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So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.
It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.
Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).
This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.
Most accurate ≠ most useful.
If I can select from two pools of people, one Asian with an average IQ of 100, one Middle-east/African, with an average IQ of 90, why should I spend time looking for candidates in the group with a lower average IQ?
Hypothetically I might be able to devise a mechanism to accurately sift through both populations that finds 100% of the qualified people from both groups. But given I know one population is just a better pool of candidates there is little utility in going for the lower IQ group so long as the higher IQ group has enough qualified candidates, which it does have. All you are doing is wasting time and effort.
In a real world scenario the situation is abundantly clear. You don't want to waste any time on a worse pool of candidates since your error margins are going to be wider with a pool where the unqualified outnumber the qualified. This error margin is not just relating to work performance but baseline function in society. These errors cost lives and I find it very hard to weigh the alleged 'economic benefit' of mass immigration with descriptions from little girls of how they were gang raped over years, pictures of little children torn to pieces after someone intentionally drove over them in a truck, or descriptions of teenagers tortured to death in their own homelands, that were much safer prior to these 'economic benefits' arriving.
As for your own argumentation, sidelining peoples instincts as racism does little to foster understanding between two differing viewpoints. I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa. I assume you have good intentions and that your tend and befriend instincts are a valuable part of your humanity that has great utility and benefit to those around you. But it's not for a lack of issues that your instincts cause others that I refrain from such insinuations. I'd appreciate if you could do the same.
You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.
Education, skills and employment are not the same country by country. You care about the box 'race' because it serves as a proxy for a whole lot of information. Hell, even within countries the difference in ability despite education level, like in the US, you have big differences between races. The first few paragraphs of this article demonstrates this point
On top of that, 'race' to some extent, and ethnicity and country of origin to a greater extent, serve as great proxies for the credibility of claims made by hopeful migrant laborers. I know from experience there exists great stigma around foreign laborers in construction work, often times for good reason. I've heard similar things from my programmer friends deriding 'Indian code'.
I, from experience, would conclude that a lot of the claims made by foreign laborers are lies. Getting your foot in the door is much more important than being true to your own abilities. Especially since most imported labor is not working high skill jobs for high pay, but working low skill jobs for low pay. And they know this.
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100. What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.
(Edited) This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else. I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.
No dude, what you are doing became complete nonsense. It starts of with imagining a hypothetical that is antithetical to reality. We don't have a list of 1000 numbers, we have applications earmarked by a list of traits. Country of origin, country of residence, employment status, spousal status, education and so on. The point made by me was that accepting applications from countries with low IQ ends up wasting a whole lot more resources than applications from higher IQ countries. There is nothing nonsensical about this proposition. It is extremely simple.
Maybe this is a difference of governance, but where I am from the processing of any foreign born people, be it migrants or any other sort, is extremely costly. It takes time to go through the various bureaucracies to confirm the authenticity of the claims made. It's not picking 95 over 91.
It's not random and the weighing is not "very slight".
From a purely mathematical perspective, picking from the higher number group is very obviously more optimal than picking from the lower number group as soon as you factor in that every pick has a cost and that sorting through the list of numbers is not as simple as your hypothetical makes it out to be.
How mutual this feeling is.
This is not a discussion about racial differences. So far no one has gone off the deep end into denying IQ. So what we are left with is optimizing policy based on reality. Or making banal insinuations about biases whilst pretending we are immune to it ourselves.
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