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For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration? Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them? Arabs?
That can be, and is an important part of why immigration, especially the highest skill immigration is so important to keeping the US rich and powerful.
Let's say that white people will have a polymath SuperGenius in one out of a million people. In the US, that leaves us with roughly 210 white polymath SuperGenius. (in this scenario, we are Bovino pilled and have no non whites left)
Meanwhile let's be really racist and say that the ethnic Chinese only have a SuperGenius with one in three million. China, even despite this handicap, has roughly 450 or so super geniuses.
China has more one in a million SuperGenius than the US despite a significant disadvantage we applied to them. Do the same with 1 in 500k or 1 in 100k or whatever and you get the same results. China has more.
If the US does not either grow numbers significantly or recruit more SuperGenius, subSuperGenius, Genius, etc from elsewhere in the world, we will lose the top of intelligence war. Maybe we can cope with that, maybe we have better healthier systems from our higher average intelligence or something. But we will lose it anyway, China will have more just by pure numbers. Now consider that China is probably not 3x dumber than us at making SuperGenius.
Now apply this to the whole world. The US is only about 4.3% of the world population. Way more geniuses and talent of all sorts is born outside the country than in it. The best thing you can do is be immigrant friendly, and bring in the geniuses who do things like make up almost a third of your country's nobel prizes and make you richer and stronger. The worst thing you can do is to expel your geniuses so they all work for the immigrant friendly country willing to accept them.
You need the elite human capital. And of course, the more willing you are to take in anyone who is above average, your chances of Geniuses grows.
Personally I've always said that we should extend immediate citizenship invites to winners of the math Olympiad and other such contests.
If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.
The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.
People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.
I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.
People are not fungible. Jensen Huang alone has created far more value than the extremely large majority of other Americans regardless of race. You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible. You take a random white guy off the street and compare their value, and you can't even see the stranger on the chart. That is how dwarfed he is by Huang.
Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.
Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.
Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out. Alone. And we are not even close to that number of immigrants who are purely net negative.
I think Hanania addressed this with an excellent point that realistically, the same people pushing nativism the hardest now have been sabotaging themselves with the things they claimed immigrants would do.
Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants. Meanwhile go up in the Appalachians or something and you get a bunch of drug addict white trash statists who would rather bitch about how unfair things are.
Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.
They are the people who embrace being American far more than some white chick reposting marx memes on her phone between college classes, or some white trash honey boo boo family, or the endless other complainers and whiners who when given the greatest and most opportunities filled country in the world, in history, for free with native citizenship, flounder like the losers they are and complain instead.
I mean I suppose it depends on the immigrants and the compatibility of the culture. Chinese secular people would generally fit within the framework of American secular culture just fine. But if you’re importing the supermen from less compatible culture groups, and allowing them to set up little ethnic bergs within your country you’ll eventually end up being a collection of incompatible cultures bound together by nothing more than a piece of cloth and a national anthem. Unless you want to jettison democracy to find a strongman to hold all of those ethnic groups and their competing interests together, you’re going to watch the thing fly apart at the speed that those groups learn to use the federal government to issue carve outs for them and no one else.
Also keep in mind that immigration is permanent and regression to the mean exists. You might import a super genius from Iran in 2026, but by 2050 his 4-5 kids won’t be much smarter than average. They’ll still be Iranian Shia Muslims, still have a lot of Iranian cultural baggage, and be much more interested in promoting the fortunes of Arab-Americans at the expense of everyone else’s ethnic groups.
Children born and raised in the country are extremely integrated into American culture. It's a common story trope even of like, the Chinese grandma who is upset her grandkids don't know any of the cultural traditions or speak the language.
It does exist, but genetics is still a thing and those kids will actually be in general much smarter than the norm.
Absolutely not true, only 34% of Iranian Americans are Muslim and that's including the first generation immigrants. Iranian Americans are more irreligious seculars than they are Muslim. No wonder when the selection effect causing this is obvious, we're taking in smart people (less likely to be hyper religious anyway) who don't like the islamist regime and wanted to leave for a freer less religious nation.
Even more than the general population!
Iranian Americans are better than the general population at dismissing the sky daddy belief.
And it's not exclusive to Iranians. Not only do American Muslims integrate quite well into American culture, but 1 in 4 raised in Islam don't continue being Muslims in adulthood!.
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Plenty of places manage this without meaningful abilities to tap into the social security net. Dubai, Singapore etcetera are welcoming but you're going to struggle immensely to ever get a passport for a lot of immigrants. I do also broadly agree that the 'O1'/'genius' level of immigration should be encouraged (albeit one must acknowledge you're absolutely fucking the developing world by taking their best and brightest), but the current playing field has gone far far far far beyond that where now the H1B layer is taking fairly interchangeable mid-level career jobs and being used as a bludgeon on the native stock to keep wages down.
Without even going down to the Deliveroo layer that's now plowing into Europe where '30 years ago when we were ultra-selective people from these countries used to excel now let's take anybody who can get on a plane' is absolutely botched policy.
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First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.
Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.
Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.
Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.
Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.
Well no shit, lazy losers don't like being told that they're lazy losers and they especially don't like being told they should work harder. That doesn't change it is an improvement to the country if we go to hard work and effort being valued instead. Nativism against high skill immigrants is also a problem of ego.
Yes they actually do, in fact we used to debate on how accommodating we would be for immigrants. Look back on Reagan for instance, he never once hid how pro immigration he was and he is one of the most popular and beloved presidents in history. Heck you
Elite human capital is only one part of the equation, even the smartest people can not overcome bad systems. This is not Atlus Shrugged, the John Galts of the world are often stuck just working in suboptimal suppressive conditions instead of being able to break open the government.
Hey another example of how despite the complaints of immigrants, it's actually something being done even more by the increasingly nativist Republican party instead. The same way that the nativist party has abandoned the idea of free markets and trade, we have the government now blatently engaging in suppression of free speech even further than any immigrants have managed. And no, whataboutism does not fix the issue.
It the nativists themselves turn into the communists and censors, then that can't possibly be the true issue they have with immigrants. The nativists embrace the anti American ideals, ones we've had since the founding. George Washington himself saying the USA is a country to take the virtuous and persecuted. It is Washington's view that lead us to winning the space race, creating the nukes, and plenty of other achievements off the backs of the scientists the Nazis cast out.
This is not a binary choice. The US as a "coherent nation" has always been one of immigrants. Even now, about half of the citizenship can trace back heritage to just Ellis Island alone for instance. And economic strength is one of the necessary components to being a coherent nation, the US is strong and powerful because we have the best of the world. Would you rather it be Germany or Japan who developed the nukes first?
It traces back so far that it even goes to the very founding. George Washington himself himself wanted the USA to be a country that takes in the virtuous and persecuted. It is Washington's view that lead us to winning the space race, creating the nukes, and plenty of other achievements off the backs of the scientists the Nazis and Maoists and whoever else cast out.
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Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either, until well into the 2010s. There is a very noisy anti-immigration movement going back to Enoch Powell in the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and it has real mass working class support, but it doesn't actually move votes.
Even now, anti-immigration populist parties seem to face a hard cap of 25-30% support and centre-right parties who go into coalitions with them are punished - in other words about 70% of the voters are opposed to anti-immigration populism. (Trump wins because the US system allows you to capture the Presidency with 26% of the vote by winning a close primary and then a close general - in a jungle primary he would get 25-30%).
The British far right and populist right are an electoral irrelevance until UKIP get 16% of the vote in a low-turnout European election in 2004, and the first time a party running to the right of the Tories gets a significant vote share in a general election is 2015 when UKIP get 12.6%. The Tories run an anti-immigration campaign in 2005 (with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" and it goes down like a lead balloon. David Cameron includes a pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos, but the voters (correctly) don't believe him, he wins anyway, and doesn't cut immigration. Boris gets a landslide in 2019 despite having published policies that imply he will do a Boriswave.
The lack of ballot-box support for an anti-immigration insurgent party is unlikely to be purely because FPTP suppresses it - other third parties get mass support during this period, with the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaking at 25.4% in 1983 and the Greens getting 15% in the 1989 European elections.
So the big picture in the UK is that the Tories don't need an anti-immigration message to win, which is good because they can't effectively use one. And there is no meaningful opposition to their right until Farage, and even Farage doesn't have enough votes to matter until 2024 - his impact on British politics between 2010 and 2024 is driven by the impact of Farage panic on the internal politics of the Conservative Party.
In France, you have a serious anti-immigration party opposing the Gaullists from the right going back to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in the 1980's, but it's stuck on about 15% of the vote (with very little chance of winning anything under the French electoral system, because the other 85% will hold their noses and vote for anyone-but-FN in the runoff) until Marine Le Pen's 2017 breakthrough.
In the US, socially conservative insurgents (who, among other things, oppose immigration) consistently get about 20% in Republican primaries until Trump. The GOP grassroots are obviously more anti-immigrant than this suggests, but when they get into the polling booth they pull the lever for a GOPe tax cutter.
What does all this mean - the simplest interpretation is that immigration is low salience for normies until well into the 2010s. Talking about the issue (in either direction) is a vote loser even among anti-immigration conservative voters because it implies you don't care enough about the bread-and-butter issues voters care about. The other point is that effective anti-immigration politics is very visibly tied to the failure of traditional centre-left and centre-right parties to offer a positive programme voters could vote for. The best example here is the French Presidential election in 2017, where the traditional two big parties came third and fifth, but you see the same thing happening in the UK (where Boris can only win in 2019 by running against his own party's record in government) and the US (where neither the GOPe nor the Democrats can manage run a replacement-level candidate against Trump).
So the interesting question is the direction of causation. Do centre-left and centre-right parties decline because the public finally means it when they say they are fed up with mass immigration, or does anti-immigration politics exploit a vacuum left by the decline of centre-left and centre-right parties for other reasons? Those other reasons are obvious - some combination of social media-driven negativity and very real policy failures including the 2008 financial crisis and Iraq, with the relative impact depending on how sympathetic you find the old-school politicians.
At least in Europe, mass migration on the scale that it's a noticeable and negative thing for most people is actually shockingly recent. And if you dig into when it hit various countries, there absolutely was backlash, pre-2010s included. German guest workers were promised to be temporary. Asian migration to Australia was promised to be modest. The US had such backlash that until 1965ish there was a law on the books to basically freeze their demographics.
I would also argue that the idea that restrictions = nazism and racism post 1945 was used in the west to push it heavily. Also, usually populist parties that actually stopped migration also bundled rather odious populist policies and/or nationalist stuff with the whole thing. Why that is can be discussed at another time.
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And? If the idea is that our rulers get to do whatever they want, even if their constituents are against it because "neener neener, you didn't vote hard enough" (even when they clearly did - see the policies under the "fascist" governments of Italy, Poland, or the recent DIGNIDAD Act), then it's time to stop pretending "democracy" as a concept has any substance to it at all.
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I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.
To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.
America gets all the first and second round draft picks.
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Yeah I'm not a particular Elon Musk fan and I think he's probably better example of somebody who's harder to replace in that he has the right combination of luck, willingness to keep diversifying into new speculative fields and raw tenacity to actually engender meaningful change as an individual. IMO somebody like Huang would have likely emerged regardless since it's not like he invented Unobtanium that completely unlocked the path of GPU development.
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Not really. It's true no amount of average Joe's can replace a Jensen Huang, but the truth is he depends on them as much as they depend on him. This is trivially observable by the fact that none of these people are able to "cancel out" impoverished populations of other countries, and have to go to the US for their success.
It's also telling you measure his contribution by the valuation of his company, which is an absurd thing to do. In the mind of a valuation appreciator, all you have to do is subtract government expenditures going to the net negative parasites from the company valuation, and as long as the bottom line is in the black,you're good! The reality is that just like no amount of average Joes can compensate for Jensen Huang, even if you get enough of them that their total contributions exceed $5.4 trillion, no amount of Jensen Huangs, and no amount of money transferred by the government, can compensate for the social erosion caused by mass immigration from incompatible cultures.
That's not the cultural change that's happening anywhere in the west. We are constantly being pushed to erode our standards, and a significant justification for that is the push for greater "diversity" necessitated by mass migration.
Right. You need Jensen Huang, plus all the various competent people he hires and who make up his customers. Plus you need a paucity of competent ultraparasites who make Bernie Sanders look like an Ayn Rand fan -- that's a thing lacking almost everywhere. Note that California, at least, is crossing a line on that latter point.
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Just because no super genius on an abandoned island can build a plane by themselves doesn't erase their immense and overwhelming power when given opportunities. Society works by depending on each other, but there's a reason why it's those like Jensen Huang or Elon Musk and not some John Smith who works as a trash collector. Trash collection is an extremely valuable and necessary role, but he is easily replaceable with anyone else. Huang is not.
It's obviously not actually that simple, but valuation is the easy quick way to determine a person's value to society. What Huang has created is worth trillions of dollars. Because you can earn a billion dollars if you do things that people really really want.
You're right, unfortunately despite the grinder culture selection effect of immigration, it's not enough to overcome the growing problem of victimhood natives who instead of embracing freedom and opportunity, turn to their phones to whine on Tiktok instead about how unfair it is that the smarter and harder working Indians and Asians are "taking their jobs".
I'm not sure why you perceive the rest of the world as Mordor where any burgeoning company is instantly snuffed by the inability of peons to execute tasks. Nvidia has always manufactured a significant chunk of their product in Taiwan due to expertise, talent and advantages that don't exist inside the USA. The USA's useful more for being the best place to raise cash than necessarily in terms of pure manufacturing or actually making things happen.
Which is where your argument starts to run into a wall where it's more that the USA is a PVP realm of adspend optimizers, Facebook button colourers, ligitation and financial magicians. None of this is a particularly good use of human capital, actual manufacturing has been fucked off to other countries since getting affordable, hard-working talent to do it in the West is increasingly difficult
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They also can't build it in certain densely populated, resource-rich, parts of the world either.
Yes, that's my argument. You'll note that at no point have I denied their contribution, literally said "no amount of Jensen Huangs, can compensate for the social erosion caused by mass immigration from incompatible cultures" , a point which you are deliberately avoiding now.
You'll again note that at no point have I denied Huang's contribution to society. What I did deny was his ability to compensate for mass migration from incompatible cultures. The argument for him possessing that ability clearly rests on it being that simple.
- Doctor, I think I have a cold.
- Here, have some arsenic. Feel any better?
- No, I feel a lot worse...
- You're right, unfortunately despite the healing effect of arsenic, it's not enough to overcome the growing common cold infection in your body...
There's absolutely no reason to believe the "grinder culture" culture of (some) immigrants in any way positively contributes to hosts cultures. On the other hand, the part of the native culture that is the most into victimhood narratives is also the most fanatically pro-immigration.
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