I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)
> I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is.
And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.
Edit: And before you mention O-1 and friends for highly accomplished individuals (maybe that's not affected for now? Honestly have no idea), this kind of policy has wide ranging second order effects even if it doesn't affect top talent directly. Like I said I was U.S. educated myself, once I would encourage bright minds from elsewhere to pursue a higher education in the U.S., now I heavily advise them from even setting foot in the U.S.
Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here.
> Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs.
> which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met.
> And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration
That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.
But America being what it is, it attracts those with most potential creating and sustaining a network effect.
But there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad of the US, and it’s quite easy to mess up the equilibrium and go back to the mediocrity you mentioned
That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.
Generally, yes.
But then there's Elon Musk.
Peter Thiel too: while a US citizen by birth, he defacto immigrated to the US from elsewhere (as in: moved from another country to settle in the US).
Immigration for rich folks is a bit different, see.
If that was about any other class of people it'd be downvoted to oblivion, but for some reason Americans and white can always be talked shit on.
This is the kind of shit US AMERICANS are talking about, this xenophilia bullshit that is infecting our nation.
Go to any high school and see how little American schoolchildren care about academics vs immigrant schoolchildren. Academic excellence being uncool is baked into American culture. You're a "nerd" if you do well and care. Getting a B is "good enough." And "C's get degrees." This mentality is plainly unacceptable in most immigrant cultures.
I took almost two dozen AP classes in my day. In each one, the concentration of immigrant groups was far higher than the rest of the school at large.
Expand this out to college. Look at the admissions for top colleges without affirmative action. How do their demographics compare to the rest of the country? - MIT, 47% Asian. Berkeley, 41% Asian. UCLA and Stanford, 27% Asian.
6% of the US population is Asian, and 75% is white, and these schools don't have affirmative action. If all groups were equally competitive, admissions would reflect demographics.
(Ethnicity here is a crude approximation for immigration recency. I am not saying one ethnic group is better than another - simply that children of immigrants excel.)
The same goes for top PhD programs, the highest paying STEM jobs, even C-suite positions at big tech.
I am American and when I say that we have a problem where most Americans do not give a fuck about education, I am not being racist, I am just pointing out the truth. Over decades, our culture has bred an anti-intellectual attitude, one that prioritizes being cool and sociable over getting shit done. This is the antithesis of progress and ambition. It is great for sitting around and demanding handouts.
Immigrants more closely approximate the culture the founding fathers intended for the US. They uproot their lives to build something great. They get off their asses, do exceptionally well, and are carrying the nation on their backs. The rest of our culture could learn from them, instead of blaming our problems on them and turning them away.
Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?
I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.
No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.
Given that they’re underwater for approval rating on immigration it seems both you and they have misread the room. Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants. For this, they have no mandate.
There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.
And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.
And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.
White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.
[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/199094/dhs-neo-nazi-memes-no...
[1]https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nati...
I would challenge this. If you do believe that there are violent criminals coming through the porous border, whether it's 1% of the illegal immigrants or 100% of them, trying to seal the border off is not irrational. I'm not endorsing the physical wall itself, as I know a ton of illegal migrants are just overstaying visas, and I've heard of ladders and tunnels.
I think what's really compelling, and what the Left can't seem to relate to, is this: Everyone serious does believe the true fact that illegal immigrants have a lower rate of committing crimes than the overall population. But people who are victimized by those crimes have a valid point that those crimes are still incremental crimes - meaning that if we already had 1000 people in $BORDER_STATE who are going to commit violent crimes, letting in 1000 more people, even if only 10 of them (1%) are violent criminals, gives us 1,010 violent criminals. That's more crime than we had before. It's not like we get to trade in 10 of our own criminals for 10 immigrant ones.
Making no effort to control who comes here is irresponsible, because of course if there's a country that doesn't even try to vet you, and would feel guilty making you leave, of course criminals would be excited to go there.
I'm not so sure.
I think it would play out like this:
1. 20% H1Bs leave; 2. Those migrants are now in countries of origin, looking for work; 3. Many of the big US tech companies will already have offices in those countries, and those that don't can make new offices if they wanted to; 4. many, but likely not all, of those employees are now working for the same employer (or close enough), just in a different jurisdiction; 5. as none of these employees are physically in US hotspots, all the other stuff that happened in those hotspots because of big tech pay, suffers, conversely all the stuff which was suppressed because of those wages may (possibly) return; 6. two of the things that go down are the number of people transitioning from temporary visa to citizenship, and the available talent pool for the local-to-those-places startup and VC scenes.
If you just got massively screwed over by them (having upended your entire life in hope of getting a better future, then having that rugpulled), why would you get another job at that company with significantly worse contract terms?
Considering the rest of the world is reacting to the US setting itself on fire by finally stimulating local tech, why not just join one of the local alternatives instead?
