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US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

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Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#111

Post by LexiMax »

eudamoniac wrote: post #106
LexiMax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens. I disagree, because what seems to always be the logical next step is "My monoculture is superior, and deserves dominion above your monoculture, which deserves eradication. And oh by the way, if you don't like our monoculture and try to escape it, we'll invade that place too." That's kind of what the "mono" in monoculture implies. Multicultural…

I don't see it that way. From my perspective, America would be more stable socially if it balkanized. There is a lot of tension borne of cultural heterogeneity. Coasts vs South, most of Texas vs Houston, etc. Nothing about it is positive, except maybe economically. I guess this might lead to wars via a more cohesive national identity, like how diversity in the workplace reduces unionization efforts, but I largely dou…

What makes you believe that a hypothetical American balkanization would go any better than...say...what happened in the balkans proper?

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#112

Post by eudamoniac »

LexiMax wrote: post #111
eudamoniac wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it that way. From my perspective, America would be more stable socially if it balkanized. There is a lot of tension borne of cultural heterogeneity. Coasts vs South, most of Texas vs Houston, etc. Nothing about it is positive, except maybe economically. I guess this might lead to wars via a more cohesive national identity, like how diversity in the workplace reduces unionization efforts, but I largely dou…

What makes you believe that a hypothetical American balkanization would go any better than...say...what happened in the balkans proper?

I don't necessarily think it would. But what makes you think that a hypothetical status quo will go any better than what happened in the Roman empire? There are no great options imo.

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#113

Post by eudamoniac »

eudamoniac wrote: post #105
jgwil2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially [ethnostates]. In Sweden 25% of the population has foreign background, in Norway 19%, in Denmark 14%. Hardly "ethnostates" at all.

Okay, but those are very recent developments to which the historical sentiment hasn't fully caught up. To the extent it has, it's via negative memetic sentiments, e.g. "Stockholm is now the rape capital of the world!" Sweden, at least, also, doesn't capture racial demographics, so we don't know the makeup of the foreign born population. Walking around Helsinki, you don't need statistics to notice the homogeny.

Didn't have time to check Norway and Denmark before, but looking now it seems most of the foreign born population is still white/European.

> figures from World Population Review suggesting around 83.2% are Norwegian, and another 8.3% are other Europeans, totaling roughly 91.5% of European descent, though exact "white" percentages vary by source and definition, with estimates often placing the broader "white" or European-origin population well above 90%.

Another source I found puts non-Danes in Denmark at 9%, putting their white/European percentage at 95%.

For approximate parity comparison, Japan is 98% Japanese, UK is 82%, and France is 71%, all falling. Imo Norway and Denmark still qualify as ethnostates, though maybe not for much longer.

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#114

Post by eudamoniac »

surgical_fire wrote: post #95
eudamoniac wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but UK has experienced massive amounts of foreign culture immigration recently that Ireland has not.

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/collection... According to official stats, 16% of Irish residents are citizens of other countries. Keep in mind that this number will exclude foreign nationals that got Irish citizenship through naturalization (and therefore became Irish citizens). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the... Most recent numbers from the UK list 16% of the populatio…

Huh, I guess I'm wrong about this one. I'll update my priors!

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#115

Post by roenxi »

Steltek wrote: post #101
roenxi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The growth of a welfare system seems like the major change. How does that plan interact with the welfare system? If someone is impoverished in Asia can they get a plane ticket to the US and expect to eventually be entitled to a state-sponsored minimum standard of living? Maybe healthcare if the left's plans for that get through eventually?

There were only two requirements at Ellis Island: 1. You were free of contagious medical diseases 2. You were not in danger of "becoming a public charge" (welfare) That plan is perfectly compatible with your concerns.

It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century".

Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

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

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#116

Post by LexiMax »

eudamoniac wrote: post #112
LexiMax wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you believe that a hypothetical American balkanization would go any better than...say...what happened in the balkans proper?

I don't necessarily think it would. But what makes you think that a hypothetical status quo will go any better than what happened in the Roman empire? There are no great options imo.

I believe the current status quo is the fault of oligarchs successfully fooling people into blaming scapegoats while we're all being robbed blind.

Recognizing what is going on for what it is would be a good first step.

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#117

Post by rayiner »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #86
rayiner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries. We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitud…

> You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy. OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book. However, what's going on in this chart? https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru... I can s…

> However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust

Ireland is culturally distinct from the U.K. For example, the U.K. is historically predominantly Protestant, while Ireland is historically strongly Catholic. That manifests in many ways. For example, the Anglosphere tends to have the latest gestational limits on abortion among European and European-derived countries. By contrast, abortion was illegal altogether in Ireland until recently (2018).

There is also the fact that the Irish were brutally colonized by England and Irish society developed a strong cohesiveness from that external pressure. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million people out of a population of about 60 million. The Irish Famine, by contrast, killed 1 million people out of a population of only about 8 million. Indeed, the Irish population peaked in 1841, a few years before the start of the Great Famine and never returned to that peak.

> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

Europeans are culturally quite different from each other! For example, the Swedish practice of not feeding guests (https://www.the-independent.com/voices/swedengate-sweden-din...) would be mortifying to Americans in the southern U.S.

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#118

Post by boroboro4 »

rayiner wrote: post #104
Apreche wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These new immigrants will work and pay taxes. And of course, taxing the rich can cover a LOT of people.

No, your assumption is false. Even if all those paper valuations, etc., were real money you could use to pay for school lunches today, a 100% tax on the total wealth of U.S. billionaires wouldn’t even fund the federal and state governments for a year.

Total US wealth is ~170T so obviously it will be enough to cover federal and state government for a year (and more like 20 years).

Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#119

Post by readthenotes1 »

Apreche wrote: post #27

My family came to the US via Ellis Island. Compared to what people have to do today, their legal path to US citizenship was relatively easy. I see no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century. Open a 21st century equivalent of Ellis Island, and let people become citizens.

Nowadays, there's both welfare and voting concerns that weren't the same in the 1800s.

If the USA offered food and shelter security, billions would come in

Re: US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

#120

Post by readthenotes1 »

The immigration system for the USA is broken not only beyond repair, but IMO broken beyond reasonable discussion because it's so complex and multi-faceted.

It doesn't need fixing, it needs replacing, and replaced by some mythical group that would put long-term good for the country over partisan gain

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