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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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Top 5 are Memphis TN, Oakland CA, St Louis MO, Little Rock AR, Tacoma WA. Oakland is the only one of those I particularly associate with immigrants. Also I don't really like the methodology of weighting larceny equal to murder. Looking at murder rate alone which is harder to fudge the top 5 are Birmingham AL, St Louis MO, Memphis TN, Baltimore MD, Detroit MI. Larceny theft alone does put Oakland and Portland near the top, which tracks.

Regardless, the "immigrants specifically make cities bad to live in" hypothesis doesn't seem particularly reflective of reality.

I have no objections to looking at only the murder rate - but that doesn't actually change anything, just check out the demographics.

Looking at foreign-born fraction, I see

For reference 13.8% of all US residents are foreign-born by the same metric. If you're going to Notice things about the populations of those cities, the things you notice are not going to be immigration-related.

Unless you're saying the hispanic people have a sense of racial solidarity with other minorities, to which I have to ask whether you've ever talked to a mexican person because they are usually second only to indians in expressed racism.

I'll just quote myself here:

It's called ethnic spoils for a reason. It doesn't matter much whether the different ethnicities have immigrated recently or have been there for generations.

Foreign-born is generally one of the worst categories you can possibly look at, because it mixes vastly different groups together as if they are mostly interchangeable. Ethnic spoils systems also don't depend on trust/solidarity, it's quite the opposite; Because trust is so low, nobody believes any other group to actually do merit-based allocations, and without trust, allocating by quota is usually the only kind-of-fair system that everyone can agree on.

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