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Notes -
Ask Sahaj: Isn’t it racist to insist your kids marry within their race?
This article posits it's OK to demand your kids marry another Indian (or South Asian), due to, uh, racism or something, while it's not OK for whites to do this.
Well, but the point is you left your collectivist culture. Marriage in the modern west is an individualist thing. Also note the shameless promotion of family honour ("tarnish your name")
I mean I get that it sucks that you don't get to keep your culture as such, but it's a good deal. You get to often 10-20x your resources after all. I guess the presupposition is that you should keep your culture and all it entails. Which is a bit disrespectful to the host country in my opinion. Do they not get a say at all about all this?
I don't care too much about the article or the premise itself, but I work with a lot of Indians. I don't generally dislike them at all. But I do notice certain behavioural patterns. I have also been to the place. I know people who spent a lot of time there. One thing that came up is that they can be very racist themselves. Almost fractally so in fact, it's quite incredible. Casteism is also still a thing, though less so in the big cities.
I guess it's also notable how they act as immigrants. Indians care a lot about honour. They are quite irredentist, think they are heirs to a great civilisation state, if only it weren't for the pernicious English they'd split the world in two with China or something. Many a time when I spent time with one I was lectured about how the west is in decline, how it's going to be an Indian century, etc. (insert 2025 superpower meme) They are quite protective of their culture, they don't change their names when they emigrate, don't outmarry as much (though WMIF is a thing) and are generally quite quick to jump on the whole AA grift.
Even as a tourist, when I'm in a foreign country, I generally try to be polite, I certainly don't serenade people with some weird nationalist screed about how my civilisation used to better than theirs etc. So this is quite foreign to me. Hindu nationalism can be very funny though as an outsider. It's a bit whimsical, a bit like Balkan nationalism.
There are a lot of allegations that they like hiring their own and well, I have seen this more or less first hand. Though Russians and others also do that (viz. "thick" vs. thin cultures, I think people from "thin" cultures make better immigrants). They generally don't want to assimilate. Assimilation is out now anyway I guess. You can contrast this with East Asians. They generally still tend to have more of a 2000s classroom globalism view, where everyone ought to work together etc., they change their names and they often try to intermarry. Even though China is irredentist even recent Chinese immigrants tend to shut up about this while IME Indian ones generally don't.
They may be very good for GDP etc. but I am not sure that mass Indian immigration is a good thing in the long term. Do you want a group in your country that will quite openly have split loyalties? People used to fuss about this in the US with Catholics. I guess we have a natural experiment with Canada and Australia to a lesser extent. We shall see. Indian emigration is continuing apace anyway, they have dreadful youth unemployment rates.
I am skeptical that Hindu and Muslim immigrants will remain homogenous over time. Muslims seem to marry other Muslims from wherever (see Mamdami) and Hinduism may be uniquely weak when transported (Brahamical prohibitions on traveling overseas are for a reason: it’s one thing to persuade your kid to worship the gods in front of a three thousand-year-old temple ground where everything has lore and pedigree, another when it was built 10 years ago across from a Burger King in a town named after the wrong kind of Indian). Sikhs will probably be a bit more resilient as they have an ethnireligious component, and “Sahaj” is indeed Sikh. The issue I see with Indian migration is rather that the country seems dysfunctional, corrupt, and unaesthetic, and it’s not wise to bring its population into America when the relationship between quality of country and quality of immigrant seems to track well in most cases. The addition of a high IQ individual is not necessarily good if it comes with other bad traits as the history of American corruption attests (Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, etc). It’s probably the case that a high-trust and high-empathy 90iq is better than a corrupt 110iq. And this will be an even worse problem in the AI age as meritocracy becomes increasingly difficult to instantiate. At the same time, India is so diverse that I imagine there are probably sub-populations that are the highest trust in the world (what are the Jains doing? Can we bring Parsis here?) but I doubt anyone is looking into that properly.
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