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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.
No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion (e.g. I'd prefer moslem Indonesians over Christian Nigerians). There are many people willing to work for low wages as streetsweepers, garbage men, nurses etc. You're not just importing workers. You're importing a people with its own distinctive culture. And cultures are sticky (tied to ethnicity/race). Denying this is the blank slate approach which has failed and continues to fail.
Some amount of racism is necessary, but it should be pragmatic/selective and not universal, e.g. you prefer some groups over others rather than penalising everyone with a darker skin color. There's no point in pussyfooting around this issue and the right should drop its naïve colorblind approach.
This is not too hard to fix---just do the salary sorting independently for each position after you've decided how much of each you want. Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race. Again, saying the first thing that comes to my head just to emphasize how close it comes and how easy the problem is, even just English proficiency might suffice. Knowing nothing else, would you prefer a natively English-proficient Christian Nigerians over random Muslim Indonesian? Seriously trying to come up with a filter would do dramatically better than just looking at race. Immigration officials have so much more information about prospectives and this completely overwhelms any evidence provided by race.
Saying this another way, filtering by race doesn't make sense unless you can somehow argue that race is actually a strong proxy for merit/cultural compatibility/whatever you want from immigrants. Even the most extreme HBD positions don't deny a huge overlap in distributions of whichever characteristic you care about, so such a position would seem ridiculous.
Race cannot be gamed (except for edge cases). The whole point of race is its inherence. Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.
Why is having had British colonial masters a marker of cultural compatibility?
Why "cursory"? Because you want it to be gameable? Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.
That said, I think racial profiling is indeed unfair if it goes beyond defining vague priors. It's desirable to filter immigrants for their comprehensive human capital.
It's just… Suppose you were not allowed into the world's richest country on grounds of your character, which was found wanting not through stereotyping you based on race, but through, de facto, systematic measurement and determination of your similarity to your predominant racial type and dissimilarity from natives.
Of course, this can be couched (and even understood by practitioners) in entirely non-racial terminology, like Harvard does – they would just have a holistic psychometric definition of a desirable immigrant, derived, say, from anonymous surveys of natives' evaluation of character and assimilation success.
Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?
Is this supposed to be a trap? I would definitely recognize any accurate judgement like this as fair! Race can't mean you refuse to judge people as bad in certain ways the exact same way it can't mean you refuse to judge people as good in certain ways. Now, the way the human brain works, there's a very strong bias towards seeing more of a stereotypical negative trait in a member of another racial group than actually exists. Therefore, for this judgement to actually be accurate, some care needs to taken to account for this bias in the exact same way you account for any other cognitive bias if you actually want to be right about the world.
Goodhart's law isn't an overwhelming force that overwhelms everything else. We still accept legible measures in deciding who gets positions in every other aspect of life and, while obviously not perfect since nothing is in the real world, they work far better than just deciding based on race. Your argument here seems to be a generalized counterargument to any kind of meritocracy at all. Even if you accept some worst-case, all-powerful Goodhart, you can just change the measure when you notice it's turned into something harmful---make it a moving target to keep ahead of Goodhart.
You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else? I'm very curious to hear what possibly gave you the impression that I'm particularly good at manipulating bureaucracies. Is this just your "vague prior" based on perceived race?
I think this can also be interpreted as a general "you", somewhat awkwardly phrased. At least it didn't occur to me to be a personal attack until you wrote your reply, and as you observed, it would only make sense in a context where you'd be known as a beaurocratically savvy type.
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