This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.
As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports
The US is not an economic zone.
While the implementation is cruel (giving people out of the country essentially 24 hours to return), this had to happen.
The 2008 housing collapse could arguably be blamed on the appraisers. They were going along with the scam and giving 20% annual appreciation to houses, while the rating agencies were fudging the quality of the debt being sold. People were supposed to be watching each other, but they weren't and everybody was getting rich.
In US tech jobs, the blame lies on the HR departments. The obvious fake resumes the obvious nepotism and discrimination between Indian hires, etc.
Everybody who works in this industry has seen how this scam functions. You get one Indian in a position of power in your company, and shortly thereafter, the entire company is Indian, and the quality of work has dropped to 0. HR doesn't understand because the resumes claimed that these were all "high quality" employees with tons of certifications (fake) degrees (fake) and experience (fake).
Yes this benefited many Indians, benefitted India, and may have benefitted some American companies, but it was all at the detriment of middle class Americans.
Again, we are not an economic zone. The H1B system was blatantly abused, specifically by Indians, and now it's ending. Good.
(Although my guess is that this get's reversed over the weekend, I'm still going to enjoy the few more hours where it's real)
What does this mean? Like, policy-wise, this idea would seem to suggest support for social services and doing our best to ensure a minimum standard of living for all Americans. In practice, it seems like the people who say "the US is not an economic zone" are the people most prone to treating the US like an economic zone - indifferent to the welfare of their fellow citizens and primarily interested in making the country a captive market for the purposes of rent-seeking.
Very simply, "A country is not an economic zone" rebuts the idea that policy should be made purely for economic gain above other goods. Specifically, this is used in Far/Alt right circles against Neo-Cons and Liberals as a rebuttal against the idea of importing workers and offshoring work. The point of the argument is that a country is not an economic zone, but a culture, a people, and a land. An "American" is not someone who lives and works in America, or even merely an American citizen, but someone who shares American culture. In the American example, "American people" doesn't really mean anything because Americans are such a mix racially that there's no real such thing as "racial Americans." The point about culture is very real, though. For the most stark example on race, look no further than Japan. A "foreigner" with a Japanese passport who is even born in Japan is not and will never been considered "Japanese."
Consider the example of Japan for a minute. Suppose that in the blink of an eye, all Japanese people on Japan ceased to exist. Then, in another blink of an eye, Every single Japanese person that used to exist was instead replaced by Indians. How long do you suppose it will take before Tokyo resembles Mumbai or New Delhi? At that point, would "Japan" still exist? If you agree with "A country is not an economic zone," you would say that if that happened, Japan would essentially become India, and "Japan" would no longer exist outside of the name and as a number on a spreadsheet. Therefore, the more a country imports foreign workers in search of cheap labor and economic gain, the more that country destroys its own culture. Eventually, this reaches a critical mass where the country would have replaced its original population. This is essentially the death of the original country. Consider again the Japan example. Suppose that the Japanese people, instead of disappearing instantly, slowly went away over the next 20 years. Over the same 20 years, Indians come to settle Japan. I'll ask the same questions again. How long do you suppose it will take before Tokyo resembles Mumbai or New Delhi? At that point, would "Japan" still exist?
I'm partial to this argument as it's something that is not really in dispute outside of the West. I'm Chinese, and if you ask a Chinese person what "China" is, you'll get a very similar answer: Chinese culture, Chinese people, and China as a landmass. It's mainly the West (America, Canada, and the Eurozone) that's done away with this idea, much to their detriment in my opinion. Ask Canadians about how well importing Indian workers has been for them. Ask the British about how well the Muslim population gels with the native population.
Advocates for immigration do not contemplate immigration policy purely in economic terms. At least in the US, and to my knowledge in Canada, Australia, and Britain as well, support for immigration is often pitched as an expression of values or a crucial part of national greatness. More than a few progressive immigration advocates are averse to making economic arguments for immigration, preferring to couch it as a humanitarian obligation.
But, to be more direct: there is a massive unfilled gap between "A country is not an economic zone" and ideological ethnonationalism. The US is more than an economic zone now. It was more than an economic zone in the mid 19th century when it had functionally open borders. There is no actual substance behind saying "a country is not an economic zone". The people who say it are not cultural traditionalists, nor are they concerned for solidarity with their fellow citizens (and are in fact often openly disdainful of their well-being).
I don't find this hypothetical to be interesting or relevant because it has no relationship to the actual reality of immigration policy anywhere. Whereas, "what if we had mass immigration" isn't even a hypothetical. It's American history. About ten million Germans and Irish immigrated during the 19th century. There was a great deal of anxiety about this: they were largely poor, many were (shudder) Catholic, they were uneducated, they were acculturated to despotism and would make poor citizens of a Republic, etc... Spoiler alert: it was actually fine, and nowadays anti-Irish/German bigotry is a punchline to suggest someone is a next-level racist. Similar things were said about the Italians, the Poles, the Japanese etc... and now they're all just Americans. By far the majority of conflict and integration problems that have arisen from large-scale immigration in the US have not been from immigrants but from nativist backlash against immigration.
Now, if you were deeply attached to maintaining the purity of superficial elements of Protestant Anglo-Scots culture, this was probably extremely distressing, but the reality of how humans act was bound to disappoint anyway: culture is dynamic everywhere and American culture had already substantially diverged from its British roots by the time of independence. Obsession with ethno-cultural purity thus strikes me as irrational.
Broke-ass losersI don't really know that that is indicative of much other than liberalism mostly being a western phenomenon. Outside of the West, ethnonationalism/ethnocentrism seems to have very mixed results. It certainly does not seem to promise harmony, stability, or prosperity. Conversely, here in the West it is very normal for immigrants to be scapegoated for issues they have little to do with (e.g. housing, economic stagnation) or simply serve as a focal point of resentment (e.g. Red staters mad that immigrants to Blue states take advantage of social services they don't have in their own states).Putting aside the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment [1] [2], I don’t think that we can conclude that the immigration of these groups (which have indeed assimilated) has not had a huge impact on the American republic. One good piece of evidence that I’ve seen for this is a blogpost that analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants. Something along the lines of “the rightmost Italian-American Republicans have views on fiscal policy to the left of the median American Democrat.” Assuming that these conclusions are true [3], if immigration really does significantly impact the long-term political fabric of America, then it’s hard to just brush off the effects of immigration as changes to mere “superficial elements” of the culture, as you put it.
Beyond those specifics, I think you’re being too dismissive of the desire to not see drastic changes in the political and cultural makeup of one’s country. I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure, would you be happy if America instantly imported 10 million of the most hardcore traditionalist Afghanis? A way more extreme way of putting it: would you be happy if the number of red-tribe MAGA lunatics [insert further epithets here] suddenly tripled?
I would be surprised if you answered “yeah I’d be cool with that.” Now, if your argument is rather something like “those numbers are too large to be reasonable; realistically, we would be better able to assimilate the number of immigrants that are actually on the table in the real world”, then that makes more sense, but at this point, we’re just “haggling over the price”, as the old joke goes.
[1] For example, check out the political cartoon at the top of the Wikipedia page for “Hyphenated American”, calling American immigrants who retained their ancestral identities “freaks” and implying that they shouldn’t vote. In modern times, this sentiment would be relegated to the loony wingnut cartoons your grandma would send you, but at the time, that cartoon was published in Puck, a respected New York political cartoon magazine (ironically founded by an immigrant).
[2] Notably, Germans were assimilated in a mass ethnolysis in the 1910s and 1940s, for obvious reasons.
[3] And I sadly can’t seem to find this blogpost despite throwing all the search terms I can think of at Google. If anyone reading this can remind me of it, even if to debunk it (or especially if!), then I’d be really grateful.
I don't think that's actually true. The central group of contemporary concern, Hispanics/Latinos, are assimilating extremely quickly. The major difference I perceive between 1900 and 2025 is the acceptability of explicitly racism - everybody is still more than a little bit racist, but almost everyone agrees, on paper, that racism is bad and feels the need to launder racist claims through other paradigms.
Assuming this is substantively correct, it doesn't meant much on its own. Different immigrant groups were not uniformly distributed around the country. Germans were heavily concentrated in the Midwest, Italians on the East coast, etc... These places have their own regional politics that will confound efforts to trace an ideological lineage through immigrant populations.
I think this hypothetical is nonsense. It's not far off asking, "in the absence of air, would you be happy taking a plane from NYC to London?"
The pressure to assimilate doesn't come from having people lecture you about the importance of assimilating. It comes from being immersed in the host society, from unavoidably picking up the norms and values of that society, from the countless petty conveniences of conforming to that society's expectations, from having your children grow up in that society. To a large degree it comes from being allowed to assimilate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link