men union is more sympathetic when it comes to asking for gibs than American tech workers (yes the US is richer than other developed countries but the wage premium American tech workers command is massive compared to just as well trained tech workers in the UK for example). Borders are meant to provide national security, they aren't meant to be a DEI scheme for those who're already gonna live 99th percentile lives when averaged out over all of humanity.

  • -23

Borders are meant to provide national security, they aren't meant to be a DEI scheme for those who're already gonna live 99th percentile lives when averaged out over all of humanity.

Borders are absolutely intended to serve the interests of the people represented by the government, and to elevate the interest of those people above foreigners. The gambit of accusing the anti-H1B crowd of "DEI" is rhetorically desperate since it's clearly anti-diversifying the workplace and anti-equitable and anti-inclusive. Yes, you were born abroad so we are going to discriminate against you. If our government does not do that it is illegitimate. And European countries are the only ones in the world that are expected to take the tact you imply here. Is Israel meant to be something other than a "DEI" schema for the Jews?

White American tech workers are not overpaid, it is not their fault that countries like India are totally incapable of generating a civilization that could reciprocate employment opportunity. Instead, you get entitled Indians demanding access to European civilization and pretending it's all about "meritocracy" when their homelands have absolutely nothing to offer Europeans.

Trump is unlikely to curb the h1b

Why do you say this? I think he is as likely as not to follow through with this, its at least as likely as him doing anything else he said he would do that isn't totally impossible.

He said he will staple green cards to diplomas and that US needs mass legal skilled immigration because something something AI. I think he promised to deal with h1b when he ran in 2016, not now?

They won't have kids in the US either

I'm a white American tech worker. I have lots of Indian immigrant coworkers. In my entirely unscientific personal experience, it seems like immigrant Indian tech workers have more kids than white American tech workers.

Awesome, so it’ll help us address the fertility crisis too

America is so back

In my own entirely unscientific personal experience, most Indian couples here in the Northeast tend to have one kid or none at all. It fits with the general trend of India's birthrate declining and the diaspora thus following the trend of their co-ethnics as well as the new society they're in. The birthrate is probably still at least somewhat higher than American tech workers, but I suspect that doesn't last a generation.

There's a strong scientific reason to be against H1B entirely, even if it increases GDP:

  1. Humans only developed the ability to form social groups because it benefitted gene proliferation. Community, society, and civilization are intrinsically tied to what benefits human gene proliferation.
  2. H1B and other forms of immigration actively damage the reproductive success of Americans because (a) our national fertility is low, (b) rival nations have a comparatively enormous population and take in few immigrants, (c) they take the highest wage jobs, (d) they take up physical space in the territory and (e) they accrue political power.
  3. H1B violates the only reason we are able, as humans, to form countries and organize socially at all, making it a rare case of an objectively bad evolutionary decision.

A funny hypothetical illustrates the point. Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success. We have lost in the deepest sense, because we have betrayed the whole purpose of cognition. Rather than making America competitive, we would have forever lost the evolutionary competition which designed our very minds. Probably because evolution selects for intuitive prosocial genes like empathy (flip-side: out-group prejudice) and not just raw abstract pattern recognition. We would have lost the game of life, and gained a small footnote in the future Hindi history of the world. We would have even reneged on the first words God ever spoke to us — “be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth”.

Obviously, 200 million is excessive for the point of a thought experiment. But this just means that the damage occurs to a lesser degree. Indian Americans are 1.5% of America, the highest paid group in America, and the fastest-growing demographic. Let’s say that a generous .1% are geniuses who have aided American military might. This reduces American reproductive success by at least 1.4%, arguably more because of the higher socioeconomic position. The greatest risk is that they begin to use their high earnings to lobby for more Indians, which seems to be happening presently.

I find it hard to believe that this arrangement is even in the evolutionary interests of “elite human capital”. If you are Elon Musk, you have more genes in common with the average American than the average Indian. If Elon is crowned Eternal King of India and begins the genetic proliferation that befits a medieval royal — along with a haram of beautiful nubiles — it’s doubtful that he would ever reach the level of similarity that he already has with Americans generally, and Northern European Americans specifically. So what is even the biological point? It makes no sense from a scientific point of view. It is a form of biological self-harm.

It’s weird that no one actually brings up the science in these discussions, only the economic studies. But the economic studies are only valuable when subordinated to and weighed by biology. Okay, economists are saying that if we add the Indians then the CEO gets another ski home… but the biology is quite clear that this is ultimately not in anyone’s interest, even the CEOs, and goes against natural design (both evolution and God). If you guys really want the ski homes then we can invade the Himalayas.

Bullshit, I offer a counterpoint:

The JD Vance strategy

Seriously though, admixture is human. Europeans are full of Neanderthal genes, heck my DNA report shows that I have Inuit genes and it's likely because my Viking ancestors stole women from everywhere they went.

It’s in our nature.

Fearing the loss of advanced pattern recognition because some people might hook up with Indians is silly, you’ll just end up with some little mixed Srinivasan Ramanujans running around.

Usha is already here. Usha is also not average H1B. She was a Supreme Court law clerk and her mother was a provost at UCSD. Also, people are likely to pair if they fall in love, and we are deciding a policy about whether or not to even invite Indians to the continent. I’m not trying to dictate whether people in love should marry or not.

admixture is human

Hahahah, tell that to Usha’s ancestors! Who for three millennia as Brahmins conserved as much indo-aryan DNA as they could by instituting a genetic caste system in which they have eternal control over society, which the Hindu religious system revolves around, which they created for that purpose. Are you curious why Brahmin IQ is high? Or why India’s Indo-Aryan DNA is exclusively patrilineal and your Inuit DNA is matrilineal? Men invade and conquer women because that is their genetic divine mandate, because that expands their genes, which at least Hinduism has the honesty to accept. Seriously, violating this is the nearest science has to violating the will of God: this principle is your creator, it is responsible for your very life and cognition, and you can appreciate it because this creator endowed you with thought, so that your reason can understand it if for some reason your instincts fail. Yes, you have the free choice to disobey your creator, in which case your genetic line will eventually lose eternal life.

Idk.

My ancestors are from northern Europe.

You know what that means?

I come from the people who more than any other group bred with a different freaking species than my own.

If admixture between races offends God than my lineage has already been damned since the last glacial maximum.

That's actually not what that means. The title for most archaic admixture currently belongs to Melanesians (especially Negritos), who have 4-6% Denisovan admixture on top of the 1-4% Neanderthal admixture of Eurasians.

I come from the people who more than any other group bred with a different freaking species than my own. If admixture between races offends God than my lineage has already been damned since the last glacial maximum.

Yes, or even the last deluge. We read this in Genesis 6.

There is pretty good evidence that immigration has next to no effect on wages. It may even be slightly positive. Everyone who complains about immigrants suppressing wages seems to think that labour demand is fixed. Growing the population increases the supply and demand for labour about equally.

The idea that immigrants take up too much physical space also seems absurd given that Americans congregate in places with higher density. Being around people is a net benefit. There is lots of empty space for those who disagree.

  • -10

immigration

We are talking about a very specific type of immigration which takes a somewhat higher income job. Which analysis did you read that focuses on H1B and first subtracts all of these immigrants from the “effect on wages”, eg the effect on non-H1B wages? When Elon hires H1-B for Tesla, do you really think that (checks net worth) he would not be able to spend 20k more on an American? It’s either H1-B or he closes shop? The profits and net worths of the highest H1B recipients prove that it is a way to hoard profit for owners and investors.

immigrants take up too much space is absurd

If humans tend to congregate around urban areas, which they do in both America and horribly dense India, then there is limited space for them, which means… they take up space. “Find a coding job in North Dakota” is not a real criticism here. The Indians can just as well find a job in the Himalayas.

Ok, but the evolutionary argument applies to ellis island migration just the same- Italians aren't founding stock.

Some of my ancestors are of that, but the answer to this question is something along the lines of, "Yes And?"

Much of the things the anti-immigration advocates of that era did come to pass. We did have cities grow machines. We did have proliferation of crime. We did have expansions of ethnic tensions and permanent expansions of the federal government. The naysayers were fairly correct about the downsides. Did perhaps the upside of growing the labor pool fast enough that we could be the turning point in 2 world wars where our homeland went largely untouched thus making us the preeminent power in the world for over a half century outweigh that? Unknown. Perhaps it did, perhaps the other side of my family would have made up for all of that via some other force of will. I think this question is quite hard, but I still think a few of my ancestors and their kin should have voted against FDR more. They were stupid in at least that specific arena.

The same is true of the 1965ers. Most of the warnings have came to pass. Also America has continued to be the best (among, IMO a very weak selection of states on offer) larger power. Are we more bestest or less bestest (I think there is no scenario where America is not #1 without that immigration reform), obviously we cannot know. I say probably less. We continue to get richer mostly based on stepping on rakes less than other countries with the potential to be the best, not by outright excellence. This is why Peter Theil's idea of a new floating city state is absurd. If it was successful, America would nuke it. Well the regime would first try to destroy it by other means, but eventually it would be considered worse than Hitler and would be nuked.

The people against importing the Italians and Irish did have a point.

It was about religion, not genes. Otherwise, it would make no sense to complain about Irish immigration while pushing for more German immigration.

It applies at all scales from the family on up. Still, there is a threshold of distance between A and B in genetic space below which A and B perceive each other as partners and beyond which they perceive each other as competitors. All white Europeans are inside the genetic similarity threshold.

You do know that the bloodiest wars in world history* have been fought by white Christian Europeans against other white Christian Europeans, or by Han Chinese against other Han Chinese?

So was the bloodiest war in the history of the Americas (the American Civil War).

* Conquests of Genghis Khan being the possible exception.

So? You can fight wars against people on the "same" side of the same/other sociogenetic divide

But, why? Yes Italians are closer to the english midlands(where the WASPs came from) or the scottish marches(where southern Whites came from), genetically, than Indians. But they're still Indo-European. They're both closer than the west Africans who make up the single largest group in our founding stock.

Why draw the line there? What's special about white skin(and dot-Indians have more European than not features in other respects)? Literally.

I'm totally onboard with "Indian culture is bad and we shouldn't let them in because they're savages who worship cows/can't stop fucking close relatives/are awful scam artists/whatever". I'm onboard with "Their HBD is bad, Italians' wasn't". But there's no particular reason to draw the genetic similarity lines at the Bosporous and Gibraltar.

They're both closer than the west Africans who make up the single largest group in our founding stock.

Surely if we're going to reduce people to continent size blocks, then west Europeans are a larger part of our founding stock than west Africans.

This is rhetorical trick similar to saying "Mohammad is the most common name for baby boys in England" and leading people to inaccurately believe that a majority of boys born in England are Muslim.

/pol/ had the kill shot years ago. How are they good for us but not their home country?

If we answered that question truthfully we could have a serious discussion about exact numbers to allow, rather than having to "dance" around it with the sledgehammer of the elimination of all H-class Visas. We could say, biologically, there is a maximum and knowable quantity of immigration candidates from any given country with average standards of living below the West.

Then, if we were allowing more than that umber, we would know either our standards were slipping, or they were being gamed.

Europeans and certain other populations exhibit a high average level of civilized behavior, call that inclination h, following from g. Russia is very close to the US, in many ways more civilized, but I would still feel confident saying measured on the whole, Russia is one standard deviation below America in h value. One step of degradation below Russia is not India, so India must be at least two steps below Russia, which means it is no closer than three below the United States. In comparison, Iceland is probably one sigma above, and Japan two.

I think this is imprecise, that there are external factors to an extent, but there are such obvious differences looking from India, to the US, to Japan, that there's something intrinsic and gestalt that speaks broadly to the peoples, and that does feel close enough.

For an Indian immigrant to match, they would need come from a population at least 3 sigmas above India's average h. This rejects almost all Indians, from 1.4 billion to 1.9 million. It's less than that, though, because if you want to improve a country, you can't bring in people who are only average. So the actual line starts at 4 sigmas, and that reduces it to about 45,000.

I have no problem believing there are about 45,000 Indians who would contribute to the strength of America. It's math. Here's the problem, I would assume a minimum of half of those persons intend to live out their days as citizens of India, using their talents in their own country for their own gain. Also consider others in that population will have immigrated elsewhere, such as Europe. This means short of calamitous conditions wherein only America is a viable immigration target, we should have a soft cap of 20,000, to in no circumstances exceed the hard cap of 45,000.

We're well over that. In 2023 (Page 32) there were 279,386 H-1B issuances to Indian nationals. Ignore everything I just wrote, I know that number immediately as gross excess. The US isn't lacking, in anything, to the degree that it requires the importation of nearly 300,000 laborers from a single country. Especially when you remember, that's just the H-1B admissions.

Despite this, it is conceivable the number could exceed 45,000, but only if we instituted extremely strict requirements, ensured those requirements could not be gamed, abolished birthright citizenship including retroactive revocations, etc.

Who says they aren't good for their own country?

The immigrants say that when they leave and don't come back.

There are Mexican immigrants who would be good for Mexico even though they aren't good for the US. The Mexican government has built a dependence on those people leaving. They're dissatisfied and highly motivated compared to their remaining countrymen, they could be rallied by a populist like Bukele as he oversees a new and greater Porfiriato and grinds the cartels into the dirt. Years ago I wouldn't have thought it possible, and Bukele is in a different situation since El Salvador is so small and Mara Salvatrucha members have the most convenient habit of getting MS-13 tattooed on their faces, but a horrifically violent gang just bent over when a figure finally stood tall and said enough. The cartels are also horrifically violent, but as roughly as I know Mexican history, I know they're just the latest examples of Mexico's long history with caudillos, they are tolerated, and this is very important: the cartels exist because the Mexican government allows to exist. Porfirio repeatedly crushed such groups when they failed to acquiesce.

Bukele could be in the States, enjoying life in luxury as a highly successful private citizen. Strict immigration controls wouldn't stop a man like that, he'd find a way through or immigrate to some other highly civilized nation. But El Salvador was the violently shaking pressure cooker, primed for the arrival of Bukele, and Mexico would be that, too, if they didn't have the release valve of all the people who would historically be the greatest agitators for change instead just crossing a border. So that man might be in Mexico, but I think it unfortunately all too likely he's instead in the States, a private citizen doing very well for himself, but who could have been Mexico's Bukele or superior Porfirio.

India, with 1.4 billion people, is a little harder, and I'm not remotely qualified to speculate on what would improve it except that I know it's not 300,000 H-1Bs.

If anything they are the only thing preventing their country from going to the dogs. If you had Brunel +50 million chimps stranded on an island the average living quality and infrastructure will be chimp tier, even though Brunel on his own would be a massive positive contributor (but when all you have is chimps you really can't do much more than a few small bridges). America should take Brunel and leave the chimps behind and if the choice is between giving an engineering job to the foreign Brunel or a local chimp, well then Brunel should get it.

Who's Brunel?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who is considered "one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history", "one of the 19th-century engineering giants", and "one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, [who] changed the face of the English landscape with his groundbreaking designs and ingenious constructions". Brunel built dockyards, the Great Western Railway (GWR), a series of steamships including the first purpose-built transatlantic steamship, and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering.

In 2002, Brunel was placed second in a BBC public poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons".

If a modern Indian Brunel couldn't make comparably sweeping improvements to India then it would be absolutely true that he should be in the States, and it would also be absolutely true that the total immigration accepted from India would need to be moved even lower from 20,000 to a 5 sigma 400, so 200.

This analysis assumes that there is a single Indian population whose traits are normally distributed, but it seems pretty clear that there are in fact dozens of genetically and culturally distinct subpopulations that differ in average g and h by at least 1 or 2 SD's. This plays havoc with any tail-end estimates and there is an unfortunate lack of data in this area.

I would say, and I did say, it seems reasonable to consider factor h civility of a nation something gestalt. If 150 million Indians truly abhor their living conditions, their h is nevertheless indicted for failing to effect change.

It's charitable anyway to consider it a collective trait of people from India, and that's because with so many ethnic groups of presumably differing h, the alternative is a general ban.

Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.

This would only be true if Indian immigrants and their descendants never married into the existing American population and remained a culturally and genetically distinct population indefinitely, which is clearly not the case. The children of elite Indian immigrants marry their White, Jewish, and East Asian peers all the time and have children who are about as Indian as Japanese curry powder. There are other countries where this is not so e.g. the UK where British-born Indian Muslims and Pakistanis seem to often get arranged marriages with peasant girls from back home, leaving their children in a perpetually unassimilated state, but even the few arranged marriages I know of in the US occur between two second generation immigrants who themselves are detached from the social networks that would allow them to continue the practice.

Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race? From the perspective of a single gene perhaps, but from that point of view the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all. I'm reminded of Roman naming conventions here, to wit: "The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever." With all due respect to the Romans, who I, like any man, remember fondly at least once per day, the mere thought of such stultifying monotony makes me want to fedpost.

Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%. Because Indian genes will still make up 99% of India if +200mil were dropped in America. American genes simply reduce their prevalence (if admixed) or ability to proliferate (if no intermarriage occurs). It makes no sense to do this given what we know about our design: with instincts to form groups exclusively for the purposes of gene proliferation. Who would ever form a group that specifically reduces their reproductive success?

Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race

If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.

the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all

Humans did not evolve to be cloned, they evolved to live in somewhat small bands where 3rd-4th degree cousin marriage was common.

If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.

Only if they're immigrants (who wouldn't otherwise have come, else they reproduce with each other) and fertility's perfectly elastic with population density (so that the home country reproduces more to replace the emigrants and the destination country reproduces less because of the immigrants). I don't think fertility's perfectly elastic with population transfer, though as I've previously noted it's not zero either.

Even if it is not elastic with density, these people are going to be in your territory forever, whereas the original people still maintain dominion over their territory. So they have thousands of years to change fertility in their country where they often make up 99% inhabitants, but you introduced genes that will stay in your territory forever.

American genes

I'm an American. The past few generations of my family were Americans.

What on Earth is an "American gene"? I don't mean that as an obtuse "pretending I can't understand words" rhetorical trick. My ancestors are from Ireland. You mean my Irish genes were transformed into American genes? Like how most white Americans are predominantly some mix of English and German genes, now transformed into "American genes"?

I literally explained this in the parentheses of the first sentence. If you are an American, of literally any ancestry, then your reproductive success is harmed with the introduction of Indian genes. Your biological success is reduced by introducing H1B immigrants, especially as it makes eventual citizenship more likely. Because this is a new introduction at a time when every group is low TF. And so this applies to all non-Indian Americans. Are you American? You have genes and are affected.

I don't see how this harms my reproductive success. The presence or absence of such people is unrelated to me having kids. Unless I have children with one of them, in which case it is to my reproductive benefit.

We're missing some important point here to tie this together.

American population cannot growth infinitely and you are filling the land with far away genes. These people disproportionately take high income jobs. It deters the government and industries from problem-solving about our own fertility. Even nepotism aside, which is also an issue, it affects your reproductive success*. And you shouldn’t be sure that your descendants are going to forever mate in a separate sphere. Also, H1B is mostly men. Also, if you would only reproductive if you saw a woman who originates 8000 miles away, you are a genetic anomaly.

Those H1B men aren't taking all the women. Our reproductive success or lack of it doesn't hinge on half a million H1B workers hyper-concentrated in a few major cities. They're a small and irrelevant group in this matter. I've never been denied a relationship because an Indian guy took her first. That's not a problem for American men.

I know a number of American men who married immigrant women and have kids with them. Those particular immigrants were apparently to those men's reproductive advantage. Not to generalize too much from a few people I personally know.

There are some guys who appear to excessively like a certain sort of woman. Only dating Hispanics or Asians or something. I'm not that way, but I'm not going to judge them. If they are overcome with lust for women who traveled 5000 miles to live in the US, so be it. Now that I'm older, I know older couples and those guys typically married one of those women. I'm calling that success according to their preferences.

Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%

It's by no means an implausible mid-term future scenario for the US to have higher fertility than India; indeed, the USA being a top three developed world country for TFR(competing with France for #2) is very much in the cards and India's fertility is plummeting and already below replacement.

Americans (of any non-indian ethnicity) lose the biological competition regardless of whether intermarriage occurs 100%, 50%, or 0%. Because Indian genes will still make up 99% of India if +200mil were dropped in America.

Why should it matter to us how many total Indians there are in the world? There could be two or three billion people on the subcontinent and they would still be living in miserable squalor and unable to influence global affairs. Countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia have populations in the hundreds of millions and can be freely ignored or bullied by more powerful states a fraction of their size.

If this continues, the genes of that organism will go extinct. Their genes are reduced by half per iteration.

Given the fact that the urban areas where such people tend to live are fertility shredders, the proportion of Asian ancestry in their descendants will be lower than you might expect (cf. the mixed urban population of the Roman empire left hardly any genetic trace in modern Italians and yet they did leave behind many cultural and literary works of value).

Humans did not evolve to be cloned, they evolved to live in somewhat small bands where 3rd-4th degree cousin marriage was common.

That is true, and yet I am still different from a Papuan tribesman not simply by culture or upbringing, but because my ancestors underwent thousands of years of genetic pacification and adaptation to living in settled agricultural communities with higher population densities. The software may not yet be out of beta, but I have no desire to scrap it all and return to the jungle. Thankfully, there are no countries with millions of hunter-gatherers for mindkilled liberals to suggest we take in, but if there were I would oppose it in the strongest terms.

If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.

Your biological definition of success, especially keyed to some concept of the American "people" that's supposedly cached out to something biological (is it white people? Anglo-Amerocans, descendents of anyone present in 1776?) is just as constructed. You're begging the question on the question of immigration by defining success that way.

Okay, if we add a bunch of Indians and have the best economy on the world, I (a white American with pre-revolutionary ancestry) win in many ways: the technology of my country develops rapidly, I am able to buy many products for cheap and I have a high income, the value of my dollar is worth a lot globally, my physical security is backed by the mightiest military in the world, I have a vast selection of consumer goods, my kids get reach adulthood in a country with new and thriving businesses that they can be part of.

A thriving economy puts more options on the table for me and my kin. Why wouldn't I want that?

Okay, if we add a bunch of Indians and have the best economy on the world, I (a white American with pre-revolutionary ancestry) win in many ways:

Actually, the most likely outcome from this kind of immigration project would involve none of those things. While "the economy" in abstract would doubtless be doing extremely well, you are not an abstraction of a human being. These kinds of immigration policies have, everywhere they have been implemented, boosted "the economy" while in many cases having detrimental effects on the outcomes of individual workers. In the world you're proposing your income would not have kept pace with the rates of inflation imposed by such huge migrations of people - the pressure on housing, food, education etc would be immense. Your income would actually be substantially lower in real terms, because you've just introduced hundreds of millions of competitors for your labour. Your physical security would actually be substantially impacted - just go look at what happens to crime rates in areas with high levels of immigration. Your kids wouldn't exist, because you'd be unable to achieve the financial security required for family formation (unless you just dropped out and moved to the trailer park).

A thriving economy puts more options on the table for the actual power elite who run things, and allows the people who run tech companies to drive down wages. What is good for "the economy" in abstract is very often bad for the people who actually live in it - human prosperity and flourishing is not particularly advanced by having a gigantic population of incompetent and low-human capital peasants whose consumption of food, medical services and housing pumps up the GDP while suppressing wages.

Your physical security would actually be substantially impacted - just go look at what happens to crime rates in areas with high levels of immigration.

Areas with high concentrations of Indian tech workers in California or the northeast don't seem particularly prone to crime. I can't speak to whether there's more white collar crime going on, but that isn't particularly relevant to physical safety. Canada may be a different story, but they have a separate set of (idiotic) policies and problems they spawned.

Your income would actually be substantially lower in real terms, because you've just introduced hundreds of millions of competitors for your labour.

human prosperity and flourishing is not particularly advanced by having a gigantic population of incompetent and low-human capital peasants whose consumption of food, medical services and housing pumps up the GDP while suppressing wages.

For these immigrants to be meaningful competitors for the labor of anyone posting here, they would presumably have to be highly-skilled and therefore not incompetent and low human capital. I don't see how they could be both.

Areas with high concentrations of Indian tech workers in California or the northeast don't seem particularly prone to crime

Look back up at the post you're defending - the current program is excessive and causing huge issues already, but you're defending someone importing 200 million fresh new indians. At those numbers you are learning nothing at all by looking at places like San Francisco (not that I'd want to live there now) - you have to go look at the crime statistics for India itself if you want to get a real picture. And that picture isn't particularly flattering, especially not for women.

For these immigrants to be meaningful competitors for the labor of anyone posting here, they would presumably have to be highly-skilled and therefore not incompetent and low human capital. I don't see how they could be both.

Highly-skilled? I think you're confused - we're not talking about the O-1 Visa program. We're talking about the H1B Visa program, the program that brings in bakers, laborers and line-cooks. The reason they're a threat to the labor of anyone posting here is that they accept terrible pay and are essentially an indentured servant class who are unable to leave their employer. Sure, their quality is much worse and in the long run they're usually more expensive than hiring local, but that doesn't mean anything to a manager who can get a massive compensation payout for temporarily juicing their numbers at the expense of long term success (I'm sure you're familiar with the principal-agent problem). At the same time, the existence of this imported servant class has a downward pressure on income and expectation for every other sector of the job market too, as the impact spreads from the lower-income populations they're being used to suppress. One of the stories that got Trump to the white house in 2016 was how H1B immigrants replaced the IT workers at Disney after they were forced to train their replacements.

This happens when you make your people just an idea instead of actual people. People online are slowly more conscious of identitarian issues, the abuse of migration systems, legal or illegal and then publicly mocking the host nations people is explicitly asking for hostilities to be amped up.

There are some really good ones in India, many have gone to the US, some of them frequent this forum and are upstanding people, most h1bs are not and the arguments for the H1B cap removal has led to a meltdown in Indian image at least online. There is no way I can make a nuanced argument for this without having everyone my nation call me a sepoy or self hating despite them knowing what is up.

People do not want to bring up HBD, some people did and a person even claimed that top 1 percent of upper castes is way smarter than the same percentile of euros, something that is laughably untrue but represents what you are saying in a way. You cannot allow your young to have to compete away their reproductive abilities to have a decent life. Self-identification with your people is not downstream from HBD. The only good thing here perhaps is that now HBD is not as much of a taboo anymore due to Indians using stats to dunk on people but incorrectly making it even worse.

200 million Indians will wreck any nation, it wrecked India, the aryan remnants are few and far between. Still that is not why i would self-identify with my own group, HBD is an afterthought, the same way you love your family or your wife, because they are yours.

Let’s say that a generous .1% are geniuses who have aided American military might

what is funny is that you need to be a citizen to work in aerospace or the military, most h1bs are it workers, some are outstanding, most are average if they are lucky.

How are Indians not fulfilling the "be fruitful and multiply" mission, if they are more fruitful and multiply faster than Americans? As far as I'm aware, they also obey the same laws of evolution as Americans.

Man, it's a good reason no Irish or German immigrants ever came. They'd totally make the mission of the original WASP Americans a complete failure in the game of life. They'd probably have dissolved the community too.

The science of hybrid vigor is actually reasonably well settled as well -- your individual genes would (all other things being equal) be better off hitched onto a mate somewhat further away from you.

Of course, "all other things being equal" is doing a lot of work here -- you would genuinely have to find an Indian or East Asian of the same IQ and temperament as your hypothetical replacement mate. Given your point (2) though, it seems like you wouldn't find that too implausible.

Despite people wish-casting as such, hybrid vigor isn't really a thing in humans other than a guard against inbreeding depression. And inbreeding depression isn't a concern unless you come from a long line of cousin/niece-enjoyers, like in some cultures or regions.

I vaguely recall the risks of inbreeding depression falling with the square root of effective population size, so it doesn't take much non-inbreeding to not have any depressive effects. Kind of like how randomly selecting 10,000 stocks by market value gets you surprisingly little diversification benefit relative to 100 stocks.

Not that inbreeding necessarily wipes away traits like high IQ, as can be observed in the case of Ashkenazi Jews. Cheetahs are incredibly inbred, but if you want a faster feline than a cheetah, hardly would you expect a cheetah-${OtherFeline} cross to be faster than a cheetah.

Non-additive heritability (of which hybrid vigor would be a subset) as a whole isn't even a thing in humans for polygenic traits like height or IQ. In the usual circumstances in the West, children are basically the average of their parents, plus a little random noise and regression to the mean.

So if all kids are just the plain average of their parents, then finding a 110-115 IQ East Asian partner is probably net beneficial as compared to the median replacement mate.

Plus, given how desirable it is to migrate to the US, immigrants are positively selected. So it's basically a pre-filter.

Likely so, if the primary concern for your children is IQ and your median replacement mate has a materially lower IQ. However, still not hybrid vigor.

Certainly the scale of the immigration matters.

It's one thing to have 5% of your population be immigrants (1970, US). It's another thing for it to be 15-20% (US, today). And then there's Canada... (RIP).

And of course, the who matters just as much as the how many. Even though the Germans were assimilated into the US quite readily, African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.

African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.

African-American culture has it's problems but it's American as all get out. It's basically just a shittier version of southern culture with worse 'music' and some fifties leftover ideas the rest of us figured out were bad ideas.

African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.

It certainly hasn't been tried for 300 years though, considering forced segregation, Jim Crow and the like, it's maybe 60 years tops. You have to want to assimilate but also you have to be allowed to assimilate.

There's also the suggestion that they did absorb much of the culture around them hence the similarities with white Borderer culture.

I don’t know man. Italians who came over in 1910 were pretty damn assimilated by 1970. And black people in the north haven’t assimilated either despite centuries of opportunity.

Not really centuries though. If you are segregated you aren't going to assimilate into the culture you are segregated from.

"Restrictive covenants blocked black entry into many neighborhoods. Schools were openly segregated. Shopkeepers and theaters displayed “whites only” signs. Sugrue writes, “Even celebrities such as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge and Marian Anderson had a hard time finding rooms and faced Jim Crow in restaurants when they toured the North.”"

"In 1964, he tried to open public construction sites to black workers by suing New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, charging they were turning an unconstitutional blind eye on craft union discrimination. New York’s highest court, however, was unimpressed, ruling 7-0. But three years later, our office won a similar case in a federal trial court against Ohio’s Gov. James Rhodes."

Even now many northern cities are de facto segregated, even if it does not have any legal backing. You can only assimilate into a culture if you are spending time in that culture (and that culture is willing to spend time with you). As mentioned by other's Italian-American culture only began to assimilate as other groups shared space with them.

African-American culture is the result of assimilation, it just wasn't assimilation into the broader American culture, but one picking up what little came across from Africa, plus from the poor borderers and the like they were surrounded by. It certainly isn't much like actual African cultures (hence why you get clashes between newer African immigrants and ADOS).

So now to assimilate them, you would have to have them exposed on a daily basis in and around the culture you want them to take on, and undo the previous behaviors that have been internalized. But that does have costs to the broader culture and there will be frictions due to historical racial grievances. Or to put it another way, very few people progressive or otherwise want black kids bussed into their schools, for quite understandable reasons in many cases. So we're stuck.

My wife is black and when I got to family events, I am usually the only white person there, or perhaps one other at most. When I stayed at her mother's house I might see one or two other white people within a couple of blocks. You can't assimilate to a culture you barely experience.

ADOS had a very different path to where they are now than any voluntary group of immigrants. So we shouldn't expect them to integrate in the same way.

19th century immigration enhanced the fertility of Anglo-Americans because Germans and Irish began their life in the lowest economic position — indentured servants, apprentices, and some creating farming towns out of nothing. This at a time of zero public services, and obviously no DEI. Germany is also the origin of Anglo-Saxons (the angles and the saxons), and the Normans for that matter, and you can read the etymology of men like Washington and Lincoln to see where their forefathers originated. Meanwhile, Irish is so similar to non-Germanic British that DNA sites have difficulty distinguishing between them.

If hybrid vigor is our concern, then consider that India has a high rate of cousin marriage, whereas Europeans had consanguinity laws for much of their history. Look at the rate of genetic problems among Pakistanis in the UK. India has low hybrid vigor, whereas Europeans have a fair amount due to historical laws on >4th generation cousin marriages.

So if immigrants have high human capital, it's bad because they should start at the bottom. If they start at the bottom, it's bad because we're taking the worst from the rest of the world.

In actuality, the immigrants were those with enough money and sense to escape Europe, so like today's immigrants they were positively selected.

And finally, Pakistan is a very different place than India, not least for religious reasons.

We are no longer in a 7.0 TFR world, but a sub 2.0 world, meaning that any addition of immigrant either to the top or bottom is actively harmful. When TFR is high and the land is immense and farmable, then immigrants to the bottom may expedite the fertility of higher “classes”. The population of America in 1800 was only 5 million.

In a sub-2.0 world, it's ever more important to attract the best talent.

None of what you say is remotely internally consistent.

I think that depends on whether people are productive or one more body that shares in the spoils of your nations AI bounty.

Presumably a world in which people are not the majority of productivity is also one in which total fertility no longer really matters.

They'd totally make the mission of the original WASP Americans a complete failure in the game of life.

Without necessarily agreeing with the above post, yes, massive Irish, Italian, German etc immigration did irreparably change the character, culture and identity of the United States. Whether it was for better or worse is a question of opinion, but it did change.

Indeed. I don't at all dispute that it was a change, but it seems ridiculous to sit where the US is today and look back and see that as a failure.

Change is inevitable, static societies die. So too are societies that change too fast or in unwise ways.

the US as it was founded was killed, the Republic was killed, federalism was killed, and what was produced was Empire

no, it's not ridiculous to think this was "a failure"

Change is inevitable, static societies die. So too are societies that change too fast or in unwise ways.

trying to imply the US in <1850, pre mass german and irish immigration waves, was a "static society" is simply ridiculous

it's hard to think the US with its anglo stock and TFR >5 wouldn't have become a global juggernaut superpower without the mass immigration of Irish or Germans or the Ellis Islanders in 1890+, perhaps with a generation delay, but it's a counterfactual

no, it's not ridiculous to think this was "a failure"

If the current economic and cultural dominance of the US is a failure, then I cannot imagine what actual success might look like.

it's hard to think the US with its anglo stock and TFR >5 wouldn't have become a global juggernaut superpower without the mass immigration of Irish or Germans or the Ellis Islanders in 1890+, perhaps with a generation delay, but it's a counterfactual

A generation of delay would mean a generation too late to win WWII.

Germany would have formed a European empire if America didn’t halt the final progression of balance of power politics. Near-to-midterm utility would have probably been maximized but whose to tell the far term prognosis based on the butterfly effect.

Given how Germany did govern their (brief) empire, I suspect that isn't exactly a good thing.

WWI doesn't happen unless Britain thinks they have a US bailout. WWII doesn't happen without Americas WWI bailout...

Yeah, that's quite plausible. I regret getting into historical counterfactuals because the space of possibilities is too vast.

???

Britain doesn't think they have a US bailout in 1914. (The possibility doesn't come up until the Germans take up U-boat warfare.) All sides are expecting a war of maneuver similar to the Franco-Prussian war ended by a decisive battle within less than a year, which is a timescale where the US can't make a difference at all.

Regardless of who was influencing Britain in August 1914, we didn't start WW1 and couldn't have stopped it - based on the sequence of events in August 1914, the decision to fight is taken primarily by Russia and Germany, not Britain and France. Germany decides to go to war with Russia as a result of events following the Sarajevo assassination, and invades Russia's ally (France) first for tactical reasons. At the point where the British get to make a decision, it is a decision whether to join in the war or sit it out - German troops have already crossed the French border. You can claim that the French only go to war because they are expecting a British bailout (and had they had a choice, you would probably have been right), but France didn't get a choice in August 1914 either - they were invaded by Germany. Their choice had been taken when the Franco-Russian Alliance was signed in 1894, at a time when Britain was still (genuinely) neutral between the German-Austrian and Franco-Russian blocs.

If Britain doesn't join the Franco-Russian bloc, it isn't clear how this makes WW1 less likely. The basic logic that the decline of the Ottoman Empire was going to turn the Balkans into a zone of Great Power conflict was obvious since the early 19th century (the Crimean War was also fought over this issue) and the fact that this conflict would primarily be between Russia and Austria was already obvious by the time of the Crimean War in the 1850's (Austria doesn't join the Allies in the Crimean war because the Habsburgs' domestic position is still weak after the 1848 Hungarian Revolution). And the Franco-Russian and Austrian-German alliances, plus the Franco-German rivalry, mean that a Balkan war with Great Power involvement is expected to turn into a general European War, and all the Continental Great Powers made war plans on this basis. (The Schlieffen Plan for a German blitzkrieg against France while Russia is still mobilising is first drawn up in 1906, which is after the 1904 Entente Cordiale between Britain and France, but before the 1908 formal military alliance between Britain, France, and Russia.) If everyone expects a neutral Britain, Germany is more likely to win and therefor more likely to choose to invade France, not less. So the argument that anything Britain (or the US via their influence on Britain) could have done to prevent the war depends on the idea that we could have convinced Russia not to defend Serbia and de facto surrender the Balkans to Austria. (Britain did try to mediate between Russia, Austria, and Serbia, but Germany told Austria to reject this offer - the Central Powers were expecting to win and had very limited interest in a negotiated peace).

Amusingly, there is one American who definitely can be blamed for British involvement in WW1. Admiral Mahan wrote the seminal books on naval history which convinced the Kaiser to build a navy. Without a German navy, the British don't see Germany as hostile, and don't try to join an anti-German alliance.

I don't see a current world without US cultural and economic dominance given the population in the US, absent waves of Irish, German, or other Ellis Islanders, and the territory it conquered from the Atlantic to the Pacific (also before the waves of Irish, German, or other Ellis Islanders), and the context of their neighbors and large oceans on either side. You seem to think it's a necessary condition and I'm not sure why.

According to Americans at the time, success would likely look like a powerful and dominant nation of Americans which is full of Americans and their posterity under a particular social organization and a particular religion. The "America" as the Americans at the time thought of it was destroyed by the waves of mass European and especially Catholic immigration.

A generation of delay would mean a generation too late to win WWII.

you mean the generation which won WW1?

gosh, I wonder what would have been had the American generation which won ww1 not shown up and we didn't get the 1919 Treaty of Versailles

even if one views American involvement in WWII (or WWI) as a good thing, and I don't, I'm not sure what this short quip is supposed to show or support

even if one views American involvement in WWII (or WWI) as a good thing, and I don't, I'm not sure what this short quip is supposed to show or support

It's a fairly widespread view that the Germany and Japan of WWII were evil across a number of dimensions. Perhaps not universal, but almost so.

I am sympathetic to the view that perhaps the whole thing could have been avoided with a more statesmanlike resolution of WWI. To that extent that (perhaps) American involvement in the prosecution of WWI made a poor resolution more likely, I would be happy to say it was a bad thing.

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What makes you think US TFR would've stayed high? Entirely possible a no-mass migration USA has a much, much smaller population, is majority minority(you know heritage americans are like forty percent black, right? Now add in the preexisting hispanics and natives in conquered territories), and has vast utterly undeveloped hinterlands.

TFR among Americans stayed high with mass migration because there was vast cheap land and no birth control. TFR among Americans remained high in areas of the country which didn't have big waves of immigration ( or at least that particular wave going to other parts at the same time). Pre-birth control and women's "liberation," I see no good reason to think mass migration had much of an effect on TFR of heritage Americans, let alone a significantly positive one. The US was regularly getting >30% population growth every 10 years before mass immigration (even removing immigrants), e.g., in the 1790-1820, the total number of new immigrants (not counting people who left), averaged around an estimated 180k total over 30 years while the total US population increased by over 5.5M, a gain of >245%.

Yes, it's entirely possible the US would have a lower population without the waves of immigrants in the 19th century. Maybe we'd have a population of only 200,000,000, still larger than the population the US had during WW2, and 1950, 1960, and 1970 when the US was hardly an undeveloped backwater.

This is the first time a single topic has so completely taken over my Twitter feed that I've been driven off it because of how annoying and never ending the discussion has become. Every other Tweet is about Indians or H1B visas, and very little of substance is being said. It's just a lot of anger and dumb takes. One side is mostly just being blatantly racist while the other is getting really pissed off and gloating about the superiority of immigrants. It's incredibly boring.

I would be interested in a conversation about actually improving immigration policy. I find it ridiculous that the US has elements of randomness to its system and isn't blind to national origins.

I'd be curious to know more technical details about Canada's system. There has clearly been a huge drop in the quality of immigrants. I used to think that they just lowered the points threshold for permanent residency in order to raise the immigration rate, but I learned recently that they actually introduced or expanded some different immigration streams that just require employer sponsorships in specific industries which take people directly from community colleges and they actually targeted India first to start with. Apparently, this is being abused with basically fake college programs and sometimes even fake jobs. I'd love to know more about what happened here.

To put it bluntly, the recent explosion of immigration to Canada is a naked attempt at keeping the ponzi scheme that is Canadian real estate inflated. The exact mechanisms aren't really important.

The LMIA and TFW program:

Canadian corporations can hire TFW (temporary foreign workers) by submitting a LMIA (labor market impact assessment). The LMIA is supposed to show that the relevant position could not be filled with a domestic Canadian. Of course, this program was rife with fraud. Corporations would put up fake job postings that were unable to be accessed, then use their vacancy as justification for hiring TFW. The foreign workers themselves would pay for an LMIA by paying immigration lawyers to fill an LMIA for them; those lawyers would then garnish their wages. Sometimes, the business owners themselves would act as "immigration lawyers", essentially paying TFWs below market rates. Also, foreign workers would sometimes simply pay for an LMIA for an entirely fake job, in order to migrate to Canada. This entire scheme was a way for Indians to escape to Canada from India.

Diploma Mills:

Foreign post-secondary students pay much more than domestic students in Canada. So, some fraudulent colleges have popped up offering extremely weak diplomas in "hospitality" and "business management", for the express purpose of luring in foreign students, mostly Indians. Side note: Its not just new colleges doing this. Well established colleges have also dumbed down their programs and purposefully admitted huge amounts of foreign students just to juice their profits. Now why would Indians enroll in such blatantly fraudulent programs? Why as a means of immigration of course. Foreign students (again, mostly Indian), enroll in this programs, then cheat, or skip class in order to work.

All of this is a way to attain permanent residency, and then eventually Canadian citizenship, all the while inflating the housing market and depressing wages. By the way, this doesn't even begin to cover the bribes, and fake job offers used to bolster permanent residency applications, or the fact that the points requirement got significantly lowered by the present administration.

being blatantly racist while the other is getting really pissed off and gloating about the superiority of immigrants.

So, both sides just being racist.

It's funny how that label only gets applied in one direction.

No, one side is saying some Indians are better workers than some Americans. That's not saying Indians are better as a whole.

White countries are the only ones expected to take in millions of foreigners, regardless of the actual desire of the population of the country, and opposing that is dismissed as "racist" and "stupid." It's not stupid to not want millions of Indians to flood your community and workplace. You can just say "I don't want to live with you" and that is 100% good enough justification.

Some people do want to live with them though.

This is less convincing than it would be in a world where freedom of association is actually allowed.

Practically, because of the way American laws work, demanding it for any American is demanding it for all of them.

You can just say "I don't want to live with you" and that is 100% good enough justification.

Sure, but then the equivalent person who says "I do want to live with you" has just as much weight. It's not an argument it's just might makes right basically. Which is fine, but it can be turned to support any cause. It's an argument agnostic tool.

Sure, but then the equivalent person who says "I do want to live with you" has just as much weight.

No it doesn't, because it's our country. The person demanding access to someone else's country and community has less weight than the community and country they are trying to access.

But some of your people IN your country support immigration. When they say yes, come on in, your position applies to them just as much.

I don’t think this works. If my sister and I were living in a shared house, it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to invite random people to come and live with us.

Sure it would. Absent any other agreement, you both have equal rights to decide who lives there. She can move Bob into her bedroom, its her house too after all.

My point was that SS did not advance an argument beyond if i don't want it, it shouldn't happen, but absent some actual structure on why, that is exactly equally countered by someone else saying I do want it so it should happen.

It's an argument that can be used for anything for or against. Which means it isn't a very good argument at all.

If you don't want Bob in the house you are likely going to have to convince your sister with an actual argument. There isn't enough room, you can't afford the extra food, and so on.

Certainly for my sister, if i tell her not to do something she wants to do, she is going to want a reason, beyond I don't want you to.

Your intuition may differ, but SS was making the same point that I was: to me, it seems obviously unacceptable for one party to make significant unilateral changes to shared living conditions without getting clear buy-in from everyone else involved.

That doesn’t mean you have a license to block all changes just for the fun of it but ‘I don’t want to share my house with strangers’ is an entirely valid reason. It just seems totally obvious to me that you don’t get to install strangers in somebody else’s house just because it’s your house too. Personally I think this is a common assumption, which is why politicians constantly lie to give the impression they respect it.

Once that’s assumed, SS is arguing (correctly in my opinion) that he and other anti-immigration advocates possess the inalienable right of veto. He doesn’t need to convince his countrymen, they actively need to convince him to permit immigration. “I’ve known Bob for ages, he’s a great guy, he does DIY and I’ll tell him to move out if he’s a nuisance, please give him a chance.”

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Holy shit man, same. I have so far added word filters for:

  • India

  • Indians

  • h1b

  • h1-b

  • h-1B

And it’s still flooding me. I need AI based filtering and I need it now.

It'll get better once normies finish with their holidays. Right now it's the maladjusted who don't visit family arguing with non-christians who don't celebrate Christmas.

This is the same thing that’s been happening for the last 30 years, but now it affects Silicon Valley eggheads so it actually matters. Much like how nobody cared about automation taking jobs until it started threatening terminally online artists.

It's affected SV people for years too. None of these arguments are new at all.

The only thing that has changed is that the faction that demands less immigration has been emboldened by recent successes and feels like it can win the argument without being crushed under a regime that allows it to play out.

Like most things this is just people getting into semantics arguments, when they likely agree with each other.

The MAGA people: yes to high skilled immigration. Yes to operation paper clip, and draining the rest of the world of their geniuses.

The tech people: same.

But there is a contingent of people who, when they say “high skilled” mean: useless Indian code monkeys, “IT consultants” and the like. Anybody who has worked with these people has had the following experience:

  • They lie about their abilities

  • They’re rude

  • They lie about when things are going to be finished

  • The work they do produce is low quality

This also does seem to be something unique to whatever system Indian uses to educate its population. It also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that India, despite supposedly being full of “high skilled” tech workers, hasn’t produced any high tech companies. There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc.

When the MAGA right hears “H1B” or “high skilled tech workers”, this is what they’re thinking of. They’re fine with Werner Von Braun coming here. They don’t want an endless stream of people who are claiming to have skills they don’t have, in fields where our own workers are apparently struggling to find work (although I doubt the truth of that as well: tl;dr skill issue).

I mean, if you find a foolproof (in the adversarial sense) way to assess how well someone would perform at a high-skilled job, you would be a billionaire overnight.

There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc

Because all the ones with enough chops end up at Google. Like Sundar :-)

66% of Infosys h1bs make less than 100k.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=infosys&job=&city=&year=2024

I think it's fair to say that Infosys doesn't actually believe any of those will perform well at a high skill job.

It's just trivially easy to spot h1b body shops. A salary floor and a ban on companies who have been exploiting them from getting more would be simple and effective.

Oh absolutely. I would certainly endorse a salary floor of $150K or even higher.

I mean, if you find a foolproof (in the adversarial sense) way to assess how well someone would perform at a high-skilled job, you would be a billionaire overnight.

No, you wouldn't, because it would have disparate impact out the wazoo, which means it would be illegal.

If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them? I'm not buying that it's because of nepotism. Different groups of Indians don't even seem to like each other much, and these companies have shareholder meetings and boards of directors. They face competition in the marketplace. And in my experience, when programmers have one common belief that seems to be contradicted by the market, the market is always right. Two examples: 1) you used to hear from programmers that they were massively underpaid relative to their value to their employers and 2) more recently, they claim to be more productive working from home, which doesn't appear to be true for most people. Why should I believe these anecdotes about Indian nepotism? Many other industries have the phenomenon of hiring only Indians. Maybe it's just comparative advantage.

Tech Companies, and, in fact, a lot of companies don't actually face competition. What they face is nonsense. What is bizarre is Elon being on team H1B when he just fired 80% of his people and service got better. The fact is, tech has been bloated for decades, we could eliminate almost all H1Bs, replace them with directional state U grads, and then fill in those direction state U grads with HS seniors and do fine.

...If labor laws allowed that. H1Bs are largely cause by credentialism and lawsuits. If the lawsuit pressure ever turned against H1Bs (aka a Soros level operation cracking back on claims that no American could do the job) there would be like 1000 H1Bs issued a year.

What's a directional state U grad? Even if there is bloat (I'm not sure I agree. Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.), it still helps companies to give them more people to choose from.

What's a directional state U grad?

A directional state school is typically a non-premier public institution within a state. They often have a cardinal direction in their name such a as "Eastern Michigan" or "Southern Illinois University" they also may be indicated by a city such as University of Virginia Arlington or University of North Carolina Asheville. These tend to have less competitive admissions than the flagship campus, but still generally screen for competent 18 year olds and have decent enough instruction that grads from their tech programs can do the kind of monkey grunt work the bottom 80% of H1bs appear to be doing.

Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.

You have rose tinted glasses, it was much worse before he took over. Particularly the bots. Perhaps you enjoyed the BlueAnon bots?

It was explained to me by a Brazilian H1B after he told a story about being offended by corporate DEI efforts thinking he needed help- Indian devs mostly suck, but they're so so so much cheaper that just fixing mistakes is more cost effective.

Indian developers are a lot cheaper and most jobs don't require a genius. There are plenty of boring repetitive tasks in tech and often the really talented people aren't good at these tasks because the best developers tend to get bored.

The model that works is two high skill developers in the west managing 8 lower skilled devs in another country. The two high skilled devs will complain endlessly about having to manage "low status" people and review code instead of writing their own but the truth is that Indians are often far more cost effective. The all Indians are awfull trope is exaggerated. There are plenty of awfull Indian devs but there are also high skilled Indian devs.

The argument is not “Indians aren’t capable of doing technical work” since that is obviously wrong. It isn’t even “there are no high skilled Indians”, since that is also obviously wrong. It’s that India is not uniquely predisposed to producing technical geniuses in a way that would justify the number of allegedly “high skill” Indian men who come to the United States and Canada.

It’s that India is not uniquely predisposed to producing technical geniuses in a way that would justify the number of allegedly “high skill” Indian men who come to the United States and Canada.

The second part of the argument is that Indians, being from a poor and less developed country, are obviously more willing to move to the US than people from Europe, China, Japan and elsewhere.

If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them?

I've heard it alleged that they are paid substantially less than American born workers, even guys on the same team in adjacent cubicles. Does anyone know if this is true?

At least in my $BIGTECH company, there are internal equity guidelines within roles. If you wanted to pay them substantially less, they would have to be systematically be promoted less.

Does that apply to contractors?

Employees only.

I don’t know that it’s unique to India- third world corrupt countries just seem bad at this. I’ve not heard nice things about Nigerian workers either.

The exceptions seem to be post soviet countries, but the Soviets for all their many flaws knew how to produce people who actually did stuff, even if it wasn’t reflected in their people’s standard of living.

It also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that India, despite supposedly being full of “high skilled” tech workers, hasn’t produced any high tech companies. There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc.

Nowhere other than the US and (to a much lesser extent) a handful of East Asian nations (China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan) have produced major tech companies. China only produced them because of local ownership rules and heavy state backing. Japan and Korea have big hardware companies but are bad at software, Taiwan got lucky with chips but has little else.

So really it’s the US and China.

There are kind of too many to list that disprove your point. Germany has BMW, festo/festool, SAP, Siemens, etc etc. England has rolls Royce and BAE, and honestly countless others. France has Dassalt, Ariane, and Airbus.

I mean it honestly just goes on and on.

My point is that India is implying a radical claim, that their country is uniquely full of highly desirable high tech genius workers. France, England, Germany, etc. aren’t making that claim and yet they appear to have high tech companies.

China could make that claim, and if they did it would be valid. China has tons of high tech companies (although some might claim it is stolen technology, but whatever).

India has no high tech companies, and it seems to follow that since they have a high population and still not innovative companies, they must be uniquely bad at innovation. There should be VERY FEW (if any?) Indians coming to the US on the claim that there is no America alternative.

That isn’t the case. It seems like something else is going on.

Ariane? The space company with 3 launches in the past two years? That's a smaller manifest than SpaceX last week.

Is your point that there are no high tech aerospace companies in France?

No; Arianespace is clearly a high tech aerospace company. But the phrase you responded to was "major tech companies", and if you'll forgive my moving the goal posts back to that, retaining ~1% of a market vs a competitor you got decades of head start against is not "major".

SpaceX accomplishments are of such magnitude that Arianespace once called them "a dream" (derogatory). It's cool that they can still reach orbit, but they're just not in the same league ... and what's most damning is they have no plans to fix that! They're not like Blue Origin, with big plans that are just running late; their remaining market is a political sinecure, so they're content with it. They're not a company you want to name to contest the differences between US and EU innovation, they're a company you want to name to demonstrate it!

I’m not comparing US and EU innovation. I’m saying that India, despite having a billion residents, has little to no high tech or innovative companies.

Ariane is not necessary to make my point. You’re arguing against the words here, not the point.

How are BMW or BAE the equivalent of Google or Amazon? The former are legacy industrial manufacturers, akin to Ford or Lockheed.

I Amazon is the yard-stick you are measuring by, the US (with Apple and Amazon) and South Korea (with Samsung) are pretty much the only games in town.

FAANG is dead, long live AAS.

Does India have an equivalent to Ford or Lockheed?

Because I’ve ridden in many Tata cars and…it doesn’t seem so.

I think it’s that they have a high population, have English as the de facto national language (since southern Indians refuse to speak/learn Hindi), and are poor, which drives emigration.

For the second point, we can even look at this place. I can’t name a single ethnically Chinese poster here (I’m sure there are one or two), but there are many Indians / South Asians. Chinese people may emigrate to the West today once they’re wealthy when they want to buy citizenship / a bolt hole somewhere, and some PMC Chinese families send kids to study in the US, but smart Chinese engineers wouldn’t even know where to begin in terms of emigration if they didn’t study in the West.

Nokia, Thales, Bosch, Ericsson, BAE, SAP, ASML, Logitech, Et Al would all like a word.

If Thales and BAE count as big tech, then so does Lockheed and Boeing. There’s no equivalent to FAANG.

Yes. The largest best companies are in the US. But a decent chunk of the second best are in Europe.

If Thales and BAE count as big tech, then so does Lockheed and Boeing. There’s no equivalent to FAANG.

How many billions in assets and net revenue, or thousands of engineers in it's employment, does a company have to have to be considered "big tech" in your eyes? Netflix is a relative small-fry by said metrics, and arguably not even a "tech" company (they're more of a movie studio) when compared a company like BAE or Lockheed.

Are you limiting "tech" to software companies? Otherwise I'd point to a few European examples like Nokia (pre-acquisition) or Ericsson or AMSL. Acquisitions are also probably skewing your count.

Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter

It's not "huwhite," just "hwite." Taylor speaks with an accent that hasn't undergone the wine-whine merger, probably because he's from...(checks notes)...Kobe, Japan.

That was interesting reading, thank you. My husband pokes fun at me because my pronunciation of white is distinct from how I pronounce wight... Because I pronounce my wh's.

Where are you from?

A little bit of everywhere. Mostly east coast and Midwest. One side of my family comes from the Ozarks which might explain this.

It's interesting that media portrays the accent as a Waspy new England affectation, when in reality most people who use it are red-dirt types from or with ties to the rural south- like listening to me speak a sentence that doesn't have a wh sound, you wouldn't expect me to drop a what even just before I do.

I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.

The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science

I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles.

Agreed, as @Stellula suggests above there seems to be a semantic bait-and-switch going on. What's being sold is something like Operation Paperclip or the Rockefeller Foundation's Assistance to Refugee Scholars program that brought figures like Werner Von Braun, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Alexander Solzenhitzen to the US. What we're actually getting in practice, is a bunch of minimally competent third-worlders who are, to all appearances, contemptuous of Western norms/values, and more concerned with extracting value than producing it, and who's only observable contribution to the community is diluting the supply and thus lowering the wages of native-born code-monkeys, medical professionals, finance bros, Et Al.

I consider myself reasonably "Based and MAGA-Pilled" and I am totally onboard with the former, while being deeply opposed to the latter.

I'd sooner accept a 100 immigrants from Central America or Sub-Saharan Africa who sincerely love baseball, apple pie, and everything else American over a single immigrant like @BurdensomeCount as even "low human captital" is of greater value than negative human capital.

Just want to endorse the second part of what you said. It’s probably some of my Catholicism leaking through here, but I am explicitly not a white nationalist. I am an “American nationalist”. We’re a Christian country, we like guns and big trucks and big tits and bikinis and apple pie and baseball and chicken wings and bigass rockets and we consider the moon our sovereign territory. We hate the government, are naturally suspicious of authority.

That has all led to the most prosperous, most badass nation on earth and if you want to be an American you can, but when you get here you need to assimilate, and part of that means having a near-contempt for the country you fled. I don’t want to hear you talking about your ex girlfriend old country for 3-4 generations.

Maybe that’s a good analogy. Imagine you meet a girl in an abusive relationship with a loser guy. You fall in love with her and help her move from the slums to a giant mansion on the coast.

Now imagine she refuses to be seen in public with you, goes to her exes house for holidays, and talks to you about having dual citizenship a polyamorous relationship with her ex, who she also keeps sending remittances money to. Now imagine she also wants to talk about your toxic masculinity (which saved her) and the problematic nature of your wealth.

Yeah no thanks. We’re down to marry the super models (Werner Von Braun), but not so much the cheating gold digger.

I get the impression that you and I agree on much and would get along quite well offline. That or we would bicker endlessly like siblings. ;-)

For my part, I have always been partial to Teddy Roosevelt's bit about "Hyphenated Americans".

Maybe we already know each other but are behind seven boxxies alt accounts and won’t ever know it.

I once found out I'd lived in the same house as a motter thanks to his description of the insane landlord. It's more likely than you think with how filtered we are by irl interests and professions.

everything else American over a single immigrant like @BurdensomeCount as even "low human captital" is of greater value than negative human capital.

Sir, I demand satisfaction! Even if you think I am negative value to society (naturally I disagree) at the very least you must grant that the magnitude if not the sign of my contributions is leagues and bounds beyond that your average sub-Saharan African is capable of.

The average human being, even if they try their damnedest, is not capable of making a big impact on society either way, positive or negative (discounting of course banal crap like shooting the person they got minor beef with, but that doesn't count because even here they are merely channeling the destructive power of a far greater force than themselves); true perniciousness is firmly beyond their capabilities.

Even if you think I am a net negative (which is your prerogative) you must admit that the extent of my negativeness is extraordinary- that is, I am not like them in any way at all beyond the superficial.

EDIT: I must also add that the job I am working in at the moment is one that's completely borders agnostic. Functionally I'm already taking a job away from an American if you're the sort of person who thinks in those terms, except that right now the US is getting precisely $0 in taxes from me. Giving me a free green card (not that I'd accept it, US has very onerous tax policies on their worldwide income for permanent residents living anywhere in the world) and welcoming me to the US is basically free money for you with no downside.

Have you considered that people don't like having new neighbors who openly look down their noses at them?

Sir, I demand satisfaction!

Pistols or Swords? If the latter we might actually be able to make that happen. I plan to be at Pennsic 51 (Schedule Permitting), bearing the banner of The Outlands on behalf of Cariadoc. Look for the knight in white, black, and gold with a sausage pierced by a sword on his shield. The Poleaxe/Bill is also an option, as is the Spear.

at the very least you must grant that the magnitude if not the sign of my contributions is leagues and bounds beyond that your average sub-Saharan African is capable of.

No i do not, because little or no gain is still preferable to a "loss" of any magnitude.

To be clear I don't "think" you are "a net negative value to society". I am taking your own statements about your relationship with your host country at face value and drawing what, to me, seem like obvious conclusions.

Finally, if the job you're working is borders agnostic, why immigrate? if the answer, is "superior quality of life" why can't you just shut up and be grateful instead of sneering at your hosts?

Given what a replacement-level CEO did to Microsoft, Satya Nadella's value-over-replacement is in the low trillions of dollars, not counting the consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

Mature companies with P/E ratios north of 20 (which includes all the US tech megastars) are being priced on the basis that the business will outlive the current leadership. Not Boeinging a successful mature business is extraordinarily valuable, and apparently harder than it looks given that Bill Gates' chosen successor couldn't.

Yeah but once you're in charge of such a large organism it's just as much macroeconomic trends and the work of 1000s of random cogs than it is straight up 'Guy A is a great CEO since company did well, Guy B is bad CEO since company did poorly' when they're likely unable to meaningfully steer the ship. My personal experience with Indian skilled immigrants is that the main advantage they have over other groups is being superduper willing and proficient at 'playing the corporate game'. Aggressively gaming KPIs, driving to tick every box and get every possible ingroup referral when applying for roles and generally showing a great savvy at the game of bureaucracy. I was kind of amazed in University seeing how my overseas Indian friends would go about applying for graduateships/internships versus people from other cultures, in how it was systematized and how collaborative a front there seemed to be even from Indians of vastly different geographic origins.

Like corporate entryism is mostly bullshit fugazi busywork for HR so I'm not against the hustle, but I think that relentless targeting of the rules of engagement is the main reason for Indian success as immigrants. Moreso than 'brilliance at the task at hand' and like should it particularly offend me that some person who is a 9.5/10 at leetcode and resume optimization but a 6/10 coder gets the Google graduateship over a 7/10 coder who didn't ruthlessly squeeze out every edge to get their butt on the seat when the job's likely to be pointless floundering busywork anyways?

consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

This is such a tremendous lie I can't take the rest of your post seriously. Was this meant as sarcasm or a joke?

Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

Are you out of your damned mind? My experience with every Microsoft product I use has gotten worse to the point where I'm planning on quitting Windows after support for Windows 10 finally ends in only a year.

I mean, lets start with Windows 10. They keep randomly pushing ads into my default experience. Windows updates will constantly start shoving ads into my start menu, lock screen, etc, that I then I have to look up how to turn off. Basic fucking shit like "Solitaire" has been turned into some Games as a Service crap they expect me to pay a monthly fee for in order to skip ads. On solitaire!! Windows 10 was the start of Microsoft pushing updates that, oops, brick your fucking computer. Our bad.

And good god, when it comes to my work, where I'm also locked into a Microsoft ecosystem, to this day nobody knows the correct settings for IIS to keep a web application running instead of going to sleep. I have to keep an instance of Docker running on Windows Server, but every time there is a Windows Update it somehow manages to fucking break "Boot Docker on Startup" and I have to run around figuring out some new goofy script or workaround to make it happen.

It is unfathomable to me that anybody can claim Microsoft's products have gotten better for the user since Satya took over. It's been downhill in a truly unprecedented manner, with unreliable software that is constantly shoving ads into every visible surface. It's enough that I'd rather go back to Win9X, rebooting my computer every day because it was so unstable, versus dealing with the cavalcade of forced advertising and things breaking out from under me that modern Windows represents.

I've decided to ditch Windows at home rather than move to Win11. What's your preferred OS?

I wish I knew. I'm still fence sitting myself. Unless a compelling argument presents itself, I'm likely to default to Ubuntu.

That's where I am. Though I made it as far as downloading the Mint iso a couple weeks ago.

One part of the old user experience you seem to be forgetting is the part where you plunk down the equivalent of between $250 and $450 in today's money every few years just to have an updated system. And pay $100 for web browsing software. And pay, pay, pay for every little thing that didn't come preinstalled on your $5,000 computer. The days when giving away something for free was enough to prompt an antitrust lawsuit.

That was because computer hardware was improving at a rapid pace in the days of the Internet Explorer anti-trust suit. Nowadays, there's more freeware (free as in speech and beer!), most PC games worth playing can still be run on hardware from a decade-plus ago, and some of the code monkeys competing with the H1Bs being discussed in this thread sometimes pop out a very useful piece of open-source programming that might solve some need you have.

Wait, how do you get all this stuff? I lobotomized my copy of 10 with powershell when I first got it, and set it up to look just like XP. I'd go fucking nuclear if I ever saw an ad in my operating system.

I don't recall every one, but the latest was they added "Weather and More" as a widget to my pristine lock screen. The "and more" is ads. Nonstop obnoxious ass ads. I had to find just the right submenu in Settings to remove it. Which brings me to another gripe. I can't fucking believe how the settings are still scattered across a Windows 8/10/11 style "Settings" menu and a Win9x/2k/xp "Control Panel" menu.

Even without "best of the best" arguments, countries with >1B people are bound to have some mass of brilliant individuals. Same goes for China too.

I can say also that having seen excellent management in tech and mediocre/mixed management, the value-add from not driving things into the ground is massive. You're perhaps right on upside, but Satya or Sundar could vaporize hundreds of billions with a few bad decisions. The VORCEO is probably dominated by the downside.

Why don't we just auction off H1B slots and let the market find the right price?

What is the auction system? How long is the H1B admittee essentially your wageslave to remain in the US? Because the argument is that this admittance is essentially of near infinite value because America, as long as we don't admit too many foreigners, will probably be better than most foreign countries for a very long time (not a bad assumption seeing how bad they are). But that engages a sort of perverse incentive. The truth that America is the best will eventually be annulled by us admitting non-best persons who agree to be wageslaves, because persons who agree to such are not the best.

The actual reason this doesn't happen is that the entire point of the H1B program is to depress wages/salaries of tech workers, and this would defeat the point.

As fucked up as it is, I unironically believe that this would be a superior system to the one we have. If the government or some company/VC genuinely believes that this particular individual could be a game changer then they should be able to come up with the money.

Would also help decrease the deficit (a small amount)

This whole debate between Elon and the rest of the right hinges upon what people understand the purpose of a state to be.

Is it an ideological organization like the Comintern, the Ummah or Christendom (or e/acc aerospace/digital foom)? Is it a commercial area, devoted to making the green line go up? Alternately, is the state a suit of political power-armour for a nation, devoted to advancing their national, ethnic interests?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871978282289082585

The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.

Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.

Elon is in with the neocons, the fundamentalists and the woke on this one, he lacks a national concept for the state.

At the end of the day, I believe in the nation-state as the fundamental unit. Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China' - maybe some other wars. Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation as the US has experienced and is experiencing. And it corrodes the necessary spirit of sacrifice. People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes. If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone, they'll likely make the logical decision to leave when the going gets tough. On a collective level, logical individual decisions are no good. It makes more sense to evade duty and responsibility - but then you end up living in a poor, unsafe and weak state, you're worse off than before.

The US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough. They were bigger and better than everyone in their region and enjoyed allies who did most of the hard fighting in the big wars. Even then, there have been significant political problems in America due to a lack of ethnic homogeneity. There can't be any race riots if there's only one race present.

Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.

Elon is an important figure that is forgivable on this particular issue. He was abandoned by his home country.

If he was more right he would go further.

Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers

Meanwhile Russians and Ukrainians spend years in grinding battles against their own extended family members due to their allegiance to a nation state.

People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.

Sunni Islamists of all races appear to be very happy fighting together for an ideology.

Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking

Recruitment shortfalls for Anglo armies over the last 40 years correlate extremely strongly with periods of great economic prosperity. The 90s also saw recruitment struggles. The last time the British Army easily met its targets was 2010, long after the UK became an economic zone but at the trough of the unemployment wave caused by the financial crisis.

Nations are also abstract causes, come to that.

A dyed-in-the-wool ethnonationalist (which I assuredly am not) would argue that a nation is, literally, an extended family, i.e., the biological descendants of a specific group of human beings. There are many problems with this argument, but being abstract is not one of them—except, I suppose, insofar as any super-Dunbar group of people is an abstraction.

except, I suppose, insofar as any super-Dunbar group of people is an abstraction.

Subjective groups beyond your cognitive limits to maintain would certainly qualify as more conceptual than evidential in my book.

The idea of filling up your elite with people who left their home land for a better economic deal that isn't even that much better is absurd. The US is filling the upper class who would ditch their culture, homeland, family and friends for 2-3x salary increase. The US elite is going to drift far from the general population if it largely consists of rich arabs, Vietnamese computer nerds, wealth Chinese business people, eastern European jews and other groups who find Milwaukee as relevant as a white guy in Singapore finds Bhutan. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the US is deeply divided when the elite view the country as a vehicle for their own personal success and have no real ties to it.

That’s literally the entire concept of America, we’re a country of people who had the resolve to cross oceans to seek a better life. Every single one of us apart from the Native Americans and those descended from slaves meets that description.

Now we’re suddenly going to rewrite it?

who had the resolve to cross oceans to seek a better life.

It's a nice story but the world has changed. Oceans have shrunk, they're now about three podcasts - or a good-sized audiobook on double speed - wide. On top of that, people have way more access to their original society than in the past. This works for America, in terms of how many people are Americanized, but it doesn't just work for America.

The world is smaller, more nations are willing to cater to expats looking for a low tax rate.

America is still the best deal on the table and shows every indication of remaining so (so they're net importers of the Sunaks and Scheers of the world) but there are substantial differences from whatever idealized sort of migration or migrants from the good old days you're appealing to.

It still takes something to uproot your life and move to a new country and culture 1000s of miles away from everything you’ve known.

It’s a big part of the reason why immigrants so often outperform native stock of Americans economically. They’re the people who were willing to dive in and risk charting a new course.

The common counterpoint to this is that they mostly just come here because even an illegally-low wage is still more than they can earn busting their butts back home. I wonder if "we shouldn't pay the cost for other countries being poorly-run" would be a strong counterargument to immigration.

It is not. The concept of America is being pioneers. Joining an established place where prosperity exists is unamerican in many ways. A Ugandan attempting to start a moon colony is at least somewhat American. The same guy moving to New York is basically 0% American.

So now literally nobody is American in America since there aren’t any frontiers left in the country.

Many people still embody the spirit of their pioneer ancestors.

Nobody more so than immigrants in my opinion

Starting a new life in a foreign land

Is not pioneering in any sense when that country is more developed than your own. It is, in fact, the opposite

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Rather it was communities from western Europe who wanted to have their own states where they could have their values and their way of life.

And they built one who’s principles y’all now question.

If you wanted a blood and soil type country with deep ethnic roots you can try to move to one. The US is a pretty bad option for those who do like that sort of thing.

It was communities from the British Isles who subsequently dealt with catastrophic, culture-destroying immigration from the rest of Europe, sure. That America is rich in spite of that is an achievement, but it’s ridiculous to pretend Ben Franklin and the other founding fathers wanted America to be a melting pot of every European nation from Tromso to Odesa.

What do you mean British isles? You literally would let Irish people in? That’d erode the fabric of the nation.

I think that large scale Irish immigration was highly deleterious for the US, but it’s happened now and they’re largely assimilated, plus Ireland is now rich enough (and still quite a small country, with a now-low birth rate) that ongoing inflows would be minimal. Plus there were always some Irish in the US, although more at the start were from Ulster or Protestants/settlers in general.

In what way was it deleterious?

Curious because I’ve never actually heard a serious argument that it was!

It’s a problem for electoral systems in general. You don’t win by loyalty, in fact loyalty is often detrimental to the project. Being of, by, and for the people doesn’t matter, in fact the opposite, as the money lies in selling out the people to global interests. What matters is the ability to imitate the people enough to not trip alarms while you work to sell the country to the highest bidder while using propaganda to convince the people that all of this is to their benefit.

I don’t know that changing the demographics changes much, if anything I think it might accidentally help as it becomes increasingly obvious to the public that not only do the elites not care about them, but often have no serious connections to the actual country or its citizens. It might be possible for white guys with American accents to convince Amerikanners that they’re on side and not working for international interests. It’s not going to land nearly so well when the same “free trade! More immigration! Stop practicing your culture and religion you bigots!” Rhetoric comes from people with pajeet or mandarin or Arabic accents living in coastal global cities that have nothing in common with what average Americans people want.

It's like Vivek read this and said, "hold my beer"

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Seems like he's torched his political career, or at least presidential ambitions, in one post.

Does he really think sports culture doesn’t celebrate achievement? It might not celebrate a particular kind of achievement but competitive sports are in fact meritocracy.

I do think Vivek has a point that Americans have gotten soft (eg participation trophies) but the point is that softness influences everything; not just math.

Seems like he's torched his political career, or at least presidential ambitions, in one post.

On an unrelated note, It's funny, surprising, and interesting how much of Trump II politics is taking place before he even got inaugurated.

Seems like a dumb argument. In Indian popular culture the hot male action hero who saves the girl is no less a Bollywood trope than a Hollywood one. I doubt that in Indian colleges the math Olympiad champ is more popular than the person who has drugs and money and throws big parties.

I also don't know how "nerd representation" is in any way lacking in recent US media.

And I agree with the right, even though it is an unpopular opinion to take. I don't want my friends who are not obvious scamsters or posess a sense of dual loyalty to be discriminated against but the fact is, most Indian migrants see the West as a shopping mall or a tax holiday instead of an actual place. There is no way to have this happen now, India has a worse image than china, a nation that has had espionage issues since forever.

I remember three to four years ago when I would post stuff here, I would not see the Indian Question brought up because there was little chest thumping, now you have Prime Time Indian anchors making claims of dual loyalty, in any scenario besides that of more leftward momentum, this will only get worse.

Demographics and loyalty make up a state, this is also why I support smaller feudal states over larger nations, not just the threat of leftism but because loyalty does not scale. India was never one people, it always fractured.

Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda, it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.

Yes it does, there are no good answers, I feel quite blackpilled. Hindu right always made some pajeet jokes but it was never serious, twitter is officially in race war territory and the same arguments that Indians made against demographics and other communities are being recycled for them. The worst part is that all of this could have been avoided. I would have preferred had they not abused the shit out of these systems. The good ones could have left and assimilated into the west, at least that way someone who is genuinely very competent would have been able to contribute to the world instead of rotting here which they do not deserve. This seems less probable now.

This could have been prevented, all of it.

I don't see why we can't allow for the existence of states founded on different principles, whether they be nation-states, empires, theocracies, multiethnic city-states, or transhumanist online network states. Let Europe reassert the primacy of blood and soil if they have the stomach for it. Let Arabs or Turks reform the Caliphate if they can. Let wealthy elites carve out little Singapores of their own in Africa and Latin America. And let America be the un-nation whose tradition is to oppose tradition. If one of these forms is so much better than the others then the choice between them will be as obvious in the end as the choice between East and West Berlin. Online nationalists may say it's already so as they rush to post comparisons of downtown SF and some medieval village in Germany, but the smartest and most ambitious Europeans are still flocking to the former, so I would say the outcome is still uncertain.

As for Chinese immigrants specifically, I'll just point out that one notable Cold War blunder was the FBI's mistreatment and detention of Qian Xuesen under false allegations of being a communist agent, which led to his actual defection and establishment of the Chinese rocketry and ballistic missile program. It has also always baffled me that Iran hasn't been able to build nuclear weapons, despite the fact that I've met enough brilliant Iranian graduate students that I could probably put together a nuclear program of my own. The answer as near as I can tell is, apart from Israeli and American sabotage, that all the Iranians smart enough to build an atomic bomb simply hate the government and would rather live literally anywhere else. Sending such people back home to be drafted or tortured into making WMDs would be a massive self-own.

It's a bad idea to send talented people off to rival countries, I agree 100%. But don't you see the pernicious problem that emerges? You end up in a situation where you can't be sure of people's loyalties. Or worse still, you end up manipulated into harming your own interests. McCarthyism didn't emerge from thin air, it emerged from the US leaking nuclear and technical secrets like a colander, from Soviet spy rings basically running key parts of the US government for several years. It was a great blessing of the US that they were facing a smaller, poorer opponent with an economic system that didn't work.

Harry White caused insane, ludicrous amounts of damage to US interests. He sabotaged US aid to Nationalist China in WW2, he helped outline the Morgenthau plan that so greatly stiffened the German war effort in 1945, he handed over lots of secret documents to the Soviets. Just one traitor in high office can do immense damage and there were a bunch of them, check out the Venona intercepts.

If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone ... the US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough.

The US avoided that because it assimilated those migrants efficiently enough that by the time things got tough, their grandchildren were already fully American.

The going has never gotten relatively tough in America since 1812. If your grandparents were producing offspring in 1812 you were basically born in 1855 and by then America was as good as any place on Earth other than the most prosperous parts of England, and the boat ride over there sucked. By the next generation it was basically parity (again parity with the world power of the time) and trending up with much more land and opportunity for your progeny.

The number of people who have lived in America that would have been better off had their parents not come is pretty small. The number of children of those is basically rounded off to zero.

I think in 1855 it was probably fairly uneven. The Eastern Seaboard sure, but not tons.

Still, broadly agree.

Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation

The general irony of the post, but this line in particular, is the Christmas present I didn't know I needed. Truly it could only have come from a self-identified Australian who regularly cites Chinese tiktok as a representative and reliable source of information, who has been an impassioned advocate of deferring to American geopolitical offensive-realists, and whom routinely uses collective self-identification terms with American and European audiences from nearly the literal opposite side of the globe.

(Another irony for non-Australians in the audience being that if you are to rely on the Ranger's opinions to shape your own, you would be opening yourself to treachery and manipulation from a foreigner, the best way to guard against being to disregard any foreigner's opinions. Self-negating advocacy at its most unintentional.)

I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests. I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to. I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

It's common sense.

Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group. There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.

Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.

I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to. I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants

Bruh, it's the country that routinely robs/imprisons/executes their co-ethnics. Immigrants from China hate the CCP more than anyone in mainland China ever could because they know how it is from the inside.

Says here Chinese immigrants are more favourable towards China than opposed (albeit not by much): https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2023/07/19/chinese-americans-views-of-china-and-other-places/

The US has been putting out enormous amounts of anti-Chinese propaganda and they still can't get net unfavorable! In mainstream media, when's the last time you heard a story that presented anything happening in China as good? For about 8 years now the media has been declaring nothing happens there but tyranny, economic disaster, plague, debt trap diplomacy, stealing all the fish, imperial expansion, growing military, pollution, dumping cheaply made _____ on world markets, slave labour...

Surely there must be some good things happening in China. What about them building a space station, that's pretty cool! Or releasing some open-source AI models? I'm not saying that China is good on balance or that the media should be more pro-Chinese but that there is a huge and powerful propaganda effort against China that has totally worked on everyone in the West. Except people from China.

In the US, there is an obvious countervailing force that encourages non-white ethnics to treat their ancestral land as some sort of totem animal, which they are honour-bound to defend. In the light of that, you may be observing something like "Aztec empire puts out big information campaign about the dangers of jaguars in the jungle. Everyone now reports a bad opinion of jaguars, except for the Jaguar Warriors. Should we be worried that they will sell out their fellow humans and go live among the big cats?".

(This takes especially curious turns when the monolithic "Asian" identity means Korean-descent kids protesting the Japanese embassy for letting white people try on kimonos at a Monet exhibition, when average actual Koreans tend to wish the US had cancelled Japanese culture after WWII as punishment.)

Maybe they have those view because China is not, in actuality, good on the balance?

Feels like a Russell Conjugation: I educate, you persuade, they brainwash.

I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?

Or Chinese spying, is this a niche topic? I'm not one of those 'China can only copy our tech' people but they do a hell of a lot of spying on other countries. The whole Aschenbrenner thesis is predicated on the assumption of huge Chinese espionage efforts. In Australia we had Senator Dastyari who was found to be taking money from this Chinese investor in Australia, suddenly he started moving towards Chinese positions. This kind of thing happens in the US too, high-ranking officials were found to be sleeping with spies.

I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?

This isn't compatible with even the most cursory reading of I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, the fact that your ingroup may not be ethnically similar nor your outgroup ethnically distinct from you is literally one of the first thing he addresses.

I've always felt that one also pairs nicely with Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers

Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.

Chinese robbers is very relevant to the Outgroup bias when dealing with social media and groups of scale, as with enough scale you can always find outliers and then signal boost their prominence, particularly when there's availability bias shaping access to information.

I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests.

You do, however, need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese, or that 'many' is 'most' as opposed to 'a small ratio,' let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.

This is the typical smuggling of the conclusion that goes on with ethnonationalist constructs, both in the self-identification (what is an 'ethnic chinese') and in the external identification (the observable versus unobservable nature of loyalty) and in the cost-benefit (whether the costs of PRC-loyal ethnic chinese outweighs the benefits of non-PRC-loyal ethnic chinese).

I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to.

You do, however, need reliable and accurate sources. Particularly, you need reliable sources that can accurately distinguish between 'ethnic ties' and 'familial ties,' as the former has significant organizational and societal implications than the later.

If, for example, you take an ethnicity-based caution, then there are categorical exclusions on the basis of race to positions of trust / the armed forces, which in turn comes with the social and political complications of embracing formal racial discirmination on people for potential actions regardless of guilt, even if they are avowed enemies of the regime. If you take a family-based caution, on the other hand, then perhaps you don't give security clearances to ethnic han with family members in China who can be used as leverage against them, but you can employ people who lack said families in China (or whose families were purged by the CCP).

This is particularly so when much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state, including a non-trivial number being exiles of the current ruling party for issues in the current living memory.

I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

It would be amusing to see you fail to a practically textbook Chinese robbers fallacy, which was memorably coined for its statistical implications of the availability of non-representative examples.

Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group.

It is, however, a distinct cultural group, and a national group, and a political-identity group, and various other forms of groupings that make it distinct, foreign, and unreliable to other [groups] due to the divergence of identity, interests, and expected activities, despite nominal genetic commonalities.

No one is particularly confusing the Australians for the Germans, or the Brits and the French, despite their ethnic commonalities. (Not least because the vague concept of 'ethnic' stretches as far or as narrow as needed for the argument of the moment.)

There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.

A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner and so benefit from in-group bias sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of trust and persuasiveness over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties and interests (because they are a foreigner).

Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.

The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.

People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.

I’m not a hard ethnic nationalist, but I think honestly some caution is required in making the assumption that especially for first and second generation immigrants m that they retain no loyalty whatsoever to their homeland. A Chinese immigrant spent all of their formative years and probably beyond that being Chinese in a Chinese nation and in a Chinese culture. His attitude towards just about anything you can imagine are shaped by that, and it doesn’t go away just because he’s been walking around New York or Silicon Valley for five years. And the stronger the ethic and religious identities are, and the less enforcement of assimilation there is the worse it gets for creating loyalty to the new country. Muslims in Europe don’t seem to be very loyal to their new countries, in fact they’re doing their best to subvert those countries into being Muslim countries and are willing to use intimidation and propaganda and so on to get there. Thus, I think at this point, I’d be very cautious about letting first generation immigrants have access to levers of power or knowledge that can be sold off to foreign countries that may or may not be hostile to us. No, I don’t think it’s paranoid to keep Chinese and Iranian engineering students away from sensitive technology and information, especially military and cutting edge computer stuff. Of course in the 21st century, it’s heresy to say that Iranian engineering students should not be allowed on American nuclear submarines no matter their grades. I would consider it common sense.

And I don’t see how any country can survive if they’re giving away the levers of power or their greatest military and technology resources to people with no demonstrated loyalty to the actual country. If you don’t care what happens to your country or its people, at best it’s going to end with those people choosing personal interests over those of the country and at worst will choose other loyalties they may have over the interests of people they don’t care about. Even without the threat of family back in China who would face harm, but even without that, they are open to bribes and corruption because they’re here for their own reasons, mostly for some form of personal benefit.

Sure. This is a measured take. Familial ties are real, childhood upbringing is influential, and they impact things.

This is not, however, an argument of inherent ethnic loyalties overriding all else.

Moreover, it's also not approaching a policy argument of the tradeoffs- costs, benefits, opportunity costs, and so on- that go on with addressing policy questions on, say, college research. Particularly when the actor these people may hypothetically support is using them as complimentary, as opposed to primary, sources, and you do not actually have a monopoly on information control.

China, for example, is generally understood to conduct not only human espionage (asking ethnic Chinese to do things), but engage in routine cyberespionage against not just governments, but commercial actors, including almost certainly universities. (I say almost certainly because attribution is hard.) If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.

To be clear, it is a thing, but the nature of information security is that you have to be secure in all zones, and the adversary has to only succeed in one for all the measures taken to fail. There are, in turn, different policy implications for whether you can expect to control the loss of information versus if you cannot. If the student would go to another university at home but get the same research data thanks to theft, there may be an (in)efficiency cost with that for the adversary but it's not like the student isn't getting their hands on the data anyway.

This makes the strategic competition less about 'can students get the data'- the assumption is already 'yes'- to 'who benefits the most when they get their hand on the data.' In other words, who benefits the most- not exclusively- from human capital.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute maintains a Critical Technology Tracker intended to track various critical technologies and who writes the most cited papers on them. This includes their human talent flow tracker, which tracks where the authors of those papers went for undergraduate education, graduate education, and follow-on employment.

From a strategic competition perspective between states, even if you doubt the trustworthiness of these students, the optimal allocation is not 'more educated students employed in the hostile country.' Instead, you want to minimize the number of employed top performers in the countries you want the least benefit. Just like you can't control / maintain a monopoly of the information, you can't maintain a monopoly on the employment prospects of the students. That Top Producer of Cited Research is going to be employed somewhere. You can't feasibly prevent that.

What you can do- and where the cost-benefit tradeoff comes- is shape where they work.

Yes, a Chinese student doing industrial theft is bad. That is both a cost (loss of profits) and a relative loss (gain to the Chinese CCP). But if the cost is going to be incurred in some form regardless (alternative modes of theft), is it a worse cost than the gains of employing the student yourself, and denying them to the competition?

Or- put another way- is China benefiting more from a student-who-could-be-a-rocket-designer being a possible corporate spy facilitating the occasional IP theft, than by having them home being a senior rocket designer?

For a strategy game metaphor, in strategy games there are occasional tradeoffs between an ability that provides a buff with no downside, and another ability that provides a greater buff but with a downside, such as reducing health in exchange for greater offense. While the actual best option is context-dependent, as a matter of human psychology a lot people instinctively shy away from assuming known costs, even if they would be better for it. (Such as the health debuff actually letting you kill more enemies before they can hit you, saving you health despite an upfront cost.) Loss-aversion is real, even if the losses accepted enable greater profits / reduce greater lasses.

This is- loosely- analogous to the costs/benefits of brain drain of foreign students and would-be experts. There are costs to the receiving party / benefits to the sending policy, but these alone do no make refusing the costs an ideal position.

What it should mean- in a reasonable exchange- is setting reasonable limits of cost-benefit tradeoff.

You don't want Iranian students to be on nuclear submarines? Sure. But how about the experimental reactor design program? It's not exactly enabling Iran to go from non-nuclear to nuclear. Or how about Fusion? If that is invented, it'll probably be the fastest-stolen tech in history anyway. Etc. etc.

But once we get to this point of discussion on 'which jobs,' we're already accepting the premise that letting them in has merit in the first place, as opposed to the opposite.

If the same thing is stolen from all four sources by different means- by the Chinese student, from the university the Chinese student worked at, from the corporation commercializing the research, and from the government that was funding the project / holding the data- then the Chinese student is not, actually, that important to the loss of information.

By that reasoning, none of the four sources is important to the loss of information and generalized, nothing at all is important.

Not quite. It's not that nothing is important, but rather that certain objections start to lose value when they amount to special pleading rather than an actual standard of differentiation.

Think of it as analogous to swimming in the rain. Not wanting to go outside when it's raining because you don't want to get wet is fine. Not wanting to go swimming because you don't want to get wet is fine. But if you are getting in the pool, getting out because it's raining isn't compelling on 'because rain gets you wet' grounds. There may be other grounds of leaving- a storm, a need to prepare other things for the rain, what have you- but the specific 'because I'd get wet' basis isn't compelling if you're already wet.

In decision-cost frameworks, costs cease to be disqualifying objections if they're shared across the proposed courses of action. That doesn't mean costs aren't worth controlling.

More comments

need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese

No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language. You can draw up all these hypotheticals (what about this family, five generations of pure ethnic Chinese who've been living in the US their whole lives and have never been to China or speak Mandarin really, they're not really Chinese are they haha!) and they will still be irrelevant to the general case. Use wisdom!

let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation? The line from me that you quoted? The answer is obviously 'yes'. The question is not 'can you accurately produce counterfactuals over nearly a hundred years accounting for endless second-order effects', which nobody can answer, least of all social sciences papers.

much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state

So along with the patriotic Chinese we have the Falun Gong and similar who, if anything, have even more of an incentive to manipulate and propagandize. No, national policy should not be influenced by foreign grudges but by national interests. The US manages lobbying extremely badly, so I wouldn't expect you to understand why it can be a bad thing if you have your country's elected representatives wearing foreign army uniforms or describing how their first priority as secretary of state is to help a foreign country.

A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of influence over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties.

A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.

It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.

No, I do not need to defend the meaning of words no matter how much confusion you try to impose on the English language.

Yes, you do need to provide studies that support the motte position you are claiming if you want to claim studies support the motte you are claiming.

Particularly when one of the more influential past works that forms a foundation of the community ethos you are posting in is on the Chinese Robbers fallacy, which is always relevant to topics that mix media posting and China and would also be applicable to gish galloping examples that do not prove population-level assumptions.

Another foundational work being I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, which reviews why ethnic solidarity is not the pre-eminent automatic loyalty determining factor for in-group/out-group dynamics.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about whether relying on foreign talent left countries wide open to treachery and manipulation?

You may be, but no.

We were talking about the amusing mix of irony and self-awareness for you to argue for a presumption of suspicion of treachery and manipulation on the basis of foreign origin, when you are not only a foreigner to the majority of your audience, but you routinely express credulous confidence in foreign-controlled social media known to try and manipulate foreign audience perception at an algorithmic level, and you regularly praise foreign policy thinkers who make exceptionally blunt arguments of the properness of manipulating foreigners-to-them like yourself for their own nation's benefit.

A US government official using critical theory, misrepresentation and legendary goalpost manipulation to defend US government policy sounds like something a deceptive and disingenuous US government official would say to manipulate opinions.

This, too, sounds like something a foreigner would say to manipulate other foreigners with whom they share no shared identity or loyalties. Truly, such foreigners should be viewed with suspicion and their potential contributions to the community of one's own should be rejected out of hand as obvious manipulations to influence. Particularly when so heavy handed as with the amusingly blatant use of forum pejoratives tailored to the sub-audience.

(I shall update my list of accused pejoratives to now include 'critical theorist,' which will sit nicely next to the 'neocon,' 'neoliberal,' 'fascist,' and other such ideological slurs. Unfortunately, American was already included in my (multi)nationality mutt pedigree.)

Unfortunately, rejecting such foreigner influence out of hand would require incorporating the influence of said foreigner, which would not be rejecting the untrustworthy influence, hence categorically invalid on its own premise.

It's a particularly shameless given how well Australia has behaved as an ally. Australia shows up to even the silliest US wars, regardless of where they are. Australia provides good bases and good signals intelligence. Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard. It is not 'treacherous and manipulative' for an Australian to straightforwardly urge friendly countries to pursue national interests.

Unless you have put on an unprecedent amount of weight over Christmas feasting, you are not Australia, and no one would particularly confuse you for a continent, a nation, or about 26,000,000 other people of various ethnicities, of which only a minority are even ethnically Anglo-Celtic.

I also highly doubt you have ever in your life shown up for even a single American war, based a single American solider in your home, provided the Americans any intelligence function, or made a single decision in the Australian defense community that would warrant anyone to identify you, individually, as an 'ally' of the US, as opposed to someone who lives in the geographic landmass of Australia with a hobbyist level of interest in geopolitics.

I'll leave it to other self-identified Australians of the forum to say whether you are representative of Australians in general. You are certainly not representative of various wings of the Australian foreign policy establishment.

Can you dial down the contempt a little bit? You are great at long-form arguments and there is nothing wrong with taking apart someone's post, but trust me, you don't need to layer the condescension on that thickly for the subtext to get through.

Sure. I'll even disengage from this topic and any not reply to any replies from him for the rest of the year to clear the air.

Australia is paying for America to get its submarine production up to standard.

To be sure, that is because the French were completely screwing the Aussies over with that contract.

No, it is because of corruption. The PM who trashed the French deal in exchange for the comedically terrible AUKUS one (America is entirely within their rights under the contract to take our money and give us nothing in return) has an incredibly plumb job with one of the American companies that are going to be profiting from that deal (look up Scott Morrison).

The French were also laughably corrupt -- they kept not delivering anything while raising costs and pushing back dates. If that was permitted to continue, it's not clear what stopping point they'd have ever found.

you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China'

Could I have a screenshot of this, or an article about it?

Not quite sure what video site it was on but here it is. Since then it's been deleted. Here's some clips, possibly selectively edited. You can see what I'm talking about though:

Speaking Chinese to a Chinese audience: "I'm from Shenyang, I got a foreign language proficiency notice, I make 10K a month, I can retire at X date, I get Y pension. Being a soldier is just a job, no matter who you work for. US Army doesn't say that China is bad, it's fine, they don't indoctrinate you. If you get based in Korea, you can maybe go on holiday to China on a 4-day holiday. 'What would I do if the US and China go to war' - well they probably won't go to war, nuclear war makes it unlikely. But if it does happen I will definitely quit the US Army, wouldn't join the Chinese Army because I wanna keep my US citizenship but I'll do my best to help the Chinese people, wouldn't help the US against China (or help China against the US???).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rCI830ZIJd0

This is not what I would call a loyal attitude, nor is it desirable. The MSS would be unable to restrain their smiles as they see this guy on his four day holiday in China! Is the US Army an Army or is it a mob of mercenaries going in for lifestyle perks? The mob of mercenaries might be OK against hopelessly outgunned foes, it's not suitable for gruelling warfare against serious opponents. You can't just desert if it gets tough, being a soldier is not a normal job.

There's nothing in particular that comes to the mind from the last decade or so of western military reporting, so nothing systemic at least, though I am also interested if anything is provided. (Edit: Provided information did not demonstrate any systemic pattern, and was a single alleged ethnic-Chinese NCO claiming he wouldn't fight for US against China or vice versa. Motives appear to have been familial rather than ethnic, and amounted to neutrality on claimed terms.)

However, this is more likely to be an extension / reflection / TikTok propaganda perpetuation of the ethnic 'Chinese story' approach of China's diaspora policy, which seeks to utilize / cooperate / encourage ethnic Chinese in other countries to adopt pro-PRC narratives.

PRC ethnic-chinese diaspora policy has multiple roles. Part of this is to maximize the benefit to the PRC from ethnic chinese out in the world, but another part is to encourage / cultivate the perception-conflation that (ethnic) Chinese = China = PRC = CCP. What's less obvious is that this doesn't just work in so much that it convinces ethnic chinese in the diaspora (so that they believe that there is some duty owed to the PRC), but that it also works when it convinces the non-ethnic-chinese of other states.

Ethnic chinese are encouraged to be distinct, rather than assimilate, and the flip side of this is that the PRC benefits from a 'don't try to assimilate them' suspicion / caution in other parties. It's not so much that they want there to be an actual significant amount of anti-Chinese hostility, but certain amounts of distrust and hostility lets the CCP present itself as the guardian of the ethnic chinese diaspora, garnering local influence and letting them set up proxy influencers, even as it can use those ethnic chinese influence groups to lobby / try to influence the local state.

Going back to this tiktok- the claimed ethnic chinese officer claiming they wouldn't fight China (...note that they are allegedly in a recruiting position, not a combat arms branch), is almost certainly not representative, if they even exist. But encouraging the perception that ethnic Chinese military members can't be trusted would be a exceptionally beneficial propaganda line to signal boost if there was even just 1 example (or invent if there was not).

Note, also, that this is a pretty banal sort of ethnic-solidarity / national diaspora propaganda that you can find in any general ethnonationalist / conflict-adjacent context. In the 20th century, the German diaspora was not only a factor in the WW2 pro-Nazi sympathies in places like Argentina, but even earlier when before WW1 German enclaves / business interests in Africa were used as pretexts for the (late) German colonies in Africa. In WW2, it's far more remembered how few ethnic Japanese in the US tried to support Imperial Japan, but that wasn't for a lack of trying on pre-war Imperial Japanese efforts to mobilize ethnic japanese across the Pacific. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm Australian; that the PRC's been trying to co-opt the diaspora is common knowledge here. Interesting point regarding playing off "infiltrator" instincts, though.

Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.

I'm Australian;

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Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.

You could be correct, but you could be incorrect. It depends on more information than we have.

One of the weird things about the initial claim is that the Pentagon banned tiktok from government computers in 2023 barely a year and a half ago. In fact, there was an Army recruiting scandal in 2021 about use of TikTok when not supposed to. If an American recruiter is doing recruitment on TikTok, he is either doing something very wrong regardless of message/loyalty concern (violating policy), or may actually be operating within approved scopes (is operating within special exceptions).

If it's the later, there may be no violation at all. It may, in fact, even be the point.

More on that later, but it's not like the militaries lacks people who garner contempt for wanting to sit out specific conflicts. Kamalla Harris's vice president pick during the recent US election had the baggage that he tried to present himself as a service veteran despite possibly having arranged to get out of his reserve unit's overseas deployment. It's not exactly hard to find dissent within an institution over 2.8 million strong (standing military, reserves, support civilians), with some people shaping (or ending) their careers to not be associated with some conflict / etc. In past unpopular wars, it wasn't unknown for people to join entire other services (such as joining the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army in Vietnam), or to unceremoniously retire to avoid deployments (in the Iraq War era there was a surge of American reserve / national guard retirements by people who were content to be in the reserves during the 90s when it was considered low/no risk).

Ultimately Ranger's argument relies on assumptions of a separate topic (presentation of loyalties, as opposed to policy adherence) where there's a perception of what sort of loyalty people think is required (members must be willing to fight all enemies and say so!) that is less absolute in practice.

It's less absolute because manpower is not only limited (there has never been an endless supply of ideal candidates), but manpower is often both fungible (one person here can free up another person to go there) and mutually exclusive (person trained for expertise A can't be used in occupation B anyway). Full-throated concurrence with all wars wasn't a requirement in the conscription era (where conscientious objectors / pacifists could sometimes be shunted to support roles, or just put in risk and expected to save themselves), nor is it typically demanded in a volunteer-service model (where service members have some significant influence over their careers as they reach higher ranks, and thus can choose areas where they're not likely to do what they really don't want to do).

There are certainly cases / issues when an expeditionary military says 'go' and the person says 'I don't want to,' but these are both very rare at the level of the recruiter in question, and, uh, wouldn't be present for someone who is a recruiter.

///

Now to return to the point passed earlier, where it could be a context of approved message. (Emphasis on could.)

Ranger's argument works from a perspective of how this is terrible because lack of loyalty and inherent untrustworthiness and mercenaries bad and yada. Ranger is also very clearly not thinking like a manpower-capability developer (i.e. recruitment at scale), but operating from a basis of purity politic demands. Purity politics is bad force generation policy. Even governments obsessed with ideological compliance, such as the Soviets, used a purity-cadre model (political officers) as opposed to a purity rank-and-file model.

Starting from the most obvious, monetary incentives are absolutely a basis of building and retaining talent. This isn't an issue of 'mercenary' pejoratives, it's a point that that in a volunteer service model the military is an employer, and as an employer they are competing with all other employers to recruit and retain. Fundamental disconnect there, and also woefully ignorant of why so many of the common US incentives include post-service benefits, like paying for college (i.e. investing in domestic talent development after getting your military use out of them). This is why in modern history the American military has been often seen approvingly as a 'way up' for underclass Americans- it provides substantial training / more structured environments / post-service education that people may not otherwise be able to afford. It's not a guarantee, but it's a powerful incentive. Someone who serves 4 years and than leaves to enjoy college is not a failure, it's a success story of how you got someone to successfully serve 4 years at the lowest runs of the military and then improved their national value potential.

Part of any recruitment pitch, in turn, comes with conveying the perception of costs for taking the job. If a recruiter says 'you may never go see your family abroad,' then that is a lot of people who might be willing to serve but not if it means they can't serve abroad. Similarly, if a recruiter says 'you must be willing to fight the Chinese state, no matter if the PRC attempts to use your family as hostages,' then again, you are winnowing the field. The US military is designed to fight on 2 different continents at any time, with at least Europe and Korea providing non-Chinese fronts.

Further, a recruiting pitch that can appeal to both hard-core joiners (the people who would be more gung-ho than the recruiter) and the wavering (ethnic Chinese who would share the sentiment of not wanting to join a war against China, but would also not want to fight the US) isn't inviting a trojan horse with the later category, it's getting an asset.

The chinese language is, in a word, hard, and there is generally a shortage in any non-Chinese government of people who can speak and/or read it. As a result, there is a demand that far exceeds the supply in people who can (a) read / speak Chinese, and (b) are willing to do it for the government. Someone who is (c) willing to do it at an enlisted soldier's pay (low) at (d) enlisted soldiers hours (no overtime pay) and in (e) enlisted soldier's living standards (non-affluent) and at a (f) enlisted soldier's 'can be moved across the world to where most conveneient (incredibly high) is incredibly good value-for-money.

There is, in other words, a great many useful / desirable roles that a government wants a Chinese-speaker for, many of them that do not require taking up arms against the PRC even in the course of a war against the PRC. Many of them require no access to sensitive material / networks / resources either.

The role of any human resources / recruiting institution is to try to match potential incoming talent to desired needs, not to refuse to accept valuable talents because it is unsuited for any particular need. 'Speaks Chinese, but is not willing to fight the Chinese state' is not a the most desirable recruit package, but it's a very useful one. The questions / investigations of loyalty / questions of what they are willing to do are real considerations, but they are more questions on how to direct talent to the best cost/benefit position after they joined, not whether to encourage them to join.

They are also, critically, questions that go on well beyond the initial recruiter pitch. As such, a recruiter who is authorized to make such a pitch agreeable to such people, may be doing nothing wrong.

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I mean, let's be fair here, I'd refuse to fight the Motherland or Fatherland Britain or Germany unless something had gone drastically wrong in those countries requiring liberation. But if something hadn't gone drastically wrong in those countries, the only reason I'd be being asked to do so is if something had gone drastically wrong here.

Then again, I'm not in the Army (I'd kinda like to be in the Reserve, but I don't think they'd take me).

(Also, yeah, I know Chinese is hard to learn; I spent 3.5 years learning it in school.)

It's going to be the Indians that radicalize a critical mass of tech bros to the Dissident Right.

LOL, why? Low level Indian managers are infamous for hiring incompetent co-ethnics (chosen by criteria that make sense to them, but not to Americans) but they're not going to be running anything more. High-level Indian managers are no different than their white counterparts, except maybe they're a little more transparent in their mendacity (a failing I suspect experience will mend).

Parasites acting as carriers for the dysfunction of thier home culture is all the more reason to stop importing them.

This is maddening, Shiv Aroor is a prime time anchor. I won't be surprised if pajeet becomes mainstream in a few years going by what these chaps post.

The Amerikaner is correct but if you are an upper-caste male here, you will never sniff political power,

Why is this, though? Why did the upper castes so utterly lose power? Why can’t they take it back? It all seems so arbitrary, you don’t see brahmins or kshatriyas start burning down Delhi to demand an end to reservation. American conservatives did far more to attack the far less radical system of affirmative action than Brahmins have to attack reservation.

Kshatriyas or rajputs and Brahmins can actually take over since the military here is exclusively upper caste males and the only thing that works, it's just that the acceptance of electoral politics put the genie out of the bottle and it will never go back in. Other upper castes wanted more, they wanted more than what they had and happily chose to support democracy as they believed that they'd get their socialist but still castiest utopia that way, instead what you got was anti castiest (like anti racist so just lefty) dystopia.

No caste will cooperate as they care more about being the universal welders of power than sharing it as others would defect too, this wasn't as strong within the kshatriya caste as it's just or group unlike multiple castes of brahmins and mercantiles.

It is far easier to simply generalise groups, Tutsis or Yorubas are simply seen as Africans.

If we didn't want to do that, what would be your recommended more detailed classification?

You have upper castes middle castes and lower castes. Most migrants are South Indian (Telugu mostly), Punjabi or Gujratis Middle castes. As long as you avoid these three and break the backbone of Indian IT sweatshops, you'd be fine in all honesty.

Otherwise there are very minute classifications, for instance the upper two castes in the north west are least likely to migrate or want to migrate because they have a sense of sovereignty, an identity that they know would dissipate upon leaving, also how them leaving makes the Hindu fold (which again is another name for upper castes) toothless.

Middle castes simply don't care as they're the majority.

Like so many systems dreamt up by congress, the H1B mechanics were poorly designed from the start. A lottery? That's incredibly stupid. The DV lottery is one thing, kind of dystopian but one can see the 'logic' (in the progressive mindset) of allowing random people in poor countries to gamble on a kind of Ellis Island vision of making it in America.

But the H1B system requires certainty. A simple fix would just be to cut the total number by 60-80%, then turn it into a bid system. Each visa is auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would have two effects. Firstly it would provide companies with some certainty, because prices would be pretty stable, with some fluctuations depending on the strength of the economy/employment market. Secondly, it would immediately cut out Infosys/Tata/Cognizant etc because the "apply for literally every engineer we have in India, then send over the ones who win the lottery" tactic would no longer work and the new bidding price would be unaffordable for anyone who wasn't generating substantial economic value.

Another issue is the abuse of the O-1 system, which has risen from like 10,000 to 40,000 visas a year (inc dependants). There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year. This is a visa designed for Hollywood stars and Harvard academics that is again being exploited by the tech sector.

There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year.

Extraordinary, not just exceptional. Just having a PhD from a top UK university counts as exceptional under US immigration law (and probably should). Exceptional ability doesn't help much with the first visa (it makes you eligible for certain discretionary waivers), but when you are applying for one your green card comes out of a different quota pool which doesn't normally have a lag.

Extraordinary ability means meeting three out of eight criteria, one of which is "high salary" and some of the others of which are gameable. But the intent was "one of the top 100 or so people in your subfield in the world".

Interesting, I always thought the criteria for O-1 were much stricter. As things stand I'm probably eligible for the visa which is good to know...

You know, that would have made an unironic christmas gift for yourself to start on yesterday.

'This year, my gift to myself was starting my path to becoming a bloody Yank.'

Good point, although I'm quite happy here in the UK close to family working in one of the very few industries where the pay differential between the UK and the US isn't all that big. NYC is also a lot more expensive than London to live in from what I hear the people visiting us from the US say.

But the intent was "one of the top 100 or so people in your subfield in the world".

Yeah, but there's no good way to measure that objectively without having per-field requirements which are very onerous for the state to come up with.

Absolutely agreed. Some things are hard, but important to get right. If you want generally low immigration, high-skill immigration is one of them.

But the H1B system requires certainty. A simple fix would just be to cut the total number by 60-80%, then turn it into a bid system.

Or a points-based system, which can also subsume the O-1. And abolish the dual-intent of L-1, which is another incredibly stupid quirk.

Another issue is the abuse of the O-1 system, which has risen from like 10,000 to 40,000 visas a year (inc dependants). There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year. This is a visa designed for Hollywood stars and Harvard academics that is again being exploited by the tech sector.

Why not turn it into something the POTUS has power over, like these pardons of federal felons? If there's an exceptional person that is so weird he/she won't be able to score enough points through the regular route surely he/she is exceptional enough that the president is familiar with the name and can be convinced to let him/her in?

Or a points-based system

Any points-based system can be gamed. The O1 for anyone in STEM, including tech, is gamed, for example, by having applicants submit papers to bullshit fake journals that still count for the purposes of the application.

Why not turn it into something the POTUS has power over, like these pardons of federal felons?

Because then any Democratic POTUS will just stamp millions of visas.

And abolish the dual-intent of L-1, which is another incredibly stupid quirk.

Yes, agreed, the L-1 visa should be for a maximum 5 year stay in the US followed by a minimum 3 year cooling off period in the home country during which they can’t visit the US for more than 60 days per year.

Any points-based system can be gamed. The O1 for anyone in STEM, including tech, is gamed, for example, by having applicants submit papers to bullshit fake journals that still count for the purposes of the application.

I don't see how you can game the Canadian CRS, for example. By faking your age, perhaps, or getting a Ph.D. from a diploma mill.

Because then any Democratic POTUS will just stamp millions of visas.

Make it a mandatory ceremony, then. The person must arrive at the White House and the President will shake their hand and hand them their papers.

Make it a mandatory ceremony, then. The person must arrive at the White House and the President will shake their hand and hand them their papers.

That won't work; the step from "allowing a few" to "allowing a lot" is too easy to make. Maybe a by video ceremony, or using in a standin, or something else to remedy the "oversight" that "helps hard working immigrants who through no fault of their own can't attend". The exact method of slipping is less important than the fact that slipping is a very small step.

Why not just cut off H1B entirely and family reunification, etc. Only leave maybe the modified O-1 system and limit the numbers but that also has its own problems.

Just cause foreigners are capable doesn't mean it is good to have them running your country. So you need to implement controls to keep them few and compliant. Or you end up with Indians banning the American president on twitter and running things along with other ethnocentric migrant groups and ideologically aligned liberals.

You need to also care about friendliness when selecting people in addition to competence. So for such purposes you are also selecting for people who are more like those who make disproportionately the math Olympiads who are east Asian nerds who aren't charismatic who are a) smart b) unlikely to run things. And so select against those whose skills and proclivities make them good social climbers and might be inclined to coordinate with their own foreign ethnic group or with others for such purposes. To the extend competent foreigners are to be chosen it must be few, friendly, and mainly smart nerds who don't want to run things and keep them as workers, but not managers.

That and obviously a country should give priority to those competent from their or similar ethnic groups over groups that are more foreign. With again special attention made on friendliness. Some ethnic groups might hold grudges against yours, or more likely to be a nationalist fifth column, despite being closer culturally. Baltics shouldn't prefer Indians because they aren't Russians, but of course a larger % of Russians threaten more fifth column activity and so it makes sense to prefer for example French over Russian migrants.

I mean, my preference is that we just reinstate pre-65 national origins, so if you want to bring in 10,000 Indians you need to bring in 100,000 English, 100,000 Germans, 30,000 people from the former Austro-Hungarian empire etc. But clearly that's unlikely to happen.

I don't really see the appeal for a lot of these migrants coming to the west. Indians who could be making 2000 dollars a month which goes a very long way in India become underpaid engineers in the UK where their after tax salary ends up being 3000 dollars which barely covers rent. My Indian colleagues love sharing photos of the beautiful houses they grew up in, their gardeners bringing in daily tropical fruit and all the family life they have back home. In their new country they live in a cramped apartment in a semi-ghetto.

My predictions is that we are going to see an exodus to India which won't just consist of Indians. Northern European weather is awful, taxes and regulations are high and the cost of living is through the roof. It is better to move to your Indian employees than to move Indians to Europe.

Have you ever been to India? They want to leave the country, not stay there.

Here’s a game; go on google maps and grab the streetview guy and drop him in random places in India. See if you can rotate a full 360 degrees without seeing trash, or crumbling infrastructure of some kind.

Now do the same game in the US.

Thats why they want to leave.

Not just that, the average Indian has terrible hbd metrics, the introduction of castes was to protect virtue and keep fat tails to eek most out of what is here, once you go through the micro minority of good bio capital, what's left is dysfunctional.

Indians hate Indians, anything Anglo is a strong social signal here. People would rather be near homeless in NYC than be in low income ghettos in Chennai or some other city.

People mock Slough for being a shithole, but a random residential panorama from there looks like this.

The least impoverished state in India is commie Kerala, and a random residential panorama from its capital... let me paste that... Thiruvananthapuram looks like this, which is not a shithole, but it's not the kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism that will sway American NIMBYs either.

If we go to India proper, aka BIMARU, then the situation looks even worse: a random panorama from Delhi looks like this and I've cheated because Delhi is not technically a BIMARU state. Here's one from a random town in UP.

You're not comparing like for like here. The Slough street is a top 10% (or even higher) nighbourhood. Your first photo of India is an average to below average neighbourhood and your second and third ones are commercial areas with some residences on top rather than pure residential areas which are on average somewhat nicer and look more like your first photo. But even then, it's nowhere near a top 10% neighbourhood and we know this immediately because the street is too narrow for one.

That isn't top 10%. A top 10% neighborhood in the Slough area would be called "Windsor" or "Maidenhead".

Sure, in Slough yes but it's definitely top 10% for England as a whole (even ignoring land value and just looking at house quality).

It’s a 90th percentile (almost exactly) house by price, but this a poor comparison because incomes are so much higher in the Southeast and especially for residents of the affluent green belt suburbs, in which as @MadMonzer suggests this is probably more like 75th percentile.

In the median part of the UK, probably somewhere in the north, £600k can buy you a much nicer place than this.

Top 10% neighborhoods in India are often still pretty dirty, though, the street outside an apartment building where the average apartment costs $2m will have a broken sidewalk, garbage, a random cow.

Do you have a link to a top 10% Indian neighborhood? I honestly clicked on random street view streets.

This is like a top 0.1-1% neighbourhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFNzii2e6BT5Vvir5 The houses themselves are so far set back from the street that you can't even see them, but on average they look something like this.

Top 1%-10% looks like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Qef6cvBq2HCzgZMc9

Another example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/8MYWxih9nbs7aP14A

This is like a top 0.1-1% neighbourhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFNzii2e6BT5Vvir5 The houses themselves are so far set back from the street that you can't even see them, but on average they look something like this.

I had to click along the road just once to find a pile of trash. The other two are nicer, probably because people living there actually use these streets. I would rate them Russia-tier, though it's more like the penultimate decile, not the ultimate one.

Huh? That Russian neighborhood looks pretty nice. Intact curbs, lots of landscaping, and no piles of trash. There's even an under-construction sign.

This is like a top 0.1-1% neighbourhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BFNzii2e6BT5Vvir5 The houses themselves are so far set back from the street that you can't even see them, but on average they look something like this.

There's still garbage on the street, https://maps.app.goo.gl/kaDQdMq7PXkkycNP9.

Fair enough, it'll probably be picked up and removed within a few days, which is very likely a higher frequency of garbage collection than in Slough given the council funding crisis they have and all...

People mock Slough for being a shithole, but a random residential panorama from there looks like this.

This is a very nice middle class street in England, though. One of those 3-bedroom semi-detached houses costs $770,000. The people who are buying those homes today (not 20 years ago) are like young dual-income software engineer or lawyer or accountant couples (especially given the state of British salaries) .For the same price, ie. 65 million rupees or 6.5 crore rupees, you can buy something much nicer than that in Thiruvananthapuram, at least according to some property websites I just googled.

Obviously India's big problem is squalor, even in wealthy neighborhoods, but presumably this bothers Indian expats less. The interiors of the homes are usually spotless, in any case.

Some of our American friends here may not realize when looking on the street that each of those buildings is not one house, but two houses that share a wall in the middle. That half of a building is what's costing three quarters of a million dollars. It's twice as crowded a street as you might think it is if you're only considering one full building as a single house.

As an American I assumed those were all single family homes, God bless America.

Duplexes are a thing in America, although they do not generally cater to the crowd that buys three quarter million dollar houses.

This is location dependent.

There are new-build duplex 'condominium' in an HOA in our small NE town for $669k (2 bed 2.5 bath 2,165 sqft.)

Whenever I go on Google Street view in the UK, I'm shocked by how ugly the houses are. Why is everything so grey and depressing looking? I'm used to thinking of it as a rich country, but the quality of housing appears to be extremely low.

Whenever I go on Google Street view in the UK, I'm shocked by how ugly the houses are. Why is everything so grey and depressing looking?

That, along with queuing, is basically the UKs brand. There's a reason the original title for Orwell's work was 1948.

The UK has the worst housing quality in the developed world. My family's house back in our semi rural ancestral village that was build in the 1980s is better built and has more amenities today (AC for example) than those houses in the picture.

The quality of housing is poor in the UK by first world standards even compared to any other nation with similar income, so it’s not just that Europe is poorer than the US.

There are many reasons but most come back to the mid-1930s which, unlike in most of the world, was a period of great economic growth and development for the UK, which was less affected by the Great Depression than any comparable nation. (This also explains appeasement to some extent.)

Huge numbers of new suburbs were built. The default middle class British suburban house is probably still a 1930s ‘semi’[-detached] property that looks like this.

At the same time, local governments (later guaranteed by the national government) implemented policies that severely restricted suburban construction around all major British cities - seriously, look at the map in that link, especially around London. In addition, many of the wealthy long-standing commuters towns began exercising greater planning control over new developments; British local governments have very little power except over planning, and NIMBYism started early here.

For a long time, this didn’t affect much; the Blitz and postwar reconstruction destroyed a huge amount of housing stock, much of which was hastily and cheaply rebuilt in that era of austerity and rationing. Then, as London’s population declined by millions of people after WW2, there were plenty of beautiful old Victorian and Edwardian stucco townhouses and apartment buildings where homes could be had for cheap. Much of the population moved out into suburban towns build on brownfield sites or which had earlier been earmarked for development, to places like Slough.

After Margaret Thatcher restarted the British economy, millions of people began to return to London in large numbers, and the price of property began to shoot up. In the suburbs and city alike, local councils began to exercise their immense power over applications to prevent most new construction, to avoid loud works or annoyed neighbors or more strain on local schools or hospitals. In the city, much of the surviving pre-1945 stock of housing was ‘listed’ as architecturally important, which in combination with strict height limits meant London has a much lower density than comparable major cities and much less new construction.

That, coupled with the green belt itself, which all levels of government and almost all existing homeowners (who vote) guard zealously, means that British housing stock is largely both poor and expensive, especially in the southeast where most economic activity takes place. When housebuilders do get approval to build on even brownfield land, they cram as many ugly, cheap and small-windowed homes onto it as they can, because approvals can take decades of legal wrangling to achieve, thus the “Barratt box” (named after the largest UK housebuilder) negative descriptor of Deano meme fame.

If you have money and/or live somewhere with no jobs you can avoid all this and live in some of the most beautiful and well-preserved pre-1920s housing in the world. But most people can’t.

I thought those were all post-bombing 1950/60s stock? Those big windows don’t look prewar to me. We let the socialists get control during the crucial rebuilding period.

Yes, the housing stock in this picture is clearly postwar. Either the street was bombed, since Slough was apparently hit quite heavily, or it was new construction. But the reason why we can’t just demolish these houses and replace them with better ones, as happened elsewhere, is due to decisions made earlier and later than that.

There's also government regulations that require houses to look ugly so that people don't fall out the window.

https://x.com/SCP_Hughes/status/1674006804076920834

I thought they literally don't allow windows to open more than an inch now for the same reason.
There were a lot of window opening loicense jokes on Twitter last summer because of that.

Edit: it's 100mm or ~4"

Haven't heard that. Pretty sure fire regulations require that people can egress out of windows (at least in bedrooms), so maybe it applies only to some windows.

Yes, that is another BS regulation we have to deal with.

Regulations were recently introduced requiring a minimum window sill or guard height of 1.1 metres (43.3 inches).

For comparison, the US's de facto standard prescribes for window-sill heights a minimum of 18 inches (0.46 meter) and a maximum of 44 inches (1.12 meters).

It's even less restrictive than that; you can have floor to ceiling glazing (not uncommon in fixed windows and sliding doors) provided the glass meets the hazardous location standards. That standard isn't about people falling out of open windows, it's about breaking through closed ones.

There's another rule about that, R321.2.1. The minimum is 24 inches (0.61 meter), from the floor to the opening, unless a guard is provided. Obvious thing to do if you want a window lower than that is to make the top panel the operating one, and I think I've seen that. As long as it's above 18 inches you can use regular glass.

Kerala isn't better than any BIMARU states besides Bihar. The best infrastructure would be Chandigarh which looks like impoverished chiang mai from 20 years ago in the good parts. Although North East of India, the population with east Asian admixture has better infrastructure.

Bihar is the worst, the ironic thing being some of the smartest people come from these parts. South Asia has something cursed to it that it's somehow worse than other comparable nations at the similar gdp.

The only thing I know about Chandigarh is that it was designed as another one of the modernist monstrosities like Brasilia or EUR in Rome. Are the residential parts any better?

Brutalism, yes, it's way better than any Indian city by miles as they simply lack any planning or direction at all.

There's a reason why people are willing to freeze to death to leave, India isn't for beginners. There are some elite enclaves sprinkled here and there that you can only buy after doing shady shit with the government given the absurd prices.

As I understand it it's true that Indians making, say, $80,000 a year live a much better life in India than in the US. The issue is that India has an ultra-intense rat race for the few (relative to population) good jobs, there's extreme affirmative action in elite college admissions and public sector recruitment, and the 'peak' salary you can make without being a successful entrepreneur (where you're stymied by corruption, graft and socialist overregulation that the government doesn't dare/want to repeal) is much lower than in the US. That means that a lot of these people move more for their kids than themselves. The Indian passport is also bad for international travel, and there's a sense the whole house of cards could collapse at any moment, in which case you're just another poor person in a third-world country with no social safety net whatsoever.

If you move to Canada, the "worst" that could happen financially if you lose your job is much better than the worst that could happen in India, even if you live on average a slightly lower QOL.

And you get to escape the gene pool you dislike to begin with. India isn't for beginners.

I've recently immigrated from a developed nation to Malaysia for a variety of reasons, and whilst I do agree that frequently a skilled professional is probably losing out in purchasing power by immigrating it's understating how hard it can be to get through the original junior ranks in less developed economies and how brutal the work-life expectations frequently are. It's also frequently ironic that Indians who are enthusiastically arguing for quotas in the West are also likely to be victims of a huge, messy internal Idpol system of caste-based quotas that make it difficult to get on the proverbial treadmill as an upper-middle class scion. Malaysian Chinese also find themselves in a similar spot where there's very-strong preferential hiring and university placement domestically for Malays/Muslims which makes it difficult for fresh grads to get anywhere. And if they're fortunate enough to get into the local chapter of whatever elite Consultancy there's literal 120 hour workweeks.

Not directly related, but I find the whole argument around H1B damaging 'competitiveness' to be absurd when the majority of workers even in tech are still firmly in the bullshit job sphere. I'm paid very well for my digital role, but if my company were hit by a meteor tomorrow the world would not especially notice or care. Yes H1Bs might be able to claim high salaries but having more button-maintainers for the Facebook mines doesn't strike me as particularly beneficial.

While Malaysia is poor, KL is a relatively developed city with a high-for-the-developing-world median income and very developed public services. It's nicer than Bangkok, in my opinion, very clean in the nice parts. A problem is the traffic, but it's no worse than LA. You can absolutely live a first-world-tier lifestyle in KL, especially given the low rents, on a modest (for the US) income.

The issue is more that for most people from developed nations there are no jobs that would hire them at those incomes in KL other than maybe being an English teacher at a private school (where there are many candidates). There are enough PMC Malaysian Chinese in the West who would gladly move back to KL for a job paying more than say (US) $80-90k in a heartbeat. Why would you hire someone with no background/family in Malaysia? I know a couple of Europeans out there who do well, but all are married into wealthy Malaysian families (one converted to Islam for his Malay wife, the other married a Chinese Malaysian woman whose family owns a big brokerage).

My wife's originally from a part of Malaysia just outside of Kuala Lumpur (and plugging into her upper middle class Chinese family network makes the financial/cultural shift way more manageable than if I was proverbially fresh off the plane). Having spent a decent amount of time throughout SEA & other digital nomad hubs (Vietnam, Bali, Dubai, Bangkok, Singapore etc), I think Malaysia's prettymuch the perfect mid-point in terms of expenses, development and cultural vibes. Main issue I could see with Malaysia, ignoring the local economy, is the lack of a night life, which isn't really an issue for me with a young family.

My wife and I are both fortunate to have fairly niche skillsets/equity in remote-friendly companies that let us continue to earn international Western rates with reasonably strong job security, but interacting with my wife's younger siblings I can see the difficulties of being a fresh 20-something in Malaysia, especially if you are not Malay. Entry-level/customer service jobs in Selangor pay like 700-1k USD a month. My wife got out through a generous international scholarship which led her into her current role through a fairly circuitous path.

Main issue I could see with Malaysia, ignoring the local economy, is the lack of a night life, which isn't really an issue for me with a young family.

Yeah, there are a few good bars in KL, but it's the standard SEA issue of Australia being a rich country such that the most annoying Aussie tourists/backpackers can ruin the nice places. The places that are more rich international Chinese are better, and far fewer sexpats than practically anywhere else in SEA. Food scene is excellent too, lots of great spas / hotel gyms you can be a member at. Are you white or ethnically Chinese (or something else) yourself? How do you find you're treated when working with locals as a foreigner?

I'm white and far enough off the beaten tourist track that I've literally been questioned about why I'm going where I'm going by Grab Drivers a few times. I wouldn't say I get stared at perse but have had like Mamak workers come and be very curious a few times. The family's super accommodating, which helps. Generally everybody KL-adjacent will have some English, though I'm not a huge fan of KL itself (It's fine but generic SEA capital).

Food is great, my main personal limitation is I can't really train my preferred combat sports since I'm 99th percentile for size in the West.

Extremely unlikely because the Indian regime has been driving out people and investors. Indian nation runs on bioleninism as its founding mythos, there are demands of caste based affirmative action in private industries as the public ones are already beyond 70 percent effectively. Beyond the ludicrous taxes which will drive out anyone who is not stupid. The newest political gambit is offering women ubi in multiple different states by all parties. Only 2 percent of India pays taxes.

The likely outcome is more what is there already with euros pushing back more. The Indian state being stupid and most Indians choosing defect as the default will cause a real collapse. Each political faction here is hard left. You will see more Indians leaving for East Asia, the Middle East and maybe Lat Am too as this gets worse. The west is aspirational for most, people will happily live in squalor and die migrating illegally to go there.

Oof, even partial UBI in a third world country is crazy. Flailing state indeed. I'm not the most humanitarian person in the world but it's insane to advance all these high-end initiatives when child wasting is still such a big issue. They've got a space program, hypersonic missiles, plans for aircraft carriers... Fix nutrition and primary education first!

Have you ever been to India? Have you ever worked there?

While there are large slums and the underclass lives an awful life it is possible to live very well on a decent income. I have been to other developing nations but not to India.

While I think you greatly underestimate the pros of living in northern Europe, even if there was to be an exodus of people from here I doubt they'd go to India. There are plenty of places with better weather that are overall better places to live and that have better long-term prospects.

India has some of the worst housing problems in the third world, beyond issues like petty theft, dishonesty being the default, high taxes, longer work hours.

It is becoming harder to have a decent life because the political factions need more from the average white-collar worker to fund hare-brained social justice schemes and one-upping other factions each time. You cannot find housing in cities that pay you well.

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