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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   39514 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Raising the Price of Admission

I find myself immensely frustrated by Trump's recent moves to cut down on immigration, especially replacing the EB5 with his new golden ticket scheme.

I've always wanted to move to the States, but by virtue of being Indian, and in a profession with strict regulatory requirements, it was never easy. As of right now, I can't sit for the USMLE if I wanted to, but I believe that is a problem my uni could solve, unfortunately I'm locked into the UK for at least 3 more years and don't have the time to breathe down their necks.

If I wanted to spend $1 million for the old EB5, I'd probably have to sell a significant fraction of my familial assets, and they're not mine yet, I have a sibling and parents to think of. The fact that we even have that much, when my father made $50k at the peak of his career as a OBGYN surgeon, represents a lifetime of my parents being frugal and living beneath their means. My dad started out from scratch, a penniless refugee, and all his life he worked tirelessly to make sure his kids wouldn't have to work as hard as he did. To a degree, he's succeeded. I nearly make as much as he does, but that's virtue of grinding my ass off to escape India. I had to settle for the UK, whereas I'd much rather be in the States.

The EB-5 program already functioned as a high barrier to entry, requiring not just capital but also the ability to invest in ways that met the job creation criteria. By raising the price to $5 million, the U.S. is effectively signaling that it no longer wants "entrepreneurial upper-middle-class" immigrants - it only wants the ultra-wealthy. The problem, is that the truly ultra-wealthy already have multiple options. The US is relatively unique in dual-taxation, and has heavier taxes overall when compared to some of the alternatives. They can buy citizenship in other countries (Malta, St. Kitts, etc.), take advantage of residence-by-investment programs in the EU, or just maintain an arsenal of visas that allow them to live anywhere they please. The U.S. loses out on exactly the kind of people who were willing to put down roots and contribute significantly to the economy while still needing the opportunities that U.S. citizenship provides.

If Trump (or any administration) wanted a truly meritocratic system, they should be auctioning off a limited number of economic immigrant slots each year. That would at least allow market forces to determine the actual value of U.S. residency. A points-based system, like Canada’s or Australia’s, could also make more sense: prioritizing skilled professionals over sheer wealth. A million already strongly filters would-be immigrants. Five is exorbitant, especially if it's a flat sum.

(Let's leave aside the other requirements, such as running a business that creates a certain number of jobs)

Jevon's paradoxmakes us expect that increasing the price of a good by 5 times will not 5x the revenue. It'll decrease it in expectation. If Trump prizes himself as a businessman, this should be clear to him.

Even the abolition of birthright citizenship strikes me as a violation of the American ethos. It was certainly being abused, anchor babies being a case in point, but when even green cards are this hard to get, prospective skilled migrants greatly appreciate the peace of mind that their kids are entitled to citizenship provides.

End it for illegal immigrants if you have to, why lump in everyone else there legitimately? I wouldn't mind people using their visitor visas to get a fast one in being debarred too, but I look at the current state of affairs with great dismay.

At any rate, I'm not an American. I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me. Well, I'm used to life being rough, and the UK isn't the worst place I could be. I still think that even from an absolutely monetary point of view, this is a bad plan.

I hope I've made a decent case for why you're not getting much out filtering the immigrants for quality at that point, and the ones who are that loaded are probably not nearly as keen. They're easily Global Citizens for whom nationality is a formality.

Well, I'm still going to see if I manage to figure out the USMLE thing by the time my training in the UK ends, but there must be thousands of skilled immigrants in a similar boat, just noticing a rather significant leak in it. Then they're confronted by a sign at Eliis Island that just any ocean-crossing vessel won't do, they need a yacht. We don't deserve to be clubbed in with those who break the rules.

I only thought of it now, but have you been to America before?

Yes, and I do remember a surprising amount, given how long ago it was. Let's just say the NYC skyline was rather different just a few weeks after I got home.

So some kind of vacation propably? It just seems weird to me to make plans on the scale of potentially selling your inheritance, to move to a place where youve never seen normal life. Especially if, as it seems, youre not just there to earn money and live in a spacially distributed ghetto. Global US culture and internet discussions aside, thats still a cat in a bag.

There's just so much proliferation of US culture and lifestyles into internet spaces. No other nation really compares.

I, of course, intend to visit the States and scope out my options, but I wasn't blindsided to a significant degree when I moved to the UK either. People have a good idea of what to expect, and I'm confident I do.

I wasn't blindsided to a significant degree

In the sense of few surprises, or just that you didnt notice them negatively?

All of the surprises were minor in absolute terms. I knew what to expect in terms of culture and the activities of daily living,

Before I landed in London a few years back, did I know that buses had little buttons you could press to ensure they pulled over before your stop? I didn't, they're not a thing in India, you usually just tell the conductor or driver if you want to get off. But I saw people use them, and in about 5 minutes I knew what to do. Most other minor surprises are of about the same magnitude, I can't recall seeing something of significant importance that I didn't know before I came.

Hm. I sometimes find myself surprised by different social environments even within my country. Either Im more sensitive, or the brits did a really good job colonising.

What explains the massive difference between the reception to this post and self_made_human's last on wanting to move to the states?

There is something deeply unsettling to me about the way that subcontinentals talk and think about the US. First of all, I want to do my best to empathize with them. Millennials entering the job market post 2008, racked with student loan debt often had a very tough time getting a foot hold in their careers, and I was one of those. There was a feeling among many that a promise had been that if you make it to a state school and get a bachelor's degree that companies will roll out the red carpet for you and you'll be on a glidepath to the upper middle class. Many of us did those thing and then languished in food service or retail for a period while struggling to make ends meet and coping with crushing student debt. The promise didn't pay off. And we resented the promiser.

For Indians, America is the promise. And you can sense that in this post. If you're going to work hard in India, get grades, pass tests all in the hopes that some richer country will let you in, then America is the destination of choice. You'll have friends and relatives who make it. If you get left behind, you'll see your cousin Rajesh posting a photo of his McMansion in Cincinnati. He'll be holding his little son, an American citizen, which means he'll have a hell of a time being deported even if his H1B falls through. He'll be with his beautiful wife, because families in your home village were eager to throw their daughters at him. And, if after 15 years he becomes an American citizen, he will be able to sponsor other relatives for green card consideration -- a huge boon to the family. And, he'll be making more money than he could anywhere else in the world even though he's working at a discount compared to every other American citizen.

Why is he working at a discount? Because the ability to offer him legal residency in the US and all of the status and opportunity that comes with that ESPECIALLY to his friends and neighbors back home and especially in terms of his children being American citizens is HUGELY valuable. The government giving his employer the opportunity to do that are subsidizing his wages to compete against American citizens. And in doing so, they've created a situation where the whole world in general, but subcontinentals in particular, think they are getting cheated if they can't come here.

Obviously, I'm not in favor of this arrangement. It is grossly unfair to Americans. H1Bs, insofar as they're needed, should come at a cost to the company that wants to issue them. They should be paying more than they would pay any American in that role, and they should be paying a tax on top of that to the government. A tariff on foreign labor if you will. Otherwise we are stuck in this gross situation that breeds resentment.

I think the extreme lengths Indians are willing to go to to gain entry to the United States puts normal Americans in a difficult position.

On the one hand, I don't think many Americans actually want very large numbers of Indians to immigrate to the United States. Probably a minority does, many are largely indifferent, and a sizeable proportion does not.

In many cases this goes even for the ones who, like this poster, are obviously intelligent and have marketable skills. Frankly, we don't really need them. We're already doing fine.

On the other hand, Americans like to think of ourselves as being easygoing, tolerant and well-meaning people. This is an important part of our self-image. We would like to prevent very large numbers of Indians from moving to the United States, many of whom will do literally anything to do so, but this requires us to say 'no' over and over again and to erect ever higher barriers to filter them out. This forces us to admit that we aren't as nice and altruistic as we like to let on. This is psychologically exhausting.

It's actually similar to Scott's experiences dealing with street beggars in India, which he blogged about. I don't mean that the situations are identical, just that the psychological difficulty is similar.

As the poster mentions, one solution to this would be to auction off residence spots. The EB-5 visa can be seen as a step in this direction. I would actually support a system that just replaces all visas of any kind with a single auctioned visa. I don't think this is morally unreasonable. Residency in the US is extremely valuable. It is also more economically efficient to put a price on scarce and valuable goods.

If this system were implemented, it would reduce demand while allowing American citizens to collect more of the proceeds from immigration. This would be psychologically less unpleasant (for us). But if we needed to salve our consciences further, we could spend some or all of the proceeds on poverty relief in the third world.

However, I wouldn't demand the price be paid up front; it would be possible to pay an additional tax on your earnings in the US instead. This might actually allow entrance to many people who are denied under the current system.

It is grossly unfair to Americans.

Assuming self_made_human is as competent as the median American doctor, it is obviously not "unfair to Americans" for them to get a new Doctor willing to charge less. Unless their hatred for Indians outweighs their desire for access to cheaper medical care. It is of course "unfavorable" (unfair is a loaded word) for the 0.3% of Americans who are already doctors if a doctor for any country, including America, enters the market, which is why labor unions take great steps to increase the barrier of entry for their industry.

Assuming self_made_human is as competent as the median American doctor

That is very kind of you to assume, though I can't agree or disagree beyond saying that all the American doctors I personally know are scary good. Look at @Throwaway05, who I highly respect, though I think he's well above median. And I hope for the sake of my self-esteem that he is significantly older and more experienced than me, because god knows I have stiff competition as is.

(I don't know many American doctors, but they have very high quality training, even by First World standards)

I do expect to be a better doctor by the time I'm (eligible) for the USMLE, and a rather good one if I can overcome the strong competition for the positions that are bookmarked for international doctors (around 4.5k the last time I checked, and you better believe the competition is an order of magnitude larger).

I'm early in training! I've only been a psychiatry resident for 6 months and change, so God knows that you wouldn't want to leave me entirely on my own to handle truly difficult cases. I'd probably not bungle it, because I can always look up treatment guidelines, but the mark of a competent doctor these days is the ability to make good decisions when operating outside the cut and dry, where guidelines and standard practice no longer apply.

An important addendum is that you don't have to be a median or better doctor to be a net value add! This is important, and the joke about half of all doctors being below average in their class is (mostly) a joke. A 10th percentile doctor is probably the point where I'd start having strong second thoughts, and that number depends on how strong the filtering is for both med students and fully qualified doctors with MDs. This is fair, because 90% of doctors will do an adequate job of treating you.

I have no firm numbers on hand for the relative difficulty of getting into medicine in either the States, the US or the UK (I'm tipsy at a pub), but I can definitely admit without shame that the average American doctor has better training than the rest.

I would very much like to charge as much money as people would pay me, especially in the States, but on a macro level letting more foreign doctors in will both suppress local wages and also increase access to healthcare for the average American. The former is likely going to be barely perceptible, unless the AMC does something drastic like allowing all Western doctors from near-peer nations to practise in the States automatically (and they never will). The latter also depends strongly on multiple factors, but the average IMG who does get into the States will probably be forced to take a role that pays less than the median (because it's easier for us to get into the unpopular things like Family Medicine), which will make IMG doctors cheaper on average for the average Joe.

If you want to peg my capabilities, I was around 75th percentile for all doctors, both British-trained and foreign (who met the eligibility criteria to sit it) in the clinical section of the exam I gave to enter higher training. When you include both the clinical knowledge and the ethical section of the exam, I was around 65th percentile. I will say that the ethics section of the MSRA, called the SJT, is universally panned as absolute bullshit and barely better than random noise on a good day.

Assuming self_made_human is as competent as the median American doctor

I meant "my analysis holds if you're as competent as the median American doctor" not that I already assume that.

An important addendum is that you don't have to be a median or better doctor to be a net value add!

This seems plausible but I'm unsure. I did realize my analysis depends on the belief that the median doctor is a net value add, which some people dispute.

This seems plausible but I'm unsure. I did realize my analysis depends on the belief that the median doctor is a net value add, which some people dispute.

You do agree or at least consider it plausible, so I guess I can only express frank confusion about those who don't. I can only hope they're a small minority (haha).

I don't know if my opinion about doctors is invalid because I'm one, but I've never felt myself having to exercise particular caution when looking for a doctor, and I'm usually happy with the treatment I receive. This is, of course, confounded by the fact I've been a doctor for a while, and a med student for about as long, and the scion of doctors for as long as I've been alive. Other doctors will treat you differently for any of the above, but I expect not to the point they wouldn't do a good job for the average person. They'll treat you regardless.

A nation is a group of people with shared heritage and language. It is not an economic zone, and it is not a above-median-skilled person. GDP is not a nation. Ideals are not a nation.

I will not give away my inheritance, and the inheritance of my children, for cheaper healthcare. I will not do it for cheap fruit or cheap cotton. My ancestors lived and died on the frontier without healthcare, and I'd rather my descendants do the same than live in a country where they are a hated minority. We already are hated, by blacks and asians and yes, indians, and as soon as we're a minority we will see the landscape shift rapidly against us.

Additionally, he's a shrink. Not even a PCP or surgeon or ER doc. He's not curing diseases, or treating the sick, he's treating depression and anxiety and ADHD. I don't think we need to be importing people for that purpose at all, and to conflate this with that is part of the shell game.

This sounds like you mostly agree with my analysis, it's not exactly "I hate Indians" (though it might be) but "I think the presence of even competent Indians that benefit the economy is bad for my descendants" and you basically do think he's less competent than the median American doctor because you don't think psychiatry is all that useful (or that it's just saturated).

The last post came across as "I want to move to the states myself, as I see it as good, and wished more people saw it as good".

This post came across as "I want more people (or at the very least don't want less people) to move to the states, and I am going to criticize a place I wish to move to for its policies on who can move to it".

These are not the same thing, and it does not surprise me that some people overall like the former but not the latter.

I don't know if you read my comment below, but I do agree with you. Critique of a country by a foreigner will almost certainly go down harder than praise (by a foreigner).

If someone went to /r/India and began extolling the virtues of chicken Tikka masala, they'd have a very different reception to someone in the West who complained about street shitting.

The 'vibe shift' also changed the equation somewhat. Some unabashed american chauvinism from an outside 'mirer in the mid biden years feels like a breath of fresh air, leaving many people saying 'you've got better spirit than a lot of my actual neighbors, hope to see you here soon bro'. Or at least respecting the contrarian take (especially framed as an argument with a more cosmopolitan/europhile girlfriend).

But right now and for the past few months, practically every day has already felt like christmas to an american chauvinist. So there's no longer much feeling of thirsty drought of that kind of spirit -- making it exactly the wrong time to air any kind of annoyed entitlement over the changes from the shift, based on taking the previous sentiments for granted. That exposes the cracks in the 'more american than actual americans' fantasy.

I'm not entirely sure myself. I didn't expect it to be remotely as polarizing! Before the vote count became visible, my expectations would have been a 65:35 spread at worst.

If I had to guess, and I am guessing, it's because I explicitly discuss a particular means of immigration that might strike people as being "unfair". I'd wager people have different opinions on a prospective migrant crossing hurdles like licensing exams versus one who even considers the option of buying entry.

It might be that I'm actively criticizing the current administration and Trump in particular, whereas my previous post was a paen of praise for the US of A that made hearts swell and tears shed across the aisle. America is Great is an easier statement to get behind than America is Great and You Shouldn't Make it Harder For People Like Me To Get In.

A different commenter has suggested getting a fraudulent marriage. But I do kind of wonder how blurry the line is between a fraudulent marriage and a real marriage.

Q: I see that you, a natural-born US citizen, have married this random Indian immigrant in the UK after just one visit to the UK. Naturally, you must understand that this makes us feds suspicious.

A: Sure, we met in person only once before marrying. But we actually have known each other for many years on a niche Internet forum. He impressed me with his fluency in English (though he does tend to use italics a little too often for my taste). And his actual substantive opinions are not far off from mine. I decided to meet him in person, and very quickly realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

Q: Our investigation indicates that you have never before exhibited homosexual (or, as the kids say nowadays, homoromantic) tendencies. We have the court file showing that your ill-fated high-school crush was on a girl, not on a boy. Why the sudden shift?

A: Actually, I have always had some homosexual tendencies, particularly for cute twinks, though I have never acted on them. My new husband does not necessarily fit that profile too well, but I have made allowances for his physical shortcomings, given his great mental prowess. We take turns fucking each other in the ass on alternating nights. Also, if you have my court file, then you should know that that old crush was Indian as well, just like my husband.

I'm shaving my butthole as we speak, see you at the aisle!

My comment actually was not a joke. Unfortunately, upon reflection I don't think I would be able to tolerate presenting myself as homosexual (or bisexual) to my family members and coworkers in order to appease the federal investigators. So your anus sadly will have to remain unpenetrated by me. Is that decision selfish of me, in light of the huge benefits that you would gain from US citizenship? Probably. So I apologize for the fragility of my ego.

It's a bummer you're not a bummer. :(

Now what am I supposed to do, glue all that hair back on?

I recommend weaving it into fabric and making a little butthole cozy for yourself (or a special someone). Waste not, want not!

For the purposes of such an American thread, wouldn’t a merkin serve better?

While it's true butthole cozies are typically associated with the British - we all remember that old Enid Blyton story about when Aunt Eloise taught Felicity and Joan how to knit their own - they have been popular in America ever since the corps of discovery expedition, when Meriwether Lewis noticed that the icy winds of the Rocky mountains were chilling his butthole "most ferociously" and considered cancelling the expedition. That's where we get the famous Jefferson quote "Butthole cozies or bust!" in fact.

I think you're my special someone, I think I've just got over my heartbreak when ToaKraka shot me down, and I hope the Visa Office does too. DM me your address, shipping is on me!

I'm flattered and I would love to receive your butthole cozy, but alas I don't think my wife would understand. You know how it is, once you get married they don't want you to interact with anyone's butt hair except theirs.

I'm just going to declare this whole exchange the greatest comment thread in the illustrious history of the Motte.

Dudes stay rockin'!

take advantage of residence-by-investment programs in the EU

Those have been mostly phased out, AFAIK. The only one left is Malta, and it has a bunch of restrictions.

I believe you're confusing citizenship by investment with residence by investment.

Yeah the EU started threatening countries that were ‘just’ selling passports, so now you have to actually live there for a little while.

That is frustrating. I do wish skilled immigration was generally very permissive in the US. Even though it already directly impacts my ability to get programming jobs (my profession).

I've always had a sense that "stop illegal immigration" is the bailey while "stop all immigration" is the motte. I think Vivek and Elon didn't realize that when they waded into the H1-B visa debate a few weeks ago.

There is this weird emotion I get watching anti-immigration stuff. Its maybe like being the first hipster in your grade level that gets into music, and you find all these awesome classic rock songs. And then everyone else starts getting into music and they just like pop garbage. Don't read too much into that metaphor. Its just the feeling.

I recently joined a family society. On my mother's side we can trace our ancestry back in the US to the 1620's. My dad's family is what I consider more recent immigrants. They came here about 150 years ago sometime after the Civil war. My dad is anti-immigration, my mom is not.

... I just realized what the feeling is. Its elitism. I feel a sense of elitism over most of the anti-immigration people I personally run into. Just as a matter of demographics most people in the US came here or are descendants of people that came here within the last 100 years. The same way that you might look at a guy with a broken hispanic accent who just attained citizenship saying "shut down the border" is how I look at most people saying "shut down the border". Or the same way you might look at a person, still dripping wet after pulling themself onto the lifeboat and saying "we can't let anyone else on".

"Hey scum stop talking about founding stock as if you are part of the founding stock, you are a recent jumped up German immigrant. Be happy we let you in and stop trying to gate keep." Is what I'd say in my head to my dad if we was annoying enough to talk about "founding stock".

Anyways, I hope the political winds shift back on this issue. Middle class immigrants seem like the best immigrant class to get, I don't understand why the US makes it so hard.

I don't want African Muslims in my neighborhoods, and I don't want giant Hindu statues erected in America. I simply do not want more immigrants right now, because the ones we have are not integrating, and there is no reason for them to try.

We need sixty years, two generations, of essentially no immigrants in order to stabilize. The is what we've done in the past, and it had resulted in prosperity and community those times.

As for my bona fides, I don't have any known ancestors in the 17th century, but both sides have borderer roots in the middle 18th century.

Both sides also have Italian, and other immigrant stock, from the early 20th century. Italian great-grandmothers, that sort of thing.

Those borderer men crossed the Cumberland gap and settled Tennessee, and I think they earned the right to bequeath the country they forged to their posterity, and not to, again, African Muslims and Hindus who do not share their blood, their religion, or their values.

Seriously though, it's an embarrassment that people like Ilhan Omar an get elected as a foreign agent in Minnesota, or Jayapal can do the same in Washington. If that is the result of this immigration, then no thank you, we're not full you're simply not welcome here.

Any man who says he is American by something else besides is no American at all, and any American who carries a hyphen carries with him a dagger to plunge into the back of the American nation.

Last thing, you mixed up motte and bailey. The defensible motte is no illegal immigration. The bailey is no more foreigners, denaturalize and deport the paper citizens, too.

Ah ya I did mix up the motte and bailey.

Anyways most of the US was settled by 1870, some parts were a little more filled in, and they were done by 1900. That's why I like civil war as a good cutoff. Plus the civil war shaped the nation just as heavily as the revolutionary war.

We have above us an example of a more American person than most actual Americans.

My ancestors founded this country, and it was based on an idea, not blood. A bunch of nationalist and monarch loving central Europeans started coming over in the 1900's and started trying to make it all about blood. If it's blood then the English, the Dutch, and the descendants of slaves can stay and everyone else can fuck off.

A bunch of them even think that fighting in European and Asian wars (aka every 20th century war) should grant them special consideration. Yuck.

My ancestors founded this country and trying to explain to them it's not about blood and their posterity but about "an idea," would leave them very puzzled. And to be frank, I would be pretty shocked if your ancestors didn't either. The writings of the time, e.g., a relative of mine died in King Phillip's War, make it pretty clear they were concerned with blood at least as a rally against the Indians (and later black slaves).

I encourage anyone who qualifies to participate in the various family societies like the Sons of the American Revolution. They average age may be 75, but they're good people and are a great way to feel more apart of wherever you live.

If it's blood then the English, the Dutch, and the descendants of slaves can stay and everyone else can fuck off.

Oh yes, the German and especially catholic waves of immigrants post 1850 were a terrible idea and many, including my ancestors at the time, repeatedly said so. It's only gotten worse since then.

Palatine German immigration to the USA began around ~1709, it reached its height from the 1720 - 1750.

so not the "German and especially catholic waves of immigrants post 1850"?

They're German but very pre-1850 and heavily / mostly Protestant.

I probably should have phrased that part as "post-1850 German and especially Catholic immigration... ." I didn't mean to include the earlier anabaptists in that sentence.

More comments

and it was based on an idea, not blood

It was based on both, which was reflected in the first eighty years of immigration acts as passed by the Congress, after being reaffirmed by many founding fathers. The idea is a necessary, not sufficient, condition.

then the English, the Dutch, and the descendants of slaves can stay and everyone else can fuck off.

I don't consider African-Americans to be the same as Americans, but they have no where else to go, and I view them as native to the land, despite their distance from the American population. The time to repatriate them to Africa was 150 years ago, and that door has since closed*. They are one of three categories of people native to the continent, which are essentially Americans, African-Americans, and the various tribes (not American and so not Native American, either).

Otherwise, unironically yeschad.jpeg. The only reason I don't use the revolutionary war as the cutoff is because of the 14th amendment, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died to settle that dispute, but if your ancestors weren't here on Jan 1 1866, then you're just visiting. Immigrants have the responsibility not just to assimilate through dress and culture and language, but through blood, and so the Irish-American and Italian-American communities you see on the East Coast are also repugnant to my sensibilities.

European and Asian wars (aka every 20th century war) should grant them special consideration. Yuck.

Gary Locke is my prime example. Ancestors immigrated in the late 19th century, but his Chinese grandmother gave birth to his Chinese father in China, and then that man moved to back to America and served in WWII, but went back to Hong Kong to marry a Chinese woman. He's Chinese, still, and married another Chinese woman (Mona Lee) and made Chinese children.

Being born in a barn does not make a man a horse.

I've always respected the logical consistency of this position, but it is so far outside the realm of possibility that to debate it feels like stepping into some alternate dimension where the platonic forms of nationalism, true communism (tm), and libertarianism exist unmoored from the flesh and blood human beings they are supposed to apply to. How much pre-1866 ancestry is enough? Is someone whose grandparents came through Ellis Island but only identifies as American really less worthy of the title than me, who has colonial ancestry but also an immigrant mother and speaks a foreign language at home? If some immigration officer with a Polish last name comes to deport me one day, can I pull out my SAR badge like an Uno reverse card and send him to Warsaw instead, or would we have to compare blood quanta first? In short order this gets as messy as trying to dole out reparations for slavery would.

For most people, common sense says no, if they observed all aspects of my life they would conclude that I am in fact less American than the third generation Italian, or the Korean adoptee who hasn't been outside the midwest since she was a baby and speaks only English, or even the Indian doctor in the UK who would love nothing more than to become an American and believes it's the greatest country in the world. The fact that there were minutemen with my last name in the New England militias 250 years ago doesn't change that. Now, if both majority pre-Civil War ancestry and belief in the existence of an Amerikaner ethnos defined by said ancestry are necessary to make one a true American, that leaves you with a population of several thousand Twitter shitposters and a lizardman's constant of rednecks. That's not nothing; Australia was created with less, but you aren't winning a civil war against the civic nationalists anytime soon.

so far outside the realm of possibility

We have to start somewhere, and you start by asserting your frame and believing in it.

If some immigration officer with a Polish last name comes to deport me one day, can I pull out my SAR badge like an Uno reverse card and send him to Warsaw instead

Yes, actually. Your SAR card is the whole point. After all, the Constitution says that its purpose is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. That means you, and it doesn't mean Polaski or Tinetti.

The fact that there are so many immigrants that we have so many halfsies is itself the problem, and it's a problem that is solved by shutting the doors, repressing foreign language and culture, and forcing intermarriage. The third generation Italian in America, who has six different people all choosing to inbreed instead of intermingle, is also the problem. Third generation isn't even that old, we could be talking about the grandparents who immigrated in the 1950s or 60s. The Italians are more like five generations, which again, you couldn't have found a few mixed marriages among thirty people?

anytime soon

We're talking in generational terms already. I'm hoping my sons and grandsons think more this way, and act like it, too.

I've always had a sense that "stop illegal immigration" is the bailey while "stop all immigration" is the motte.

The left has been kept in control of the culture so long they've torched and salted the immigration motte so hard that for the longest time even just very moderate positions like "reduce immigration" made right wingers sound racist to even their own side. The bailey is all that was left, because of its almost tautological nature (you can't really formulate many good arguments against the government stopping the immigration that the government decided wasn't allowed to legally happen).

Now the right are timidly coming out of the bailey, seeing the invading army mostly gone with only a skeleton garrison and cardboard cutouts in their place. And they're seeing some sprouts in the motte, give them time.

I hate to be that guy, but you're using motte and bailey backwards.

You're absolutely right! *slaps forehead*

I remember having this same discussion of illegal vs legal immigration 2 decades ago during the Bush years. Back then I was in a high school debate class, and I had all the studies lined up and arguments together about why immigration is good. And once I finished my opening remarks they said "oh we are only talking about how we don't want illegal immigration". My rebuttal of "well then my side is arguing for making all immigration legal". They didn't like that and insisted I needed to argue for illegal immigration.

And no the left did not completely dominate the media landscape back then.

And no the left did not completely dominate the media landscape back then.

They wrote the movies, tv shows, books, music and ran the schools. Has there ever been a time in a millenial's life where popular Western media depicted someone who thinks there should be less immigrants in his Western country in a positive light?

Stan was presented as a voice of reason in the South Park Goobacks episode.

Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings adaptation presenting in a positive light the struggle of white Middle-Eartheners agains the swarthy Orcen hordes attempting to immigrate to Gondor and Rohan.

There was a conservative business approach to immigrants of "they are cheap labor". So yeah there was a pro-immigration consensus for a long time. But it was a bi-party consensus.

Was this a conservative party view or was this a conservative constituent view?

I think Vivek and Elon didn't realize that when they waded into the H1-B visa debate a few weeks ago.

The people most statistically likely to have their wages suppressed through employer ab/use of the H1-Bs are Blue tribers.

And the people most statistically likely to make anti-immigration the core of their politics are Red tribers. Funny that.

The same is true in the UK, except that the UK culture war is more generational than tribal. The people who benefit financially from immigration are homeowning pensioners, who are also the core demographic for anti-immigration politics.

Hardcore immigration opposition is driven by culture, not economics.

And the people most statistically likely to make anti-immigration the core of their politics are Red tribers. Funny that.

Not so funny; Red Tribers have their wages suppressed and employment prospects reduced by immigration, just not by H1-B abuse in particular.

Sure, but red tribers get along much better with Mexicans that compete with them for jobs with some regularity than with Indians who mostly don’t.

I've always had a sense that "stop illegal immigration" is the bailey while "stop all immigration" is the motte.

Yes it is.

Mostly ignoring the American context, I think it's important to be explicit about this so that nobody gets any funny ideas about calling the job done when illegal immigration is finally consider not-actually-OK again. Mass immigration is a problem in and of itself, illegal or not, and arguing that the problem is merely the legality of it just invites pro-immigration actors to game the system by changing or subverting the laws.

Trying to play cute motte-and-bailey-games by tactically condemning illegal immigration because you think it an easier target when what you really mean is to condemn mass immigration or even any kind of immigration just sets you up for failure further down the line.

It's kayfabe on both sides. Both Left and Right governments in the UK prefer talking about illegal immigration to talking about mass legal immigration. Criticising illegal immigration is easy, makes you sound tough, and everyone knows there's not much you can do about it so under the rhetoric expectations are low.

What politicians on both sides refuse to discuss is that they have total control over legal immigration which is 20x the number. And with every 600,000 people per annum it gets harder to discuss.

The same way that you might look at a guy with a broken hispanic accent who just attained citizenship saying "shut down the border" is how I look at most people saying "shut down the border". Or the same way you might look at a person, still dripping wet after pulling themself onto the lifeboat and saying "we can't let anyone else on".

You know, unless I had some independent reason to think theyre crazy, I would take that as strong evidence that its in my interest what theyre saying.

And since were doing credentials: My family has lived within an hour of here longer than europeans have been to america.

I knew I shouldn't have included the lifeboat one. Its a terrible immigration metaphor. Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent. So its more like some guy washing up on the beach from a ship wreck and then saying "don't let anyone else come ashore".

But also part of the point is not what he is saying, but how he is saying it. "we can't let anyone else on". Like when did "we" become a "we".

And since were doing credentials: My family has lived within an hour of here longer than europeans have been to america.

I assume you don't live in America? In that case I say "go for it" whatever immigration policy floats your boat. I don't think most countries have a strong enough culture to assimilate immigrants. American culture dominates the world, so most of them come halfway pre-assimilated. And America is generally rich enough to have economic opportunity for them.

Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent.

Really? Because I don’t see too many “refugees” clamoring to get into Mexico (except as a by station to get into America) or heck, how many are settling in the arctic?

Im not a fan of the lifeboat metaphor either because its not about limited resources per se (although crowding is a real concern and net negative - see mouse utopia experiments) but the real problem is obviously the culture fit issue. If you are privileged enough to travel, you can’t help but notice how absolute shite every other non western country is on multiple levels. Pollution, littering, poverty, corruption, crime, the list goes on. Do you truly think you won’t be importing any of those issues? Do I need to bring up my FGM rates in the UK?

Mexico has a far higher standard of living than elsewhere in Latin America and IIRC is a destination for immigration for that reason.

What makes the standard of living? The people or the institutions? Which of the two are fungible? You and I probably share an opinion on this, but it is not the politically correct opinion.

Institutions are made up of people. You can’t switch the people out of the institutions and have them remain the same. Look at the ACLU for a recent example.

Count Canada too and central America is basically a rounding error.

I have been to India. Some of it looked better than Northern Virginia. At least the area I was working in when I was there.

Much of it was worse. But that's why I said middle class immigrants are great.

My daughter is in public school, less than half the kids in her class are white. She is also in girl scouts. It's about 1/3 each of White, Indian, and Hispanic. In both cases it's been fine. In the case of girl scouts I can't imagine a more American organization for little girls to join.

There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].

There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].

Poppycock. I've seen plenty of enclaves, both urban and rural, with distinctive ethnic and cultural differences despite having immigrated over a century prior.

No thank you.

I specifically claimed that there are enclaves where people don't assimilate. Often it is in cities. Your response: "poppycock [exactly what I just said]"

Honestly if you hadn't included the "poppycock" or the "no thank you" I would have thought you were just pointlessly agreeing with what I said.

The rural enclaves all end up speaking exclusively American English within a generation or two. They all heavily consume American culture. Many of them volunteer for the military at higher rates.

The urban enclaves I have a sense of "who gives a shit". They stay in a city and live out their lives in a weird half-in-half-out state. And their kids slowly abandon them to the wider much better culture and economy that is all around them. They have all the vibrancy and threat of a museum.

Is this where we ignore how Urban areas tend to have a great amount of political control over a state as a whole? Not exactly something I'd describe as 'vibrancy and threat of a museum'.

I don't really care how you think those rural enclaves act. It was my experience with them combined with looking at history over the past hundred years or so that shifted me more toward an immigration hardliner - you import the culture, you get the problems, regardless of what environment they're in. Import good culture, you get good outcome. Import bad culture, you get bad outcomes. That simple.

There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].

Ah, the universal cop-out of "That's not true, except for the places it is, but I've decided they don't count." Speaking of Northern VA, I've seen unassimilated conclaves multiply exponentially over my 4 decades living there. Unassimilated Vietnamese pockets in Seven Corners, unassimilated South Korean pockets in Centreville, unassimilated Mexican pockets in Manassas, unassimilated Indians in Herndon. At certain point there is nothing to assimilate to anymore. In most of those towns native born whites are the minority. All of Northern VA in the 2020 census has a foreign born percentage of nearly 30%, far above what I believe would facilitate any sort of assimilation.

All I'm saying is, you done fucked up using my back yard as your example.

To me the question of assimilation is primarily about second and third generation immigrants. Obviously a bunch of people fresh off the boat are going to seem foreign, whether they're Europeans a hundred years ago or Asians today. To use a fictional example, Tony Soprano would count as unassimilated because despite being at least two generations removed from Italy, he does not consider himself American (he even uses the word madigan i.e. the dialectal Italian word for American, as a term of derision for WASPs), his speech is peppered with dozens of foreign expressions, and he is involved with a dysfunctional social practice from his ancestral homeland by being a mafia boss.

By contrast, the American-born children of Vietnamese from Seven Corners, Koreans from Centreville, or Indians from Herndon (all of whom I went to school with and know quite well) do not typically speak their heritage languages to anyone their own age or younger (i.e. they will die out within a generation), self-identify as American (hyphenated, of course), and are under the majority of circumstances culturally indistinguishable from their white neighbors (Indians insisting on traditional wedding ceremonies being the biggest exception that I can think of). Now, the culture they all share is cosmopolitan urban liberal culture, so anyone who has a problem with said culture will have a problem with them, but plenty of heritage Americans are part of it too.

In practice it's harder to maintain a distinct enclave in the suburbs compared to the city due to a lack of third places or walkable neighborhoods for people to congregate outside and do whatever activities are part of their culture. The ethnic neighborhoods in Queens (e.g. Flushing and Jackson Heights) are the most non-American feeling places in the country to me for this reason, and even there many immigrant children get out by testing into Stuyvesant or other selective high schools.

See my girl scouts comment.

I think there is a reason the "anti-immigration is racist" argument has lived on for so long. Ultimately it feels like no metric is ever good enough to convince anyone when there are just too many brown people by their approximation.

I went to George Mason, I've lived in the area for over a decade. My parents grew up in Northern Virginia (but neither stayed there). I grew up in a slightly rural area of Virginia. I only really know the English language. Aside from the area not being as white as where I grew up it still feels very American to me. I've been to India and multiple countries in Europe, so I know what a foreign country feels like. There is a discomfort in not knowing the language, in missing so many of the basic cultural understandings of everyone around you, and of not having the grounding feeling of knowing people around you. Its a feeling, I acknowledge you can feel differently about things. But if we are just gonna go on vibes, then I'm telling you where my vibe is at.

So its not just "your" backyard. Its at best "our" backyard. Though I don't claim any form of ownership over the area despite having lived here and had parents that have grown up here. That is one of my ongoing frustration with anti-immigration viewpoints and woke viewpoints. You don't solely own the common spaces. You don't own the right to determine who and what is acceptable there. So much of what they said is kind of status jockeying to be like "well I am the ultimate american, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look" or "i am the ultimate oppressed victim, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look".

So, you are committed to just skipping over all the unassimilated pockets I mentioned? After you claimed they only exist in "New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name]"? This isn't a dick measuring contest about who's more American, it's a "You've point of fact lied" problem. I get why you want to just ignore that to the same degree you wanted to handwave away unassimilated pockets in the first place. But I'm not going to let you.

There is a discomfort in not knowing the language, in missing so many of the basic cultural understandings of everyone around you, and of not having the grounding feeling of knowing people around you.

Yes, and that's exactly the feeling I get in the Eden Center at Seven Corners. In large sections of Manassas, and Centreville, and Herndon. It's bizarre having the place I grew up literally become a foreign country out from under me. I don't understand how you can look at those place, where they don't speak english, all the businesses aren't in english, nobody is dressing, speaking, or conducting themselves like Americans, and then say "Well they're selling thin mints so it all looks good to me. Nothing is as American as getting fucking fat."

Its a terrible immigration metaphor.

Obviously if you have prior disagreements with it, that is what it is. My argument is that him thinking so is a significant bit of evidence, and thats independent of how high the prior is.

Like when did "we" become a "we".

Presumably when you let him on (oops, turns out there are downsides to that). Or are you trying to argue that even more immigration is bad for him specifically but not you?

Our "lifeboat" is an entire freaking continent.

The country has limited space. It cannot absorb everyone who wants to come. That's why the lifeboat metaphor works in the first palace.

America is one of the least dense countries in the world. It is a net exporter of food. The US is about three times larger than India in size.

"The country has limited space" is only true in the trite and meaningless sense that it is not actually infinite. But it is certainly not running out of space or even getting all that tight.

The lifeboat metaphor is the ultimate "their is a fixed pie of resources" perspective. And if I believed that "fixed pie" story to be true I'd agree on immigration restrictions. But it's objectively not true and I'd have to lobotomize all the parts of my brain that know anything about economics to believe it.

I don't want strangers and foreigners in my space, regardless of how dense it's already populated. That space is the inheritance of my great grandchildren, and I'm not willing to give it away in a profligate manner, for any reason.

Go live in a treehouse in the woods and own all the land around you. Why should you get to dictate who is in public spaces? Strangers are a necessary part of civilization. People with foreign cultures, beliefs, and genes are a natural consequence of an expansive market that can provide nearly anything.

People with foreign cultures, beliefs, and genes are a natural consequence of an expansive market that can provide nearly anything.

China, Japan and South Korea say otherwise. You can't just throw out vague platitudes like that like they are iron laws. Countries exist that have figured out (or preserved the knowledge) how to take the goods off the market, and leave the people that made them.

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It is a net exporter of food.

The US has been a net importer of food for a few years now (starting just before COVID)

"The country has limited space" is only true in the trite and meaningless sense that it is not actually infinite. But it is certainly not running out of space or even getting all that tight.

Most of that unused space is useless for living; the rest is off-limits for various reasons which aren't changing.

Then we need to sell off all the parks. And I don't need to tell you who does most of the farming.

The big areas where the resources are pretty fixed are university admission slots (especially prestige universities) and homes within commuting range of our most productive cities. I think it's fairfir Americans to view a society where they have more cheaper, crappier goods and can't afford a home or a shot at a good degree to be worse than one where goods are more expensive but they can all afford to live where they choose and their student loans are more manageable.

Those problems exist without immigration. They are in fact active policy choices on the part of cities and universities respectively.

Yes, they do, and so it's better to deal with those problems inside the family rather than inviting in a bunch of strangers to make it worse.

You haven't acknowledged that part of the reason for the problem is the last sixty-two years of immigration policy, either.

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You know, unless I had some independent reason to think theyre crazy, I would take that as strong evidence that its in my interest what theyre saying.

I've read that several times and I still don't quite understand what you mean. That the guy who wants to shut down the lifeboat is acting in your interests?

If Im on the lifeboat, and we pull up a guy and he says the lifeboats full, leave the others in the water, then its propably in my interest to do so. Obviously that also calls into question whether bringing him on was a good idea, but it might be too late on that front.

Perhaps. If the lifeboat starts sinking and we have to move onto another one, though, it would be a bad idea to let that guy go in front.

it might be too late on that front.

Careful when pushing people back into the water, lest the guy behind you decides that he would be safer yet were you too out of the boat?

No particular reason, just that this is potentially a different case and the otcome there not necessarily an argument for treating the swimmers a certain way.

EB-5 is already over for Indians and Chinese, with wait times of over 5 years. At the current rate and as a doctor, you are probably better grinding for EB-1 or going for a nonimmigrant visa and hope you get lucky and figure something out. The fact is that the number of Indians with the means and desire to immigrate is absurdly, overwhelmingly large. Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in. It's like the admissions system to Harvard, where there's no illusion that they're selecting the "best" or even any idea what the "best" might be, but irregardless they have to keep 97% of applicants out.

Anyways, don't blame Trump for changing EB-5 because you weren't going to get it anyways, and either way the number of spots on EB-5 is so small that it was destined to be overrun irregardless.

The U.S. loses out on exactly the kind of people who were willing to put down roots and contribute significantly to the economy while still needing the opportunities that U.S. citizenship provides.

Specifically the EB-5 number is so small that the actual immigrants themselves are unlikely to have any substantial impact in the long run. The entire program isn't for the benefit of the immigrants, but just a slightly roundabout stimulus program that is hopefully slightly less wasteful than direct helicopter money. Anyways with such a small number of spots, any impact that could be made is going to be through an even smaller number of exceptional people, and idk if changing the cutoff will make it more or less likely to admit unicorns, but I also don't think it's obviously worse.

If Trump (or any administration) wanted a truly meritocratic system, they should be auctioning off a limited number of economic immigrant slots each year.

Then you definitely won't be getting it if they implemented an auction.

my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me.

I would be happy to have you, but not 10 million of you.

I would be happy to have you, but not 10 million of you.

Every so often I see these horror stories from Canadians complaining about how a flood of Indians has absolutely raped the commons. Their beaches flooded with creepy leering men, people shitting in public, massive nepotism and scams, services falling off a cliff as they get staffed up by Indians. It made me wonder what would happen if 50% of the extant population in my county was supplemented with Indians like Canada has seen.

There is this cute little nature preserve down the road from me. In the summer kids like to play in the river at a shallow. There is only parking for like 8 cars, enforcement is nonexistent, and it's honor system to clean up after yourself and not destroy the commons. It's hard to imagine that surviving. If the stories of off the boat Indians shitting in bodies of water like it's just what you do are true, it's fucked. To say nothing of the more disturbing and obnoxious light sex pestery. Akaash Singh had this great bit about what it's like being leered at by a hundred Indian men on a train in India that I can't find now, but his predominantly Indian-American crowd was laughing their asses off at how much they recognized it, so I assume it was based in some kernel of truth. The "You can't make me go back! Anything but that!" attitude of second generation Indian-Americans is profound. But it's not the weather or the land they want to be away from. It's other Indians.

The kid's parks here have these great little "take a book, leave a book" bins that my daughter has loved, and they've done a lot to get her excited about exploring books. It's hard to imagine these not being stripped bare or otherwise ruined given the stories of almost purposeless pillaging for the sake of pillaging the commons that I've heard out of Indian over run areas of Canada. Taking for the sake of taking just becomes expected. Maybe it has less to do with Indians specifically and more the low trust aspects of multiculturalism. I don't know. I only know it happens.

And then there is the shameless nepotism and scamming. It's more or less known that if you make the mistake of putting an Indian in charge of hiring, suddenly your company is hiring only Indians. That most resumes from Indians and credentials from institutions that service mostly Indians are completely fake and can't be trusted. I've seen repeated stories out of Canada that local education institutions which have leaned into servicing Indians have become so overrun with fraud, employers have begun just chucking applications from those institutions in the garbage. Been burned too many times.

Everyone has dealt with the completely detached from the outcome attitude of Indian call centers. When we lived in a major city, we had similar experiences with Indian doctors we visited. There is just this overwhelming sense they don't care. They don't have any duty to service. Any investment in outcomes. There is a script, they get paid, what more do you want? My wife constantly struggled with lingering issues that several Indian doctors (why were they so dominant?) just made scattershot prescriptions for, before finally getting in with an Asian American doctor who was actually invested in solving her problems.

Now my wife constantly has to work the phones because of my daughter's health issues and the vagaries of our insurance. Luckily, she's usually talking to actual employees at the local doctors office, lab office, insurance company, etc. It's already a frustrating, opaque process where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, and often neither of them know anything. But generally the people want to be helpful, and so even though the system is fucked up and frustrating and a pain in the ass, it ends up being a moderately collaborative effort and even though it takes my wife 4 hours of working the phones and being on hold constantly, things get accomplished. Now I'm not going to say something dramatic like my daughter would be dead if all these people were replaced by Indians, her issues aren't that serious. But somebody's probably would be if past experience is any indicator. I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.

I've complained before about my own experiences working with Indians. The Vivek's of the world speak in broad terms that these Indian workers are just better than me. They work harder, longer, for less pay, and they're probably smarter than me to boot. People here, when I've complained about the fecklessness and passive aggression I'm met with when trying to get an Indian to actually complete their task, respond with things along the lines of "They're just being smart, avoiding work and getting paid all the same." Seems like some sort of merited impossible to me. It's not happening, and also when it does it somehow still proves they're better than me.

I often struggle with notions of where I will flee to when America is ruined. My way of life is disappearing, my culture is being squeezed out, my history is being erased, my co-ethnics aren't reproducing. But where would even have me? Could I even blame them for not letting me in, for fear of Americans ruining their country the way we ruined our own? Sometimes you see Japan pop up as an option. A lot of embarrassing weebs think they know what Japan is like because they've digested a lot of Japanese media. Sometimes they even move to Japan and get on...ok. I remember watching this old video by Super Bunnyhop before every video he did was somehow SJ adjacent. He was talking about how these Americans were setting up bars where you could play a library of old games on consoles. In theory, this should be legal in Japan. But they were sued by the companies that owned the rights to those games all the same. They decided to fight this in courts, as is their right. But the native Japanese viewed this with scorn, it's just not what you do. Damned Americans and getting all legal about shit. Whatever it is about Japan that makes it so attractive to American's, I'm 99% certain we'd ruin if even 1m of us moved there. Especially if we just formed insular expat communities or overran certain areas. I can only imagine how obnoxious an American ghetto would be in Japan.

I've seen very little self awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from, or what makes them different. And to whatever degree self_made_human thinks he "knows" America and wants to live here, it just seems like an embarrassing strain of weebism to me. He imagines there is some mechanism by which he could come here, but that very same mechanism wouldn't play a part in destroying America, just the same way I'm certain 1m Americans would seriously fuck up Japan. There is almost no mechanism you could devise that would filter the "bad" Americans out of Japan, because our culture will ruin theirs. You let in the top 1m Americans, and they'll just serve as the vanguard for the next 10m even worse Americans because they'll be sympathetic for, and even long for, the shitty culture they fled from.

It's probably all inevitable. Civilizations rise and fall. It's just such an existential horror to know yours is falling and may not even survive your posterity.

I agree with your overall point and share your general sentiment. Which isn't to say that I think cjet is wrong; I respect his opinion as well.

But on the topic of doctors: German doctors aren't one whit better than the Indian doctors you describe. The doctors themselves blame the buerocracy, and I'm sympathetic to that complaint, but somehow it feels like they aren't all that unhappy to minimize their time with their annoying, idiotic patients.

horror stories from Canadians

I've posted about this extensively on TheMotte. But here it goes again.

Since the 70s, Canada has imported India's lowest-skilled. While Indians were considered model immigrants everywhere else, Canadian-Indians were busy committing 9/11-level terrorist acts. Canadian-Indian bad actors are part of a large web of criminal gangs, human trafficking rings, and drug distribution cartels. Trudeau turbocharged this problem by opening the floodgates. In India, the flight of uneducated and unskilled migrants to Canada was rampant enough to become a meme. Many among us (governments included) warned Canada that these channels were being exploited to facilitate crime. Trudeau did not heed our advice. The outcomes are a result of Canada's stubbornness.

Indian immigrants in other nations do not have the same demographics. They're well-integrated, peaceful, and high-earning versus conservative, uneducated, and of flexible morality. Of course, #NOTMOSTCANADIANS, but you get my point. Projecting Canada's problems with ethnic Indians onto other nations makes no sense, and the statistical differences prove my point (crime, earnings, education).

50% of the extant population in my county was supplemented with Indians like Canada has seen.

Ethnic Indians are 5% of Canada's population.

If the stories of off-the-boat Indians shitting in bodies of water like it's just what you do are true, it's fucked.

You're scared of the bogeyman. These people don't exist.

I have never met an Indian who shits in bodies of water. I've never seen it among people I know in India, let alone outside the country. The kind of Indian who does it can't speak one sentence in English, let alone get a passport or a visa to ever exit the nation. I don't want to laugh at their misfortune. Street-shitters are a desperate and downtrodden class of people. They're barely tolerated in AC restaurants in India, let alone a foreign nation.

"You can't make me go back! Anything but that!" attitude of second-generation Indian-Americans is profound.

Ah, I'll leave this for another day. The ABC vs. Chinese or ABCD vs. Indians conversation is strongly colored by insecurity, ungroundedness, and colonial mindsets. For now, I'll say that it has little to do with their dislike of India. India (and developing nations in general) run on survivalist mentalities based around class systems. Second-generation Indians are insecure about their place at the top of the survivalist-Indian hierarchy. Their actions should always be viewed with that fact in mind.

And then there is the shameless nepotism and scamming. It's more or less known that if you make the mistake of putting an Indian in charge of hiring, suddenly your company is hiring only Indians. That most resumes from Indians and credentials from institutions that service mostly Indians are completely fake and can't be trusted. I've seen repeated stories out of Canada that local education institutions, which have leaned into servicing Indians, have become so overrun with fraud that employers have begun just chucking applications from those institutions in the garbage. Been burned too many times.

You have causality backward. White people are unwilling to work for wages that desperate Indians agree to. This makes it so that the only people who meet the hiring bar and are willing to accept the wages are Indian immigrants. Similarly, Tier 3 Canadian institutions start cash-cow programs with little educational, career, or prestige value. The only kind of person who sees value in such a program is someone with ulterior motives. The program gets fraud-friendly candidates because it’s structured to only draw fraud-friendly candidates.

Detached from the outcome attitude.

While we're exchanging anecdotes, my experience has been the opposite. Doctors back in India are caring, invested, and treat you like a human. I've found American doctors to be cold and impatient.

I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.

My experience couldn't be more different. My Indian (and first-gen Chinese) coworkers clearly work harder and produce higher-quality outcomes than the natives. But the natives keep getting rewarded because the company can't afford to lose citizens.

The Viveks of the world speak in broad terms that these Indian workers are just better than me.

Yeah, Vivek felt resentful and hurt in his comments. I don't agree with his comments, but I can see how your average white person would feel attacked by it. Fair enough.

My way of life is disappearing, my culture is being squeezed out, my history is being erased, my co-ethnics aren't reproducing.

Yeah, it has to do with your co-ethnics. Indians (among other first-gen immigrants) are more spiritual, family-oriented, and 90s-American-like than native 2025 Americans. Your complaints are rooted in Gen Z Americans rejecting classically American values. Don’t point to us immigrants. This is all you. If it is any solace, this seems to be a global problem. Everywhere, urban kids of the next generation are rejecting ideas that their 'elders' held close to their hearts. Time is ruthless.

I've seen very little self-awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from or what makes them different.

I see your point. For every Indian who seeks integration, there are smart and educated Indians who ghettoize. It's how immigration works. Jews, Italians, Cubans, etc.—they all ghettoized in their first generation. In time, they integrate.

I don’t agree with your Japan analogy, though. America exported every part of its culture for a whole century. It forcefully molded workers at other English-speaking corporations into pseudo-Americans. America is a 'global' phenomenon. Irrespective of the truth, that’s the image it portrays and sells. If immigrants drink the Kool-Aid, then that’s on America for shoving it down our throats. You might argue that this was the doing of the filthy globalists, and it isn’t the will of 'true' Americans. But to me, that just sounds like you saying that you're a powerless normie who is angry about being powerless in their country. If you didn’t want to be flag bearers of globalism for 50 years, then you should've found your way to power and reversed the trend. Even in 2025, Trump may cosplay as a nativist, but he's as global coastal elite as they come.

Look, I'd be just as against opening the floodgates of immigration to Indians as you are.

The worst part of being an Indian in India is being surrounded by other Indians, in much the same way the worst part about poverty is having to live with poor people. Indians have the dual misfortune of being both Indian and poor (usually).

Canada is a clear example of taking things too far. When you're excusing diploma-mills in the country that exist solely to provide a convenient pretext for people to come on a 'student' visa and then start driving taxis with their Punjabi uncle, you're doing skilled immigration wrong.

On the other hand, Indian immigrants in the US and UK are clear success stories. They are usually the richest demographic, often fighting Jews and the Chinese for pole position, and remarkably well assimilated and lacking criminal tendency. Whatever mechanism allows for this to happen is a good one, and at least in the UK, Indian migrants are far more respected than their Pakistani and Bangladeshi subcontinental brethren. They have not imported the same bad habits from their homeland.

When we lived in a major city, we had similar experiences with Indian doctors we visited. There is just this overwhelming sense they don't care. They don't have any duty to service. Any investment in outcomes. There is a script, they get paid, what more do you want? My wife constantly struggled with lingering issues that several Indian doctors (why were they so dominant?) just made scattershot prescriptions for, before finally getting in with an Asian American doctor who was actually invested in solving her problems.

I can't really argue that your personal experiences haven't happened. I can argue that they're not representative. I've been treated by Indian doctors most of my life, and I wouldn't say they were uncaring automata in it for just the amount of money they can squeeze out of you. I necessarily know more doctors, Indians, and Indian doctors than you do, and I think my opinion is more likely to hold true at scale.

But somebody's probably would be if past experience is any indicator. I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.

I don't know if you ever noticed, but here I am, on this site, often handling out medical advice for the price of free. We could play games of Chinese Cardiologists all day if we had to. I know I've done more than the bare minimum for more people than I can count.

I've seen very little self awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from, or what makes them different. And to whatever degree self_made_human thinks he "knows" America and wants to live here, it just seems like an embarrassing strain of weebism to me. He imagines there is some mechanism by which he could come here, but that very same mechanism wouldn't play a part in destroying America, just the same way I'm certain 1m Americans would seriously fuck up Japan.

The mechanisms that would bring me there would be the same mechanisms that have brought existing Indians to America. And most people have positive opinions of those there. One mechanism that has worked for other Indian doctors is (hopefully temporarily) not an option for me at present. Another has been swung shut.

We strongly disagree on whether the status-quo is a good thing or not, and I don't expect to change your mind in that regard. I object to the status quo moving in a direction I think is worse for the country, and for skilled immigrants.

In fact, I respect your right to want to keep America the way it is, and preserve its culture. I think that I'm culturally American more than anything else, you can call me a Texaboo if you like, but can you deny that the average weeb loves Japan? Maybe I have more faith in the spirit of America than you do, it has assimilated tens of millions, it can take a million more, especially if they're a million like the ones who came before.

usually the richest demographic, often fighting Jews and the Chinese for pole position

This is just bad in the other direction. Importing a new elite class to rule over the native middle and bottom isn't really an improvement. Many places already struggle with nepotism prone foreign elites with divided loyalties.

There are challenges to assimilating into Japan that surprise even the weebiest: partly because what's shown in media is a very specific slice of everyday culture, partly because some aspects of the culture are so alien to Americans they have to live here for a few years before they even realise that those aspects exist.

In America, honesty and self-expression is a moral duty. In Japan, self-expression is (literally) selfishness.

You are expected to show the socially-appropriate face at all times. It doesn't matter if you disagree with your boss, it doesn't matter if you didn't mean to upset the person demanding an apology, it doesn't matter if you want to dress differently from other people, it doesn't matter if you think your parents are being stupid or overbearing. You are expected to do what is Done, and to uphold the harmony of the community.

Westerners in general and Americans in particular struggle with it hugely. They find it hard to behave appropriately, because they feel a moral duty to be honest and to push back against perceived unfairness. They also find it hard to feel comfortable around people who they think are putting on a fake face. Multiple American friends who've lived here for a long time tell me they feel like they're surrounded by aliens, or robots.

(For me it's easier because Britain also has a strong culture of 'what is Done', so I'm used to expressing different sides of myself in different roles and I have more ways to show my feelings without stepping out of bounds).

Then you have all the things that are necessary to maintain the cohesion that makes Japan work. Seniority is supreme: you can be fifty, sixty years old and your boss will still dress you down like a child in front of your colleagues to make sure you know your place. Your child is quite likely be bullied in school for being different (maybe, I don't have first-hand reports on this, just rumours). Often, your wife will expect absolute control over your bank account and your child, and may react to your attempts at co-parenting with jealousy at you muscling in on her turf (I've seen this).

Don't get me wrong, I love Japan. It's a great place to live and although I don't have many native friends I'm very fond of the ones I have. The depiction above is deliberately coloured as 'the other side' of what anime-lovers like me imagine before we come here. But assimilating, really assimilating, is very difficult. Maybe even impossible - I suspect the relevant personality traits are genetic. And after a few years, you look around and realise that you're living in a ghetto because it's just...easier to live around people like you.

but can you deny that the average weeb loves Japan

He love not necessarily idealized Japan, as by analogy @WhiningCoil reasons, but an Americanized one.

One which is like great you know, certainly not a shithole country, but man, think of how cool it would if it, like, ditched the "kanji" thing I read in the blog written by an American. Japanese hate it, you know, consider it the worst of their language, but their out-touch ultra-nationalist politicuans refuse to listen to them.

Or cartoons, man the ones for young boys are tight! Always action-packed! But there are some iffy ones, I've heard. Like a girl is still in high-school, but despite of that she is shown to feel love. And her classmate doesn't act like that is strange and sometimes even puts the moves on her. That is no bueno for me.

I've recently learned of great Black Japanese (two of the cloorst things ever!) hero of legends, Yasuke. He was the closest friend and advisor to Nobunaga. I had look up Nobunaga, he was apparently some sort of a head honcho in Japan. So anyay, Japanese not only know, they adore Yasuke.

Uh.. I'm not quite sure what point you're making, unless you're taking off entirely tangentially.

That being said:

I've recently learned of great Black Japanese hero of legends, Yasuke. He was the closest friend and advisor to Nobunaga. I had look up Nobunaga, he was apparently some sort of a head honcho in Japan. So anyay, Japanese not only know, and adore Yasuke. You know, I've heard they are pretty racist there, but as their love for Yasuke will rise new heights, hopefully they will overcome this flaw.

My man, have you known many weebs? They can be racist as fuck, and are probably one of the demographic most ticked off by Assassin's Creed: Shadows, and their depiction of an African uberchad steamrolling underfed rice-eating Japs. Even Afro Samurai had the decency to set itself in the far future, with the character effectively being a LARPer.

There is a certain demographic in the west who identifies as being fans of Japan, but only likes the stuff "Japan as a variant of their home country", "Localized Japan" rather than "Japan as viewed by the Japanese". Not really an issue for you, as you do not see any alien-to-India elements in the US society as defects. But others might.

Buffet-line thinking. America's very common to it because they see themselves as picking and choosing the "best" and leaving out everything they don't like - it slots into their national ethos as a culture of "fair" competition.

So they only like the "best" things about Japan, the things they find icky or don't like they pretend don't exist.

Thanks. I think I understand your argument now.

In fact, I respect your right to want to keep America the way it is, and preserve its culture. I think that I'm culturally American more than anything else, you can call me a Texaboo if you like, but can you deny that the average weeb loves Japan? Maybe I have more faith in the spirit of America than you do, it has assimilated tens of millions, it can take a million more, especially if they're a million like the ones who came before.

You know, there is this thing called Paris Syndrome. Allegedly it's a thing Japanese tourist get when they expect to visit the glamorous Paris of the silver screen of old, and instead its a filthy crime ridden Muslim/African ghetto. I really do wonder what would happen to your perception of America if I showed you the dozen abject failures of assimilation in a 60 mile radius around me, especially with my color commentary of how they used to be. Maybe take you to all the areas where nobody will understand that American sounding English you are so proud of.

If nothing else it might take some of the shine off and ease your suffering for want of not being here. America has become more like the 3rd world, than all the 3rd world we've imported has become like America.

I showed you the dozen abject failures of assimilation in a 60 mile radius around me, especially with my color commentary of how they used to be

I would watch and support this podcast. Would you call it 'Decline and Fall', 'Managed Decline', 'Back When the Lights Were On'?

Do you think women would watch like they watch true crime informative murder porn?

Do you genuinely think I'm not aware of the failures of America? The fent addicts nodding off next to piles of human feces? Ghettos where everyone knows not to go, where shampoo and baby food is kept under lock? Rust Belt towns that have denizens so devoid of hope that they cling to welfare and opioid addictions?

How much of that is "3rd world imports"? Not much. A certain underclass in the country has ancestors who came over, rather unwillingly, several centuries back.

Did the Chinese, Korean and Indian immigrants, probably two or three generations in the country, who fled conditions as bad as the worst of the 3rd world today, show the same dysfunction? Did they fail to assimilate and live off the dole?

I expect to see a lot of awful things in the States. I also expect to see much more good. And of the awful I see, very little of it has anything to do with skilled immigrants. Hell, there are no end of people with kids and grandkids in the middle and upper class now who themselves came over destitute and unable to speak a word of English. Origin matters, and so does filtering.

I guess this is why we are just talking past each other. You see a dead America, corpse being picked clean and future kingdoms taking root, and think it's still a fantastic place to live. "That's it?" you think.

The only immigrants I'd want are ones who see what is become of America, and would prefer to fortify their own homeland from the rot.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. Those bemoaning the fall of the Roman republic would have been surprised to hear that Rome would endure for another five centuries (fourteen if we count the east) and that the height of her power and glory was yet to come. Tocqueville's America was killed by Lincoln, Lincoln's America was killed by FDR, and now FDR's America is being fed into the woodchipper by Elon Musk, but all of these struggles are orthogonal to the interests of prospective immigrants. What they care about is technological and material prosperity. Tanner Greer put it best:

Americans often think that constitutionalism, liberal democracy, and universal truths about the equality of man are the United States’ most significant gift to humankind. But from the start of the 20th century to its close, foreigners in the mold of Wang Huning have honored the United States as the land of Edison, not the land of Jefferson.

It is this America, the America that pioneered the greatest transformation the human species has experienced since foragers began farming 12,000 years ago, that so awed the young Wang Huning.

The idea that an America that is head and shoulders above every other nation in technological innovation is in any way ruined (compared to whom?) is laughable to the billions that want to move here.

I guess this is why we are just talking past each other. You see a dead America, corpse being picked clean and future kingdoms taking root, and think it's still a fantastic place to live. "That's it?" you think.

That's laughable hyperbole at best. Seriously? Do you know what a truly dysfunctional, ethnically and politically divided nation looks like? You haven't even engaged with my rebuttals, or the clear evidence that I am aware of the warts on America's ass cheeks.

The only immigrants I'd want are ones who see what is become of America, and would prefer to fortify their own homeland from the rot.

Well, you're a citizen, and I'm not, so you're entitled to that opinion. That Republic you consider a rotten corpse is still yours, provided that you can keep it. You don't even seem to want to.

I mean, you're a doctor. How would you react if summoned to a corpse squirming with maggots, and passers by went "Why aren't you trying to save it? Don't you ever care? Look, he's even still moving!" Yes, technically there is life (the maggots) that can be seen making parts of the body squirm, but the body is dead, and there is nothing to save.

A (hypothetical and not at all how real maggots work) maggot might walk by and say "Oh my god, how dare you declare them dead?! They're alive and thriving you monster." But they aren't talking about the same thing you are talking about, except to the extent it shares the same space as the thing you are talking about.

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Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in

Letting in all Indians at or above self_made_human's intelligence / merit would not lead to total replacement of the native population, though? They aren't all doctors or FAANG engineers

Google lied to me and said there were 10 million+ doctors in India but actually there are 10 lakh+ doctors in India.

Nevertheless if you had a system that made it easy for Indian doctors to get a visa, you would find that thousands of diploma mills would spring up overnight churning out millions and millions of degrees. And somehow all of them will have the full Indian government licensing, accreditation, and whatnot to seem as legit as anything can be without actually existing.

We already have the flood of fraudulent paperwork with Indian companies filing dozens and dozens of H1-B applications per person, just to abuse the lottery, and trying to catch even a fraction of them is a losing battle.

As far as I can tell, there's no way an Indian doctor can practise in the States without clearing the USMLE.

That is a protracted process, and there is identity verification involved. If a licensing exam can't rule out fraudulent or unqualified candidates, it's not worth the name.

Just being a doctor is of little value, they want you to prove equivalency.

The fact that doctors and lawyers aren't allowed to sit for their exam without taking years of schooling and training suggests otherwise. Of course the training requirements are likely more of a cartel thing, but at least ostensibly the exam only tests a fraction of what's necessary to practice.

@Throwaway05 has been scaring me with claims of how difficult the USMLE is. He's better positioned to answer this than I am, but I'm personally quite confident that almost nobody who did not actually have the skills and knowledge of an American doctor could make it through the gauntlet. The only way to get those, at present, is med school.

The USMLE is necessary but not sufficient, other stuff is required to be a competent doctor (and NPs/PAs certainly become doctors without passing the USMLE, and while not actually good enough certainly make some people comfortable).

Preparation side of things gets weird, these days most applicants use uniformly the same few "best in class" test prep resources like Sketchy and First Aid, hypothetically someone could pass the USMLE without the structure and context of course work but it would be nearly impossible because of the sheer amount of crap you need to know.

As you know but the other poster likely doesn't, a lot of what is involved in being a good doctor involves practical experience doing shit in the hospital (sometimes physical skills and the like) with training wheels for awhile before you do it on your own.

You don't want your first time doing X to be doing it by yourself with no supervision, it's a terrifying thought.

Incidentally some states in the U.S. do allow lawyers to became barred without law school but I don't know the details of that.

Can't really do that in the same way for medicine.

Lastly it's entirely possible to pass USMLE and be ass as a physician for a variety of reasons including skills atrophying and laziness.

I believe you. It's not like the PLAB doesn't occasionally let absolute lemons through, and I wish I could say that every doctor with the same nominal degree I have was someone I'd entrust my medical care to.

God knows that I've sometimes felt scared and befuddled by how much autonomy the UK saw fit to grant me, back in India it was far too easy to hide behind a consultant's skirt, but that's not really a possibility when the senior psychiatrist hasn't had to interpret a CXR longer than I've been alive. I personally think it's nigh miraculous how doctors once managed without ready access to the internet.

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Nevertheless if you had a system that made it easy for Indian doctors to get a visa, you would find that thousands of diploma mills would spring up overnight churning out millions and millions of degrees

Yeah, and if you have a competent right-wing administration overseeing the immigration process, and also immigrating costs $1M USD, then this won't be an issue

In a democracy you absolutely should never make laws that only work well as long as you're in power but become a giant thorn in the side once you aren't anymore. In fact, while Musk & Trump are certainly trying to change that, the current government staff is still massively left-leaning. So such a law would be a thorn pretty much instantly.

I mean it's going to be hard to have any immigration laws work well if half the time the executive is held by people who want unlimited immigration. A lot of the policies people here would prefer aren't currently politically practical but they'd still be better if they were

The obvious next step seems to me to be removing those laws again before the next election.

There's a lot of them.

... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so

... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so

Why should HBD tell you that? India's been pretty civilised for ages, and Indians have the same basic subspecies makeup as whites AIUI (and there was plenty of geneflow even after OoA2; Persia wasn't a hard barrier, which is why Indians look more like whites than they do Chinese). I would expect the average Indian IQ to have been lower in the 20th century due to the Flynn effect, but I don't see a reason to suspect a large genetic difference. If you have something I'm not aware of, I'm all ears.

Indian students score so poorly on the PISA exams that their government pulled out in embarassment. Most lines of evidence suggest that there is extreme IQ stratification in India, with only certain high-caste subgroups performing at or above European or East Asian levels.

So, a substantial part of the Indian population has the Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is a European lineage almost certainly introduced to India by the Aryan steppe invasion which conquered the existing Dravidian culture in the north of the subcontinent and introduced Indo-Aryan language and culture.

However, there is a gradient of R ancestry which is stronger in the north and much more rare in the south of the continent, where more South Asian Y-haplogroups such as L and H are far more prevalent. And of course once you look at mitochondrial ancestry, which comes from female ancestors, you see far more Asia- and India-specific lineage, such as the M haplogroup. This is consistent with the story of male conquerors intermingling with local women of Dravidian ancestry in the north and spreading their DNA in areas where they had political and cultural control. Over time their ancestry has been diluted substantially by intermarriage with people of ancient pre-Aryan Indian ancestry — people related to the Austronesian peoples of Southeastern Asia.

The big question mark over the Austronesians from my POV is the substantial Denisovan admixture, which fits the pattern of (lack of) civilisation suspiciously well. According to WP the Denisovan admixture in Indians is of a smaller level, similar to that in Orientals.

That's a ton of people. We should not be inviting millions of people into the country. That's too much by an order of magnitude, and we're only talking about one country that is not compatible with our values and culture.

The US currently has 40M people who were born in foreign countries? I can see the argument that that's too much, but a few million doesn't seem like that many to our current 350M.

a truly meritocratic system

FWIW, I don't want a purely meritocratic system.

Right now there is a fight (to make a sweeping gesture) "America is a proposition nation" and "America is a Nation Of Founding Stock" which, purely on the immigration question, seems kinda like a moot argument if there's no effort to ensure that America remains a proposition nation. Team A and Team B fight over whether immigrants should share American values or American characteristics, and somehow neither are winning – or so it seems to me.

You would know more than me – are there any efforts to substantially screen people to ensure they agree with American ideology? Specifically American ideology, no generic 'Western democratic values' – I'm talking no-holds-barred free speech, right to bear arms, rule of law and private property, a federalized system where the states are important and sovereign, freedom of religion.

From what I understand there's a quiz, some sort of background check, and maybe they check your social media to make sure you aren't a terrorist or something. I'm not really sure that is selecting for people whose beliefs are American.

Anyway, setting citizenship at $1 million or $5 million or $15 million or nothing + meritocracy doesn't really solve for that either way.

You would know more than me – are there any efforts to substantially screen people to ensure they agree with American ideology? Specifically American ideology, no generic 'Western democratic values' – I'm talking no-holds-barred free speech, right to bear arms, rule of law and private property, a federalized system where the states are important and sovereign, freedom of religion.

I personally endorse all of these, so I wouldn't be worried about some kind of test of American Values. Hell, the fact that the UK lacks these is a driving reason behind my desire to treat it like a temporary pitstop.

I personally endorse all of these, so I wouldn't be worried about some kind of test of American Values. Hell, the fact that the UK lacks these is a driving reason behind my desire to treat it like a temporary pitstop.

The "life in the UK" test (which is our equivalent of the US civics test, but harder) is hilarious on this point. The test was brought in by Labour in 2002, so the original version included a whole load of woke questions like "What year did women get the vote?" or "How do you report your employer for discrimination?" and then the Tories replaced most of them with "right-wing" questions like "Who wrote Rule Britannia?"

This demonstrates two problems:

  • Countries can't always agree on what their values actually are except on an "I know it when I see it" basis. In the US this mostly comes down to "Was the New Deal a betrayal of American values, or the fulfillment of them?"
  • You can't test values with a pencil-and-paper test - you just test ability and willingness to cram for the test.

Good!

But you see my concern with both pure meritocracy and Golden Tickets as selectors, here.

Those are political beliefs but I think there is more to being American than simply political beliefs

I am sympathetic to this. But at a minimum it seems immigrants should broadly share Americans' political beliefs!

I agree with that. But I think about Springfield Ohio. Let’s say all of the Haitians shares the political values. I still think it would be a tragedy for Springfield where over a few years the entire cultural fabric changed.

In short, I’m okay with some immigration but what I don’t want is to change in a fundamental way the culture. Part of that is politics but not only.

Sure – and I would add that I think this is also worth considering in the reverse, where immigration (or even internal migration!) can hollow out entire communities and warp their cultural fabric.

Oh that’s easy. America should be a proposition nation, right up until all the members of my ethnic group have finished immigrating, whereupon it should become a nation of founding stock, “founding stock” here meaning my ethnic group and all the ones that came before it, except for the ones that I don’t like. This is the objectively correct opinion and no one can prove me wrong.

Specifically American ideology, no generic 'Western democratic values' – I'm talking no-holds-barred free speech, right to bear arms, rule of law and private property, a federalized system where the states are important and sovereign, freedom of religion.

Was FDR against American ideology? I think he stomped on all of those except guns, to the raucous applause of the American public.

I mean, maybe you think he was, but that would suggest that this ship has sailed some time ago. America contains multitudes, for better or worse.

Was FDR against American ideology?

Maybe it was using threats of court packing to nullify the 10th Amendment, perhaps it was the racial concentration camps, or maybe it was handing half of Europe to a genocidal communist, but yeah, at some point one must become a tiny bit suspicious!

America contains multitudes, for better or worse.

Those aren't two binary options, remember, they're a sliding scale. There's always "even worse" as a possibility.

I don't see what there is to be done about it, though. Without mind reading, "selecting for people whose beliefs are American" isn't going to filter out all aspiring immigrants with un-American beliefs, it's only going to filter out the honest ones. And if we did have a magical filter, why would I expect it to be used to test for my definition of "American" or the Constitution's, rather than for the definition that would earn "the raucous applause of the American public"?

Yes, he was a communist, and the first president without enough shame and nobility to run for more than two terms. We're all stil suffering from his imperial rule, and the irony is that it would take multiple terms from the same president to undo the damage, which is no longer possible.

Was FDR against American ideology?

Yes, FDR and his team dabbled very explicitly in importing European fascist/socialist ideals.

America contains multitudes, for better or worse.

Sure. That's why alignment with American ideology is important. If Americans stop believing in the right to free speech, free religion, the rule of law, the importance of states, and so on, America will no longer be able to contain multitudes

It's not clear to me why your version of American ideology is the one true version to the exclusion of all the other ideologies that have been popular in America. Even the founders did not always support what you claim is American ideology. It's basically a no true Scotsman.

It's not clear to me why your version of American ideology is the one true version to the exclusion of all the other ideologies that have been popular in America.

Without taking a side on who's ideology should be seen as the true one, doesn't the fact that the title of "the American ideology" is contested, make the whole idea of a propositional nation unfeasible? I can imagine a sustainable group that puts no barriers to entry on ethnicity, but limits it's members on creed, but I'm having trouble imagining it when the creed itself is not a requirement.

If you can contest the idea that there is an American ideology (or really, it is probably better to say American values) then you are signaling that you can't speak descriptively about the collective values of any group of people (at least at the level of a nation or broad culture that is not bound by explicit ideological tenets such as a party platform – and even then there are plenty of e.g. Democrats who do not agree with 100% of their party platform!)

I think that such a position obscures much more than it reveals, even if it is true that there are going to be outliers to every group and that there are and can be good-faith disagreements about what values are truly integral to a nation or a culture.

Disagreement among Americans and instances of outliers (or even extreme and fundamental disagreements) does not mean that one cannot make generally true (even if admittedly broad) statements both about American culture as a whole and about American subcultures (which I often point out do not always share values!)

In the case of the Alien and Sedition Acts, they (particularly as I understand it the parts that repressed free speech) led to negative public backlash and were repealed [ETA: actually it looks like some of them expired and the Alien Enemies law was not repealed because it was noncontroversial] precisely because they ran contrary to the American ideology (or American values, if you will, which might be a better way of conceptualizing it).

What did FDR do against religion?

four of the eight justices in the majority in this case were nominated by FDR. A bit of a stretch, I admit, but you can't have everything.

A bit of a stretch, but also interesting to read about in its own right. Three of the FDR justices in the majority vote in that case also voted with the majority to overturn it just 3 years later, with a separate concurrence to specifically discuss why they deliberately did so. Their concurrence isn't entirely the paean to freedom I'd have hoped for, but it's still impressive to see people change their minds so significantly, publicly, and (relative to the judicial workings) quickly.

I think he stomped on all of those except guns

I regret to inform you of the national firearms act of 1934

I knew one of our resident firearms enjoyers would come by to set the record straight if I was mistaken.

Just curious: why do you want to be in America instead of the UK? If I had no family or friends in America (maybe you do, I'm just assuming you don't), I think I'd be equally happy here or in the UK. I might even prefer to UK for some reasons.

The UK isn't a terrible place. It's about adequate, as a country where I could see myself residing and settling in, and it certainly beats India in most regards.

It's just that the US is better on almost all the metrics I personally care about:

  1. The pay is important to me. It's not my only concern, or I'd be considering places like the Middle East that lavish money on doctors with western training with more glee. US physician salaries can be double or triple that of British doctors.

  2. The UK is an authoritarian country, politely authoritarian in the quintessential British way , but authoritarian nonetheless. My freedom of speech is significantly curtailed. The US is the closest the planet truly has to a bastion of true free speech and freedom of association.

  3. The climate sucks. Scotland is lovely in the summer and early autumn, but I'd very much prefer sunnier climes, and even further down south in England isn't what I consider ideal.

  4. I identify with American political values and ideals far more than I do with British ones. Not in every case, but more often than not. I want to shoot full-auto AR-15s when I can dawg.

  5. I'm strongly concerned about technological unemployment, and the US is one of the countries that is most capable of weathering the storm without too much social disruption. This isn't something that can be taken for granted, but it has a much better manufacturing base than the UK does, and is far wealthier overall.

  6. I also think the States is far more vibrant and interesting, the UK is tiny, and Europe can be nice to visit, but I still prefer the States.

I would also do the same, and also add that the UK is a dying economy that doesn't produce great statesmen or have much in the way of political will.

British food does not deserve the reputation it gets, but it got that reputation on top of wartime rationing because British used to take a quiet pride in maintaining a stiff upper lip at things being shit and being grateful for what they're given. Then people figured out that this allowed them to get away with much worse because the poor fuckers were too polite to complain, and it was a sliding scale ever since. A Frenchman will complain if the wine pairing is wrong, an Italian will bitch that he can make the food better.

It took me a longer time to understand that this applies to British government as well. It's endemic in the EU, but much of the populace exists under a near perpetual state of learned helplessness, and if they act out, they know they are venting their frustration in a non-productive way. Americans are the opposite - many of them come across as naive and crazy to me, but they genuinely believe even destructive venting of their frustration has a positive effect. Storming the capitol on June 6 accomplished nothing and was never going to, but the irony of it all was that for a very brief moment, both the people storming the capitol and the people outraged that the capitol got stormed actually thought there was a chance it might. Similarly, BLM, #metoo, Occupy, etc.

Technological employment is shot in the entire EU and will never change. Their blind stabs at attempting to have a Silicon Valley for themselves will come to nothing; they pat themselves on the back over a few million dollars here and there in a technology fund when Meta misplaces that amount on whatever dumb initiative they're workshopping internally every Tuesday.

British food does not deserve the reputation it gets, but it got that reputation on top of wartime rationing because British used to take a quiet pride in maintaining a stiff upper lip at things being shit and being grateful for what they're given.

Also that Britain (alongside Belgium and the Netherlands, which do not exactly have a reputation for fine dining) industrialised and urbanised before refrigeration, which means that we went through a long period where most of the population did not have access to fresh food.

I identify with American political values and ideals far more than I do with British ones. Not in every case, but more often than not. I want to shoot full-auto AR-15s when I can dawg.

You should visit sometime and come hang out. We'll have some fun dawg.

My annual leave is mostly spent going back home to India for a few weeks, but I do plan to come to the States in the nearish future to attend a close friend's marriage. When I do, I'll be sure to hit you up!

aww yeee baby

For 1, I also want to ask what costs of living are like in each place, because that is as relevant as your salary. I feel like costs of living here are astronomical near cities, which is where most people want to live. But I don't know what it's like in the UK. I would have assumed that the socialized structure makes things cheaper to match the lower pay, so I'm curious to hear your take on it.

For 3, I think the climate sucks here too. But I've always lived in the northeast. Here the skies are gray 3/4 of the year.

6 is interesting. I feel the opposite, but maybe it's because I've lived here my whole life.

London is exorbitantly expensive. You have to either be very well off or very poor to live there without penny pinching, paradoxically. That's because the latter is often given free council housing in areas where free-market prices would be several thousands of pounds for a house in rent a month.

Most other cities are much better off in comparison, Edinburgh is expensive, but not the point it scares people away.

My main gripe is that I'm not being paid free-market wages. The NHS is a monopsony employer, and has a stranglehold on medical residencies and higher training. Doctors have faced sub-inflation pay raises for over a decade now, and even the meek and conflict-avoidant British doctors took to the streets in protest not that long ago. This lead to a recent pay uplift, but nowhere near enough to account for cumulative inflation. More or less every year, you face a gradual real-terms pay cut.

I am not strapped for cash, but only because I live well below my means and have no dependents. When I consider what I'd end up paying for things like childcare (I expect I'll marry another working professional, if not necessarily a doctor), it's rather eye watering. I don't think things like groceries or rents are significantly lower than the States, and housing prices have to account for the fact that UK housing is tiny compared to the former.

And regardless of the precise COL, which can vary substantially like you think, there's no way that the double or triple pay raise the US represents is beaten by it. Proportionally, I'd pay much less for private insurance than I would for the NHS, through taxes.

For 3, I think the climate sucks here too. But I've always lived in the northeast. Here the skies are gray 3/4 of the year.

That's the beauty of the States, you can choose to live anywhere from subtropical marshland to arctic conditions or a baking desert. I'd head to somewhere where the winters didn't last over 4 months.

6 is interesting. I feel the opposite, but maybe it's because I've lived here my whole life.

It's by far the most subjective claim I make. Some people, like @2rafa would claim that London is unmatched for its vibes and culture. I wasn't particularly impressed myself. I would absolutely take the Bay Area every time over anything that the UK offers, but others have different preferences.

For 1, I also want to ask what costs of living are like in each place, because that is as relevant as your salary.

The difference in material standards of living between the UK and the USA is real, and large, particularly for the upper-middle class, and within the upper-middle class particularly for doctors and programmers. But this is obfuscated by the fact that the consumption bundle of an upper-middle-class suburban Londoner (which includes low-crime, low-filth walkable urbanism) is close to unavailable at any price in the US and the consumption bundle of an upper-middle-class suburban American (which includes one light-duty commercial vehicle per adult used as personal transport) is taxed into oblivion in the UK.

I'm strongly concerned about technological unemployment, and the US is one of the countries that is most capable of weathering the storm without too much social disruption. This isn't something that can be taken for granted, but it has a much better manufacturing base than the UK does, and is far wealthier overall.

I find this surprising. The US seems to me to be in an unusually weak position to handle technological unemployment in that:

  • One side of the political fence is opposed to a redistributive welfare state in principle, and has a particular hate-on for unemployed working-age adults. The best the GOP is likely to offer the technologically unemployed is deliberately unpleasant make-work jobs.
  • The US has a worse-than-average fiscal position compared to other rich countries, and a political system (Presidential democracy with separation of powers) which obfuscates responsibility for fixing it.

I find this surprising. The US seems to me to be in an unusually weak position to handle technological unemployment

We're approaching a world where Humans Need Not Apply. When that happens, the quality of human capital becomes mostly irrelevant, and things like raw resources, an existing manufacturing base that can be rapidly automated, and a smaller population that needs to subsist off UBI becomes the only real differentiating factors between nations. This is, of course, simplification, AI can take many trajectories, but as of early 2025, we're seeing near parity between the US and China, the latter is only 6 months behind, though it might fall further if chip shortages become the limiting factor.

Surprisingly, by virtue of the world's largest manufacturing base, China is surprisingly well positioned to make the most of automation. A lot of the factories are robotic, and eventually all of them will be.

On the other hand, the US has a decent manufacturing base, albeit one that has seen relative and absolute decline. It is, however, much richer in terms of initial capital, which is what allows rapid scaling once humans are no longer the bottleneck.

Even if the Republicans are against welfare (and my impression is that they're loathe to cut back things that a large portion of what their underemployed and disenfranchised voters require to survive), once we're seeing double digit unemployment, they're going to either be forced to accept UBI, or watch as the majority of the population starves. The latter isn't something I can say won't happen, but the US is large, rich, relatively underpopulated, and has welfare systems that could expand to cover nearly the entire population. I would strongly expect that in the initial turmoil, citizens would be prioritized over all others.

Other countries might be rich. They lack the industry or the raw resources to keep up. What will Singapore be forced to do when most of its services and the highly skilled and educated workforce becomes redundant?

once we're seeing double digit unemployment, they're going to either be forced to accept UBI, or watch as the majority of the population starves.

What on earth makes you think these are the only options?

There’s going to be great variety on the make-work-to-UBI scale. I can see the Nordics embracing UBI, but the Americans? They will have you (or us) dig ditches and fill them in before they hand everyone no strings attached spending power, I’d bet on it. Your knowledge of American culture and values is still less than fully developed.

I have discussed a whole range of options in the past, including make-work. Even that is a form of UBI, just a rather shitty one, and once again, the US would be in a better position to make it work.

So are current make work jobs like hospital administrators or financial regulators UBI then? Seems like a wide definition.

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There are a lot of cultural reasons to prefer the US to the UK

  • The UK is much more aristocratic and hereditarian---there's a royal family, a House of Lords, everyone is judged by the accent they developed while growing up, most politicians didn't just go to the same few universities, but literally the exact same high school, etc.
  • Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
  • The above two points also enforce quite a bit of social conformism. Having unusual hobbies or interests for your social class is much harder than in the US.
  • Ambition and particularly hard work are looked upon much more favorably in the US.

Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.

Hah, this is interesting. I've felt drained recently because specifically where I live, social conversation is about how little you give a fuck about anything, and how blatantly and non-cleverly you can be about insulting the other person, but still have them take it. And I remember in high school that to have any interests at all made you a loser. All of life is about seeming like you don't give a fuck, here. But this is very specific to my region.

Isn't that all of Western culture, to some extent? There's a reason why "cool" (as in cold, disinterested) was the ideal that everyone strived towards for decades, and has basically become our generic casual word for "good". I'm just glad that this ideal seems to finally have gone on the retreat since about 2010 or so (but then all of the political heating was probably part of the monkey's-paw price for that).

Eh, I think irony and detachment was the thing that took over around 2010, though that too may be passing.

That might be the case. That'd make me happy if my kids grew up in a high school where they didn't have to act like they don't care about anything.

But also, having lived in several different areas, even recently, I think the people in my particular area are more rude than in other places.

If so, then I think we should tread with some care. Stoicism is a worthwhile ability to keep around; I thoroughly despise the drama queens who will turn everything into an outburst worthy of being put on social media.

Obviously there are harmful extremes in both directions. But the happy medium is, IMO, a little towards the cool side. But of course I would say that.

The UK is much poorer than the US, and in particular doctor salaries are oddly low there.

Oh, I guess that makes sense. Do doctors work their asses off in the UK like they do in the US? Whenever I talk to my doctor friends, their lives sound miserable, almost like they're being hazed by a fraternity for years on end. I don't personally know anyone who became a doctor who wasn't pushed into it by strong family expectations.

The answer is: It depends.

What kind of doctor? As a psychiatrist, I don't think my work would look very different in either country, but I know which one would pay me double or triple. At the very least, American doctors have the option of cutting back their hours while still making more than we do.

I think in most other specialities, doctors are just about as harried and overworked, but it's hard to say for sure.

The UK medical system has a lot of weird quirks designed to make sure doctors stay there and stay cheap. It's a natural consequence of the NHS's fully nationalized setup.

They purposely don't enter into some certification equivalence treaties so British doctors don't get the qualifications to go abroad easily for instance.

And Europe in general has low salaries compared to similarly developed countries because taxes make supergross salaries quite expensive.

If you're a successful upper middle class professional, Europe (bar few exceptions) offers a shit deal versus any other developed country. You are essentially paying for everything and getting subpart services in return. Hence the massive brain drain.

Jevon's paradoxmakes us expect that increasing the price of a good by 5 times will not 5x the revenue. It'll decrease it in expectation. If Trump prizes himself as a businessman, this should be clear to him.

This is exactly the point. Trump ran on reducing immigration. That's what he's doing.

My impression is that Trump ran on reducing illegal immigration, and to the extent that there are quasi-legals like asylum seekers, he wanted them gone too.

I am not aware of him wanting all immigration reduced. He has been remarkably inconsistent when it comes to skilled immigration, but even the new Golden Ticket is framed as a play to snag wealthy immigrants while reducing the national debt.

To reduce debt, you want more money. Ergo this is a bad idea on its own merits.

To reduce debt, you want more income

Insofar as immigration is seen as having a significant baseline cost per immigrant, raising the amount of money received per immigrant can result in higher net income even if revenue falls.

I don't think I'm making a controversial claim if I say that the people who can manage to spend $1 million on investments in the States, while employing 10 people, are rather likely to be net-positive taxpayers.

Now do the same calculation while sending profits home over a lifetime.

Or with dependent visas.

I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me.

Yes.

Are you single? Have you considered a sham marriage to an American woman (or man)? I've seen that work fairly well.

I've heard of deals around $50k in New Jersey. It's not that bad. You need to give your wife a good life for 3-4 years, and then you can divorce on amicable terms.

That’s still expensive and risky. Sham marriage would be immigration fraud, a crime. This means that you need to compensate your co-conspirators generously to go along with it, because it requires a lot of effort and legal risk, and binds them to you for years. Ultimately, the investment visa might be cheaper in practice when you adjust for risk.

Yeah, I don't know.

The most absurd one that I've seen that worked is a dude found a homely lesbian woman with bad career prospects at an anime convention while he was visiting. They became friends and he paid her $20k/year and they roomed together (he paid for the 2 bedroom apartment) so they could fake marry and he could get his citizenship.

Their "wedding photos" were so obviously faked and it still succeeded. I think the fact that they were both awkward ultra nerds threw off the immigration officials.

They were friends and both liked anime so it was kind of a cute romance, in a way.

There's no one to throw off. They aren't checking this shit. My wife's aunt introduced me to a lovely very young couple who were cohabitating in Miami, and they were planning to get married. The only wrinkle they had to get out of the way is that she was currently in the middle of a fraudulent marriage to an immigrant. They were completely open about it. Everyone offered a polite, "Oh, interesting!"

I know multiple people who got their green cards through a fake marriage, and they each paid $10,000. I was offered that much to do it myself, but I turned it down because I wanted to keep the option of marrying a mail-order-bride for real. Now, granted, that was before inflation, but even now I don't think it would be more than $20,000-$30,000, plus a few thousand more for the lawyer and fees. Definitely cheaper one million dollars, let alone five.

30 k$ seems pretty low for a crime whose default punishment (for the citizen, not for the alien) under the US Sentencing Guidelines is a prison sentence of 8–14 months plus a fine of 4–40 k$. I have a hard time believing that enforcement is so lax that people will commit such an easily-trackable felony for so little.

you think people are not so desperate they wouldn't take $30k to commit a crime that simply involves lying to the government about the contents of their heart?

such an easily-trackable felony

It seems very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Just don't write anything down.

  • "Oh it was love at first sight, so we married shortly after meeting."

  • "Our marriage wasn't very close, but things don't always match your expectations."

  • "Yes, I did end up 20-30k richer than you might expect after the divorce, but that's well within the normal variance."

It would be a lot easier to prove that someone had a sham Sacrament of Holy Matrimony than a sham legal marriage because civil standards are incredibly lax.

It isn't that simple. Court opinions on this topic show that the immigration authorities conduct intrusive interviews and investigations to check whether the marriage appears genuine. How did you meet? How did you propose? Where was the honeymoon? What is your spouse's birthday? Do you live with your spouse? Do you share a bank account? Et cetera.

@dr_analog @hydroacetylene

No, ergvw34 is right- if you’re of the right ethnicity(IIRC he’s Hispanic, which would have a much lower going rate than Africans would have to pony up), the cost of a green card marriage is extremely low, and if you’re willing to live together for the whole five-ish years that’s all the proof immigration needs.

You don’t even need to live together. Just have all your mail delivered to the fake spouse address, and pick it up once in a while. If you have relatives you can live with them and pay them in cash for living expenses. Easy peasy

The federal investigators will check whether you are living together.

None of the people I know who got their green cards this way actually moved in together, except the one marriage that was real. They all just pretended to.

I once heard the process summed up as "find a gringo who is willing to participate, take a dozen photographs together, and practice the right answers for the interview". It's a little more complicated than that (e.g. the woman is expected to change her last name), but not much. That's why you pay an immigration lawyer; he knows what the immigration officials want to see and will teach you how to fake it. Honeymoon photos can be as simple as taking a trip to Disneyland together for one weekend.

I really think you are forming an inaccurate picture of how thoroughly the government investigates these marriages based on the documents you are reading online. Having seen the process with my own eyes, I can tell you it's not like that.

I think we both know that even if I was willing to go to any lengths to get in, admitting to fraudulent intent in an online forum is a bad idea haha. Even a pseudonymous one.

I think it's nigh inevitable that we're all unmasked by AI doing stylometry. My OP-sec is far from perfect, and there's enough unique information about me out there that a determined human adversary could manage. I even nurse minor ambitions of becoming a Proper Blogger some day, and that just increases the attack surface.

In all honesty, I want it to be as legal as I can make it. I could certainly afford a flight to Guatemala or Nicaragua and find a mule, but I don't want to live the life of an illegal immigrant. The medical profession in UK might not be ideal, but it beats that as far as I'm concerned!

As for finding a legitimate American wife, the easiest way is to be in America. Most Americans are sensible enough not to move to either the UK or India. Most of them would also prefer that their husband be gainfully employed.

To practise as a doctor in the States requires me to be eligible for the USMLE and then pass it. I've been keeping a close eye on the recent trend of many individual US states waiving the residency requirement, but to my dismay, there isn't one that does away with the USMLE altogether, not even if I were a senior clinician who had finished their higher training in a peer medical system like the UK. They usually ask that such candidates work in under-served rural areas, but I can deal with that.

(This is true, the bit about being peers. The NHS is certainly poorer, but not to that extent. We've got the same things you do in your private hospitals, we just have to dole the expensive stuff out much more begrudgingly. And psychiatry? You can't get away with just a pen and paper these days, but it isn't a very demanding field in terms of equipment)

I'd strongly prefer to continue working as a doctor. I haven't entirely ruled out a pivot to something that is non-clinical, which would let me work in the States, but many options take additional degrees and loads of time. Time I don't think I have, with the pace of progress in AI.

A friend of mine, from the same med school, ended up doing a PhD in Public Health in Texas and now works with the big names, but the ideal time for me to have done that would have been 3 years in the past.

If I did so now, not only would I be taking up educational debt, I'd be losing out on several years of earnings. This wouldn't mean shit in India, but since I'm already in the UK..

You can see how complicated things are. If I had to rank my options:

  1. Practice in the US as a doctor and settle down there. Highly desired, not impossible, but time consuming.

1.5) If that USMLE issue is fixed, I would also be able to go to countries that are better off than the UK and pay doctors well. Think Canada or NZ, the same obstacle blocks all of them. Slightly lower payoff than the States, but I'd be happy with it.

  1. Continue training in the UK and resign myself to life here. It beats India. This is more or less something I can count on.

  2. Discard clinical medicine and do something that doesn't have so much regulatory red tape, and try to get into the States that way. Uncertain odds, massive opportunity costs if I have to quit my job and training program.

Now, if some lovely lady becomes so enamored by my hobby of arguing with strangers online that she wants to marry me, I might not say no haha. If I was a US citizen, then I could apply for jobs that think that even if my medical credentials aren't directly applicable, it's proof of general competence.

I do wish I was, and my impression is that most of you would be happy to have me.

Yes.

Thank you. I'd have linked to the same post on the Motte if I wasn't too tired to dig through my profile. If you were one of the people who had said it back then, I appreciate you, and I do now.

I think I'd be a fine American. Let's see if that pans out, my life hasn't been entirely terrible outside of it.

Continue training in the UK and resign myself to life here. It beats India. This is more or less something I can count on.

You also have the option of completing training in the UK and then moving to a country like Australia that wants to poach British-trained doctors.

I would if I could! The same American NGO that certifies international doctors as being eligible for the USMLE, is also relied upon by other Commonwealth countries to vet applicants.

The UK still has delusions of grandeur, and has their own certification pathway without entirely outsourcing that bit to an American org. Unfortunately, this doesn't provide a way to side-step the issues with my original med school, even if my higher training is recognized by Australia and New Zealand.

Otherwise I'd probably be replying back at an awkward time zone, as soon as I was safe from drop bear attack.

Have you considered staying inside your home country? Americans overwhelmingly voted to lower immigration - Trump’s policies aren’t a "suggestion" or some miscalculation, they’re the people’s choice. It's quite selfish to continue to game the system in the face of this.

I have to ask - do you not feel uncomfortable coming to a country where the people do not want you there? I know I could not make such a move.

All of the immigrants that I've known (friends included) have a deeply held belief in what I've seen called 'immigrationism': the idea that if you work hard and pay taxes you are entitled to go wherever you please. And of course in the UK it's literally illegal to suggest otherwise.

Please do not use the word "literally" metaphorically.

There are many people in the UK (Nigel Farage most obviously) who have made a good living out of saying things they insist you are not allowed to say. That is because you are allowed to say those things.

There are still too many things that are illegal to say in the UK, to the point where if you didn't say "literally" I would accept that you were engaging in permissible exaggeration and not argue, but one of them is not "the UK has the right as a sovereign country to exclude net-taxpaying immigrants on cultural grounds". And if it isn't illegal to say, it isn't literally illegal to say.

People have been arrested for anti immigration comments.

Can you say, the UK has he right to exclude immigrants for any reason, especially ethnic replacement? I don't think you can.

The UK, as a sovereign state, has the right to exclude any non-citizen it wants, for any reason. (In some cases we would need to withdraw from treaties like the Refugee Convention or the European Convention on Human Rights to do so legally, but treaties have exit clauses).

I just did, from a UK IP, using a weak pseudonym.

Seriously, the UK establishment doesn't have a brief to protect Nigel Farage or Melanie Phillips. If it was illegal to say the things they are saying, they would be arrested. The UK hate speech laws require the speech to be "threatening, abusive, or insulting" as well as discriminatory against a protected group, so if you are polite and don't insult identifiable individuals you are not breaking the law. I don't support these laws, but I don't support foreigners lying about them either.

In the context of the recent riots, the much bigger difference is that the US has an unusually high bar for substantive incitement charges (which carry much higher sentences than hate speech charges) - if you poast "There are asylum seekers at 10 Acacia Avenue. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone burned the place down?" from your mother's basement and someone you never met who read the post does, in fact, burn down 10 Acacia Avenue then you are likely to be convicted of incitement to commit arson in the UK, but this would probably be 1st-amendment protected in the US.

Investigating "non-crime hate incidents" is stupid and the police should stop doing it, but the operative part is "non-crime" - none of the stories you hear about them involve someone being arrested, prosecuted, locked up etc.

I wasn't clear, sorry. Making the general anti-immigration case is legal, but what about saying to an actual immigrant in front of you, 'I don't care how much tax you pay, I don't think you should be here'? At the very least, I'm pretty sure that it would be counted as a non-crime hate incident. And since that's the case, any given immigrant is never going to have their bubble of 'I pay my taxes, so it's fine' disrupted.

I'm not actually advocating for going around yelling 'Go home' in people's faces, but I think it's important to realise that here as in many areas status quo bias rules. Once you're in the country, it's very hard for people to tell you to leave it. Whereas if you're out of the country and you want to come in, shrugging and saying 'sorry, no can do' is much easier. Thus my constant insistence that immigration is like nuclear fission in a power plant: it has to be strictly controlled at all times because you can't undo a chain reaction later.

I don't think it's fair to describe any presidential victory margin in the past 25 years as overwhelming. In general, we are usually talking 48% to 49% of the popluar vote.

If the next US president runs on a platform of repudiating and deplatforming Trump and his followers and wins with something similar to Trump's numbers, will you also ask pro-Trump people who want to continue spreading their message whether they aren't uncomfortable staying in a country where the people do not want them, and tell them that they are being selfish to game the system?

The mods had a little discussion about this. Your post isn't against the rules on content - "I don't want more Indians here" is an allowable opinion - but it is veering close to consensus building. (You cannot speak for how most people on the Motte feel, let alone presume to speak for the entire country.) And we have noticed that your two posts so far seem to be harping on your dislike of Indians. I'm pretty certain this is an alt you are using to grind this particular axe.

Contribute something other than how much you don't like Indians if you want to keep posting with this account.

  • -10

Contribute something other than how much you don't like Indians

That is not how this post came across to me, and it saddens me that this appears to be the Official mod interpretation of that post.

Alas, we often cause sadness.

Fair enough.

Read 'sadness' as shorthand for 'a small but decidedly nonzero tick of update towards having to weight views on this site based on presumed self-censorship, inexpressibility of some views, and resulting skewed representation, when this is one of shockingly few sites left on the public internet that appeared to have not fully gone down that path.'

We've been hearing it since reddit days. For how constantly we're being told we're making some views inexpressible, it's amazing how often those views continue to be expressed.

Attempting to ban a view preferentially results in banning actual discussion of that view.

If a view is common you'll still get one-offs of people who either do not realize the view is banned, or don't care, and who drop an unbacked opinion.

This has the obvious feedback effect.

Attempting to ban a view

This hasn't happened.

More comments

To be fair, y'all did ban a certain view for like a month (though I think this was before your time as a mod).

Yes, that was long before I was a mod. Even then, it was a temporary ban because the HBD threads had become exhausting. I personally think it was a mistake, but if one single topic is taking all the air out of the room it's tempting to be fed up with it.

For the record, despite being a mod myself, I had no part in this discussion. I was too busy replying to people to even notice while that was underway, in case anyone thinks that negativity expressed towards moderators is treated differently.

I've been chided by you yet wholeheartedly defend your regime as mod, FTR. Well done. Amadan too, begrudgingly. And more than I can name.

Even @cjet79 is pretty cool.

Thank you. It can occasionally be thankless work, I don't enjoy having to rap people on the knuckles, so if someone who underwent that still considers me a decent mod, I'm glad.

We try our best!

Have you considered staying inside your home country?

Certainly. I have, on further consideration, decided not to.

Americans overwhelmingly voted to lower immigration - Trump’s policies aren’t a "suggestion" or some miscalculation, they’re the people’s choice. It's quite selfish to continue to game the system in the face of this.

Americans have voted against illegal immigration. Against people hopping the border. You could also say that they're against the expansion of asylum seeking, and that would be true.

Skilled immigration is nowhere near as unpopular, I'd have to look up polls, but I recall it being seen as a positive across the aisle.

Trump is keeping his promises this term, but in a ham-fisted way. You can address illegal immigration while not worsening the already difficult process of legal immigration.

It's quite selfish to continue to game the system in the face of this.

Now, my dear friend. Do I look like an illegal migrant or an asylum seeker?

How exactly have I "gamed" the system? By trying my absolute best to sort out the impediments that would prevent me from legally moving to the States as a doctor? By considering an entirely legal class of visa, the EB5?

I have to ask - do you not feel uncomfortable coming to a country where the people do not want you there? I know I could not make such a move.

I'd be uncomfortable if this was true. It's not.

Here's a handy link to a previous post about my desire to move to the States, where I discussed my desperate efforts to make a now ex-girlfriend understand how amazing the States is as a country, and how its flaws are overplayed.

It's on this very forum. It has 70 upvotes at the time of writing, probably putting it in the top 0.1% of posts ever by popularity.

You are welcome to count the number of people who sympathized with my desire, and clearly said they wanted me to achieve my goal. There are people there inviting me to their homes, offering to show me around, take me out shooting.

They dwarf the mere two or three people who said they didn't want me around. Feel free to look yourself.

I am a law-abiding, responsible highly-trained professional in one of the most respected professions around. I'm articulate, fluent in English at a native level, an anglophile and a big fan of the United States. I hold nuanced political views and am friends with people on both sides of the political spectrum. I nurse no ethnic grudges, I'm not seeking to displace or replace anyone. I'm as Westernized as it gets, and my personal views and beliefs, if they were material, are those you could find in any number of Americans. I'd probably be working in under-served communities that your local doctors avoid if they can help it.

I invite you to present to me an example of someone you think would be a better candidate for an immigrant.

Even in the UK, almost everyone I've met has liked me, and been glad to have my presence. That includes old people at bars who complain about Pakis while telling me they vote SNP, that gentleman ended up saying I was one of the good ones and tried to set me up with a bartender.

I rest my case.

Americans have voted against illegal immigration. Against people hopping the border. You could also say that they're against the expansion of asylum seeking, and that would be true.

Skilled immigration is nowhere near as unpopular, I'd have to look up polls, but I recall it being seen as a positive across the aisle.

Opinion polls on immigration are largely cognitive dissonant bullshit, and nobody means the same things with any of the words they use. People notice where they live getting increasingly alien and dysfunctional, and the nice way to complain about that is to complain about illegal immigration. That goalpost has gradually shifted to fraudulent asylum claims, or fraudulent temporary worker visa, etc. Are they really fraudulent? I don't know. Do people feel like the outcomes of these policies aren't what they were promised, and are using the word "fraudulent" to express how they feel personally lied to about the impacts of all forms of immigration? That'd be my guess.

And especially with H1B, which is the current code word for "skilled immigration", it's the worst shit show anyone has ever seen. People being forced to train their own replacement, people blatantly abusing the system to replace american workers with lower cost wage slaves. I can't go into details, but I'm like 80% certain at least the division of a government agency I have to work with has become a fraudulent H1B colony. All my points of contact have become Indian over the last 5 years, their basic competence has plummeted into hell, and this year they actually didn't do anything. Redelivered last years deliverables, with great difficulty, and basically went "We're the government, eat shit, we don't have to do anything, we can't be fired." This is a ubiquitous experience, and to whatever degree "skilled immigration" polls positively, it is not inclusive of whatever the fuck that is which our overlords appear to consider "skilled immigration".

I have to ask - do you not feel uncomfortable coming to a country where the people do not want you there? I know I could not make such a move.

I'd be uncomfortable if this was true. It's not.

The Motte is not America. You may be better served taking the temperature on twitter, if for no other reason than the contrast.

You can't take the temperature on a site that shows you an algorithmically-curated selection of what is being posted. It just tells you what Musk wants you to see, either for (his) business or (his) pleasure.

Large portions of Trump votes are likely based on illegal immigration or concerns about inflation, his election isn’t itself evidence that any majority of the US is deeply against having an Indian doctor move here.

And not just any Indian doctor. I think it's entirely fair to say that my values, attitudes and beliefs are far closer to American than Indian.

Hell, even the way I talk, I've been asked dozens of times by Brits if I'm an American based on my accent.

But yes, I sincerely doubt that the average American would be against a foreign doctor who had passed all the competency requirements, and had even gone through training in a Western country.

Depends on how well informed the American is.

Most Americans assume that doctors trained in Britain(or, say- France, Australia, etc) have fairly minimal hoops to jump through to become American doctors. These people would hear the cliff notes version of your story and think that your difficulties in becoming licensed to practice medicine in the USA are due to competency differences, maybe in some specific area, and not inscrutable bureaucratic bullshit. Anti-Indian prejudice isn’t terribly uncommon- blue collar Americans by and large don’t like Indians and I’ve heard tech workers usually don’t either- but it probably makes an exception for doctors, if not other high skilled professions. But also there are far more people than you might think who are ok with throwing the baby out with the bathwater to reduce immigration- especially from India and ‘not Mexico but the countries south of there’.

As a pretty average American compared to most of this forum, I'd be okay with you or anyone else living here only if you did most of the following: got married (ideally to an American), had kids, learned to hunt or fish, started going to church or at least showed up and participated in public events hosted by churches, took an interest in local politics, and participated in traditional civil religion ceremonies (e.g. 4th of July cookout), got and kept a stable job, and generally deferred to the local culture, social conventions, and moral code (e.g. no loud ethnic music or fireworks at weird times, no opening abortion or gender transition clinics, no complaining about halal/no vegetarian food).

If you don't want to do those things, I honestly don't really want you in my country at all, no offense personally. If you must come, I hope you stay in the rootless cosmopolitan containment zones (blue cities).

I think this is how many (most?) non urbanite Americans actually feel but as @WhiningCoil points out, even the reddest red state hobbits have been successfully trained by state education to crimestop when thinking these thoughts, so they make mouth noises about "illegal immigration."

Also, just curious, but since you are transhumanist (IIRC) atheist, isn't the social and political climate of the UK much more amenable to your beliefs and political goals? America has a large population of recalcitrant believers in the imago dei, including not a few members of the elite, who completely oppose transhumanism.

Also, speak English [or rather, the country's language whatever it may be] in public spaces. Yes, even when speaking to other people who share a different common tongue.

This may be so self-evident to some as to be not worth mentioning.

Cliques of people speaking a language you don't is demoralizing at best.

Good point.

Assuming you're American, would you speak Spanish to a fellow American expat in Mexico City? Or Thai to one in Bangkok? I read once that certain Aboriginal Australians would beat to death anyone who uttered so much as a single word of another tribe's tongue on their soil and expected everyone to switch languages even mid-sentence as they were crossing tribal boundaries, but in practice this is an impossible standard to uphold unless you are a hyperpolyglot or simply never visit non-Anglophone countries.

would you speak Spanish to a fellow American expat in Mexico City? Or Thai to one in Bangkok?

If I was emigrating to there, and it was a public space? Absolutely. Admittedly, that is one of my pushes away from emigrating to a country with a different language, as I am terrible enough at my native tongue.

Be aware that immigration != tourism.

Fair enough, I respect that. I just don't know how one would consistently distinguish between tourists and immigrants just from hearing them speak in public. The children and grandchildren of immigrants also lose their ancestral languages so quickly that it doesn't seem like that big of a problem in the long run.

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As a pretty average American compared to most of this forum, I'd be okay with you or anyone else living here only if you did most of the following: got married (ideally to an American), had kids, learned to hunt or fish, started going to church or at least showed up and participated in public events hosted by churches, took an interest in local politics, and participated in traditional civil religion ceremonies (e.g. 4th of July cookout), got and kept a stable job, and generally deferred to the local culture, social conventions, and moral code (e.g. no loud ethnic music or fireworks at weird times, no opening abortion or gender transition clinics, no complaining about halal/no vegetarian food).

I was just about to say that I tick all of the boxes, except for ever being willing to be a devout member of a church, when I saw that you left open the option of simply participating in civic life.

I can genuinely say, with little doubt, that these are all things or practices I would be happy to do, or at least try, in the case of hunting (I fucking love guns, I want to turn a boar into pink mist with .50 bmg, I also have ADHD so I'd probably have to take meds in order to handle all the waiting around).

Abortion clinics? I'm for abortion being legal, and probably more pro-choice than most. I'm not in the business of opening them, I discarded the family trade of OBGYN.

As a psychiatrist, I also treat gender transitioning as something to be greatly skeptical of. I wouldn't be going around encouraging it, even if I don't really have an issue with trans people and try to be polite in their company.

So I can easily imagine myself settling into a small town, showing up to grill beef steaks with no issues, drinking beer and shooting the shit (and beer cans) with my neighbors and their kids while my own kids, the product of legal and ceremonial marriage, speak to them in English.

Also, just curious, but since you are transhumanist (IIRC) atheist, isn't the social and political climate of the UK much more amenable to your beliefs and political goals? America has a large population of recalcitrant believers in the imago dei, including not a few members of the elite, who completely oppose transhumanism.

The UK will jail you for burning a Koran, and will let the person who assaulted you while brandishing a knife go with bail. It's a state that does secularism entirely wrong, unlike the French, who have the right idea with lacité. America handles freedom of speech and religion far better.

I do not expect to have issues with religious people in the States. I usually keep my religious opinions to myself, except when I'm in an argumentative mood in an online forum with internet strangers. If they don't bother me, I won't bother them beyond not practicing their tenets.

Besides, the bulk of the atheist transhumanists live in the Bay Area. That's my first choice, though I like most of America and would be happy to live there (barring Alaska).

I fucking love guns, I want to turn a boar into pink mist with .50 bmg

I know you're being hyperbolic, but if you want to pass for being fully assimilated into American gun culture you have to be more nuanced than this. Full auto and .50 BMG are the types of things you do as a rental on a weekend to Nevada. You use them to obliterate a junk car or washing machine. Even with physician money it's just to impractical to do all the time. You'll almost never see this kind of thing at a normal range in the US.

More Platonicly American methods of hunting hogs:

  • Still hunting with a lever action rifle chambered in something like a .44 Remington Magnum
  • Night hunting with night vision optics on an AR platform, .223 Remington
  • Hunting from a helicopter with "Fortunate Son" playing in the background, probably .223 Remington again

I don't consider hog hunting to be the most American form of hunting though. For me the form of hunting that is most characteristic of the American ethos is elk hunting. Probably with something like a .300 Winchester Magnum or one of the other big 30's.

It was hyperbole. I would like to own at least 2 different rifles, probably an AR-15 chambered in 5.56, and a DMR in something like .338 or .408. If you can't tell, I like guns that go boom. I could tell you more about my aesthetics, I'd kit out the AR with Daniel Defense furniture barring a magpul MOE buttstock, Geissele match triggers, an LPVO with a mounted red dot. The DMR would (ideally) be a Mk-18 Mjolnir, because I love that gun, but I'd settle for a off the shelf AR-10 in 7.62x51 if I had to.

The 5.56 for plinking or at the range, the DMR for the hell of it. If I wanted to go hunting boar from a chopper with a Barrett, that would be a special treat if anything.

I suppose given that you are in the UK right now, I'll accept NATO nomenclature for caliber. There is something decidedly transatlantic about using millimeter based measurements to specify caliber over US customary units though.

I'll have to insist on you describing all charge sizes in the mass unit of grains before naturalizing to the US. Of course actually referring to the volume of a some particular brand of dipper and powder you used and not the actual mass.

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coming to a country where the people do not want you there?

Who are the people? Realistically, the vast majority of skilled migrants to the US are going to be living in areas where most of their neighbours are pro-immigration.

And how is he gaming the system, anyway?

I also disagree with your characterization of “the people’s choice.” Immigration was not the only issue. Immigration from India, specifically, was barely mentioned. What else do Americans “overwhelmingly” not want?

In an ideal world, I'd have already given the USMLE and would have whatever visa was offered to international medical graduates doing a residency in the States.

This is still a goal of mine, assuming the blocking factor is finished by the time I finish my current British training in psychiatry. The issue is that my med school doesn't have a sponsor note from an American organization called the ECFMG. It is entitled to one, it meets the recently updated requirements in full, but the last time I had them reach out to the ECFMG, all we heard were crickets. Even then, it's a process that can take years, both due to the ECFMG being lazy, and the Indian National Medical Council being even lazier.

If I saw that coveted tick box, I'd likely drop everything that wasn't strictly necessary for me to remain in my job, and begin grinding for the USMLE. I entered psych training in the UK both because I want to be a shrink, and so I can at least have a backup if the blocker never resolves.

I also had another fallback, namely the EB5 visa described above. It was about $1 million invested in the States, as well as starting a business that employed ten Americans. Now it's $5 million, the rest being unchanged (I could be wrong about minor details).

This wouldn't let work as a doctor, not without also giving the USMLE, and it would represent liquidating parental assets. If I really needed it, they'd probably oblige, and UK doctor salaries are shite so it would take me decades to save up enough by myself. But at least it was an option. $5 million? Not happening before my kids would be as old as I am.

You can see @TheDag's post below about the Golden Tickets that replace the EB5. As I've mentioned, it's five times the previous price, which only let in about ten thousand people taking previously. At 5 million, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers dropped down to a thousand or less.

Do keep in mind that even if you ass blast the shit out of Step you won't be 100% sure to get a PGY-1 position (especially with psychiatry which has gotten a lot more competitive).

I'm very confused. I have it on good authority that:

There is actually a surplus of residency spots. Yes you heard me.

I'm becoming more and more of the opinion that approximately every use of the words 'shortage' or 'surplus', by anyone who is not an economist, is mostly self-serving BS to argue for some form of gov't protection/handout for their industry.

The existences of spots does not equal the existence of good spots.

Sounds more like "not so much a surplus", then. ...what would you say a "surplus" is?

As you've previously mentioned, there is at least the possibility of having residency requirements waived if you can show experience and equivalency.

The waivers for IMGs in under-served areas don't specify a specialty, but I presume that at least some of the hospitals or practices looking for doctors would be in need of psychiatrists.

I'd be happy to take my chances, and I know I'll have to work for it. If I can't make the cut, then there's nobody to blame but myself. I'd have chased my dreams and failed, instead of nursing bitterness over the fact that factors beyond my power prevented me from trying.

I don't know that much about this because its obviously not relevant to my life but my understanding is that they mostly exist badly underserved areas (like Kentucky) and are vulnerable to legislators abruptly changing them and then you are trapped with no ability to work (or move out of state).

Viable for some but have caution.

Also Step is a lot of work, although it does cater toward foreign medical education in some ways (at least the earlier Steps, later not as much).

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