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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14113 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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The fertility decline/rapid aging of the citizen population doesn't help either imo.

I might sound like a broken record, but I think TFR is the root cause of all this. Western governments see population decline (and consequent tax base erosion) as a sovereign risk and will do whatever they can to forestall it. Immigration is the only tool they think is feasible to 'fix' this, so we continue to see uniparty policies of mass immigration despite it being grossly unpopular.

Everything else is downstream of this. I've heard speculation that AI based productivity gains might obviate the need for immigration, but I'm not holding my breath.

I might sound like a broken record, but I think TFR is the root cause of all this. Western governments see population decline (and consequent tax base erosion) as a sovereign risk and will do whatever they can to forestall it.

We know this is not the reason, because the governments have data that show immigrants are a massive money sink. Some of them even decided to share it with the public!

This didn't actually prevent some government orgs from assuming otherwise, e.g. in the British OBR projections that assumed migrants would be as productive as locals.

That and lobbying from business (and fears of a dying healthcare system) explains the massive post-COVID migration spike.

Incredibly short sighted (basically low wages for business that didn't like how COVID shifted the labour market + pretty projections of growth so you can borrow at the expense of taxpayers for decades) but governments can be shortsighted. It also doesn't help when discussions on human capital are basically taboo so it's hard to coordinate criticism without being called racist.

Of course, that's another structural problem caused by aging: there aren't really many high IQ populations to squeeze since most of their countries are both wealthy now and aging (and, in the case of Britain, they left the EU). If you think migration is your solution it's gonna be Third World migration and we've seen how even selective immigration systems that try to get the cream of the crop from places like India got corrupted by the incentive to import cheap labour.

Refugees are definitely a money sink. Young educated tradespeople or professionals going through a strict points based system are normally positive in lifetime contribution.

Its difficult to do direct comparisons on net lifetime contributions across the anglo countries because a lot of the studies seem to be gamed to create the strongest arguments for immigration.

Regardless, as soon as you look at non-economic impacts, multiculturalism has so many downsides over homogeneity.

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