My Google job was tedious and pointless

Maybe I haven't been paying attention. I hear a lot of talk about Trump and supporters being white supremacists, but when I ask his accusers, they aren't able to articulate very significant evidence at all. Most such conversations end with implications that I'm a racist for lacking the astute progressive hearing required to perceive Trump's dog whistles. The irony that dog whistles are (by definition) intended to be perceptible only to actual racists is apparently lost on many progressives.

You are beating a dead horse at this point.

> What I think you're finding is people used to majority privilege, suddenly finding their viewpoints in the minority, becoming obsessively sensitive and claiming victimhood for which there is paltry evidence.

Most of the egregious cases (including the Google Memo) involve liberals who are censored, harassed, or assaulted by progressives for openly inquiring or pointing to inconsistencies in the progressive narrative. Based solely on the frequency of these starkest of cases, I don't know how anyone could reasonably conclude that the evidence is paltry. Everyone should be allowed to ask questions and express (at least moderate) political ideas without fearing for their safety or income. This has nothing to do with privilege, and it shouldn't be a right conferred only to the extreme left.

> Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.

Prior to the last few years, I've only ever heard the term applied to conservatives, who ostensibly failed to live up to the formerly-progressive value of open-mindedness. Conservatives have always been taken to task for failing to abide by progressive values (tolerance, free speech, open-mindedness, etc). Now progressives are under the same gun and it's all "poor progressives! why aren't conservatives faulted for failing to live up to progressive values?"; at any rate, the term is still widely (and justifiably) applied to conservatives.

I'm a little over 30, and the shortest I've stayed somewhere is a little over two years (and counting...)

I can't imagine wanting to leave just 6 months after starting somewhere.

>It's a tiny risk because it's a small fraction of an already tiny proportion of the population. Increasing that proportion of the population will lead to a higher level of risk. We've already seen what that looks like in Europe, and that all began to accelerate rather quickly in the last few years. It's very rational to not want that to happen here as well.

You can't compare Europe's problems with assimilating immigrants to ours. But if you keep alienating immigrants, you will make them feel like outsiders, and then you will face more of the kinds of problems Europe has.

>While that makes some amount of sense, it also leads to chain migration and ultimately displaces more of the native population economically AND politically. We can't ignore that the one side that supports increased immigration is the side that will ultimately benefit from having their children as voters.

When the Chinese came to America, they worked jobs people here didn't want, including taking over cotton picking in the South after slavery was banned, and running stores that catered to African Americans under Jim Crow. They did dangerous work on the railroads that white Americans didn't want to do.

You're running a slippery slope argument that justifies a harsh stance now when none is justified. "They could start raping our women if we let a lot more in" We've seen this played out time and time again.

At the same time conservative politics plays the dog whistle game with immigration, claiming immigrants are putting them out of work, they're also opposing efforts to make native born Americans more competitive, like expanded educational opportunity, access to daycare, and other investments in human capital.

Why was "chained immigration" no problem when it was Western Europeans, but all of a sudden, it's a problem if you have yellow or brown skin? And given the immense amount of value that generations of immigrants have brought to this country, why should I fear "chained immigration"?

>For what it's worth, I had no interest in immigration issues at all until I was bombarded with how evil it was to be against any form of immigration. Voters have the right to an opinion on these issues, and "that's racist" isn't going to stop them anymore.

Well, it's bad to be against it when you have fallacious reasons, by ballooning up the dangers of it and buying into nationalist fervor. There's a reason why the middle class got stagnated over the last 40 years, and it has nothing to do with immigration. The same thing happened in Japan which has some of the most protectionist immigration policies you can think of.

People got used to the low hanging fruit of easy GDP growth that can from a rapid switchover from agricultural to industrial society, and now with growth tapering off to ~2% GDP all over the developed world, everyone is looking for something to blame, and dark political forces all over are trying to blame immigrants. Here it's the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Asians. In Britain, it was the Polish. In Germany, it was the Jews (and not the harsh penalties imposed by WWI on Germany).

Find someone to blame, usually a foreigner.

In the meantime, we aren't making the investments we need in infrastructure, in education, in health, in early childhood -- because those require sacrifice.

Instead, take the easy route: sacrifice these other people.