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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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The thing is you have to force economic conditions that are worse than the place they came from -- sufficiently worse to overcome the activation energy to get up and move again, at an older age than they did the first time!

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place. But the time to do that was decades ago, back when.. US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants, and many of them are on welfare, this is a much easier matter.

No you have to force economic conditions to suck for immigrants. Strictly enforce e verify. Heavily tax remittances. Harshly restrict benefits to immigrants. Turn off chain migration.

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place.

No one knows how to do that. I mean, if Trump really does get rid of Maduro that will likely help, but only a little bit.

It's tricky, but the premise does seem to hold: checking out the El Salvador emigration data, we can see it's 5x lower than it used to be. And it dropped by a factor of 2 the moment Bukele took office!

Now that Bukele has shown that you can, in fact, just put the violent criminals in prison, maybe others will give it a shot.

I mean I'm given to understand that tattooing 'I am evil' on your face is pretty specific to el salvadorean gangs and so it's a lot harder to replicate that strategy elsewhere.

Gang tattoos are a thing everywhere gangs are. Drug gangs are not exactly bastions of high human capital. They are very primitive in their mental processes.

In the age of cheap camera surveillance, solving low-class crime is purely a problem of political will. There are no other relevant factors.

No one knows how to do that.

Oh no, the US has Manifest Destiny, but their founding myth also kind of involves them not being an empire so they don't want to. Plus, the pro-Empire faction is too busy trying to establish a domestic successor empire to bother with taking over other countries in this way.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants

Europe is in a much, much worse position when you consider the ages involved. The Muslims are disproportionately young adults and children, and the middle aged and elderly dying people are disproportionately white.

The thing is the US is already so non-white. Whites account for around 50% of US births, which is pretty bad compared to most of Europe, as far as I can tell, although it's a bit tricky to compare numbers due to how data is collected and classified.

And Eastern Europe is mostly okay (I mean, they still have cratering fertility. But at least it's not buoyed by third-world migrant births).

Sure, but the different non white groups may not like whites, but they hate each other. The blacks meeting an indian(or oriental, but that's a lot less likely) boss will beg for the klan to come be in charge again. The Hispanics often won't accept a black manager. Etc, etc.

But in America, the different ethnic groups are held in tension with one another. In Europe there’s one mostly contiguous ethno-religious block waiting in the wings to seize power.

US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Sure, but without US intervention Latin America would have instituted Communism in a bunch of places, and it's extremely difficult to imagine they would have been any more economically prosperous under Communism.

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