Cuba would be a great travel destination.

Their cigars aren't as on par anymore as far as I know, but there's potential there, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic basically make the best ones last I checked.

Nicaragua and Dominican Republic are garbage compared to Cubans, still to this day. Several times while in the US (where I've lived in the past few years) I tried to smoke non-cuban cigars. Not once I found something that was remotely close to the worse cuban I've had.

My basic understanding is because of two factors: 1. The tobacco doesn't grow anywhere else like it does in Cuba. It's an island with very specific combination of soil and weather that can't be replicated. The tobacco leafs are huge in Cuba and that makes a big difference when making a cigar which ideally should use as few leafs as possible. 2. The best workers that know how to select, blend and roll a cigar are still all in Cuba. Other countries tried to replicate but they don't come close in terms of skills and knowledge.

I don't have sources for the two factors above but my experience tells me it adds up.

I only heard people complimenting non-cuban cigars here in the US. Nowhere else. Which sounds fair or else the entire cigar industry would have gone bankrupt without access to the best stuff. Overtime you won't find people in the US who understands what a cuban cigar is like because they have no exposure to it.

While the tobacco itself is unbeatable, Cuban cigars have quality control issues. You regularly run into draw issues, for example. Aging is typically required for best experience, which also isn't easy.

I smoke Olivas and Arturo Fuentes regularly, despite having access to Cubans.

I'll try those 2 you mentioned and see if it's to my taste. Dona Flor, made in Brazil, are pretty decent. Unfortunately they are not easy to come by near where I live.

It's been a while since I visited places outside the US, but one of the shocking things was travel ads for Cuba everywhere.

From what I can tell, US-Cuban relations seem to be at the whim of the US President. Most of the US population doesn't care; most of the rest of the world has fine relations with Cuba, but isn't going to pressure the US. Nobody is sending missiles to Cuba anymore.

When Florida was a swing state, that was enough to make every presidential candidate be pro embargo.

Now that Florida is a red state, it might be different.

"No, absolutely not. Don't even waste your time considering it. Castro ruined it and it will never be the same".

I think the moral is that for many Cubans the embargo isn't against the people, it's against the Cuban government, and they genuinely hate the government with every fiber of their existence. They hate what Castro took from them and have no dissolutions that letting up the embargo would strengthen that governments rule while only providing minuscule benefits to the people. Until the government regime changes in Cuba, any pressure we can apply is worth it.

The only time he makes the news in the west is when he mentions nuking some random European country, which for the record happens quite frequently.

You should never take anything he says seriously.

He's there to blow things out of proportion locally, he just happens to be translated from time to time for clicks. There's no significance to his words. He doesn't speak on behalf of Putin, he's not there to leak some super-secret internal plans for the future, he's just there to yap about how Russia can totally take over the entire Europe.

As a practical matter, Americans can travel to Cuba without much trouble. Several of my friends have gone.

Florida is important in Presidential elections.

US elections are structured such that dumb stuff like a relatively small—but loud—and also hopeless interest in a single US state can influence policy and make a whole bunch more lives worse for no good reason.

AFAIK that’s basically the story.

We have sanctions on Cuba for the same reason we have sanctions on Russia and Venezuela now- we don't want to fund what their government is doing, and allying with them gives us little to nothing in return.

That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change. I don't think anyone has the stomach for putting boots on the ground, though.

What is their government doing that is so terrible?

Anyway let's suppose Cuba is a brutal dictatorship, even though it really isn't by any metric. Why are there no sanctions on Saudi Arabia? Why no sanctions on Taiwan during the white terror? Why no sanctions on Chile when they threw alive protesters from flying helicopters? I could go on for a while.

Recent events have shown that to be very much not the case. Over the past few weeks we've had news of the Russian Navy paying port calls and the Chinese building major signals intelligence capabilities. Wouldn't it be better to have them as an ally?

It's always interesting to contrast our relationships with Cuba vs Vietnam. We fought a long hot war with Vietnam yet today we have good relations with them. Obviously we can't say we would have a good relationship with Cuba if we had been nicer to them but it certainly makes me think.

On the flip side, you have China, where US pretty much helped build up their economy and hoped for a peaceful and democratic outcome. How well did that go?

Seems more likely sanctions would cause a steady state where the sanctioned country is some n months/years behind where it would otherwise be, speaking as a complete geopolitical layman anyway.

Many senior government officials over the years, including then Vice President Cheney, have plainly said that our interest in Venezuela is their oil. The sanctions, as in any country, are about wanting control over their resources.

Most people are pushing for the latter, to get a more neutral approach to foreign relations.

There are opinions that come from different groups on the political spectrum, that pop up again and again and can be regarded as "common beliefs".

My comment is based on that.

I can tell you, not just the US.

See: farmers having an absolute chokehold on the EU despite virtually everyone hating them, and them only being a tiny percentage of population, votes or GDP.

Essentially, it's because producing food doesn't give you the right to be pampered by everyone else and make economically bad decisions.

In Europe specifically, it would be in part because of the "tractor protests" where tractors were mass driven into city centers in protest, especially the Netherlands because they didn't like being restricted on nitrogen pollution. It would be especially irksome when you can get most peoples' votes for bad policy just by saying "support farmers, they grow your food." Except that all that nitrogen in the Netherlands goes to actually growing exported food ($$)...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/16/nitrogen...

It is actually interesting, a state converting to single-party rule significantly reduces the electoral leverage it has.

And that still doesn't explain the continual drain happening, to this day, as is evidenced by this very article we're commenting on. What, are these 10% also filthy capitalists somehow?

As a Serb whose parents fled an eerily similar situation to Cuba's way back when for greener pastures to the literal other side of the planet, this thing where people blame the citizens rather than the worthless piece of shit government for fleeing these socialist hellholes is always an amusing one for me.

I received a compensation 60 years after WW2, but it was few thousand euros (many generations have passed). And by the way it was the polish, not Ukrainian government that compensated us.

Other than the revolutionary war from 1776 to 1785, the other break we had was from 1812-1815 during the War of 1812.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom%E2%80%93United_...

The bright side is, despite the suffering involved, moving to America is the greatest thing that could have happened to my family.

It’s a tale as old as time!

Russians were more aligned with usa tho...

They should've learned from the French making sure there's nobody left to hold a grudge.

The comment pokes fun at people holding grudges for that long, on behalf of their ancestors, and at the whole situation in general. Ultimately is is meant to make people think whether demanding reparations from a less well-off people is really a better idea than just moving on. If everyone held grudges like that, no two people on earth would have good relations and we'd all sit in our little caves brooding over some slight our neighbor's ancestors inflicted on our family ten generations ago.

No, I'm not arguing for genocide. But thanks for the laugh.

Most people fleeing Cuba blame current regime for their suffering with good reason. So they have a desire to see it overthrown.

> which after WW2 was one of the richest countries in the world

Oh yeah, I wonder what changed then.

Anyone who believes the US acts to punish evil authoritarians in defense of freedom and democracy is delusional. Look at our allies in the middle east.

Why does not the Communist regime in Cuba "open up"? Because they know the day Cuba becomes a multiparty state with elections -- they have to run out of the country. Both Cuban and Venezuelan elite along with many Caribbean states are active in Drug Dealings and Money Laundering.

Yes, the hawks in US have a role but they are not only active players, there are hawks in Cuba too.

Do something horrible to your neighbour - be surprised that he doesn't keep good behaviour torwards you.

Democrats took an L for freedom, prosperity and common sense and Republicans capitalized to win back the presidency.

If you understand the origin of the sanctions against Cuba, you know the answer to this question is that the US wants control over Cuba and their resources.

Trump reverted the relationship back to Cold War status when he took office.

There are many similar destinations, and all of them are still poor. Besides, Cuba has already tourists from Canada and Europe.

My guess their best chance is to start manufacturing for cheap. Close to US makes them more competitive. But for this to happen commies government has to go.

You’re going to need sources on that. Cubans are still the best dollar for dollar.

It's irrelevant. Hard-line socialist countries don't voluntarily decide to change their government: their countries collapse and start over again.

While sanctions on Cuba are irrelevant to the US these days, it doesn't change the fact that Cuba would be a dysfunctional society in any case. Venezuela was a resource rich nation and 7.7 million people fled (>20% of the population). The Soviet Union was one of the most resource-rich entities in the world, with similar failures.

I find it somewhat astonishing that people in tech—an industry built around the belief that well-built systems can produce good results—are so dismissive of the role of agency when it comes to these issues. Somehow it's America's fault that people are leaving Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico... and left to their own devices, those places would be paradise.

This is true of any regime which refuses to adapt to reality. And in any case it's more or less tautological: a "hardliner" is defined precisely by the refusal to budge even when it might be to their benefit.

For example, in this article is about white collar crime, it points out that many Somali-Americans were professionals back in Somalia. I'm not concerned about the crime because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society.

A Somali-American former investigator: why you’re hearing about fraud in my community

https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/07/17/a-somali-american-i...

You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are. The author of the article you linked to also exhorts the Somali immigrant community to not engage in crime.

> because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society.

History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).

It's clear that the national interest is in accepting skilled immigrants who migrate legally and are able to integrate fully into the host society, a la Teddy Roosevelt's dropping of the hyphen. It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.

American Jew here, who spent years living in France and Spain. I've heard the same polite euphemisms refering to Arabs and Gypsies from the mouths of members of the Front National. You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society.

One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?

It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups.

When the US ghettoized Chinese economic migrants, American politicians claimed they could never integrate. And yet the Chinese-American population is well integrated and hugely successful since the host society allowed it. Same with Jews in America, and increasingly with Hispanics.

Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?

I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group. Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states (something America does not have), in deep-seated xenophobia that causes social exclusion of immigrant or out-groups, and in the fact that its states' reasons for existence are based on tribal boundaries and wars for territory rather than on achieving broader democratic and economic flourishing by harnessing the capability of the whole population. And thus Europe presents neither a dream of integration nor a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French"). And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.

I also never felt any issue regarding Jewish people but considering this was after ww2 .. nobody would really say a thing either, but personally they never displayed anything noteworthy society wise. another non issue

Now it's African, northern African populations being at the forefront of news, but personally i had many more issues with them (and i'm partially brown so the chances of them thinking I'm too different are lower). regularly they displayed very low morals, aggressiveness, sudden high fanaticism toward religious principles they didn't really grasp, worse behavior in school.

My mother knew people from Asia (Vietnamese, Cambodians) fleeing from war, with no resources, not speaking french, nothing in common with Europe, they mentioned seeing some racism, yet they too ended up being a non issue. They end up being as the cliche quiet-asian-1st-in-class kid and that's the end of it.

It's possible France or other European countries have some underlying, hard to describe, notion of integration. It's less economical and more about mentality ? Maybe except UK, where it's often said that anybody will to work would rapidly integrate. I still can't say.

Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).

It's not that I even necessarily disagree with what you're saying but unfortunately your comment is 80% demagoguery and 20% substance.

> Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?

Possible different population samples that don't overlap as much? By and large (unless you're crossing the Mexican border I guess...) immigrating to the US has been significantly harder than to the EU even if you're educated/relatively high skilled. The US can afford to be much more picky.

> One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?

There are 2x more Jews in France than before WW2? Guess from where most of the threats/attacks towards them are coming? (hint: not the host society).

What gives me a bit of hope is that this seem to be quite rapidly changing, at least in part of society. I have been working at a company in central Stockholm where none! of about 100 employees had even immigrated parents. I’m working in a large company right now where some departments still are 100% native Swedes, but other, that see what a waste it is to not use all this talent, employ 50% or more first or second generation of immigrants.

The welfare system doesn't work well with integration either. If all that is available to you are bad jobs due to your lack of job market / language skills, why work if welfare pays almost the same?

I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.

As a (technically) second generation migrant born and raised I doubt this. This is a sentiment mostly only shared by isolated liberal wing of the society, who probably don't really mingle with expat population beyond surface chatter.

And it's not just some racism sentiment but as the post you replied to insinuate, general xenophobic / supremacist sentiments. I even know other (white) Europeans with great education and jobs getting sick of this place because just how condescending and unfriendly people in general are, for petty things such as unperfect Swedish. (Native English speaking migrant being the only exception)

Tbh I doubt it. If it's anything like German society, which is incredibly insular, just being non-German is enough to make you unwelcome.

If you live in Sweden then you will also know that the state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...). These areas are then labeled as unsafe because of a slightly elevated crime rate and because they're labeled unsafe, swedes start moving out and quality of services and house prices drop and the downward spiral continues until the area becomes a ghetto even though they're usually not that bad.

Although SFI exists to teach Swedish to immigrants, the quality of the teaching is not great in most schools.

That's where the integration effort stops.

Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society. That's how you end up with people living in upscale parts of Stockholm for 10+ years and can barely form a sentence in Sweden.

No it doesn't. Refugees are placed in municipalities all over Sweden but most choose to move to the big cities as soon as they can and end up in these districts because they are the cheapest.

> slightly elevated crime rate.

Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.

> That's where the integration effort stops.

Simply not true. There are oodles of integration efforts all over Sweden at many levels; public projects, local initiatives and on top of that immigration heavy areas gets more public funding than average for schools, after-school activities, park/street cleanings, etc.

> Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society.

That's because Swedish is a small language and most professionals don't plan on staying. Most Swedish professionals speak English on a native speaker level and most large Swedish companies has English as the official corporate language. In my experience most non-English speakers that comes to Sweden spend their efforts on becoming fully proficient in English while the English speakers are delighted to find that they can use English everywhere in society. Learning Swedish has a very low priority and after a couple of years most expats grows tired of the cold, darkness, taxes, low salaries, etc.

How to enforce that: fine whoever sells/rents to them outside where they are supposed to live. And threaten to deport them if they move without the years passing or showing they’ve integrated / learned the language / culture etc.

Obviously, exceptions can be made for reasons of safety or being closer to a job they got, but then the same procedure should be followed (spread out and surrounded by neighbors willing to help integrate them).

They should also have access to resource to accelerate the cultural integration, like meetups and schools etc.

Facebook and Uber and AirBNB did it in social networking and transportation and housing, respectively, starting in colleges and cities.

I am doing it for all kinds of things, and sometimes selling it to political campaigns such as I did with https://qbix.com/yang2020.pdf but that is not really my goal, just to help some politicians was never my goal

I put out a few apps like Groups on iOS and so far we attracted a million small community leaders in 100 countries, who have our app on their phones. So the first phase (bottom-up) is under way

I even launched blockchain applications worldwide, that are actually helpful: https://intercoin.org/applications

including working on launching a fund for refugees that will be crowdfunded by people worldwide: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/2688

Years I go I met with Rohingya Project guys and working together to create the R Coin, Identity and Academy on decentralized platform for the Rohingya refugees: https://rohingyaproject.com/platform/

Now this year for the first time, we got a VC (Balaji’s fund) leading our round for Network States. Balaji is a big proponent of these (kind of like Estonia’s e-residency), his fund also has Naval Ravikant, Fred Wilson and others on their investment commitee… basically a lot of people involved in Web3 (CoinBase, CoinList, etc.)

I’m going to Singapore on Sept 22nd for their conference to meet with Vitalik and others: https://balajis.com/p/network-state-conference

So if you’re serious about doing the first part of the solution (software) I recommend you can do it in software, and working on the ground with small towns and neighborhoods. I already have a platform doing just that, so if you want to do it locally, we can reach out about doing something together. We’re eventually looking to go to every part of the world, but currently we’re at a stage of just doing local pilots. Look at my profile and you can email me.

And/or come to the Singapore conference on September 22nd and let’s all meet and discuss there in person :)

But PS: our platform isn’t only about resettling refugees, although it is a big part. It’s about dating, job boards, local currencies, and much more. I think that if Donald Trump and Co get into office again, there will be a huge “crypto summer” but we need to use crypto for actual applications like the one I mentioned, with global donation crowdfunding and transparency and benefitting the stateless people on the ground, instead of crazy ponzi schemes round 4 LOL.

It should be said that the pre-WW2 Jewish population of Sweden was miniscule, but that Swedes took great personal risks to save these refugees from a culture they did not know.

The rise in antisemitic attacks in France, conducted entirely by Muslim immigrants, is a feature of the weakness of the French pluralist/secularist and legal state which again appears to be failing to integrate new arrivals into its Enlightenment ideals. One hopes Sweden doesn't fall into the same trap. But my gripe is about integration, and historically Sweden has not had to deal with anything on the scale of what is happening now.

I agree that our social, educational and cultural institutions are doing an absolutely atrocious job of integrating immigrant populations.

Despite that, I find that most people I know from the Maghreb are actually quite well integrated, mostly because as an educated, well-to-do person I hang around with other educated, well-to-do people and they tend to be quite nice to get along with.

I grew up in Houston (arrived age 6, left just before my 18th birthday), and honestly I find the way 'native'/anglo Texans treat Mexicans (more properly, Hispanics, but over there everyone calls them Mexicans) to be probably slightly worse on average than the way French people treat people of African descent.

However, the French welfare state + my god our educational system is so fucked it's not even funny mean that it's possible to get certain pathological cases where an immigrant will move to France, live off the welfare state while railing against everything French (post-colonial hatred) and then use that sweet welfare money to plan and execute terrorist attacks.

I don't blame that one the innate character of French people though, just on badly designed social institutions. Our current welfare state was modified by well-meaning leftists who were aiming to make something more egalitarian, but instead made everything worse, and then modified by well-meaning neoliberals who were aiming to make something more efficient, but instead made everything worse, and now it's starting to look like a big ugly pile of legacy code written in Perl.

I'm not blaming the character of the French any more than the character of the Arabs, I just think the system is not built in a way like America where assimilation is the goal of either party.

Being educated helps a lot. Being wealthy helps a lot. Speaking English helps a lot. Being white helps a lot. Not having these attributes is not a deal-breaker (we DID manage to elect a black president), but they do significantly effect how someone and their children might be able to access the greater community, education, jobs, and more, and particularly outside of the immigrant community they might belong to. This is exacerbated by the state of our geography: America is big, and spread-out, and was built in its current form with an eye toward advantaging car-ownership and ethnic/economic segregation. It is possible to come to this country as someone who is not American, become American, and then become fabulously successful as an American, but it's not a given, and there are often headwinds.

It's a difficult problem. We shouldn't despair because our governments haven't been able to tackle it. It's one worth continuing to try at because the alternatives (terrorism and internecine violence on one end, a form of genocide on the other) are horrible.

At least no one can pretend that Larry was missing the skills to handle the job, Perl community neither laked dedication on par with the flowing resources, and what they build still make stand a significant part of the internet diligently.

US specifically already has extremely high crimes rates (compared to most developed countries) which might overshadow any effect immigrants might have.

We also have weaker regulations that allow you to start a business with basically $20 and a pressure washer, and you can legalize it with a foreign passport. The English speaking countries generally have lowest barriers to start a business which is a good release valve when you can produce value but racists won't hire you (customers will at low enough price).

I suspect illegals and foreigners in general don't cause so many problems here because its easier to survive helping us than hurting us.

This isn't adjusted by immigrant education/background though?

e.g. in the UK a slightly higher proportion of foreign born residents have tertiary degrees, in France it's the opposite (especially if we look at Île-de-France).

Australia especially is extremely picky (e.g. 60% (immigrants) vs 40%(native))

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/a0fc61dd-en.pdf?expi...

And I assume there might be other significant cultural/class/etc. differences. e.g. in the US 53% of all Arab-Americans are Christian. I can't quickly find any statistics but I assume in Europe the ratio is very different. Not saying that this specific example necessarily has an impact but differences in other characteristics might.

Generally English speaking countries tend to have and advantage at attracting highly educated/productive immigrants presumably both due to language and other cultural, economic and social factors. It's not at all surprising that their children do a better than average.

I think overall Germans, deep down, don't really want us here. We are here to pay for the pension bill—that's literally it. But since we are here, they want us to completely assimilate and give up everything about yourself that came from our homelands. There is no respect nor appreciation for any external culture, so your "differences" have negative value, because you have to Be German.

I dated a third generation Turkish German for 2 years whilst I lived here and she faced fairly casual racism from white Germans with a regularity that would be unthinkable in the UK. She was often getting complimented on how good her German (it's her mother tongue) was or asked about what country she came from (she was born and raised in Germany). It's a racist country. Don't believe the PR about how liberal Germany is—it's liberal if you're white and German.

And I say all this as a white Western European. It's going to be so much harder for the average Syrian or Afghan.

Integration is hard - I recently went to an intergration event at a local church - almost no Germans there - and also the different foreign communities didn't really interact with each other. E.g. there's severe hatered between the different groups of Turkish people.

I think there are a lot of outsiders in German society - ethnic integration is hard. Maybe Special interest groups - like Computer Meetups or Maker-Spaces can help with Integration into a new Clan?!

Even though the Austrian girl had heavy accent and technically being the migrant, her "germanic" name and white face gave her access to the most basic thing:housing; something a German born Iranian (studying engineering, well educated and mannered), will struggle to have. One of the landlord she met, an old lady, even explicitly said she was happy "a German" applied and she felt she would take care of the place better.

Similar discrimination exist in Japan, where I lived. All my European expat friends complained about how they struggle getting apartments because landlord silently decline based on their foreigner name.

Very few of them even want to BELIEVE the above Austrian girls story. The common reply is always questioning the story. Maybe some other reason, it's an anecdote, how can she be sure. (when the Austrian girl tell her German friends same questioning occur)

At the core of it the unfriendliness of northern Europe + Germany is a double punch: you're often silently discriminated, and when you try to voice it, you're often gaslighted.

At least in USA or other English speaking places those voices are allowed to be voiced, without condemnation (people will debate it, but we won't even get there for places like Germany or Sweden )

Some Germans may like to think of Germany as a country of immigrants, but it just isn't, regardless of how many live here.

> Continental Europeans have very bad experiences with British tourists

Funnily enough I've never been anywhere where our trashy British tourists go (why would I?). So actually I don't know what they're like, but I've heard very bad things. I've also heard even worse things about the Dutch, though.

> And I am quite sure I get support from around a 100 Million dead guys

Well whoever they are that you're talking about, they are dead, so I am not sure they're in a position to support you at all. Having said that, I wonder what the all the dead Europeans and Jews murdered by Germans would think of Germany.

> But the shithole you live in of course may vary

I live and work in Hamburg.

>Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.

Yes, because of how the majority ethnic German population treated them and continues to treat them. It's a very racist country. That's what living and working in Germany and falling in love with a Turkish German taught me. Thank you for the cultural exchange.

You are calling me xenophobic and second the point I made? Are you mentally ill?

And btw, never heard anything worse or even comparable about the Dutch.

And btw 2, never about Scots, either.

> Well whoever they are that you're talking about, they are dead,

I guess you know very well who they are. The people killed in India by the British colonialism, according to the study of an US american institute. And yes, other monkeys are murderish assholes, too. Especially when the uniformism of the nation state mindset kicks in.

And you should discuss your argument that the dead cannot give support with the Jews.

> That's what living and working in Germany and falling in love with a Turkish German taught me.

I doubt your objectivism.

Reader: never let anyone tell you Germans aren't nationalistic. They are as nationalistic as anyone, they are simply more subtle about it and eschew overt symbolism.

>I doubt your objectivism.

Yes, to truly understand the racism of Germany, I have to witness someone who I do not give a shit about being victimised. If I care about that person, then it doesn't count and I am not allowed to form an opinion. Lol.

You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear. Yes, the same exact complains that some French have nowadays. At some point facts are facts, and victimization doesn't work. For the record, a lot of other nationalities blended without issues within two generations (Portugese, Polonese, Vietnamese, etc.)

That seems like a bizarre claim... If anything the attacks, discrimination etc. would have encouraged assimilation. Voluntary conversion to Christianity wasn't particularly uncommon either (forced violent conversion also occurred). Even when national governments started expelling their entire Jewish populations staying and getting to keep all of your property ussually was an option. Yet most chose to leave rather than convert.

Yes, converted Jews might have faced discrimination and even violence (this depended a lot on the willingness to abandon your old customs and practices and varied hugely based on time and place, but seemingly became a bigger issue at the very end of the middle ages) but ussually they managed to more or less fully assimilate in a few generations.

But contrast that with, for instance, Kaifeng[0]. The biggest fear of Jewish believers is that they will encounter a society like America or China which swallows their talents whole and integrates them fully.

Put another way, it is a fear right now in segments of the Jewish community that without antisemitism, Jews would cease to exist. And there is a truth to this borne out by history. In Jewish communities it is practically taken for granted that if we had been treated equally, most of us would have given up our identity ages ago.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews

Have you considered that perhaps if the idea of integration itself is considered abhorrent by a culture then that culture will very rarely be accepted anywhere?

Or to put it another way: if everywhere one goes smells like feces, maybe one should check their own boots

They want the benefits of being part of the community without being part of the community

For an example, take a look at the history of the Cagots in France, who were (are) ethnically identical to other French but due to their psychological treatment and ostracizatìon were forced into tight communities for survival.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot

This can happen to any arbitrary group of people sufficiently singled out for any reason. A similar case exists in Japan. Then if that group remains together for fear of the abuse they receive, the broader population says "they want to be separate".

Also, your shit on boots metaphor is highly offensive, but I'm answering you as if you aren't a bigot. Sometimes the reason people end up as bigots is that no one treated them with respect and gave them complete answers.

Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.

Jewish people have generally been treated abominably for the last 2000 years, but surely he most marginalised groups don't even exist any more, because they were wiped out entirely.

> because that's denying a group of people their homeland

History is full of peoples who left or were kicked out of some original homeland. Jewish people are not special in that regard. My ancestors left Saxony about 1500 years ago to conquer an island, and kicked the inhabitants out to the periphery. That's more recent than the expulsion of the Jews 2000 years ago.

I think Israel should exist in the sense that it already exists so let's favour the status quo. But clearly we've learned that it's a completely stupid way to found new countries. Let's not make more ethnostates in other random parts of the world where people already live. We tried it, it turned out that it makes a mess.

Think about how stupid what you wrote is in the context of a hypothetical second Jewish country that also claims to represent all Jews.

It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.

Perhaps you mean that Germany and Austria have no right to exist, because Germanic tribes are just recent migrants there in the last 2000 years who came from the Urals or something? But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?

> But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?

Indeed, that's why the founding of Israel was so problematic. Living somewhere 2000 years ago does not trump the rights of the people who lived there for the last 2000+ years. If we are to be consistent, Berlin must be returned to the West Slavs, London to the Celts, and so on... it's nonsense.

In the West we have (at least) started to acknowledge the crimes of colonialism and the various wars of conquest over the centuries. For us it is not existential, to acknowledge that what the British did during the slave trade is not existential. But for Israel it is, so many Israelis have to just pretend that the founding of Israel was perfectly just and fair, when it so obviously was an act of total lunacy when looked at through today's eyes. Please note, I do support the continued existence of Israel, because I favour the status quo, but its founding was an act of monumental stupidity.

Having colonial powers create an state in a place where people already lived, and which did not consent to its creation, was a terrible terrible idea that led to tremendous suffering a loss of life over the past 75 years. Acknowledging this is not antisemitic.

okay I'm Jewish, and I think you're over-simplifiying when you say

> Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic

For example, you can find here: https://tsedek.fr/

a (French) collective of Jews who oppose Zionism on anti-colonial grounds. I don't personally agree with them (my own views are more accurately summed up here: https://arielche.net/Lydie.html ) but I do think that it is possible to have a logically coherent worldview that says "Jews are to be respected and treated like any other human, but the state of Israel should not exist".

Personally, I don't believe that, I believe the state of Israel should exists, although I believe that bombing your neighbors is actually a piss-poor approach to national security, and honestly buying off the Palestinians by building them schools and hospitals is a lot cheaper in the long run than killing them with expensive jet fighters, but I don't go around accusing every anti-Zionist of anti-semitism.

I know some anti-Zionists personally, and they're what I'd call humanist, who believe the basic idea that, to quote Jefferson, "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Are you scared of definitions? Do you feel like dictionaries are written to gaslight you? Don't blow it out of proportion.

This assumes those things help one integrate. The Unites States notably doesn't have these things to the same degree that countries in Europe do. This means immigrants in America need to work. And work is a strong forcing function for socialization and integration.

> You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear.

Do you have a citation for that?

Of course it's easier to integrate a magnitude fewer refugees, and there will be less issues overall.

So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.

My understanding is that pre-WW2 Europe you had community groups that dealt with their people. So in a Jewish neighborhood, you had powerful Rabbis or other religious leaders that dole out law. These unofficial community leaders were given a lot of autonomy as to how to deal with their subjects. You see hints of that today in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn where you have un-offical private police [0]. I don't think its as simple as saying they were excluded or ghettoized.

But that begs the question, what does it mean to be a country? Some people think its just magical land, like you step onto the country, get a piece of paper that says you're from that country and that's it. I think every country has a cultural identity. Much less so for America, since its the only country I know of where you can call yourself American despite not being born there or have any blood relatives from there but no one would bat an eye. But even there, some things are anti-American. Things like women being second class citizens (e.g. women can't drive or are forced to cover up). Or lawlessness (e.g. riding illegal scooters the wrong way down the street).

I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If you want to treat women like second class citizens or don't have respect for private policy or rule of law, you shouldn't be allowed to come to law abiding Western country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/nyregion/brooklyns-privat...

>> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there

But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough.

And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.

In America on the other hand, land was forcibly taken from the natives by colonists centuries ago. Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up. Forgetting for a moment that most capital is held by a single ethnicity, and they’re definitely not going to give it away for free.

This is why I think welfare states in Europe are on the wrong path toward trying to integrate foreign populations, not because it takes resources away from native Europeans (the demand side) but because it chokes off the supply side of what immigrants should expect to need to add and contribute to the society.

Uh. I want to hope that this is just a oversimplification intended to get a reaction.

Yes, US does have real issues that it needs to address those in order to make social mobility reasonably attainable. Arguably, it is a lot harder to "make it" now.

I am just an anecdote here, but, I am a first generation immigrant. I have a house, a dog and a partner. Also next week, I am taking my vacation and buying a vette ( well, I scheduled a test drive -- didn't mentally commit to buying yet ). I do not consider myself a second class citizen. I am not rich, but I can't say I am poor either. My kid is starting school ( private, public one is not great here -- ok, but not great ).

I honestly do not think I would have been able to do the same in the old country.

I absolutely accept that I might not be the norm and the current version of capitalism needs to be reined in, but, honestly, if you do want to drive that point, I think you need a better argument.

I don't think it is controversial at all to say that the US has much higher economic mobility than Europe.

There’s a reason people do their startups in the US, there’s a reason the smart Nords move to the US rather than the other way around. There’s a reason Y Combinator is American.

I encourage you to try innovating in Europe (or just the Nordic countries). Please prove me wrong, for the sake of Europe.

To be fair, it’s certainly not _impossible_ to move up, but it’s relatively much harder, which is the point.

America is totally a place where a hardworking, intelligent immigrant can become fairly wealthy (assuming no catastrophic bad luck, ie. getting shot because the second amendment says that everyone should have a full-auto assault rifle), but it does not have a monopoly on that :)

The quick answer is "very little".

Germany is not a land of opportunity, it is a land of relative comfort, with laws and regulations in place to protect the lives of German boomers. Immigrants will never go far in Germany, but they will be relatively comfortable.

disagree with this as a French person.

That "ethnic nationalist core" is the French equivalent of Trump supporters who say "America is a white (anglo) Christian nation".

the country currently known as France was originally Celtic Gaul, which was then conquered by Romans, then by various Germanic tribes, most notably the Franks who gave the country it's current name, and didn't really unify until fairly late. Even to this day, you'll find people in Brittany identify more as 'Breton' then French sometimes, despite the efforts of the French state to kill that local identity in the late 19th century. We're a nation of bastards, and always have been.

You'll have sad, sorry people on the far right who conjure up some imaginary ideal of a "true, ethnic French character", but it's like the KKK members in America talking about being 'true Americans'. It's a fallacy.

The people with high levels of melanin with parents that arrived in the country less than 50 years ago playing for our national soccer team are, at least to my mind, just as French as my father whose family lived around Saint-Etienne for the past 300+ years, even if some of them act like the equivalent of "that girl from Jersey shore saying she's Italian because her last name is Spaghetti despite not actually speaking a word of Italian and having never been there" sometimes. :)

If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world.

The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey.

Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled.

Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.

So I suspect but won't condemn the parent poster of conflating "values" with a blood/soil/religious code, but that is not what I meant talking about American values, which are applicable to all comers without surrendering one's belief system. In theory, French values should be the same. Jefferson thought so. And in practice, as you point out, there is a deep well of nativists in both countries who believe they possess some further mystic undefined value system which excludes this or that foreign practice. But as you say the law is enforced and the state is preeminent; the difference being that this simple equality under law is what people come to America to seek, with some conviction that they can become American while fusing those liberties to the elements of their culture that they wish to maintain.

I would strongly recommend the following essay, which I read in an ethics class and found extremely powerful. The essay argues that humans can relatively easily be persuaded or intimidated into helping murder other humans, as long as they are introduced to it in the “correct” way. So we should understand what that way is and be vigilant against it.

Destroying the innocent with a clear conscience: A sociopsychology of the Holocaust

John P Sabini, Maury Silver Survivors, victims, and perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, 329-358, 1980

That being said, you can't practice Christianity or Judaism openly in Saudi Arabia to this day. Looking at it from Mecca, the point of origin of the Caliphates, to their furthest extent into Europe in Spain (or the Balkans) you can still see the traces of extremist religious bans existing on both sides. Jews tend to get caught in the middle and slaughtered at each turn, as they need to seek accommodations with whichever larger religion is in power in order to survive, and then are seen as enemies by the other one.

All this is written on the streets and buildings of Granada, Spain, where ancient Jewish stars adorn old buildings where there are no Jews, where the oldest church was once a mosque, and the Alhambra, symbol of the Caliphate and its civilization, is the largest tourist attraction in Europe... where the markets sell everything Arabic yet the day to day interaction of Muslims and Christians is fraught, each understanding very well their own history in the place. And where it is very, very strange to be one of the only Jews... with both Christians and Muslims hating you and claiming to protect you.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Would someone need to exclusively repress Jews for that repression to meaningfully affect Jews' economic and human rights trajectory?

That sounds as a very weak perspective to start with. That is, what if "they" are not "innocent"? There is definitely a standard out there that will allow to judge us as guilty of some heretic behavior, whoever we are.

Surely it would not be very wise to judge a book by its title, though.

I my country Jews lived for 800 years until they left without saying Godbye in 1940s. But we have never held them hostage - they were free to move to Ottoman Empire or North Africa if that suited them better. Or behind Pale of Settlement.

Living in ghettoes, sitting shiva for members of community that married non-Jews or assimiliated, being under influence of fanatical rabbis didn't help with integration.

In the UK we have large numbers of both Pakistani and Indian immigrants. One group has integrated mostly successfully in all walks of life and the other one has not.

Hard to argue that this has not been a consequence of choice although plenty of experts, who have never lived with 100 miles of these communities, tell us otherwise.

When the UK began deindustrializing, they were extremely hard hit because the factories shut down.

Poverty and Northern England racism (BNP was normalized and doing hate crimes well into the early 2000s, schools were shite with grammar schools closing, etc) kept Mirpuris stuck in the ghetto.

And trust me - a Brown guy - when I say that tbe UK is miles more racist and passive aggressive to Desis compared to the US or Canada.

Why integrate in a country that keeps being passive aggressive and using your community as a scapegoat.

This is why my parents moved to North America instead of Europe in the 1990s - heck my dad had an offer to work for ARM plc in Cambridge back then around the initial IPO.

None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany.

I'll get amazing schacenfreude when Labour finishes signing the FTA with India in a couple months and Rolls Royce and Dyson begin slowly moving operations.

The UK recently had a Prime Minister of Indian descent, that he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling of racism is quite remarkable given he subsequently was unable to demonstrate a talent for anything.

And the US had an African American President yet police brutality incidents still occur.

And that Prime Minister has anyhow left the UK and returned to California (a couple blocks from the Santa Monica Pier). Some GSB alums are setting up a VC Fund for that PM post-Downing Street as we speak.

Hell, his business career only started AFTER he immigrated to the US and then returned to the UK to work at TCM.

> he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling P Money is the ultimate equalizer in a country as status obsessed as the UK.

Sunak attended an independent school which his parents were able to afford being specialists.

Grammar Schools were shut down in the 80s-90s and comprehensives continue to underperform independent schools in placing students in Russell Group programs.

If you're parents were working class, you statistically will remain working class.

Intergenerational Social Mobility remains lows in the UK [0][1][2][3], and add to that economic depression in the North+Midlands and the very real othering that happens in the UK and that has caused the Mirpuri community to remain economically deprived.

--------

In the US I never get asked where I'm from, or told that "my English is excellent", or after a couple pints with coworkers get told "you're one of the good ones". Yet I've faced this kinda BS ALL THE TIME whenever I'm in the UK for work. It's worse on the mainland.

Fundamentally, in the US I am not treated as a token nor do I face microagressions. In the UK or Mainland Europe I have to deal with both.

[0] - https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/from-briefin...

[1] - https://ifs.org.uk/news/social-mobility-continues-fall-and-m...

[2] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insigh...

[3] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-4446.1...

Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population. How would you integrate a culture that explicitly rejects integration without changing the culture itself?

Can we be more specific please?

I live in an European country and have not observed what you're describing here.

There are individuals and groups that have tendencies like you describe, but the generalization doesn't hold in my eyes.

I've had refugees in my family, inner circle, at workplaces and so on. The most general observation I can make is that people who tend to flee or migrate from authoritarian, politically oppressive places tend to be very appreciative of social democratic systems.

Other times may have different outcomes because countries and cultures change. Spain for example is a completely different country from what it was in the 80s, economically and culturally.

When you live in a place, and you see the same people showing up in stats, and people see the same behavior over and over and over and over, it's about time to quit calling people things and admit that something is going on and we should do things differently.

And if you don't then someone will show up promising to deal with it.

Obviously the US being a land of immigrants with most commonly spoken language in the world helps a lot too. The fact Europe isn't like the US doesn't make it xenophobic. Compared to pretty much anything except the US, it's still among the most accepting towards people of different cultures.

Some poor indian has no advantage coming to Spain compared to someone from the Magreb, in fact we could argue quite the opposite as their support networks/country of origin are pretty far away.

Or even ask, how much should they integrate? I'm in the UK. Jewish communities seem to have held on to a certain cohesion, and kept their traditions alive well past when the natives gave up on their own traditions and communities

I will speak from the perspective of one who emigrated to the US.

Every new group is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" may find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.

Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.

In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth? Why hasn't this happened to the Somalians mentioned elsewhere? The Muslims of Dearborn?

Or look at Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:

* Indian Hindus

* Indian Sikhs

* Indian and Pakistani Muslims

Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class <http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>. Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain. But the outcomes are completely different.

I will ask you the same question you posed. Are these differences in outcome the groups' fault? Or the host society's fault?

Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].

Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

It is only recently that some white Brits may have started clueing on to this. While these trends were emerging, this was definitely not the case.

And even now, it very often is not the case. To give an example, plenty of Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds have names and surnames that <1% of white Brits could place as being of that background. This isn't rare at all, unlike e.g. Arab names that indeed most can tell apart.

W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.

Doesn't that presuppose the conclusion? That such emigrants should be received regardless of how fundamentally different their hard drives' formatting is? Why should that be?

If South Korea did not have strong familial and ethnic ties with North Koreans, it would never accept any NK defectors at all, and said differences in software would a big reason why. Heck, one can imagine the South putting up walls to prevent a large-scale influx of North Koreans after the Pyongyang regime collapses.

They ruled Algeria for about 130 years, and Tunisia and Morocco for less than half that. Syria and Lebanon for a measly 26 years. That's barely a blip in historical terms. Plus some bits of West Africa with Muslim populations. That hardly counts as "a good portion of the Muslim world."

So it's rather decades here, not centuries. And more like "strategic chunks", instead of "good portion". Let's not conflate limited colonial holdings with some kind of vast Islamic empire under French rule.

Yes. And even after the institutionalized racism was banned in various forms, the social system of racism continues to this day in the form of lower wages for the same jobs, less chance of hiring or buying a home with the same qualifications.

What I am saying is that this is the indigenous European attitude toward migrants, and it is creating generations of ghettoized people who no longer believe they can integrate, just as generations of Black people in America gave up on integration, seeing that they were still kept out on a daily basis even after having achieved legal equality.

Neither is "Punjabi", "Gujarati", or "Pahari" which are most South Asians in the UK.

I'm South Asian American with family in Europe, and in all honestly Asians in Europe aren't as well integrated because of Europeans.

The US and Canada is nowhere as passive aggressively racist as Europe is (well, Massachusetts is very similar in it's attitude).

In much of North America, there is still buy-in for the "Horatio Alger" story and communities are fairly used to immigrants.

Which Jews? Ultraorthodox don't integrate very well in Israel, for instance.

The Haredi (ultraorthodox) movement itself is a reaction to urban Jews who wished to assimilate when such a thing became conceivable in the 19th C. And this is a ghetto mentality. In American terms, your question would be equivalent to "which Black people?" Implying that people who claim and cling to ghetto culture have a hard time integrating. But that 1. dismisses the role that ghettoization had on creating a subculture in the first place, and then 2. pretends the subculture itself is the reason for failure to integrate, i.e. that it's the cause rather than the effect, and 3. serves to allow and excuse and justify the mainstream of society projecting their negative perceptions of that subculture onto individual members of the same ethnic group who would like to integrate without completely renouncing their unique heritage. And in the Jewish case, even complete renunciation wasn't enough, so perhaps the ghetto culture had a point.

We Europeans love to look down upon America when it comes to stuff like functional government, bicycle paths and public services, but wrt immigration we’re so far behind the US, it’s not even funny.

> a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French")

We really need to copy this vibe wholesale from the US (and Canada). That people can move here but even their grandchildren won’t feel that they’re properly French (or in my case, Dutch) is obscene.

I like your observation that the root cause is the ethnic character of our states but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a note or two out of the American playbook. Truth is we’re not even trying.

Instead we’re hopelessly split between the left who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there’s a problem (and calls you a racist when you try), and the right who want to hold onto some ethnic nation state pipedream that we never were and never will be.

Europe is not the US, it can't be, and that doesn't mean we're at fault of everything. Many poor migrants come and do ok and have the same opportunities and challenges that others who fail.

But somehow is always the same subset we think about.

To lock people inside their little immigrant identity groups, even when done out of some loving inclusive anti-racism vibe, has the adverse effect of what’s intended. It’s totally possible to be Dutch and Turkish and we should celebrate that, not fight it.

No matter how many decades one lives in the Netherlands, one would never be seen as "Dutch". Whereas a Mexican living for 10 years in the USA and throwing BBQs in his backyard would be seen as 100% American.

Not going to write novel about this complex topic but in US, if you fail career/financially wise, society lets you easily die homeless on streets, nobody really bats an eye and everybody is focused on 'american dream', chasing money and career. Not so much in Europe. This stressor for newcomers aligns people towards direction that is actually beneficial to native society, unless they fail and turn to highly punished crime. Here in Europe we are often benevolent with social help (sometimes too much I'd say), and abuse is not uncommon, especially with migrants since systems were often not designed with this in mind. Most people perform very differently if they have firm pressure on them from many/all directions vs not so much.

Also, absolutely nothing you write is relevant about ie Switzerland, which works a bit more like US in terms of those pressures and it shows on the ground.

The issue is easily 10 levels deeper and wider, no point drilling into all of that. But please refrain from reductionism and clearly very US-centric and confident view and judging of society you clearly don't understand that much.

You as an American can move to France, and you'll never be considered French. Doesn't matter if you speak french every day for the rest of your life with the most perfect French accent the world has ever heard. And if you and your American wife have kids in France after living in France for 20 years, your kid isn't French either.. even if he lives there for another 80 years. Better hope your kid finds a french wife, or his kids won't be french either.

The idea that you move to a country and you're one of them is an American concept.

Now I decided to myself live in Japan and I hear the very same speech as yours again and again about my host country. Yet my experience is very positive, I have integrated well and made my life here, and I never felt like I wasn't accepted.

But of course it took a lot of work to get there. Learning a new language, getting familiar with the local culture and embracing it is far from easy. The problem I see with some foreigners here is that they simply don't do this work and keep living in their own (often unhappy) bubble. Or even refuse to embrace some local customs because they are convinced that their own culture's way of doing things is superior to that.

> The idea that you move to a country and you're one of them is an American concept.

Not a very old one[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphenated_American

I wonder why you would think that. France is one of the few countries were it does work like this.

Unlike the US, in France it's not common to even ask where someone "comes from" if they speak French, most people will just assume you're French. After all, one of the current candidate Prime Ministers is half Vietnamese, and a former Prime Minister (somewhat candidate today as well I guess) was Spanish. But they are both as French as anyone else without question, because being French is not an exclusive identity (traditionally at least, but the rise of the extreme right these days is trying to change that).

Of course you will have the French nationality, and of course we’ll consider you French! Don’t even need a French wife - I have many friends like this.

I might not consider you French if you scream “I hate France, vive l’Algérie” everyday, but a LOT of people will consider you French and, quote, “More French than the right-wing extremists”. Oh, the irony. You can say you hate France and all of the people in the center of Paris and Lyon will consider you are a good French.

So no, what you are saying is blatantly false.

So, if we're concerned about crime, let's create a set of laws where we can A) get the immigrants we need for demographic and workforce reasons, but B) where we can actually screen and be selective.

Plugging our ears and relying upon illegal migrants isn't going to result in good outcomes.

> It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.

The desirable place is somewhere in the middle. We benefit from distinct identities and varied culture, but we also need to reach enough of a common ground to pull as one nation and for two random people to be able to get along meaningfully.

A whole lot of joys that I experience in life come from the ways we're varied, but breaking into enclaves would prevent those joys and weaken us.

We tend to reach various kinds of overreactions. Respect for diversity is great, but not to the point to completely reject integration. The avoidance of appropriation-- avoiding adopting traditions of another culture without attribution or respect-- is important, but not to the extent that it prevents mixing or getting along.

I'm not sure that's true. For example, in the United States, it took numerous generations of German-Americans to fully integrate into society, with towns in Wisconsin speaking a dialect of German well into the 1940s. Despite this lack of cultural integration, these cities experienced very little crime.

Another way to look at it is that immigrant groups bring parts of their old world with them; German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture and established it in their new country.

Did they? I can't speak to the crime rate of the German empire, but a very common reason to immigrate, in addition to availability of farm land, was to avoid the draft (low social trust). The slow rate of assimilation is also a signal that these were not people coming from a "high-social-trust" background.

But, to add to and enforce OP's point, their cultures were a larger schism away and they instead held on and entrenched their identities (to their objective detriment, no matter your moral stance). Meanwhile, Anglo, Franco, German, Dutch, etc cultures all kind of melded into the early "White American" identity; due to the general ease of assimilation.

However, I did a quick search for every sentence containing the word Australia, and found nothing that seemed to back up the claim.

But why is so damn hard to also solidly insist on an orderly border? The US is a proper country with borders. It cannot be if you shoot or sneak in you're served like the wilds of old western bar frontier living. That's not operationally effective.

I want both.

It's congress far, far, far more than any president that is responsible for taking a 0 on all this.

This is especially true for second-generation immigrants. First generation immigrants are general less likely to commit crimes, but in countries like Germany and France the rate rises significantly with the second generation. That doesn't happen in the US or Canada, for example.

The children of immigrants in English speaking countries tend to do better financially than their parents whereas in many non-english speaking European countries the children of immigrants slide into poverty.

Edit: Here's a related article with some charts illustrating the correlation https://www.ft.com/content/c6bb7307-484c-4076-a0f3-fc2aeb0b6...

What about UK, how did that work out for them? I can't see the charts.

I agree it's not enough evidence for anything conclusive. But I think it's enough evidence to say arguing about what will happen to the US based only on Sweden data is unsound.

To me this has a simple answer: (Western) countries with English as the primary language are all New World countries, with the obvious exception of the British Isles nations.

Ask immigrants or the children of immigrants (like me).

Western Europe are just extremely insular and passive aggressive and will gladly bury their head in the sand regarding their own racism.

Anglo countries at least tried to tackle racism by introducing education about racism (eg. Civil Rights Movement in US, Aboriginal Rights Movement in Australia, First Nation's Movement and racial quotas in Canada, the anti-Skinhead movement and the trade union lead anti-racism movement in the UK) and trying to build an identity that trascends race or ethnicity.

Similar movements happened in mainland Europe as well, but aren't taught about, so mainland Europeans remain insular in their mindset.

Does it suggest that, though? It suggests that, in the specific conditions that were presented to those groups, they turned to crime. However, we can't pretend that the previous generations of immigrants had exclusively good experiences and quality of life, even in Europe. Obviously, some countries tried their best but in the past decades we had far less experience on proper integration (we as in the collective we, no country has worked out some perfect plan on it).

In fact, certain countries specifically created neighbourhoods (ghettos) for immigrant populations, all with positive intentions. Can't really blame the migrants for then becoming "ghettoized" in such a scenario. Granted, I know of other countries that specifically did not do that and still had struggles, which just goes to show how the whole thing is a minefield, where good intentions can clash with harsh reality.

Better comparison is to protestant Germans with Catholic French people.

All mass influxes of immigrant communities will have some crime element initially due to poverty and discrimination.

This is normal and should be expected.

It’s a part of the integration process over initial generations.

For the US, you can trace the phenomena to the influx of Irish Catholics in the early 1800s and from there to…

Eastern European Jews, Italians, Armenians, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Indians, Puerto-Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, Nigerians, Somalians and other immigrant communities.

Why not? Mainstreams are temporary. The Romans shifted from pagans to christians in just a decade (officially speaking). The German speaking region of Belgium was annexed in the 1900s (now the country has 3 different official languages). The whole latin america started speaking Spanish long before they became actual countries. Spain was mostly muslim for over 700 years.

There’s no mainstream. We are always changing and the mix is always better.

If these are the arguments FOR massive immigration then don't be surprised the vast majority of the public is against it.

Also should we really be accepting of cultures that openly and unashamedly want to harm marginalized groups such as anyone who identifies as LGBT? Getting some new recipes or whatever (as it appears that's the direction you're thinking of) is one thing, having people decapitating school teachers [1] because of a drawing (which itself was based on a lie) is a whole different thing which nobody sane should be in support of in literally any context, ever.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67664805

What benefits do you see from importing and allowing this kind of barbarism into society?

i think it's self-evident from history and society that "importing" "barbarism" into "society"* is how we even started doing things like not unashamedly harming marginalized groups in the West. if i'm not mistaken most christian sects, whether in europe or america have had various levels of being okay with ostracizing and harming queer and trans people until very recent times. your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time, especially using the common scapegoat of other cultures taking longer to catch up on LGBT rights.

fascinating that other people's systems of being is "barbarism" and yours is "society". and thus, it's reasonable that most of the world thinks american society was barbaric with their deep rooted slavery and racism, and european society barbaric with their violent colonial extractionism defining much of their past and present.

I'm neither a Westerner, nor am I (entirely) White (1/2 Serbian, if you count it as white (you'd be surprised), 1/2 Indonesian). I also grew up in and lived in Indonesia the majority of my life. Nowhere did I state that only Western societies are the good ones, either, I tend to believe that Taoist and Buddhist countries have a better track record both in the modern day and in the past for the most part.

I'd appreciate if you didn't build a strawman of me, because I'm probably not the person you're imagining in your head. It's shocking, but people outside the west can also believe the west is doing things right and would like them to continue doing so, often because of the cultures they've observed back home.

No, what I consider barbarism is a system of being in which it's okay to commit a brutal beheading because the victim dared to show some drawings of a guy you call a Prophet. Or the one that throws people they don't like off of buildings. Or the one that buries people in the ground and chucks rocks at their heads until they die. Or preventing little girls from attending primary and high schools.

How many beheadings of innocent people exercising their freedoms provided by the nation they were born in are we okay with until we finally admit, maybe we shouldn't be letting them play in our nice garden if they're just going to kick the flowers and rip out the roots?

I grew up in Indonesia, and the entire reason I'm in the West is because of these types of people who'd do such heinous things. And guess what? The Europeans welcomed me with wide open arms, whereas many of my own countrymen would have me grievously harmed due to not being a follower of their hideous beliefs.

this discussion imo is far too complex for a HN comment thread, but your depiction of "barbarism" is deeply rooted in western narratives omitting details such as many people from those places also find those atrocities terrible, and they are perpetuated because of a few powerful bigoted people and lots of propaganda. when atrocities are justified with propaganda, i think it's crude to think the people or the societies are barbaric as much as the leaders (usu. religious ones) are. western societies moved past honor killings, feudalism, slavery, concentration camps and other barbaric practices not-so-long ago, and to a great extent because of the resources they extracted from other countries during that time afforded them to bandwidth to focus on equitable societies. following that, wanting to isolate people of those other societies from also becoming part of these more equitable societies by precluding them as barbaric and therefore shouldn't be allowed here, imo, is what is barbaric.

the contemporary west has also repeatedly shown itself capable of direct barbarism too, like brutally levelling a school of innocent children in Pakistan or drone-striking innocents as collateral damage with no restraint. or what, is unjustified murder & cruelty only barbaric when done on your own soil, and fair game done in someone else's country with citizen tax dollars?

also somewhat unrelated but yes, serbian is white insofar as they genetically present features mostly associated with western white society (light-colored eyes, hair color other than black, caucasian bone structure) so without considering family circumstances/political background, that's white, at least on observation. of course with your mixed heritage i understand this may not be true of you specifically.

Also, it wasn't solely the 6 teens, it was also their parents and their communities at large outraged about what the teacher did and wanting his head on a spike (show a drawing of Muhammad). Not to forget the spark of the outrage, the girl who was skipping class and lied about what the teacher did, which instigated it all.

There was also that small Charlie Hebdo thing, and the Quran burning in Sweden, and countless other similar events over the years in Europe alone.

I was born and grew up in Indonesia, and the crap that was happening in Aceh, one of the only islands in Indonesia that practices Sharia law whereas the rest of the country is more secular, churns the stomach. I have no problems with Islam for the most part, but proponents of Sharia law are truly sociopathic monsters that have no place in the 21st century.

Freedom of choice. Is that insane?

Those of us who have different opinions than you probably got there because we right-size the risk of the threat you appear to hold so high.

Do you believe you are presenting an honest appraisal of both the upside risk and downside risk of immigration?

Do I not have the freedom of choice of not wanting people who will murder over something like that in the same country as myself?

> Do you believe you are presenting an honest appraisal of both the upside risk and downside risk of immigration?

I never said I'm anti-immigration. I'm an immigrant mysely, soon to be a naturalized citizen of my host country after years of hard work at embracing its culture and traditions as much as I can.

I am, however, anti-immigration if the kind of people we're talking about are the types of people that go around beheading people, regardless of their reasoning.

How is the culture of Talibans compatible with western morale? How? It's just not. We aren't all the same, that's just ignoring the truth of how the world works and is plenty naive. That doesn't mean that these people are lesser beings, but that the gap between "them" and "us" (which is a culture thing btw, not a gene thing) is bigger. And that also means that it's not equidistant throughout. We're not all socialized equally.

Example source: https://www.nzz.ch/der-andere-blick/kriminalstatistik-2023-d...

40% of suspects don't have a German passport while the base group is 15% relative to the whole country.

Opinons like yours prevent successful immigration discussions because you have the wrong foundation. That prevents us from having a) a proper integration discussion b) solving current issues and c) creating a working immigration system.

It also requires there to be replacement. I.e. an attempt to somehow remove white people.

What the parent seems to be suggesting appears to be more akin to cultural exchange and/or the traditional idea of America as a "melting pot".

Twice as many Britons joined ISIS as served in the British military. <https://www.newsweek.com/twice-many-british-muslims-fighting...> The new ISIS members are not first-generation recent arrivals; they are the children and grandchildren of those who arrived decades ago.

This might be true, but some European countries are notoriously hard to integrate. The situation could be vastly different in societies that aren’t monocultural, e.g. USA.

It stands to obvious reason that an invited houseguest is better-behaved than one that jumped the fence to be there, and doubly so if there is free cake being served. Any claims to the contrary need to examine the two groups separately.

Just look at Georgia’s law a few years ago where they enforced strict paperwork with the threat of arresting the employer - probably the worst productive year for agriculture because they didn’t have cheap labor to rely on.

Enforce deportation to the greatest extent possible but be prepared to pay for it.

Then I have great news for them! Immigrants to the U.S. are responsible for fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans.

Legal immigrants, on the other hand, are absolutely less likely to engage in criminal behavior than the general population, because they are both selected for positive traits as well as knowing that a criminal record will jeopardize their chances of citizenship.

And to put the blame of lack of integration purely on the immigrant group is very disingenuous when you have all these far-right political parties openly showing their colours and saying matter of fact that they do not want any foreigners, including legal ones, including educated ones.

And finally, what's the link between integration and crime? I don't see the connection. If anything, the people who are least integrated are the ones who are the most law abiding. The lead a pious life according to their faith. They aren't the ones going around dealing drugs in night clubs. Those drug dealers are much more integrated in the host culture. After all drug consumption is very European.

Here's some data from Denmark[0], for example, that breaks down various statistics for different immigrant groups in Denmark. I take it as axiomatic that immigrants from other Western countries are better integrated to Danish society than those from farther-away (culturally speaking) places[1]. You can see that as a group, immigrants from majority Muslim countries are very strongly overrepresented in violent crime.

> to put the blame of lack of integration purely on the immigrant group is very disingenuous

Modern immigration isn't slavery, where someone was forcibly brought to a new land against their will. Nobody has a right to be in any country they please, other than their home. So it follows that the onus is on immigrants to assimilate to the laws and cultures of the country they voluntarily chose to go to. Of course, it would be welcoming of the host country to facilitate that process, but I don't see that as being obligatory.

[0]: https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-effects-of-immigr...

[1]: Of course, you may disagree, but I would regard that as a strange position needing a stout defense.

I wish we as a society could focus on people, not ethnic groups.

Deport people who can't assimilate, keep those who can. Figure out more accurate ways to determine who is who then skin color (or even things like personal taste).

Some stereotypes are backed by statistics, but there's a reason why all stereotypes are bad.

What voters are "concerned" about and "reality" tend to be highly divorced from each other these days.

https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/comparing-crime-rat...

> The study found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.

Would you prefer a conservative source? Here ya go. https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-have-low-homici...

Conservative voters also think crime in general is spiraling out of control, because a certain fan of fake tanning products keeps shouting it to them. It's not even remotely true. Both violent and property crime have plunged for decades and by and large is still falling: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...

Hilariously, a significant uptick in homicides occurred during Fake Tanning Product's presidency, and it's dropped during Biden's:

> In 2020, for example, the U.S. murder rate saw its largest single-year increase on record – and by 2022, it remained considerably higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary data for 2023, however, suggests that the murder rate fell substantially last year.

Voters were also 'concerned' Democrats were running a pedo ring out of a pizza shop basement. That pizza shop does not even have a basement. By your logic, we should be hiring more FBI agents to inspect pizza shops looking for pedo rings because "voters are concerned" and writing legislation that requires pizza shop owners get CORI checks.

> History and data from various European nations

Why are you using historical data from another continent that is very different culturally, when there's data from the US Undocumented migrants and immigrants in the US commit half the crime US citizens do. Probably because they're here to work to do things like send money home, and so they're keeping their heads down (not to mention, busy working...)

I already provided a study, but here's more about the issue. The Brennan Center article includes links to numerous studies refuting your claims. The evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive: immigrants, documented or not, commit significantly fewer crimes per capita than US citizens.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debu...

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1237103158/immigrants-are-les...

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...

This is the primary reason why the US is the greatest country in the world: the ability to integrate immigrants.

Oh, here’s where I’ll be a little less, er, academic — as someone who lives in a city shaped by the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants - fuck out of here with “lesser”.

I said “arguably lesser,” because people obviously have different utility functions. I would say an orderly and well governed society like Sweden or Germany is better than a chaotic and disorderly but somewhat richer society like the United States. Obviously people may differ on that. My point is that immigration changed the country fundamentally.

Irish people such as my ancestors fought and died for America in WWII. They were among the finest patriots who served the country.

As I said above, we can argue about whether those changes were good or bad. My point is that the changes were fundamental. The country was supposed to look more like New Hampshire than New York.

[1] I go to a church that happens to have a high representation of northeastern Congregationalists. We had an ice breaker activity where we went around and talked about what we liked to cook. They were almost apologetic about it. They started their stories with “well I grew up being taught cooking was just for sustenance, …” They cut donuts in half at events so nobody feels tempted to take more than they should eat. It is incomprehensible to me as someone from South Asia. But it’s the basis for a worldview that does affect how those people would run the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...

How is it “prejudiced” against Irish or Italians to point out that their voting as a bloc fundamentally changed the country during the 20th century?

I imagine the biggest difference is that the core of this group has been in Canada for almost 50 years.

Explain how unskilled illegal immigrants contribute to our success. I'm open minded but I've yet to hear anything convincing.

No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.

A) are happy to put up with what is a luxurious salary for back home, but barely liveable locally

Or B) don't have a choice once they're in, since they practically become indentured servants

In the Netherlands, no dutchie wants to work construction for example, because immigrants from Eastern Europe often take under-the-table deals where they get paid drastically less than what a Dutchie would command, though still much higher than any job they'd get back home. The same happens everywhere.

The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers, but by forcing these hugely profitable companies to actually invest in the country and its citizens by paying all employees as it should.

My great grandparents came to this country as low skilled workers. I work with a second generation computer programmer whose parents came as unskilled workers. I know a guy from Guatemala who cleans houses and put his three kids through college. He just about explodes with pride when he talks about his kids.

Not everyone shares your views.

In theory, yes, but I know a decent number of my own countrymen (Serbians) that most definitely aren't legally employed in NL, but they're still working construction. It's vile, but it is what it is. (Not them, the companies are vile for what they're doing, the workers are simply surviving however they can)

And these jobs are usually picking strawberries out in the rural sections or working for Amazon at some industrial estate that doesn't have public transit late at night.

It’s insane that the supposedly progressive faction of American politics is arguing in favor of a system that amounts to a modern version of indentured servitude and systemic violation of labor rights, all for the sake of cheaper fruit and meat.

Inappropriate dissuasion surely exists, but you don't help your case by making such claims.

Anyone can do anything if they believe enough..

It is a nice sentiment and I cling to it myself more often than not, because there is something soothing about it. The unfortunate reality, however, is that being forced onto thing for which I have no predisposition, is, uhh, counterproductive at best.

In short, I disagree with pre-supposition that your position requires ( we are all amorphous blobs that can be molded into whatever with sufficient amount of force ). And that is before we get to the question of whether it is even worthwhile to teach a kid with down syndrome calculus? Not possible. Worthwhile.

<< Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.

No. People need to understand themselves. They need to experience their limits and then cater to their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. It is unhelpful to think that billions people on this planet are interchangeable cogs. We are not.

I am extremely unlikely to ever be like Georgi Gerganov. I simply do not believe I have the brain capacity needed.

It is fine to aspire, but I am not changing the world tomorrow.

There are plenty of immigrants working under the table. And there are plenty of employers willing to hire them.

We do have it both ways.

If supply for labor goes a bit down, wages will increase a bit, and then companies will be incentivized to replace these bad jobs with automation.

Those jobs going away, and wages going up, is a good thing not a bad thing.

As few people should be doing those bad jobs as possible, and for the ones that do them, they should be paid more.

Now, let's take the average farmer, orchard worker, construction worker, and then chuck them into a software job. They wouldn't know where to start and wouldn't get anywhere without the same educational basics that 99% of developers have gone through. That's not elitist, it's just reality.

So, there's a clear distinction to be made and it's not necessary to water down every word in the English language because we're afraid of hurting someone's feelings.

I wouldn't call "low-skilled" workers _unproductive_ per se, and personally think they're incredibly valuable, but economically, the cost/difficulty of replacing a "low-skilled" worker is relatively low: it's a lot easier to find a replacement farmhand than it is a replacement farmer that manages the farm itself.

It's not just because of a larger population, it's also because illegal immigrants are often desperate, often willing to accept a much lower standard of living than locals, and therefore often willing to work for very low wages (sometimes illegally low)

Thus creating an under-class of workers who keep wages from ever going up to where they should be

The premise of the comment that you are responding to is that because of supply and demand, and because these people are desperate, it reducing the wages for those jobs and makes those bad jobs worse.

Thats horrible and less people should be doing those bad jobs, and the wages should increase! Desperate immigrants doing those jobs is just people pushing off bad things to a vulnerable population, and the world would be better off if those jobs got automated away entirely.

https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/north-american-century/b...

This isn’t true in general and depends on the local economy and the immigrants country of origin. MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany, for example.

Even if economists agree, the money these immigrants spend lands in the pockets of rich capitalists.

The entire topic is far more nuanced than you make it out to be.

Health insurance companies, for example, are a negative drain on society, yet they employ hundreds of thousands of workers, in what can only be explained as a make-work program for pointless bureaucracy.

Lots of this in the DOD as well. And the homeless program administrators, which you mentioned.

It's just not explicit welfare to the poorest of the poor and there are a few implicit steps, because otherwise it looks bad.

The welfare state did not exist in that time, so the cost of absorbing immigration was confined to acculturation. Immigrants had to quickly start generating value or perish. The incentives are radically different now and the marginal cost to society of absorbing each additional immigrant is much higher.

US government spending as a percentage of GDP remained low single digits until WW1; it is roughly 35% today.

> You gotta stop trying to fight the current

You must also remember that the natural state of everything is decay, and the natural state of mankind in particular is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". The current grinds everything down to sand. It is incumbent upon everyone to fight the current in the way that affords the greatest benefit to society.

The economy of most major cities isn't based on the agricultural industry that most illegal immigrants work in.

Cities generally already have high housing costs and density. So a sudden population surge is going to be more difficult to manage.

Basically Abbott bussed immigrants to the places that are least setup to be able to absorb them. So it's not surprising that there are problems. That doesn't necessarily reflect on whether immigrants are a net gain once they have been absorbed into the economy.

I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.

Stepping back a moment. We also probably shouldn't be surprised that disorganized mass immigration is causing problems. That's why Democrats generally advocate comprehensive immigration reform. Its going to be easier to absorb immigration if its happening in an orderly manner.

I lived under George W Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott as governors. I can tell you what distinguishes Greg Abbott from the rest of them is that Greg Abbott is an absolute piece of shit. I say that with zero embellishing. When I came home from the military there was this conspiracy theory called Jade Helm rocking Texas that a scheduled military training exercise in Texas was actually an exercise in taking peoples guns. Greg Abbott knew about and authorized the exercise, but stoked fears anyway: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...

Since then Greg has also employed barbed wire in the Rio Grand so that people crossing would get stuck in it and drown: https://www.axios.com/local/san-antonio/2023/07/22/doj-abbot...

Greg quite literally pried the Houston ISD's autonomy from them despite them completing the state mandate and progressing far better than anyone thought they would in the allotted time. Why? So he could institute a voucher system so that kids can go to private, Christian schools with state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/27/real-sto...

The man is a populist of the worst type. He takes an already bad situation, dumps fuel on it, calls it a solution, and acts none the wiser when things blow up; when they do inevitably blow up, he always has a patsy to blame. This is all to say, before I'd trust the actions of Greg Abbott and shipping people to new towns you should probably ask yourself, "What political game could Greg be playing?" and that will be closer to the truth than any rationalization you can come up with.

I believe that the entropic state of human civilization is brutal authoritarianism.

Fight the current, indeed.

It's quite remarkable how effectively the citizens of the United States have managed to do that over the years. To resist the sweet, seductive lies of utopians who seek power.

I hope we're able to continue.

That's exactly what we're doing (in Europe and East Asia even more so than the U.S.) by opposing skilled migration. Increasing legal skilled migration is much more critical, though other concerns such as asylum rights for those fleeing from an oppressive government or a war-ravaged country also matter quite a bit.

That is not true. If no one is opposing immigration of skilled workers then why getting a visa is a lottery?

If you believe that quote as I do then unskilled laborers can have intelligent children. Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent

>Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent

I doubt this is true in cases where you can literally just walk across the border.

Crossing the Darién Gap: Migrants Risk Death on the Journey to the U.S.

https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...

I still have to come to terms with this way of thinking but in a world of limited resources it gave something to think about.

Without immigration, U.S. population growth would be well below replacement rate. This is a growing problem throughout the entire developed world with no fair answers -- increasingly, it looks as though the next several decades of geopolitical power will be defined by which countries can attract the immigrants necessary to maintain, at minimum, some population growth.

I won't pretend that the U.S. is a race utopia. We hit just about every single branch on the way down, if I'm being honest... but most of the ethnostates currently competing for world-power status haven't even realized there's a tree that they need to be descending yet. We have a powerful edge in the coming geopolitical era as one of the most pluralistic, multicultural nations in human history. We have unmatched institutions and experience when it comes to integrating immigrants -- not to mention the incredible advantage of having a language & culture that is familiar to the majority of living humans.

In my opinion, walking back from these advantages at such a critical turning point is probably not something that the country could survive in the long-term. We either embrace our identity as the world's melting pot or we wither away as hermits.

We are living in a death cult(ure), we arent reproducing maybe for economic conditions as in most developed countries wages have compressed in real terms and people prefer to have less if none kids than to lower their lifestile below what they were born into, maybe is the anti-family culture that permeates society, seiing the nuclear family as a burden to personal fullment, woman independence, career obstacle, problem for the enviroment or the miriad of other factors.

Importing migrants is just a band aid that moves the problems of our unhealthy society few years down the line, we need to focus on our dying societies.

I can assure you that’s not true, but we hear the most about illegal unskilled immigration because everyone agrees on that.

The reasons for inviting them I think are a combination of disingenuous or outdated. The arguments about economic survival or humanitarian reasons just don't seem true to me anymore but that's a separate point.

That being said, you do want immigrants working right? That's kinda the entire point.

And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ? Immigration exists because some parts of the world just suck, with corrupt governments, wars, you name it. I don't see how anyone can be happy of migrations, it means fleeing your home and leaving your roots. I don't think most migrations are something to be happy about.

It's a nice sentiment, but you also can't ignore that, if people like myself are willing to go through the oftentimes extremely stressful task of emigrating with all the things that entails, there's probably a reason for it. It's not like you can just pick up and leave, after all

Also, that situation is a lot more likely to occur in the mother country than most people's host countries, if it doesn't happen already. There's a reason it was the East germans fleeing, and not the other way around.

They don't leave irreversibly, they can go back if the political and institutional milieu in their home country improves, and bring valuable insights from abroad. This dynamic has been quite common wrt. those who migrated to the Americas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

By competing for their talent. I'm not a huge proponent of capitalism, but that's the world we live in and the world we'll die in. These countries simply aren't competitive in a way to encourage their people to stay. There are innumerous ways to combat this. But our current thinking is so clouded by short sighted profit that today's outcomes shouldn't surprise anyone.

They have discovered it is easier to win political points by making current legal immigrants illegal and deporting them, than addressing what people think of as "illegal immigration". But they get to call it the same thing :-)

Don't you think it makes more sense to look at Trump's 2024 platform?

https://rncplatform.donaldjtrump.com/

The only statement on legal immigration: "Republicans will prioritize Merit-based immigration, ensuring those admitted to our Country contribute positively to our Society and Economy, and never become a drain on Public Resources."

It appears to everyone, on both the left and the right, that Project 2025 is what conservatives want for a future Trump administration. There doesn't seem to be much of a competing vision for the future of the Republican party, certainly nothing as detailed as this 900 page document nor as widely backed by other conservatives.

This is why a lot of people are looking at this document. Maybe you should be, too?

I do acknowledge that Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025 lately, coinciding with the press coverage the details in that document have been getting.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/trump-allies-pro...

[1] https://live-project2025.pantheonsite.io/about/advisory-boar...

Sure, but it's not Trump's platform. If he wanted to implement those policies, he'd put them in his platform.

He didn't.

Just like the Democrats, lots of left wing policy groups have a list of policies they'd like Biden to implement. It would be silly of me to assume otherwise.

> I do acknowledge that Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025 lately.

This is an odd take. "Trying to distance himself"? I think you mean "clarifying that those policies are not his own".

People and organizations, not just on the left but also over 100 influential organizations on the right [2], take Project 2025 as the desired direction for a future Trump administration. Trump himself has endorsed many of the same positions in this document.

Right or wrong, that's why people have made the association between Trump and Project 2025. This is what conservatives as a group seem to want for a future Trump administration. There doesn't seem to be a competing vision for the party, and certainly nothing laid out in 900 pages of detail.

Why wouldn't people on the left make the association between Trump and this document when so many on the right do?

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/trump-allies-pro...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/project-2025-ex-trump-contributors-...

[2] https://live-project2025.pantheonsite.io/about/advisory-boar...

Out of America (and the world's) only $1T companies: Brin and Huang are 1st gen immigrants. Nadella is a 1st gen immigrant; he brought Microsoft out of it's malaise.

(Jobs' bio father was an immigrant, as was Bezos' adoptive father)

3/5 ain't bad. (2/5 if you're a stickler)

Tesla, which at one point was a $T company and is currently pretty close, is also famously founded by an immigrant.

There are very few people in tech in America who will not have worked for an immigrant founder/CEO at some point in their career.

I agree with most of what you posted, but not enough credit is given to Ballmer here. He set Microsoft on the trajectory that Nedella followed and got the fuck out of the way. There were a lot of cringe Ballmer moments but he had a profound impact on Microsoft, probably much more so than Nadella so far. And none of this is meant to take anything away from Nadella's competency. Just that Ballmer gets blamed for a whole lot despite setting MSFT up for the success Nadella (and shareholders) enjoy.

To Republicans, Cubans don't count as illegal immigrants because they're escaping "communism," and their immigrants consistently vote red. Plus, the majority of Cubans are white and Christian, unlike the brown immigrants that Republicans don't want in the country.

Legal immigration is more likely to bring those you actively desire via quotas. Still illegal immigration has the advantage of raw numbers.

There’s also the question of how many 2nd/3rd generation immigrants go on to become high-quality from each group.

Gestapo comparisons aside, you do understand that this is a significant deviation from the status quo in the US, right? The US can't even agree on a unified federal ID; what makes you think we're anywhere close to accepting a world in which the government is a party to civil matters like leases?

(And to be clear: enforcing this kind of introspection absolutely would require an enforcement agency with unprecedented visibility into the paychecks and housing statuses of every single person in this country.)

Illegal immigrants have many methods of getting SSNs. Like, it's not even difficult.

It's not impossible but it'd have to go with cultural changes, and have a dire impact on poor people. Just because the US is rich doesn't mean it's working well, just look at healthcare and how costly and unfair it is.

I've lived in six different countries (including the US) and in every other country there is no discussion around illegal immigrants - they are deported. It's not even a political issue. Having secure borders is a norm.

Then I get to the US and there is this weird political debate around it. For someone reason it's "bad" to refer to people who enter illegally as "illegal immigrants". People argue that people who entered illegally should be legalized.

I find it really odd.

Many of us have sympathy for people who came in under this system who generally just want to work their asses off doing jobs no American wants to do.

We're also talking about kids brought here as toddlers. Many of us think deporting these people is particularly cruel, as their home country is completely foreign to them.

Do you mean official US government policy? Do you have a source for that claim?

How about undocumented immigrants openly hanging outside of Home Depot waiting for work, while everyone looks the other way because contractors rely on them? That feels like unofficial policy to me.

The fact that the US has a bad track record on enforcing immigration law isn't proof of a "wink wink" policy, especially if you considering huge proportion of Congress doesn't want immigration laws enforced.

Also you're crazy if you think most Republicans in Congress actually want immigration laws enforced. They like the cheap labor. They just want to use it as a wedge issue every 2-4 years.

But there are lots of explanations beyond "wink-wink" for not enforcing immigration policies. The Democrats want more immigration, even if it's illegal, so where they have the power (say SF) they don't enforce them.

That doesn't mean the Democrats are happy with the status quo of a large illegal immigrant working popoulation.

> Also you're crazy if you think most Republicans in Congress actually want immigration laws enforced.

Really? So place like Texas that are trying to stop illegal immigration at the border but being blocked really want illegal immigration? I don't think so.

Canada loved to mock the US's treatment of illegal aliens (for political gain) until they started pouring into Canada. Even with those seeking asylum, Canada was pushing the "third country" agreement that people need to seek asylum in the first country they enter, not pass through the US and come to Canada. For illegal aliens, Canada is deporting record numbers,[2] but Canadians are pretty united in "you can't enter Canada illegally".

I lived in Asia and it was similar. Very strict tracking of legal immigrants and a robust process for removing people staying illegally.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environmen...

[2]https://www.newcanadianmedia.ca/alarming-number-of-deportati...

republicans support setting H1B visas at the same standard it was created for in 1991.

I support that. I support linking the standards of minimum compensation to inflation or some automatically moving metric. we already have several higher criteria work visas, H1B's is just the most popular.

republicans support our education visas turning into residency or work visas more seamlessly.

I support that.

the party doesn't support the empathy arguments for people that are here without a visa. I think something more holistic should be considered than mass deportation.

Its important to add nuance. We have many categories of immigration and many populations. As well as a porous mismanaged border.

If Republican voters supported more immigration, it could happen. They just don’t. And calling people brought here as children by their parents criminals is ridiculous.

Most people globally aren't used to the American interpretation of free speech or gun rights. I don't want people coming here using their talents to politically remove my rights. I think this is a fair point to make.

I'm far more concerned by the people who are in power today who want to politically remove women's rights. Others are worried about those who are in power who want to remove gun rights.

Immigrants are very, very far down the list of people with power to disrupt our rights.

If so, why is it ok for one group to advocate for a change, but the similar advocacy from another group is not ok?

Just for introspection..

Leftists will scream about civil rights.

Right wingers will tut tut about high taxes.

Centrists will complain about both.

But the message is clear... Less government. More individual autonomy

I wouldn’t call that static.

I think the only determining factor is if you demonstrate a commitment to American values.

We do not need highly skilled authoritarians. I'd rather get the freedom loving farm worker from Mexico.

I'm a Republican if that matters. I have met enough highly skilled immigrants in silicon valley to know that many hold American values in contempt.

My own family migrated here so this is not xenophobia. Many of my own ethnic background actively misunderstand and misconstrue American values and should never be allowed to work here much less given citizenship.

I have much more in common with the Hispanic farm worker and would prefer to provide a path by which they can come legally through a vetting process which also prevents gang members from flowing in.

Also we obviously need a wall on the southern border. I feel like anyone who's been to the border will come to this conclusion if they're being honest with themselves.

That should be perfectly acceptable and within the bounds of free speech in a democratic society. It's up to you to counter "bad speech" with other speech in the marketplace of ideas. At least that's what I'm told when I complain about all of the American racists and lunatics whose speech I'm supposed to hold sacred, while they try to undermine my rights and values.

Also free speech is a universal value, is it not? It should apply equally to everyone, everywhere, all the time, and in all contexts.

I mean this sincerely, isn't the debate irrelevant? You either support those civil rights or oppose them. I don't want to put words in your mouth but I assume you oppose 1A and 2A. Why not just say it? We wouldn't have to waste time discussing ancillary nonsense.

I never said I supported undermining any particular rights. The phrase "use their capital and ability to politically undermine our civil liberties" implies engagement in the political process, which implies free speech, which (notwithstanding your semantic games) is already established as legitimate.

>I don't want to put words in your mouth

Yes you do, your comment here does so numerous times. So feel free to argue with the strawman, I'm out.

So simply opposing immigration won't accomplish what you want, it will only be used as a weapon against you.

If you really want to keep your values, you need to find ways to attract more people who have the same values.

E.g. Cubans who run away have a good immunity against communism, that's why people who make it so easy to cross the border by foot, made it hard to enter by boats.

If you remove a handful of neighborhoods with particularly bad problems, Americas violent crime rate is on par that of Europe. Given the number of guns in those safe areas, if would seem Americans are made of some good stuff.

Until the next amendment to it, be that in a couple of years or centuries

Tangentially - I find it fascinating how the originalists on the supreme court get fuzzy on what a "well regulated militia" meant at the time the amendment was written.

Well-regulated meant, at the time, in good working order. The militia meant, and still means, able-bodied men from 18 to 45. The right was granted to the people, not the militia.

Please make snide comments in good faith, at least.

Nobody is "fuzzy" - the left-most SCOTUS Justices don't make this argument, see Caetano v. Massachusetts.

They don't define a firearm as something that can shoot bullets, they define it as (usually) the part that receives the ammunition/magazine, the "receiver", which becomes the serial-numbered portion of the gun. For some guns, it's a complicated, vaguely gun shaped object made up of welded and formed parts, for others it's something as simple as a piece of 1-2" steel tube threaded at one or both ends. This legally can be classified as a firearm and if you were to, for instance, mail it to someone across state lines, export it, sell it in some states or take it through airport security you would face jail time.

As an aside, this quirk is occasionally used by photographers and others who want hand inspection and chain of custody for expensive checked luggage, so they'll put an inert receiver in their suitcase and declare it as a firearm to the airline.

This gets further complicated by the other elements of the NFA banning machine guns and regulating short barrels, suppressors, and a couple other items. In this particular case we're talking about a specific, relatively simple aluminum receiver that can be made at home with a cheap mill or 3d printer, as it isn't pressure bearing. The ATF has deemed that this is, itself, a firearm and further, it can be modified into an illegal machine gun by drilling a hole near the top edge. In reality this does nothing, you'd need to go make or buy three-ish other distinct parts to modify a trigger group into one that supports automatic fire, as well as all the rest of the parts that make the bare receiver into a functioning firearm that can actually shoot.

As the laws are extremely complicated and subject to fairly arbitrary reinterpretation periodically, people somewhat routinely get in huge trouble for breaking them (they're enforced extremely aggressively). Some of those people are trying to poke the bear for fun, but some of them just don't realize that screwing an oil filter to the end of their rifle, or tying a shoestring to the trigger (of particular rifles) are all felonies with a 10 year prison sentence.

It's all a bit dystopian. It would be as if there were certain illegal numbers that you weren't allowed to tell your friends about...

Someone was even arrested for selling stainless steel business cards that had a particular bottle-tab looking design laser etched on it.

It’s a rhetorical question — this happens already and we handle it the way we’d handle your rhetorical question: shake our heads at the misguided worm brains, ignore it or confront them directly. But either way it’s not a threat to American civil liberties, the Bill of Rights is more robust than that.

Assimilation at the superficial level happens quickly. But deep culture—things like social trust or views on the relationship between people and government, are sticky: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594. The peak of continental European immigration to the U.S. was more than a century ago, but there is still a significant correlation on cultural attitudes between European countries and Americans with ancestry from those countries: https://cis.org/Richwine/Still-More-Evidence-Cultural-Persis...

Having the smartest people isn’t what makes a country great—which is why the super smart Indians and Chinese come to America instead of making their home countries rich.

I can only speak to my family's history and that I saw growing up, but my great-grandfather was an immigrant from a Slavic region (to be technical, Poland didn't exist yet, but he was a Catholic who spoke Polish).

To make a long story short, none of his kids ever spoke Polish. That wasn't familial pressure, but the physical and emotional abuse inflicted on children in schools to beat the slav out of them if they acted or sounded "fresh off the boat" - to the point where four generations later, all of us know that phrase because it's been said to us one way or another.

Contrast this with the most recent wave of Polish immigration to the same neighborhoods almost 80 years later. These are kids I grew up with. They had Polish clubs in school, they went to "Polish school," they spoke the language fluently and publicly, and to a certain degree that was celebrated by the rest of the community. The external pressure not to be Polish is essentially gone.

I don't have a grand point here, it's just something I think about a lot in these debates. I learned what the experience of my ancestors was, and saw something of what happened to my peers, and the only difference was 100 years. It seems to me the difference between what we think of as assimilation is really how likely a community is to join the melting pot depending on the internal or external pressures on that community.

Usa got lucky integrating most europeans first and skilled immigrants later. but it struggled with other demographics, notably afro-americans, native americans

Also, you should be concerned about the crime. Have you seen what the cartel does in Mexico? It's terrifying, and those (cartel members) are not people we want here.

But I take it 98% of Somalis women getting sexually mutilated in Somalia is the fault of colonization or something?

There’s various points and counterpoints within that and I’m woefully ill equipped to evaluate them, but it’s not wrong “prima fasciae”.

It's just illegal immigration.

We need more immigration. But people's first act as American citizens should be a legal one.

If it's brain-drain you want, the Republican party's immigration plan seems superior, actually. The previous Republican administration attempted to replace our current lottery-based legal immigration program with a meritocratic, point-based system, but was blocked by the Democrat-led house.

True, Republicans would reduce legal immigration and greatly reduce illegal immigration, but if your specific issue is bringing in brains, which seems like a better haul? 100,000 young, English-speaking, elite scientists, academics and professionals from around the world? Or two million randos picked out of a hat?

If they don't want to raise quotas then they don't really want legal immigrants. They just want to keep everyone out.

The idea of closed borders, immigration caps, etc is relatively modern and driven more by the fact that social entitlement programs cost money than a fear of dangerous people coming here.

Entitlement programs only work if we can secure our borders. If we can't secure our borders it seems to be clear that we can't have the entitlement programs.

Adoption only changes the kid's environment. How do you read that as an indicator that race was the differentiator?

Do you mean only race of the immediate family in the household, not race of the person taking the test? That seems like a stretch to say it's race based at that point, and also a pretty useless data point unless your recommendation is to somehow leverage that by adopting more kids into white families because your belief is that will make them score higher on an IQ test and that a higher IQ score is a meaningful enough metric to propose such a big intervention.

I don't have a solid enough understanding of the research to say whether IQ scores are correlated with race, but it seems plausible enough to me. That is very different from saying races causes it though. To study such a thing you have to control for so many other environmental and economic factors that it's unrealistic to do. The population sizes would be too small, or you missed controls and the data is garbage.

An IQ result alone is pretty meaningless, especially if you haven't done te research to validate that the IQ test is a high quality predictor of twhstever you are using it as an analog for.

If you have reproducable research showing a link between the IQ test design and authoritarianism I'd be very interested to see it. I've never seen such a study, at least a study done with any scientific rigor.

When IQ is indicative but not predictive, I just don't see much use there. If I can't predict future behavior, success, or some other metric then I'm not sure why I'd zero in in IQ specifically. I have also found past experience to be indicitive but not predictive, and I don't need to trust a standardized testing method to review experience.

Even though on paper I may be high-potential, in real life I'd prefer to be normal, and for every one of me that exists, there's a 100 IQ person who has the drive and willpower to achieve things that would be considered atypical. Both of us are exceptions, but we both still exist.

That's separate from the core topic here though. The slave trade and all the problems that go along with it do not change the fact that our borders were open for a majority of our history.

Republicans are anti-illegal immigration, not anti-immigration. Trump's wife is an immigrant.

> because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success.

It would only be a brain drain if you filter by skills or IQ. But if you just let everyone in, you can make things worse, not better.

> I'm not concerned about the crime

Of course, and we can see the results.

    The FBI data also shows a 59% reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022, with big declines in the rates of burglary (-75%), larceny/theft (-54%) and motor vehicle theft (-53%).

    Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71% between 1993 and 2022.

    Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.

    In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period.

Of course those with a blinkered news bubble (Fox, et al) tend to believe the hyped up overstaing of every low occurrence incidence and clutch their pearls in response.

The data says otherwise.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

Another thing you can do is reclassify felonies as misdemeanors.

Reminds you of anything?

Posting aggregate stats just comes off iso a “gotcha” instead of a real discussion involving thought or context, both of which are needed in any discussion including data.

There’s many angles someone could take this.

You mentioned Fox News. They certainly don’t drone about crime in Little Rock — they complain about the “anarchist hellscape” of liberal cities (or whatever superlative they want to call it that hour). The worst of which? HN HQ San Francisco! (fwiw I love SF).

Unfortunately, in stark contrast to your stats, property crime has certainly gone up in San Francisco since 2012 [1]. SF is also a hot destination of migrant relocation busses [2], so is probably a city Fox mentions when it comes to migrant crime.

(Fwiw, Cubans often end up in liberal cities in conservative states, like Miami, Houston, Kentucky, not SF)[3].

Anyways, I have no horse in this race. I’m not really sure what my point is with this tangential response, other than to say your stats require context, and can just as easily factually be opposite to what you wrote, depending on that context.

1 https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-...

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/abbott-texas-migrant-b...

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2024/...

Thought experiment: If you removed half of the population of a country, would that make the rest of the country richer or poorer?

I’m convinced that the system expects a percentage of leakage by design as a strainer to keep the low effort migration out.

Countries with a highly successful immigration system, notably Canada, do it by being highly merit-based, for education and professional skills. The US hasn't put together any significant plan for that. Trump briefly tried proposing merit-based immigration in his first term, but it was quickly shot down with all the usual accusations of discrimination and so on. The US kinda unofficially does it via H1-B and O-1 visas, though that's only for employment and mostly not for permanent residence.

We do have a highly successful immigration system, but don't have a highly successful infrastructure. There is a housing crisis.

The irony is I believe in the longer term Canada will face an immigrant shortage and not a housing crisis. As a born Canadian I am seeing less & less value to immigrating to Canada unless you're coming to employed as a Uber driver/Food delivery.

Would you share the same opinion if you were a victim?

    1. refugees
    2. legal immigrants              
    3. non-immigrants               magic beam of      
      3.1. temporary workers     ──infinite──>     "iMMiGraNTs"
      3.2. tourists                          irrationality      and "mIGrAntS"
    4. students
    5. illegal immigrants
    6. stateless
    7. prisoners of war
    8. etc

Mixing everything together is obfuscating the problem which is the modus operandi of those who want to prevent the solution of the problem as they have an incentive to keep the problem around.

Politicians like keeping immigration a problem because it gives them a way to divide people into groups and rewarding those groups depending on their political needs, making you easier to rule. Which is what they do for everything else. In their case, you are the problem to solve, not the actual problem they so passionately talk about. And when you get angry you play right into their villain claws.

The brain gain/drain dynamics between countries is real. Brain gain is what you definitely want as a country.

As birth rates drop globally the countries that are magnets for the highest quality immigrants will explode and basically rule the world.

The kind of immigrants we get are the envy of the world too. I am a little more sympathetic to European concerns because the immigrants they are getting are coming for different reasons. Many of them are refugees not people coming because they genuinely want to be there, and that is a different deal entirely.

And even actual refugees are really economic migrants after they crossed half a dozen countries where they wouldn't be in danger.