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> Where are the goalposts? Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no? To counter-quip: what is the goal?

by ajross 1y ago

> Where are the goalposts? Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no? To counter-quip: what is the goal? I genuinely don't have any idea in this circumstance how the reactionary right wing adherence to ideology does anything but harm the country they claim they're trying to improve. I mean, do you want Hyundai to build factories in the US? Everyone seems to claim so. Yet here is a Hyundai factory that seems likely to be shuttered or delayed for years because of... ideology?

rayiner 1y ago
> Absent other argument, I'd say "where they've been since the 50's" is a good prior to take, no? Please listen to the NYT podcast I linked. In 1950, immigration had been severely restricted for three decades, dropping the foreign-born population from 14.7% in 1910 to 5.4% in 1960. Then, Congress enacted Hart-Celler in 1965, but promised that it would not increase immigration. According to Gallup, public support for increasing immigration has never exceeded 34% since that time, and from 1965 to 2000, was under 10%. But in that timeframe, the foreign-born population has grown from a low of 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century. So no, continuing to ignore the immigration laws Americans voted for and have consistently supported is not a good prior.
- acdha 1y ago
  > the foreign-born population has grown from a low of 4.7% in 1970 to 15.6% in 2024--higher than it ever was in the 20th century. This is going to be exaggerated by the decline in the domestic birth rate over that same period. It’s widely recognized that the U.S. has avoided the aging population effect seen throughout the advanced economies solely due to allowing more working-age immigrants.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  And that's a good thing. Who else is going to staff those nursing home full of debilitated nonagenarians?
  - rayiner 1y ago
    I care very little about nursing homes. I care a lot more about the deep culture (https://opengecko.com/geckoview/interculturalism/visualising-the-iceberg-model-of-culture https://opengecko.com/geckoview/interculturalism/visualising...) of future citizens and voters.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      > I care very little about nursing homes. ok. > I care a lot more about the deep culture of future citizens and voters. Yes. The native Americans had some ideas about that too. I find it supremely hypocritical of you, child of immigrants, to start telling a good chunk of the country that you immigrated into (regardless of how they got there) that 'their culture' is not welcome. > https://opengecko.com/geckoview/interculturalism/visualising-the-iceberg-model-of-culture https://opengecko.com/geckoview/interculturalism/visualising... Did you even read that link or any of the associated texts? It seems to argue strongly against the thing you care about in isolation. It is all about interaction. And of course culture is more than just the surface. That's what makes it so beautiful. It is a whole interlocking complex of concepts and various cultures interacting and learning/borrowing/stealing bits of culture from each other is how we progress. If not for that you would not be where you are today, and I would be speaking Latin. Immigrants (illegal and otherwise) are not just a part of the United States, they are the United States.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        I linked that page because the iceberg metaphor is extremely useful. The rest of the page is feeler slop. It recognizes that cultural differences are substantive (e.g. concepts of fairness) and not only superficial (e.g. food). But it takes it as axiomatic that mixing those differences necessarily is a good thing. Of course we don't have to take it on faith that mixing cultures is a good thing, we can look at actual results. For example, more than 200 years after they immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers, Dutch Americans are still more successful and orderly along many dimensions even compared to neighboring German Americans. For example, Dutch Americans, along with Mormons, were the two groups of Republicans to vote strongly against Trump in the 2016 primary: https://michaeljdouma.com/2019/05/19/dutch-americans-in-alienated-america https://michaeljdouma.com/2019/05/19/dutch-americans-in-alie.... If you don't care about superficial elements of culture (food, movies), cultural influence from immigrants has made almost no positive impact on American culture. The most functional and orderly communities in the country in 1725 were New England Purtians, and the places populated by their descendants remain so in 2025.
- ericfr11 1y ago
  Which proves that immigration is a good thing
  - rayiner 1y ago
    The orderliness of American and society has been in consistent decline since 1965. Our ability to organize and follow the law peaked around that time.
  - cmxch 1y ago
    …for everyone but the citizens it displaces. You want people to believe it’s good? Cut huge checks from the companies that won’t hire citizens, to the citizens.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      > …for everyone but the citizens it displaces. That never happened. Except in the former USSR where whole areas were depopulated to be restocked with Russians. > You want people to believe it’s good? Cut huge checks from the companies that won’t hire citizens, to the citizens. Yes, that's called a social security system and it is being done in plenty of countries in the world.
      - cmxch 1y ago
        Social Security doesn’t have the company issue the payment. At least directly. The idea is to give the displacing firm or firms an understanding of just whom they’re affecting.

jacquesm 1y ago
> I linked that page because the iceberg metaphor is extremely useful. Indeed it is. But remarkably, it serves mostly to show why what you are writing is simply not true. > The rest of the page is feeler slop. You mean the bits you didn't bother to read before you linked the page? Or just the bits that you don't like? > It recognizes that cultural differences are substantive (e.g. concepts of fairness) and not only superficial (e.g. food). And this is news how? > But it takes it as axiomatic that mixing those differences necessarily is a good thing. Which indeed it is. > Of course we don't have to take it on faith that mixing cultures is a good thing, we can look at actual results. For example, more than 200 years after they immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers, Dutch Americans are still more successful and orderly along many dimensions even compared to neighboring German Americans. This is absolutely hilarious. Dutch Americans went to America not because they were so orderly or successful, they went there because there either was money to be made or because they were - case in point - deported. The same for many English and Irish people that made it to the early USA. My very high flying and orderly lawyer decided to figure out his ancestry and ended up at some criminal that had picked the boat instead of the gallows. > For example, Dutch Americans, along with Mormons, were the two groups of Republicans to vote strongly against Trump in the 2016 primary: https://michaeljdouma.com/2019/05/19/dutch-americans-in-alie https://michaeljdouma.com/2019/05/19/dutch-americans-in-alie.... That's by a guy whose ancestors came from Friesland, arguably the most nationalistic of all of NL, but along the lines of how Catalans or Basques see their position in Spain. They cling to their history due to endless suppression of the Frisians by the Dutch (at the time, North Holland and South Holland), not unlike what the UK did to the Irish but a bit less brutal (usually, anyway). But fine, let's look at what he wrote instead of at who he is and what his ancestorship is. He mostly argues that the Dutch have managed to set themselves apart from other groups of immigrants by staying true to their roots, but also that they have since assimilated and that those communities are now more mixed. I know a bunch of people like that. Family members that emigrated long ago, you may have heard of them, they're amongst the wealthiest in the United States. They are no longer connected to the Netherlands in any practical way, the only thing that still links them is their last name, and a vague recollection that they had some Dutch ancestry. Their story is fairly unique, but there are many stories that are much more mundane without such insane commercial success. If not for their last names you wouldn't be able to tell their ancestry at all. And sure, rural towns that were populated or founded by immigrants from one group tend to keep some of their roots alive, possibly as some kind of time capsule. Just like the Dutch Afrikaners, to name one weird offshoot of Dutch colonialism. Nothing to be proud of, that's for sure. Meanwhile, the cities are the melting pots, and that's where far more people live of all kinds of ancestry than in the rural country side. That's also where the fear of the other tends to be a lot lower, simply because there are more others and it is much easier to live together because it is normalized. I employed the only non-white guy on an Island in Canada and I've seen up close how those former Dutch (and German) ancestors dealt with the opportunity to get up close and personal with other cultures. Hint: not very well. So spare me the great advantages of those orderly people who once upon a time came across the Atlantic to colonize the new land. They are no different than anybody else, and with a little luck their little islands are as racist as they come. > If you don't care about superficial elements of culture (food, movies), cultural influence from immigrants has made almost no positive impact on American culture. What??? > The most functional and orderly communities in the country in 1725 were New England Purtians [sic], and the places populated by their descendants remain so in 2025. Yes, who would have thought that having a massive head start in money and education would lead to a lasting advantage over time? Where do you think the term 'old money' comes from? Immigrants as a rule, especially undocumented ones are not going to be hobnobbing with the wealthy New England old money descendants to pick up the finer points of dining table behavior or how to function in a social climate different than the one they came from. There are some exceptions but let's not kid each other here. But there is a very good chance that the UBO of their presence in the USA is exactly that group of descendants of those New England Puritans, and not the immigrants. And that allows you in turn to point at them as failures, rather than as the exploited. Really man, you've just been schooled in a basic principle of law, your stated profession by a foreigner. That's roughly in line with you having to explain to me what RMS power stands for or how to set up a for loop in C. You then deflect to a bunch of utter tripe about the country that I'm from, on which you have projected a whole bunch of your own feelings which are completely disconnected from reality on the ground. Now you're pulling in the end result of a couple of hundred years of head start by the first wave of immigrants as a proof point that other cultures are at best a neutral or very slightly positive contribution, if not the source of many negatives. Maybe take a breather and think this over, you are not exactly anonymous on here and you have a real world reputation to consider.
- rayiner 1y ago
  > So spare me the great advantages of those orderly people who once upon a time came across the Atlantic to colonize the new land. They are no different than anybody else, and with a little luck their little islands are as racist as they come. The Dutch built multiple advanced societies on three different continents (their homeland, the Americas, and South Africa) whilst Bangladeshis have not succeeded in building any. I care a lot more about how they did that--and not breaking whatever cultural magic is responsible--than about how nice they are to foreigners. You seem to take Dutch (or American) culture for granted. I think of it as a fragile local optimum and that we should be terrified that immigration will cause regression to the global cultural mean. > Yes, who would have thought that having a massive head start in money and education would lead to a lasting advantage over time? Where do you think the term 'old money' comes from? The head start doesn't count for much. If it did, Mexico would be richer than Massachusetts. Utah was populated by Mormons fleeing religious persecution more than 200 years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony, but its median income is only 6% behind. Regardless, it's not a money thing. Italian Americans, for example, overtook English Americans in income long ago. New Jersey has a similar median income to Massachusetts. But Massachusetts is a far better state than New Jersey on most social metrics. > But there is a very good chance that the UBO of their presence in the USA is exactly that group of descendants of those New England Puritans, and not the immigrants. And that allows you in turn to point at them as failures, rather than as the exploited. This is a third-world way of thinking. Societies get rich by creating the social and legal conditions that allow building things and running businesses, not by exploiting people. That's why culture matters so much for prosperity.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    The main reason why the Dutch do what they do is because: - it takes less than 2 hours by car in any direction to be abroad where they speak a different language - NL has been overrun historically by (not in any particular order) the Romans, the French, the Spanish, the Germans and has been in long and complicated wars with all of these, and in many cases more than once. - In spite of being tiny what you know as 'the Dutch' is internally extremely fragmented, there are at least 10 different cultures, this isn't so much a country as it is a bunch of mini countries in a trenchcoat, with the dividing lines not being so much geographical as cultural. - Trade. You can't really do much here other than think and grow potatoes and beets. Other than some natural gas in the North we have no natural resources worth mentioning, though at some point we had some coal mining in the Southernmost area. So trade it is and in the past trade meant shipbuilding. - Theft. Slavery. Colonies. Exploitation. NL absolutely excelled at all of those at some point in the past. Bangladeshi's not being able to emulate the Dutch in that sense should not come as a surprise: we were small but absolutely ruthless in war and in trade at a time when the cards in the world were being shuffled. We did not suffer from the resource curse and very early realized that religion is a personal thing and so limited the amount of influence that the various religions had here. And finally, science was adopted wholesale because it was good for business. Those factors, as well as a culture steeped in work just to keep the country in existence (without all that work it would simply disappear and become a river delta again) are where the main differences with a place like Bangladesh lie, and I don't doubt that the potential for doing this is present in many places that are not doing well today. At the same time: the current generation of Dutch people are losing sight of all of this, they take it all for granted and it's theirs to lose. Abroad in those colonies the Dutch have been horrendous and the amount of wealth plundered (from places like Bangladesh) is off the scale, the only countries that can compete are England, Portugal and Spain, and Belgium to some degree as well and that's not a pretty story either. This is a small country that is fabulously wealthy that has been built on a lake of blood. And because the blood wasn't spilled here we can pretend that we are the good guys but make no mistake, we pretty much invented genocide and have committed war crimes that we are proud enough of that the perpetrators have major streets named after themselves. We more or less invented externalization. So so much for 'Societies get rich by creating the social and legal conditions that allow building things and running businesses, not by exploiting people.' This is not the country you want as an example for that statement.

ericfr11 1y ago

The culture of the future will be built by the people of the present. If not, then, America should go back to being great again with the Apache and the Navajo leading the country!

rayiner 1y ago
> The culture of the future will be built by the people of the present That’s the problem! I am unpersuaded that the people of the present could recreate the America at which Alexander de Tocqueville marveled: http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-Tocqueville-Democracy-in-America.pdf http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-To.... American democracy is highly unusual in the world. Indians, for example, have figured out mass voting—within a society where people see government as a parental figure—but they don’t have anything resembling the bottom-up participatory democracy of something like the Iowa Caucuses. I think it’s inevitable (and baked in) that democracy in America will degrade to what it is in most third world countries: masses of low information citizens with little sense of ownership and participation voting for daddy government to care for them.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  > American democracy is highly unusual in the world. Indeed it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are other countries that show much better what democracy could look like than what the USA is going through. > Indians, for example, have figured out mass voting—within a society where people see government as a parental figure—but they don’t have anything resembling the bottom-up participatory democracy of something like the Iowa Caucuses. Nor do they have gerrymandering. But such singular characteristics are not defining either. Both India, the USA and in fact much of the planet have issues in terms of government, participation and representation. It is however pretty rare to see a nominal democracy turn into an autocracy overnight. Rarer still that this is being cheered on by those that stand the least to gain from the change. > I think it’s inevitable (and baked in) that democracy in America will degrade to what it is in most third world countries: masses of low information citizens with little sense of ownership and participation voting for daddy government to care for them. That is one possible outcome. There are many others and quite a few of them a lot worse than that. Currently, based on how things are going we are not on a worldline (to use a popular term) where the outcome that you sketch is inevitable at all.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    > But such singular characteristics are not defining either. Both India, the USA and in fact much of the planet have issues in terms of government, participation and representation. The Iowa Caucuses exemplifies the most important distinguishing characteristic of American democracy. India is a hierarchical society, where low-information masses select who will parent them. America, by contrast, is an egalitarian democracy. That doesn't mean maximizing the participation of the low-information masses. It means that Americans choose from amongst themselves people to represent them within a system of self-government. Americans have this ideal of self-government all the way down, from the President down to elected school boards and HOAs and church leadership. > There are other countries that show much better what democracy could look like than what the USA is going through. I'll grant you one thing: American democracy is worse than it was when Reagan was running against Carter, and Trump is part of the reason for that. But the way in which it's worse is that it more resembles Indian third-world slop democracy!