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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Between the lines, the report more than it did previously hints that immigration could be one way to compensate for the decline in fertility

It doesn't though? We have the stats from the Netherlands, non-Western, non-East Asian migrants are usually net losses in tax, they comprise the bulk of the migrant pool. Mass immigration is expensive!

The US will hoover up the high-quality immigrants with their high wages, why would anyone highly skilled want to go to cold, dark, high-tax Sweden? The most compelling reasons are attractive Swedish women and welfare - neither of which are good for Sweden.

Furthermore, adding more labour disincentivizes mechanization and robotization, lowers wages and productivity.

The economic arguments for mass immigration don't make sense. Increasing the total size of the economy doesn't benefit natives, only raising productivity can do that. Sweden is already a very high productivity area with higher STEM Nobels per capita than the United States! Swedes make jet fighters, machine tools, video games like Minecraft: very capable people.

High-quality immigrants are rare and hard to distinguish from cheats. Low-quality migrants can do food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation. And all immigration imposes further pressure on public services and infrastructure, which is invariably expensive to build out in modern Western country.

Mass migration proponents, besides some libertarians, are not motivated primarily by economics at heart IMO. It's a transformational/aspirational/teleological project, it's about getting rid of racism by abolishing distinction. I had one come up to me and tell me this at one point impromptu about how he hoped everyone would interbreed and then we'd all be brown.

The US will hoover up the high-quality immigrants with their high wages, why would anyone highly skilled want to go to cold, dark, high-tax Sweden? The most compelling reasons are attractive Swedish women and welfare - neither of which are good for Sweden.

I mean I live in a middle-income country (Malaysia) where approximately 5-10% (2 Millionish people) of the population is illegal immigrant workers from the absolute bottom of the global economy (Indonesia, Bangladesh mainly) and they receive no social benefits plus very enthusiastic deportation efforts. Acquiring citizenship in Malaysia as a foreigner is essentially impossible, with approximately 100 granted a year and generally only for stuff like being a National-Level Athlete. They're doing this for pursuit of bottom-end minimum wageish jobs in an economy that has roughly a 15k GDP per capita. The vast majority of 'If we don't let the temporary workers bring in their extended family and have a citizenship pathway, they won't come here' in the West is absolutely ridiculous. The Gulf Arabs have a ridiculous amount of Filipinos and Subcontinentals who they barely even treat as human, the current carrot that Western governments assume they need is about 500 times larger than it needs to be.

As far as I'm concerned most Western economies could easily figure out a scalable dorm system, add temporary working visas at about minimum wage for their countries (and maybe a distant offer for PR if you've been there 20 years and cured cancer like Singapore and Dubai do) and have unlimited resourcing for unskilled and low-skilled work. Meanwhile a bunch of Western countries are trying to run some variant of 'Bring in unskilled labor to do care work for 5 years, then grant PR, then let them bring in 10 family members' which fails to even tread water.

Increasing the total size of the economy doesn't benefit natives

I agree with a lot of this, but the above sentence is incorrect.

There are increasing returns to scale in an economy. It's a large (hah) reason why the US and China are as successful as they are. It's a reason why the EU exists, etc.

There are so many wrong things here that I don't even know where to start.

cold, dark

The climate is milder than much of the north of the US, but Boston and the PNW are not exactly unpopular.

high-tax

Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe, surprisingly.

welfare

...also comparing unfavourably to much of the rest of Europe. The medical system is every bit as much of a wreck as the British NHS, and unemployment insurance is anemic and opt-in.

Swedish women

Consensus among foreigners (spent several years working there) was that Swedish women are very mediocre, and it's actually the men who tend to be much more attractive than those elsewhere. That meshes well with the preexisting native culture warring about Swedish men taking Thai wives.

food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation

This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance based view that got thoroughly demolished in the last few years. The best estimate to make now is that research/writing/office work/management/anything white-collar are the prime targets for automation, and food delivery, meat processing and Uber are going to be the last human holdouts because meat has a competitive advantage at navigating the mess that is the 3D world. We got AI solving big open problems in maths before we got self-driving cars that can cope with a Swedish city (as opposed to a handful of American easy-mode desert town street grids).

Yes, pains me to say this but in 2 years time a qualified plumber may well be worth more to countries for immigration purposes than a senior staff level engineer at Google.

Honestly meat processing needs to be paid much much more than it is at the moment. It's a very "dirty" job that still requires a decent amount of knowledge and skill (do you know your beef cuts? I don't know my beef cuts...) and the people doing it and suffering aren't any less human than middle manager Becky in HR with her mediorce degree and unmemorable experience managing a team of 4 people.

If this means Becky from HR gets to eat steak at a restaurant less often then so be it.

he hoped everyone would interbreed and then we'd all be brown.

Such a weird thing to fetishize, as if brown people aren't racist against each other and everyone else. Ask a Mexican about Guatemalans, FFS.

If we're going to have racism, it should at least be refined competitive racism based on nation and beer preferences and clothing, not casual "darker skin bad" racism.

Racism based on beer preferences has the advantage that we can make Bud Light the n****r of beers and put normie Americans on the bottom of the racial hierarchy for once.

Do you know of even one person in the world who is racist strictly on skin tone? Nobody hates melanin, man.

There's a reason the South Koreans have the best sunscreen tech in the world and to be very clear that reason is racism / colorism

Congratulations to your big beautiful bubble shielding you from the global majority.

Prejudice due to skin color alone is normal in most of the world, especially in dark complexioned countries where no one heard about bell curves.

Search for "colorism" and be enlightened/horrified.

There is a reason why there is, in the third world, huge market for various skin whitening substances, no matter how dubious.

Not strictly on skin tone, but it is a marker for other factors, and it is making things all too easy for aspiring racists. No one cares to learn the subtle class markers like wearing your hat the wrong way or peasant pronunciation of certain vowels when you can just look at their face and instantly determine they are likely to be of a lower socio-cultural-intellectual-spiritual-economical class.

Then let me tell you a little tale about context. Far up north, where the trains don't run and the law is weak, live my in-laws. Dying small town, full of white and native trash. In that town, the only black people are the Jamaican doctors who are the only MDs who will work in a town like that. They're the richest and brightest people in town. So super-black Jamaicans are top of the SES heirarchy, but the rare less-black guy from downstate is considered a degen and likely thief. Nobody has any trouble telling them apart.

I am entirely unsurprised that small town people can remember the few exceptions to the rule.

If there's exceptions, it isn't "darker skin bad". This is the point.

If there's exceptions it means the rule exists. As you yourself stated, the black guys that do not belong to the well-known exception are not trusted.

We have the stats from the Netherlands, non-Western, non-East Asian migrants are usually net losses in tax, they comprise the bulk of the migrant pool. Mass immigration is expensive!

I suspect the solution from many of these countries will be to pivot to Indian immigration. Most of the culture war in Europe is focused on muslims more than immigrants as a whole, and the thought leaders on the right seems quite comfortable with Indians.

Canadian post-COVID immigration was primarily Indian and even that caused backlash. And this is a country that's up there in terms of tolerating immigration. 1% per year for a decade with nary a peep.

The more you take the more you weaken selection effects and deal with the things people don't like about India.

Doesnt mean they wont try.

The more you take the more you weaken selection effects and deal with the things people don't like about India.

Exactly. Trying to compare data from decades prior when you were literally taking the top 1% (In intelligence, family wealth and cosmopolitanism) of Indians who had to hustle and grind every day to get out of India, when now there's scope for the truly Middle Class Indians to get out without moving heaven and earth and in sufficient numbers to easily form enclaves.