Imagine a politician or agency saying, in the US context, "let in immigrants from these countries but not these other ones." Naturally, many people would say, "why?" The answer given would be "the cultural practices of people from these countries help the USA; the cultural practices of people from these other ones hurt the USA." Any such person or agency would be destroyed, and the policy ignominiously dropped.
Even saying having a policy like, "we need more migration from non-white countries", which would be very popular among leftists, would still probably not (?) poll well across the USA.
I bring this up, because if the liberal policy the deep culture research supports is a policy that would be demonized by both leftists (for being racist) and by rightists (for being too liberal on immigration), then it's not really clear (to me, anyway) that the deep culture research "supports" that policy.
This has always been my argument against open borders.
Most libertarians believe (a la Deirdre McCloskey) that cultural transformation was a key element in the "great enrichment." If you believe this, however, you cannot believe in open borders since not all cultures are equally compatible with the the type of economic/social/cultural characterists that produce economic success. And certainly allowing so many immigrants in that it begins to shift the successful culture of the receiving country would be foolhardy - the "melting pot" must not be overwhelmed. It also suggests that being selective in immigration is wise.
As Bryan points out, this argument is consistent with much greater immigration - probably on a merit or "points" basis, since a well-designed version will pick up the cultural preferences (in probably a more targeted way) without being political impossible - but it is not consistent with open borders. And that is exactly where we should come out as a country: much more immigration but selectively.
I haven't read Jones new book so I'm on thin ice already, but here goes.
"Above all, if a country's ancestors were technologically advanced in 1500 A.D., their descendants tend to be much richer today. "
I mean that's probably has some correlation with modern IQ, but its an imperfect proxy. Might as well just use modern IQ.
So let's get right to it.
If we take Deep Roots and IQ seriously we are going to get the following for Open Borders:
1) Africa: Awful
2) Middle East/Central Asia: Awful
3) South America: Bad, could probably have absorbed some of them but well past point of saturation already
4) SE Asia: Depends, complicated
5) Other First World Countries: Good, but few people want to move from the first world to the first world
6) India: I'm going with awful, but only because I think India as a whole has a low national IQ. In reality, I think India may be the most genetically stratified society in the world, and there really is nothing even remotely like an Indian IQ. There are subgroups with very high IQs and then a large underclass.
7) China is the only one on the list where people would want to emigrate and they would all have high IQs.
So at scale our potential joiners are a tiny sliver of some Indian Subgroups and the Chinese. At a minimum this would pass the IQ test. You implement a Australian style points system and move on.
I used to be very convinced by this case until the last two years.
However, I've come to realize that the cultural aspects of Deep Roots go beyond IQ. COVID was defiantly a lesson in that. The way East Asians handled COVID was extremely discrediting in my view. If I could improve GDP at the expense of wearing a mask for the rest of my life, I wouldn't do it (and anyway, COVID hysteria destroyed GDP). I'm not just talking about the CCP here, but collective voluntary actions of East Asians in general.
And it could go beyond COVID. When I was much higher on Asian immigration in the 1990s, Korean TFR was like 1.5. Now it's 0.8. Something is deeply wrong with East Asian culture in modernity. You can really feel it in a lot of ways.
Many of the things I like about Asians aren't even applicable once they move to America. They pick up a lot of American progressive tendencies. Educated Indian women are probably the worst for this.
All in all, I'm no longer excited about Asian immigration. I don't think it will have the same immediately negative impact that importing a billion Africans and turning America into a giant Detroit would have, but I'm not sure it would make America a country I would like living in more.
My immigration policy is that anyone with IQ > 130 will get paid money to immigrate and instant citizenship, but I'm not particularly interested in anyone else.
Either embryo selection will one day make them high IQ staying where they already are, or it will never work and then there is an even stronger reason to keep them out.
The review assumes too much prior knowledge. I understand the conclusion but not the argument. How were the countries that merit more immigration identified?
It is unfortunate that Jones' book does not quite do the job on the cultural side of immigration. I think that is probably the biggest issue a country can face when it comes to deciding on immigration levels (the purely economic being pretty well sewn up for open borders), but culture is a big deal. I think the US is seeing what happens when the core principles and values of the country become unmoored from the public consciousness. That certainly isn't the fault of immigrants, but it does mean that one has to question not only how fast immigrants can assimilate, but what they are assimilating with.
I think he addressed this specifically, but I think the US's historic (and exceptional) ability to convert immigrants from acting like "the economies they left" into "more like the US economy" is worthy, if not of approval for entirely open borders, an additional coefficient of "perhaps the US can absorb X% more immigrants while retaining its current economy"
Bryan is an honest thinker, so I am wondering if he can admit to himself that part of the reason he supports open borders is that he is a jew.
Quoting him:
"What would happen if Mormons were a solid majority of the U.S. population? Maybe they’d be as wonderful as ever, but I readily picture a sinister metamorphosis. Given enough power, even Mormons might embrace a brutal fundamentalism. Despite my lovely experiences with Mormons, they scare me.
To be fair, they’re hardly alone. You know who else scares me? Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists. Sunnis, Shiites, Catholics, and Protestants. Whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Marxists, and reactionaries. Even libertarians scare me a bit. Why? Because given enough power, there’s a serious chance they’ll do terrible things. Different terrible things, no doubt. But terrible nonetheless.
If you’re afraid of every group, though, shouldn’t you support whatever group has the minimum chance of doing terrible things once it’s firmly in charge? Not at all. There’s another path: Try to prevent any group from being firmly in charge. In the long-run, the best way to do this is to make every group a small minority – to split society into such small pieces that everyone abandons hope of running society and refocuses their energy on building beautiful Bubbles. "
And that his utility function just differs from white europeans. We are going to lose countries where we are majorities - putting us in grave danger, until eventually going extinct - but this might be beneficial to Jews.
Imagine a politician or agency saying, in the US context, "let in immigrants from these countries but not these other ones." Naturally, many people would say, "why?" The answer given would be "the cultural practices of people from these countries help the USA; the cultural practices of people from these other ones hurt the USA." Any such person or agency would be destroyed, and the policy ignominiously dropped.
Even saying having a policy like, "we need more migration from non-white countries", which would be very popular among leftists, would still probably not (?) poll well across the USA.
I bring this up, because if the liberal policy the deep culture research supports is a policy that would be demonized by both leftists (for being racist) and by rightists (for being too liberal on immigration), then it's not really clear (to me, anyway) that the deep culture research "supports" that policy.
This has always been my argument against open borders.
Most libertarians believe (a la Deirdre McCloskey) that cultural transformation was a key element in the "great enrichment." If you believe this, however, you cannot believe in open borders since not all cultures are equally compatible with the the type of economic/social/cultural characterists that produce economic success. And certainly allowing so many immigrants in that it begins to shift the successful culture of the receiving country would be foolhardy - the "melting pot" must not be overwhelmed. It also suggests that being selective in immigration is wise.
As Bryan points out, this argument is consistent with much greater immigration - probably on a merit or "points" basis, since a well-designed version will pick up the cultural preferences (in probably a more targeted way) without being political impossible - but it is not consistent with open borders. And that is exactly where we should come out as a country: much more immigration but selectively.
I haven't read Jones new book so I'm on thin ice already, but here goes.
"Above all, if a country's ancestors were technologically advanced in 1500 A.D., their descendants tend to be much richer today. "
I mean that's probably has some correlation with modern IQ, but its an imperfect proxy. Might as well just use modern IQ.
So let's get right to it.
If we take Deep Roots and IQ seriously we are going to get the following for Open Borders:
1) Africa: Awful
2) Middle East/Central Asia: Awful
3) South America: Bad, could probably have absorbed some of them but well past point of saturation already
4) SE Asia: Depends, complicated
5) Other First World Countries: Good, but few people want to move from the first world to the first world
6) India: I'm going with awful, but only because I think India as a whole has a low national IQ. In reality, I think India may be the most genetically stratified society in the world, and there really is nothing even remotely like an Indian IQ. There are subgroups with very high IQs and then a large underclass.
7) China is the only one on the list where people would want to emigrate and they would all have high IQs.
So at scale our potential joiners are a tiny sliver of some Indian Subgroups and the Chinese. At a minimum this would pass the IQ test. You implement a Australian style points system and move on.
I used to be very convinced by this case until the last two years.
However, I've come to realize that the cultural aspects of Deep Roots go beyond IQ. COVID was defiantly a lesson in that. The way East Asians handled COVID was extremely discrediting in my view. If I could improve GDP at the expense of wearing a mask for the rest of my life, I wouldn't do it (and anyway, COVID hysteria destroyed GDP). I'm not just talking about the CCP here, but collective voluntary actions of East Asians in general.
And it could go beyond COVID. When I was much higher on Asian immigration in the 1990s, Korean TFR was like 1.5. Now it's 0.8. Something is deeply wrong with East Asian culture in modernity. You can really feel it in a lot of ways.
Many of the things I like about Asians aren't even applicable once they move to America. They pick up a lot of American progressive tendencies. Educated Indian women are probably the worst for this.
All in all, I'm no longer excited about Asian immigration. I don't think it will have the same immediately negative impact that importing a billion Africans and turning America into a giant Detroit would have, but I'm not sure it would make America a country I would like living in more.
My immigration policy is that anyone with IQ > 130 will get paid money to immigrate and instant citizenship, but I'm not particularly interested in anyone else.
Either embryo selection will one day make them high IQ staying where they already are, or it will never work and then there is an even stronger reason to keep them out.
The review assumes too much prior knowledge. I understand the conclusion but not the argument. How were the countries that merit more immigration identified?
It is unfortunate that Jones' book does not quite do the job on the cultural side of immigration. I think that is probably the biggest issue a country can face when it comes to deciding on immigration levels (the purely economic being pretty well sewn up for open borders), but culture is a big deal. I think the US is seeing what happens when the core principles and values of the country become unmoored from the public consciousness. That certainly isn't the fault of immigrants, but it does mean that one has to question not only how fast immigrants can assimilate, but what they are assimilating with.
I think he addressed this specifically, but I think the US's historic (and exceptional) ability to convert immigrants from acting like "the economies they left" into "more like the US economy" is worthy, if not of approval for entirely open borders, an additional coefficient of "perhaps the US can absorb X% more immigrants while retaining its current economy"
Any response from Jones?
Bryan is an honest thinker, so I am wondering if he can admit to himself that part of the reason he supports open borders is that he is a jew.
Quoting him:
"What would happen if Mormons were a solid majority of the U.S. population? Maybe they’d be as wonderful as ever, but I readily picture a sinister metamorphosis. Given enough power, even Mormons might embrace a brutal fundamentalism. Despite my lovely experiences with Mormons, they scare me.
To be fair, they’re hardly alone. You know who else scares me? Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists. Sunnis, Shiites, Catholics, and Protestants. Whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Marxists, and reactionaries. Even libertarians scare me a bit. Why? Because given enough power, there’s a serious chance they’ll do terrible things. Different terrible things, no doubt. But terrible nonetheless.
If you’re afraid of every group, though, shouldn’t you support whatever group has the minimum chance of doing terrible things once it’s firmly in charge? Not at all. There’s another path: Try to prevent any group from being firmly in charge. In the long-run, the best way to do this is to make every group a small minority – to split society into such small pieces that everyone abandons hope of running society and refocuses their energy on building beautiful Bubbles. "
And that his utility function just differs from white europeans. We are going to lose countries where we are majorities - putting us in grave danger, until eventually going extinct - but this might be beneficial to Jews.
I'd like for Garrett to me:
Do the decedents of Europeans still do well in Bermuda and South Africa?
Do the decedents of people from China do well in southeast Asia?