3 ms·

> The super-majority of every group still marries within their group .... That certainly might be the case for the first couple of generations. But it's a movi

> The super-majority of every group still marries within their group .... That certainly might be the case for the first couple of generations. But it's a movie, not a snapshot. My own kids have ancestry from six different countries (that we know of), including emigration from two countries within just the last 100 years or so and from two other countries in the 50 years before that. The neighbor kid (who's now verging on middle age) is ethnically the product of a very-mixed marriage, and he himself married a girl from yet another immigrant group — they just had a baby whose ancestry is, I think, from six different countries as well. > I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy. Entropy presupposes no external input of energy or information, doesn't it? Immigration can provide both. > Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in. To a very-limited extent that's true. But quaere whether an even better metaphor would be a rugby scrum: Even within a hypothetical ethnic monoculture, "people" aren't a monolith (as in the famous Apple "1984" commercial); they don't have the same tastes, drives, or capabilities, and they do tend to push to get what they want, both alone and with others who are of like mind — or who are coerced to help, or at least to acquiesce.

rayiner 3y ago
> That certainly might be the case for the first couple of generations. But in that couple of generations, they’ve already massively changed the country, e.g., with Italian immigration to the US in the 20th century. Mass immigration completely changed northern Virginia where I grew up. Maybe 100 years from now those people will mix and form a new amalgam. But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly reasonable basis for opposing immigration? > Entropy presupposes no external input of energy or information, doesn't it? Immigration can provide both. If the energy input is used to organize rather than disorganize, sure. But immigration is like applying heat to an ice sculpture. Taking something organized and subjecting it to random forces.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly reasonable basis for opposing immigration? Each of us certainly has our cultural preferences. Your own preference — in essence, your value-weighting of the various factors in play – is by no means irrational. But we can question whether you've realistically assessed the likely cost and effort required to restrict global migration in today's world. (That's why in a previous comment I cited Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest about the well-intentioned but, ultimately, catastrophically-naïve policy decisions that got the U.S. into Vietnam in the 1960s.) If King Canute were alive today, he'd likely smile knowingly at our conundrum; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide. "The episode is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of 'trying to stop the tide' of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite."

rayiner 3y ago

> That certainly might be the case for the first couple of generations. But in that couple of generations, they’ve already massively changed the country, e.g., with Italian immigration to the US in the 20th century. Mass immigration completely changed northern Virginia where I grew up. Maybe 100 years from now those people will mix and form a new amalgam. But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly reasonable basis for opposing immigration? > Entropy presupposes no external input of energy or information, doesn't it? Immigration can provide both. If the energy input is used to organize rather than disorganize, sure. But immigration is like applying heat to an ice sculpture. Taking something organized and subjecting it to random forces.

dctoedt 3y ago
> But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly reasonable basis for opposing immigration? Each of us certainly has our cultural preferences. Your own preference — in essence, your value-weighting of the various factors in play – is by no means irrational. But we can question whether you've realistically assessed the likely cost and effort required to restrict global migration in today's world. (That's why in a previous comment I cited Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest about the well-intentioned but, ultimately, catastrophically-naïve policy decisions that got the U.S. into Vietnam in the 1960s.) If King Canute were alive today, he'd likely smile knowingly at our conundrum; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide. "The episode is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of 'trying to stop the tide' of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite."