5 ms·

I ended up replying a little further up in the thread to a related point you made, but to sort of restate: Have you considered that under your own rubric, you'

I ended up replying a little further up in the thread to a related point you made, but to sort of restate: Have you considered that under your own rubric, you're "bad for america" because you're from a "bad" culture? It sounds like by your rules you shouldn't have been allowed to come. You say you don't view yourself as an exception, but clearly you are, so why are you special? If people like you and your dad can come from cultures like the one you left, how is it that culture is stagnant and unchanging as you say?

rayiner 11mo ago
> Have you considered that under your own rubric, you're "bad for america" because you're from a "bad" culture? It sounds like by your rules you shouldn't have been allowed to come. Correct, but so what? I think it's important to be objective and detached. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to color my thinking by trying to come to conclusions that would validate my own presence in the country. > You say you don't view yourself as an exception, but clearly you are, so why are you special? If people like you and your dad can come from cultures like the one you left, how is it that culture is stagnant and unchanging as you say? Societies aren't monoliths. Even Bangladesh has people like my dad, who arrive everywhere early, are horrified by corruption, and love waiting in line. But immigration isn't about individuals, it's about populations in the aggregate. And the evidence shows that populations have identifiable cultural averages that are durable over generations. "Trust, for instance, is one of the more commonly studied attributes: economic cooperation relies upon it, yet it varies substantially from culture to culture. Mr. Jones, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, notes that, even after four generations in the U.S., immigrants continue to hold attitudes toward trust that are significantly influenced by their home countries. On a host of other matters, such as family, abortion and the role of government, fourth-generation immigrants on average converge only about 60% of the way to the national norm." https://manhattan.institute/article/the-culture-transplant-review-immigrations-legacy https://manhattan.institute/article/the-culture-transplant-r... "Analyses using data from the World Values Survey and the cumulative General Social Surveys indicate that the civic attitudes of contemporary Americans bear a strong resemblance to the civic attitudes of the contemporary citizens of the European nations with whom they share common ancestors." https://cis.org/Richwine/More-Evidence-Cultural-Persistence https://cis.org/Richwine/More-Evidence-Cultural-Persistence
- ivraatiems 11mo ago
  > Correct, but so what? I think it's important to be objective and detached. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to color my thinking by trying to come to conclusions that would validate my own presence in the country. But you and your family are by your own metrics evidence that your line of thinking - "people from culture X are not worth bringing to the US" - is false. > Societies aren't monoliths. Even Bangladesh has people like my dad, who arrive everywhere early, are horrified by corruption, and love waiting in line. But immigration isn't about individuals, it's about populations in the aggregate. And the evidence shows that populations have identifiable cultural averages that are durable over generations. If you believe the first sentence, the second sentence doesn't follow. Isn't the whole point of immigration laws to construct systems by which people whose traits are desirable are allowed to immigrate? If your dad exists in Bangladesh, surely he's not the only one. If Bangladesh, with ~170 million people, has 500,000 of your dad (or whatever), surely it's to our benefit as a society to get as many of them as possible here? But the people in control of policy on this issue, frankly, are people who are so bald-facedly hypernationalist that they see "Bangladeshi" and think "not American," and stop there. They do not care to implement a system that would work better. They don't want a system at all. If you think societies aren't a monolith, whether they can change or not, then allowing movement between societies to help people find ones they fit into better is a good thing. If you think the US is better off with you in it, then "just reject everyone from country/culture X" is not the right approach. That is not the position current immigration policy espouses. My original point was that the US immigration system is designed to make it impossible to immigrate legally. Not just difficult or subject to scrutiny - effectively impossible. Is that what you want, given your beliefs? (To be clear, I still hold to my original point which is that I think your fundamental view of peoples and cultures is misguided and wrong, but we're not going to agree on that, so I don't see a point in arguing it. If it were up to me the system would be very very different, but as others have pointed out, it isn't currently up to me.)
  - rayiner 11mo ago
    > But you and your family are by your own metrics evidence that your line of thinking - "people from culture X are not worth bringing to the US" - is false. I didn't say that, and I had no reason to say that because it's irrelevant to my point. You're talking about someone like Fazlur Kahn, the Bangladeshi who moved to Illinois on a Fulbright Scholarship in the 1950s and was the structural engineer who designed the Sears Tower. I'm talking about 100,000 Bangladeshis moving en masse to New York, and establishing a Bangladeshi enclave in Queens. Your final caveat that you think culture doesn't actually matter is exactly why I think your "system that would work better" is a red herring. You'd never accept the immigration system we had back when Fazlur Kahn came here, because you believe in magic soil. If we implemented such a system, immigration proponents would immediately shift their focus to eliminating any bargained-for restrictions, which is exactly what they've been doing since 1965. So in reality, the choice is binary. You either severely restrict immigration, or you have mass immigration and Bangladeshi enclaves in your city.

rayiner 11mo ago

> Have you considered that under your own rubric, you're "bad for america" because you're from a "bad" culture? It sounds like by your rules you shouldn't have been allowed to come. Correct, but so what? I think it's important to be objective and detached. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to color my thinking by trying to come to conclusions that would validate my own presence in the country. > You say you don't view yourself as an exception, but clearly you are, so why are you special? If people like you and your dad can come from cultures like the one you left, how is it that culture is stagnant and unchanging as you say? Societies aren't monoliths. Even Bangladesh has people like my dad, who arrive everywhere early, are horrified by corruption, and love waiting in line. But immigration isn't about individuals, it's about populations in the aggregate. And the evidence shows that populations have identifiable cultural averages that are durable over generations. "Trust, for instance, is one of the more commonly studied attributes: economic cooperation relies upon it, yet it varies substantially from culture to culture. Mr. Jones, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, notes that, even after four generations in the U.S., immigrants continue to hold attitudes toward trust that are significantly influenced by their home countries. On a host of other matters, such as family, abortion and the role of government, fourth-generation immigrants on average converge only about 60% of the way to the national norm." https://manhattan.institute/article/the-culture-transplant-review-immigrations-legacy https://manhattan.institute/article/the-culture-transplant-r... "Analyses using data from the World Values Survey and the cumulative General Social Surveys indicate that the civic attitudes of contemporary Americans bear a strong resemblance to the civic attitudes of the contemporary citizens of the European nations with whom they share common ancestors." https://cis.org/Richwine/More-Evidence-Cultural-Persistence https://cis.org/Richwine/More-Evidence-Cultural-Persistence

ivraatiems 11mo ago
> Correct, but so what? I think it's important to be objective and detached. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to color my thinking by trying to come to conclusions that would validate my own presence in the country. But you and your family are by your own metrics evidence that your line of thinking - "people from culture X are not worth bringing to the US" - is false. > Societies aren't monoliths. Even Bangladesh has people like my dad, who arrive everywhere early, are horrified by corruption, and love waiting in line. But immigration isn't about individuals, it's about populations in the aggregate. And the evidence shows that populations have identifiable cultural averages that are durable over generations. If you believe the first sentence, the second sentence doesn't follow. Isn't the whole point of immigration laws to construct systems by which people whose traits are desirable are allowed to immigrate? If your dad exists in Bangladesh, surely he's not the only one. If Bangladesh, with ~170 million people, has 500,000 of your dad (or whatever), surely it's to our benefit as a society to get as many of them as possible here? But the people in control of policy on this issue, frankly, are people who are so bald-facedly hypernationalist that they see "Bangladeshi" and think "not American," and stop there. They do not care to implement a system that would work better. They don't want a system at all. If you think societies aren't a monolith, whether they can change or not, then allowing movement between societies to help people find ones they fit into better is a good thing. If you think the US is better off with you in it, then "just reject everyone from country/culture X" is not the right approach. That is not the position current immigration policy espouses. My original point was that the US immigration system is designed to make it impossible to immigrate legally. Not just difficult or subject to scrutiny - effectively impossible. Is that what you want, given your beliefs? (To be clear, I still hold to my original point which is that I think your fundamental view of peoples and cultures is misguided and wrong, but we're not going to agree on that, so I don't see a point in arguing it. If it were up to me the system would be very very different, but as others have pointed out, it isn't currently up to me.)
- rayiner 11mo ago
  > But you and your family are by your own metrics evidence that your line of thinking - "people from culture X are not worth bringing to the US" - is false. I didn't say that, and I had no reason to say that because it's irrelevant to my point. You're talking about someone like Fazlur Kahn, the Bangladeshi who moved to Illinois on a Fulbright Scholarship in the 1950s and was the structural engineer who designed the Sears Tower. I'm talking about 100,000 Bangladeshis moving en masse to New York, and establishing a Bangladeshi enclave in Queens. Your final caveat that you think culture doesn't actually matter is exactly why I think your "system that would work better" is a red herring. You'd never accept the immigration system we had back when Fazlur Kahn came here, because you believe in magic soil. If we implemented such a system, immigration proponents would immediately shift their focus to eliminating any bargained-for restrictions, which is exactly what they've been doing since 1965. So in reality, the choice is binary. You either severely restrict immigration, or you have mass immigration and Bangladeshi enclaves in your city.