4 ms·

This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals are not just producers and cons

This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals are not just producers and consumers... Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.

kmeisthax 4mo ago
"Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it. As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound. Anyway, migration is a human right. What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny. For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"! So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right. Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them. But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it! [0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are. [1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.
- mytailorisrich 4mo ago
  If you attack people as soon as they say that perhaps Japanese (or insert any other country) want to preserve their culture and who they are (which makes it a "shithole" according to you) and immediately label them racists and take the extremist view that it is your "human right" to be let in any country you please then perhaps the issue is not others...
  - kmeisthax 4mo ago
    I did not label you as a racist, I labeled the pro-natalist far-right as racist, and argued that social homogeneity sucks for people in the outgroup. I do not believe you are pro-natalist, you even argued against it. So I'm not sure why you think I'm labeling you as a racist. Human rights are descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, your right to speak does not come from a piece of paper signed by a bunch of 18th century politicians; the Bill of Rights is a recognition of what people have always believed. Likewise, I am not saying that I, personally, deserve the legal right to move to this one specific country. I am saying that human migration is an activity people have been doing for tens of thousands of years and that restricting it is as much of a folly as restricting speech is. In the realm of speech, we have the concept of the Streisand Effect, where even the smallest attempts at restricting speech immediately backfire by creating more discussion about the speech. And likewise, with immigration control, attempting to keep entire groups of people out also creates a paradoxical reaction. Namely, you create a black market for access, as criminals will organize themselves around figuring out how to evade the system. If your legal immigration system has reasonable paths to immigration that ordinary people can figure out and take advantage of, then nobody risks the illegal path, the state maintains effective control over the border, and we don't have this problem. But if you make your immigration system inscrutable for anyone outside your country's legal profession, set the visa requirements to be unmeetable by most people, or otherwise try to "keep them out", you are going to lose control over your borders purely from the economic demand overruling you. How this works is that, because most people do not understand and cannot make use of the visa systems on their own, they rely primarily on employer sponsorship. As we've seen with the H-1B program in America, employee-sponsored visas create an underclass of golden-handcuffed visaholders who are only eligible for employment from the small handful of companies that specialize in visa sponsorship. In Japan, they have guest worker programs that are even more restrictive and funnel people into "black companies" (i.e. sweatshops). Some of them don't even bother with visa sponsorship and just rely on inducing well-meaning but law-illiterate people to work illegally. To make matters worse, the state might even enjoy this state of affairs. As 400 years of American history have shown, it is politically expedient to have a permanent labor underclass. It lets politicians wriggle out of minimum wage, overtime laws, worker safety, and so on. For example, the US H-2A program is full of fronts for Mexican cartels doing human trafficking. The ICE raids on illegal immigrants have the paradoxical effect of giving those cartels more market power, creating a pliant underclass of agricultural slaves. Illegal immigrants could at least ghost farmers offering shitty work[0], but legal immigrants have a sponsor who knows where their family lives. The things individuals care about with regards to immigration - i.e. damage to "culture" or "social homogeneity" - are downstream of the state deliberately creating this labor underclass. Politicians wouldn't care about them otherwise. Hell, Japan has a long history of denigrating its own traditional culture in favor of looking more western. The joke about any given traditional Japanese art is that its masters are four grandmas and one really passionate white guy. A lot of things we consider to be uniquely Japanese[1] are cultural hand-me-downs from other countries[2], because the Japanese government didn't care about culture until they realized they could use it to scare people into the ballot box. [0] Again, "if it sucks, hit the bricks". [1] Like the functioning train network [2] Like how America threw away its functioning train network

kmeisthax 4mo ago

"Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it. As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound. Anyway, migration is a human right. What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny. For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"! So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right. Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them. But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it! [0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are. [1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.

mytailorisrich 4mo ago
If you attack people as soon as they say that perhaps Japanese (or insert any other country) want to preserve their culture and who they are (which makes it a "shithole" according to you) and immediately label them racists and take the extremist view that it is your "human right" to be let in any country you please then perhaps the issue is not others...
- kmeisthax 4mo ago
  I did not label you as a racist, I labeled the pro-natalist far-right as racist, and argued that social homogeneity sucks for people in the outgroup. I do not believe you are pro-natalist, you even argued against it. So I'm not sure why you think I'm labeling you as a racist. Human rights are descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, your right to speak does not come from a piece of paper signed by a bunch of 18th century politicians; the Bill of Rights is a recognition of what people have always believed. Likewise, I am not saying that I, personally, deserve the legal right to move to this one specific country. I am saying that human migration is an activity people have been doing for tens of thousands of years and that restricting it is as much of a folly as restricting speech is. In the realm of speech, we have the concept of the Streisand Effect, where even the smallest attempts at restricting speech immediately backfire by creating more discussion about the speech. And likewise, with immigration control, attempting to keep entire groups of people out also creates a paradoxical reaction. Namely, you create a black market for access, as criminals will organize themselves around figuring out how to evade the system. If your legal immigration system has reasonable paths to immigration that ordinary people can figure out and take advantage of, then nobody risks the illegal path, the state maintains effective control over the border, and we don't have this problem. But if you make your immigration system inscrutable for anyone outside your country's legal profession, set the visa requirements to be unmeetable by most people, or otherwise try to "keep them out", you are going to lose control over your borders purely from the economic demand overruling you. How this works is that, because most people do not understand and cannot make use of the visa systems on their own, they rely primarily on employer sponsorship. As we've seen with the H-1B program in America, employee-sponsored visas create an underclass of golden-handcuffed visaholders who are only eligible for employment from the small handful of companies that specialize in visa sponsorship. In Japan, they have guest worker programs that are even more restrictive and funnel people into "black companies" (i.e. sweatshops). Some of them don't even bother with visa sponsorship and just rely on inducing well-meaning but law-illiterate people to work illegally. To make matters worse, the state might even enjoy this state of affairs. As 400 years of American history have shown, it is politically expedient to have a permanent labor underclass. It lets politicians wriggle out of minimum wage, overtime laws, worker safety, and so on. For example, the US H-2A program is full of fronts for Mexican cartels doing human trafficking. The ICE raids on illegal immigrants have the paradoxical effect of giving those cartels more market power, creating a pliant underclass of agricultural slaves. Illegal immigrants could at least ghost farmers offering shitty work[0], but legal immigrants have a sponsor who knows where their family lives. The things individuals care about with regards to immigration - i.e. damage to "culture" or "social homogeneity" - are downstream of the state deliberately creating this labor underclass. Politicians wouldn't care about them otherwise. Hell, Japan has a long history of denigrating its own traditional culture in favor of looking more western. The joke about any given traditional Japanese art is that its masters are four grandmas and one really passionate white guy. A lot of things we consider to be uniquely Japanese[1] are cultural hand-me-downs from other countries[2], because the Japanese government didn't care about culture until they realized they could use it to scare people into the ballot box. [0] Again, "if it sucks, hit the bricks". [1] Like the functioning train network [2] Like how America threw away its functioning train network