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You said in place of. What's your evidence for that? I just distinguished between addition and replacement.
I don't have a Wall Street Journal subscription, so I can't read the article itself, but I would be very shocked if the WSJ was pushing a line about demographic replacement - especially since the portions you've quoted sound sympathetic to the Koreans.
Is the native population declining? Your quotes didn't say that, and as noted I can't read the article.
I think degree matters as well. If a native population goes down by 1% while at the same time some migrants move in, I wouldn't consider that replacement. I think the word 'replacement' suggests a wholesale removal. Is anything like that going on?
The did ask to replace the native red population of Georgia, though.
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Sure, that's why I was probing you a bit about what the lines are, in order to precisify what your concerns actually are. I didn't want to leap to conclusions and assume the worst.
That said, I'm not particularly keen on you outsourcing your opinions to someone else. Dean is a very articulate poster here, but one thing Dean cannot do is tell me what NYTReader thinks.
Why do you say 'native white' specifically? I said myself that I think a community has the right to determine its own conditions of entry, but in the case of Georgia, that existing community is not exclusively white. Wikipedia tells me that about a third of Georgians are black, which sounds about right for a former Confederate state. Judging from this it sounds like it's been like that for a long time, and I'd bet that most black Georgians are descendants of people who've lived in the state for centuries. So I find it a bit odd that you specify 'the native white population', since the native population of Georgia in this context seems like it would include an awful lot of blacks as well. Do they not count, for you? If not, why not?
On a side note, I also notice that, per Wikipedia's chart on live births by race of mother, the black birthrate in Georgia is going down faster than the white birthrate, though the overall number of black residents is increasing slightly faster, presumably due to immigration. Notably comparing 2010 to 2022 on USAFacts, the populations of every racial group in Georgia have increased, including whites. It seems hard to say that Georgian whites are being 'replaced' if they are increasing in number.
Anyway, what would happen if you submitted a referendum to all native Georgians on immigration policy? You might have to define 'native Georgian', but I see no way of defining 'native Georgian' that would restrict it only to whites, since there is clearly a very large non-white population whose ancestors have been resident in the state for centuries. But let's say we poll everybody who is resident in Georgia and who had at least one ancestor resident in Georgia in 1950. What would they vote for?
The answer is that I don't know. I don't think you know either. Georgia is a red state, but not that red - Stacey Abrams won 45% of the vote in 2022, and 48% in 2018. Its house of reps is 100 Republicans to 80 Democrats. There's clearly a left in Georgia and we might expect them to be more sympathetic to immigration - and of course, many on the right, including moderate Republicans, are sympathetic to a level of immigration as well. I'm not convinced that Georgians would overwhelmingly vote to kick Koreans out. There's clearly an appetite in Georgia for cracking down on illegal immigration, and Brian Kemp has signed bills to that effect, but I can't find much recent about legal immigration. This 2025 poll suggests that most Georgians want illegal immigrants to have some path to residency - if true I can't imagine them being more hostile to legal immigrants.
What position do you think Georgians would all vote for? Ending all immigration? Banning all Asian immigration? Nonwhite immigration? What is it that you think Georgians want?
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Many people care about their local community and don't want it to change. Whatever the details are regarding the fertility rate of the established white population in the area versus the fertility of the new group is really secondary. The large infusion of new people from a different culture will change things. That is something that many people don't want, and understandably so. They are invested in the way things are, maybe for many generations.
even if they aren't things will change. But white americans don't have very high fertility rates so we can assume that the established white community probably doesn't have such overwhelming fertility rates such that they make the influx of new people irrelevant.
Fine. How about dilution? The existing population, and their community, and their culture will be diluted, which is bad enough. Concentration is just as important a variable in community strength as raw numbers are. At the very least, as the original local population is diluted their collective political power is equivalently diluted. So there is an objective reduction in the power they have over their home.
And dilution becomes more threatening due to the fact that white communities in America are generally pretty weak in terms of cultural vitality. Having a large influx of foreigners who might have more vitality and a stronger sense of community means that the new comers can punch above their weight comparatively. As dilution occurs the threat of actual replacement becomes greater, and the ability to resist it is diminished.
You can prefer dilution and cultural change in exchange for increased economic investment, but many don't. It seems like you're being intentionally avoidant about the concern.
If the concern is cultural change, I think that's valid, and I'm open to a discussion about that.
That is, though, I think a different concern to 'demographic replacement'? I take demographic replacement to suggest an agenda of, well, replacement - that is, not just a community changing through migration and integration of people of new cultural backgrounds, but rather the elimination of the existing population, and new people taking its place.
Well I would say yes, that is one of the concerns. But I didn't meant to imply that only cultural change matters. Demographic change, or more directly, ethnic change, is also part of the concern. Ethnicity is a powerful layer that has major effects on community and culture. Ethnic groups have in group preference and people of a shared ethnicity will almost always seek each other out to cooperate when in a multi ethnic setting.
ok then lets proceed with that
Yeah, I recognize that. I think you are being a little too literal with your interpretation of that term but I heard you concern. Thats why I offered an alternative, which is dilution. Do you accept that term? If so, can you then respond to all the stuff I said about why dilution could be reasonably considered bad or threatening to many?
I also argued that dilution has the effect of weakening the political power (and other kinds of power) of the established group, thereby making that group more vulnerable to actual replacement in the future. So while you don't accept that whats happening represents active replacement, would you agree that it is a step in that direction? When people are saying demographic replacement they don't usually mean that it is radical and immediate ethnic cleansing. But lets switch to dilution, something else that is threatening, do you agree thats happening? Do you see why that would threatening?
I didn't really say anything about an agenda of replacement, or agenda at all. I think that sometimes is a real thing. I sort of doubt it in this case. But thats not the core concern. The influx of foreigners will dilute the established group and that has negative effects, therefore it is a topic of concern, and we should seek policies that will prevent it - was what was being discussed I think.
I mean, my take on the broader question is that it's undoubtedly true that migration changes the character of a community - it changes its make-up in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, genetics, custom, and much more.
I also think that it is entirely reasonable for a community to have an internal discussion about how they want to change in the future, if at all, and to take organised action to ensure that they only change in ways they want, rather than ways they don't want.
That means that, for instance, if a community values being ethnically, linguistically, religiously, etc., homogenous, it can pursue policies to that effect.
The relevant question in most Western contexts is whether any given we does value that, and perhaps more importantly, whether we should value that. When we as a community make migration policy, what are our priorities? What goals are we serving?
In practice I think it's usually economic growth, and that tends to overwhelm everything else. But often people do claim different goals or motivations - the right often talks about cultural compatibility, or the left talks about compassion and hospitality. At any rate, this is a good internal debate to have.
I pressed NYTReader a bit because what that situation looked like was a community that was changing in terms of overall make-up due to an influx of Korean immigrants, and it wasn't clear that the natives were opposed to that immigration, or that the immigration was contrary to the wishes of the Georgia legislature. (Granting, hopefully, that the legislature is the preeminent forum in which the internal discussions or debates that I mentioned happen.) Hence my wanting to ask - what should be the priorities here? Why? What values or principles motivate your reasoning on this subject?
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Seems to be going on in London, and many small towns in the US with which I am personally familiar.
No idea if it's going on in this specific case, but NYTReader is pointing to the problem in a broader context and suggesting that 'bringing back' business to America is actually a bad thing if it means staffing that business with foreign labor.
Given this, your insistence on picking at micro-scale technicalities occurs to me as pedantic and obnoxious.
OliveTapenade is correct to question the validity of "demographic replacement" of white Americans by Koreans. I mean: trying to catastrophize Costco selling kimchi or a few Korean restraunts opening.
I'm sure the Hyundai plant has Koreans in it. Those (hundreds?) of immigrants aren't "replacing" us.
No, those hundreds aren't.
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