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I've slowly come over to the view that it's a good thing Trump was restricting immigration of the best and brightest so they instead went elsewhere. As they say: Democracy is the belief that voters know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. We've seen the humiliating climbdowns against China and if this policy of being unwelcoming to high end immigrants continue I suspect we'll see plenty of self-flagellation from the US 10 years down the line when it's trying to rebuild up its attractiveness for such people.
Taking what you've said at face value, possibly. If the US actually pursues going closed-borders-for-everyone, maybe it will be overtaken by China, given the slight national IQ advantage (I hedge my bets with the qualifiers because Europeans were the ones to conquer the world a few centuries ago, despite being lower IQ, so shrug)
Of course, you elide the obvious, though politically incorrect, question: What race are the immigrants? As I concede, it may be true that the US will need the best and brightest of foreign Aryans, East Asians and Jews (i.e. high-IQ races) to stay on top - but what of the best and the brightest of the Third World?
I think it is true that, for a sufficiently selective (and then properly enforced) immigration policy, we can have eugenic immigration from the Third World. But, due to HBD, the amount of additional value from Venkateshes and Bhargavas is going to be much less significant (because there are just not as many of them, and just less total human capital altogether to siphon)
On the other hand, once we hop over this fence, there is the constant danger of somehow (fraud, relaxing the bar for "skilled", etc) then allowing a less filtered, and hence dysgenic, influx. This leads to pretty serious harm - either these people assimilate (and hence lower the quality of the nation's gene pool) or you get a permanent racial underclass. In practice, this might lead to, say, your capital city becoming minority White, and the replacements actually being worse on average.
If we are looking at this purely from the perspective of national self-interest, I think this is overall a net negative. There is obviously a moral argument about helping unfortunate people who could thrive in a 1st world civilisation but were born into a low-IQ race, so it is worth the necessary overhead to carefully filter these people out and let them in (and of course, the more extreme one, which is to just let everyone in so everyone in for equality-of-opportunity reasons, and just accept the nation becoming Third World)
With the substance of my reply out of the way: why do you do this? As in, I know you are a high-IQ Third World immigrant, so I'm guessing you are not super thrilled about the recent vibe shift on immigrants: you personally haven't ever done anything bad, how unfair is it that some people implicitly blame you for (or at least associate you with) stuff like Rotherham, etc.
But you've had many conversations in the past with White identarians on this forum, so I'm pretty sure you are aware of this line of thinking, and then decide to constantly post as if you are some bluepilled liberal normie. I think it's bad form to psychologise your interlocutor, so I won't speculate why any further.
I will just ask - is there anything in what I've said that you actually factually disagree with? And I stress the word factually (since your claim that the US would fall behind and later on regret its current immigration policy is a statement about descriptive reality)
Do you not believe in HBD applied to racial groups? Do you dispute the Lynn IQ numbers as being roughly accurate? Do you dispute that IQ is a decent measure of a person's ability to function well in a society? Do you think that it doesn't make logical sense to make probabalistic judgements about groups of people on the basis of race given HBD? Do you think that the issues with Third World immigration that have occured in the past (e.g. Indians in Canada) are actually very easy to prevent if we just do X? etc
You know brahmins are a high IQ group, right?
Thank you for bringing them up! This seems to be a fairly esoteric HBD claim that is stated very matter-of-factly (iirc you said in the past that you think the Tamil Brahmins have IQ on par with the Ashkenazi) by various race realists from different backgrounds.
I don't think it's an obviously crazy assertion: there are Brahmin STEM nobels, fields medalists, and the Indian per capita income in the US is extremely high: 72k vs 36k for Whites (but as I long suspected, the household income chart showing them blowing everyone else out the water is misleading - they just live in bigger households - they come in 2nd to Taiwanese, also Jews aren't listed, I'm guessing they come 0th)
And the national IQ of India is
75IQ(according to the Lynn numbers), roughly on par with Sub Saharan Africa, and they have no STEM nobels, and I don't think there are any SSA diasporas in first world countries that exceed the White household income significantly.So I believe it is justified to complicate our model from just a single 75IQ-centered bell curve to a mixture, at least a mixture for Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin. To explain a real and significant difference from a mean 75 population.
Now the question of whether the higher IQ of the Brahmins is actually "high" (75 is a very low bar to be high from!)
The obvious thing is to look stuff up online. There is some guy called Anatoly Karlin who talks a lot about it but doesn't give any numbers. All the actual analysis I can find goes back to this paper: Lynn, Cheng 2018 Mankind Quarterly
It is too late in the night for me to go through this paper properly... so I'll just take the abstract at face value. They claim that Brahmins are more intelligent, by 5IQ points, giving an IQ of 80, i.e. on par with North Africans and Arabs (and they do indeed manage to get STEM nobels, so this feels reasonable to me now)
But wait, there is a point you did not bring up in this comment, but you (and others) bring up elsewhere. What about Tamil Brahmins?
I cannot find any estimates on this online. I suggest a crude method of estimating it though: regress IQ from STEM nobels per capita.
Let's get the Lynn IQ numbers, and also STEM nobels- I define a "STEM" nobel to be Physics, Chemistry, or Physiology or Medicine (so exclude Peace, Literature and Economics) - I got these counts by scraping the wikipedia page for nobels by country. This isn't great, as it lists by nationality instead of race. But just doing a cursory reading I didn't find much sillyness (there's a "Belarusian" winner who is Jewish, and a few Chinese / North Africans for France, but not that much, anyways this is crude - I didn't bother correcting this stuff)
We get the following plot. To clarify: a lot of countries just don't have any STEM nobels (for IQ / low population reasons, those are the red "x"s on the left of the plot. As you can see, the 0s really do span the full IQ range (it's not just SSA countries with red xes), so I think it is reasonable to discard those data points and do a linear regression on the remaining countries-as-proxies-for-races (blue dots)
The red line is just the line of best fit (minimising least squares: beta = 7.47, intercept = 142)[*], so now we just need the STEM nobel per capita for TamBrahms. If we survey the wikipedia page again, I find 4 Indian STEM nobels:
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Tamil)
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (Tamil)
Har Gobind Khorana (not Tamil)
C. V. Raman (Tamil)
So 3 TamBrahm STEM nobels[**], but what about the population? This sounds easy, but I literally cannot find it online. The only quantitative information given is in the Wikipedia article, in a subsection about a specific kind of Tamil Brahmin called Iyers (but there are only 2 apparently, so close enough):
So, if we just use these cities (and assume that is most of the TamBrahms in the world), we get: (102_905 + 58_301 + 916_857 + 289_916) * 0.1 130k population So as a lower bound, let's say 1e5 TamBrahms. And as an upper bound, let's say 1e7 (this is 10% the population of all of Tamil Nadu)
So using the population estimates, and then fitting using our model we get the following IQ estimates for Tamil Brahmins (depending on population size):
pop 1e5: 108 IQ
pop 1e6: 101 IQ
pop 1e7: 93 IQ
So, using this estimation technique, in the very best case, the Tamil Brahmins have an IQ of
108 (clipping the lower end of Ashkenazi IQ estimates: 107-115, and aligning with your claim elsewhere that they are on par with Jews), and in the worst case they are on par with trans-hajnals.I'm pretty skeptical myself of what I've written, mainly because of how I discarded all the countries without STEM nobels. But I've been putting off researching this question for almost a year now, so for my own sake at least, I thought it was worth writing down my crude estimates and resaoning on the matter, as someone who has not done any serious reading/research in race science / genetics / etc - so I can test my possibly shady thinking on this (and "quantitative" HBD in general)
So now I ask you - what is your reason to think that (Tamil) Brahmins are high-IQ? (also I would like to ask @self_made_human and @2rafa, as they make this claim too) For Tamil Brahmins is it based on similar calculations as mine? And what about for generic Brahmins? (as I mentioned, online sources just give the generic Brahmin IQ as 80. My model gives a more favourable 88IQ, but even that is not very high)
[*] As a separate interesting point, and sanity check, if we do the regression of log10(stem nobels / capita) onto IQ, we get a beta of 0.048, i.e. increasing a population's IQ by 15 makes each person 5x more likely to be a STEM Nobel. Which sounds... reasonable?
[**] The fact that 75% of the Indian STEM Nobels went to TamBrahms was also why I originally decided to entertain the sub-stratification of Brahmins into Tamil Brahmins. Even at just n=4, this seems so significant, it is reasonable to me to look into this even smaller subpopulation without risking overfitting.
Great question and certainly an interesting topic.
At some point, you have to ask yourself why half the Indians you meet at the top of every high performing PMC job belong to a tiny minority that makes up 0.15% of the Indian population. Something similar happens when you realize that in many cases it feels like a majority of PMC Africans in the West in fields like medicine, finance, big law etc are Igbos (although the outperformance is less great; there are a lot of Igbos). In both cases there are partial emigration dynamics explanations - the socialist government of Tamil Nadu after independence forcibly acted against the dominance of the Tamil Brahmins, stripped them of their caste names, removed them from positions of power, and drove many into exile, and of course for the Igbos there was the whole Biafran War thing, but those explanations are insufficient. Plenty of other tribes, after all, have faced similar circumstances without that outcome.
You also become adept at recognizing Tamil Brahmins, even if they no longer have the Iyer/Iyengar names because of anti-casteism policies in their home state. I see them everywhere now, they are impressed when I recognize them, although they can instantly recognize each other.
Quantitative data is limited; it is sometimes forgotten that the only reason we have good data on Ashkenazi Jewish outperformance and various European groups in general is that they were present and recorded in the early 20th century at the height of the scientific study of group differences; Tamil Brahmins were not (certainly in large numbers). Data is more limited. Nobels tell part of the story but, like chess competitions, far from all of it. Performance can be depressed in various ways. Clearly today when international emigration is commonplace, Tamil Brahmins outperform almost all other ethnic groups per capita in terms of leading roles like making it to the top of US corporations, senior PMC jobs, especially when accounting for legacy effects (like a corporation run by a Jewish or white gentile guy appointing his son, nephew or whatever as his successor) that they don’t have access to.
Nepotism is a poor explainer; there are so few of them and North Indian Brahmins, who are far more numerous, often look down on them for being from South India, having darker skin (lighter than all other Tamils, but certainly darker than northern Indian Brahmins) etc.
Generic Brahmins are best seen as the hereditary ancient higher segment, but remember that there are almost a hundred million of them, in some places well over 20% of the population. The best analogue is to the aristocracy in somewhere like early modern Poland where 15% of the population were technically nobles. A tiny percentage of them were actual elites, lived in palaces, had hundreds of servants, owned lots of land. Most were essentially kulaks, smallholders, people who would be considered barely above (or indeed) peasants in more restrictive European estates systems. Most Brahmins in India are rural poor, the average urban middle class person of any caste is much richer.
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China still has the strongest handicap that isn't genetic or physical. Communism.
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I agree with HBD. That doesn't mean there are no 130+ IQ Africans that it's good for a country to bring in. Yes there's some reversion to the mean but that just means increasing the thresholds on what you admit people so that even their children are still significantly above the western average.
I do dispute the Lynn IQ numbers. They're really not accurate. Sasha Gusev had a pretty good writeup a while ago. But that's neither here nor there for my main argument.
I agree IQ is a very good measure of who you want vs don't want. I agree it's fine to make probabilistic judgments. What happened with Indians in Canada was Canada's own stupidity in importing low IQ Punjabi farmers by the boatload, which they are now paying for, it's got nothing to do with importing top tier human beings. The reason low tier people are imported is that there are lots of low tier jobs that must be done which top tier foreigners or low tier natives refuse to do at reasonable wages, it's a completely separate problem to that of high skill immigration. I'm perfectly in favour of a policy which puts the yoke back on the necks of low tier natives so that they do low tier jobs for proper pay (thereby removing the need for low tier immigrants, what I find galling about low tier natives is not tha they are low tier, but that they are low tier but pretend to be equal to their betters) but democracy means they have more votes than me...
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Somehow the United States needs to keep importing “the best and brightest” forever, or we’ll lose. What happened to the best and brightest we already imported? Guess they weren’t the bestest and brightestest.
The one principle I'm learning from the neoliberals is that the importing of the best and brightest must never stop. Can't stop until the white supremacists on Twitter are, themselves, replaced by Indians.
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Not in an absolute sense, no. Plenty of countries are very livable without immigration. But I do not think you will keep your role as tech leaders without immigration.
Regression to the mean.
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I mean, to be fair, it did work with German scientists. Unfortunately, people die.
The real question is how much the current immigration system actually resembles that.
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The best and brightest aren't getting kicked out by a 100k charge. As lovers of subcontinental culture we should be thankful that the happy medium tier remains and is given opportunities to affect systemic reward. It would be a tragedy and an utter betrayal of one's fellow man to abscond to go play zero sum games in the West
Not per se, no. But it will reduce the relative attractiveness of the US as an immigration destination.
Also, the fee is only the tip of the iceberg. It is clear that the Trump administration -- and the people who voted for him -- really get off on kicking foreigners out of the country. Sure, he is unlikely to send random knowledge workers to some El Salvador megaprison without any due process, but most people would prefer not to go to countries which do not want them, all things being equal.
I think a lot depends on the specific migrant and their relative prospects in different places. There are very likely fields where someone who could become a world class researcher in the US can only hope for a meager career outside the states, and Trump can squeeze these people's balls as hard as he wants and all they will say is thank you. In other fields, things are different, and the impact of Trump plus visa costs are enough to make Cambridge more attractive than Harvard. The fact that the universities are generally on Trump's shit list will not help matters, here.
For companies, the calculation is rather similar. The answer to "do we open another research campus in the US or elsewhere?" might be different under Obama and Trump.
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A large portion of people get dissuaded from making significant purchases based on a single extra click being required (hence the huge amount of money platforms like Amazon pour into optimizing their process). This effect isn't particularly dependent on intelligence either, smart people also get put off by a significant degree due to needing one more click to buy a product.
Similarly even the fact that there's discussion of a 100k charge going around will be enough to dissuade some of the best and brightest on the margins, let alone actually implementing a policy like that.
Dissuade the best and brightest? Not the employers? It's not like the bestest and brightest are the ones paying directly.
I thihk the best pathway would be for the best and brightest to go back to places of origin and work super hard to develop their own competing paradigms. Every best and brightest who's working on product management or consulting or zero sum finance nonsense is somebody who could be making an active difference in the future. Sadly most lack the personal courage to build a future for themselves.
This is going to bite the US in the ass so hard in the next 15-20 years. It's already happening with China etc., see how good Kimi K2 Thinking is as well as GLM-4.6 etc.
China has the benefit of a capable, talented hardworking base with motivations beyond their own immediate paycheck. Unfortunately other potential players are needful of the same dedication and commitment.
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If the USA keeps importing the "best and the brightest" it will eventually turn into the country you are so desperate to run away from in order to get to the USA.
Or I am mistaking you for some other Indian commentator who constantly goes on about how they want to get to the USA for the big bucks and freedom of opportunity, are instead stuck in the UK which doesn't pay half as well, and there's a snowball in Hell's chance you'll go back to your native country because it's too poor and full of not-the-best-and-brightest?
Nah, I'm happy here in the UK, I'm in one of the few industries where the pay disparity between the US and UK is tolerable (plus the pay is high enough anyways). Since the Trump election (and even for a while before then) I've found the charms of Old Blighty (minus the people) growing on me.
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You are, actually. Burdensome has a different pattern (and iirc is Pakistani, not Indian).
Ah, right. I knew someone was complaining about being Indian and not being let into the USA, but I didn't make any particular notes of user names.
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Sure, sure, we'll totally regret it. Just stay out.
You and @HereAndGone both - stop taking personal shots at people however annoying you may find them.
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Has the Trump administration actually changed the way the O-1/EB-1A visas work?
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