I honestly find it incredible that anyone in their right mind can continue to support mass immigration. The problem with leftist thinking is that it is still rooted in 19th century principles that have no relevance in the modern world. This makes their values irrelevant and their moral posturing empty. At what point in the last hundred years did they abandon the economic first principle of supply and demand? I too have lost many friends since I have drifted right but who wants to associate with a low infomation cult that's going to get us all killed anyway?
Also, the 19th century was mostly immigration from European countries to either other European countries, colonies, or the USA. Sure, there were still differences, but they remained vaguely compatible from the days of the Roman Empire. And at that point the countries probably needed to grow; at this point, I'd call them matured, and I don't want more people here in the USA at all. Even if they're white Europeans. And I definitely don't need 20 million illegal-alien or "temporary" (what is it, 15 years and counting, Haiti? Even the Covid scam ended faster!) protected-status criminal randos at my doorstep.
A radio program in my area summed it up nicely: they aren't making more beach. So, in my lifetime, 1 million people became 10 million people became 30 million people who all wanted the same beach/lake/wherever. Demand is up, price is up, satisfaction is down (because even if you do get in, it's crowded and heavily corporatized and not even as good, anyway), and what the hell do we need so much "unskilled" labor for if all the AI and robots are taking over anyway? The frequent complaint here is "we need more housing" but, really -- not to sound too much like Klaus Schwab -- I think we need fewer people. We're bumping into each other and all want our own space without the other guys. I have begun to theorize there is a population density threshold that causes a personality shift in most people and makes a society a much worse place to live. Even my extremely left-wing sister described a trip to India as insufferable due to "people everywhere." It might be more profitable to pack everyone in like it's Bangladesh or wherever, but I have zero interest in ever living like that.
Endless, inifinite growth is the capitalist model, so it's really weird that the self-proclaimed socialists want it. And if those evil bastards want something, that's as good a reason as any to be against it.
The language switcheroo is in play as they write the history of the future. Calling them asylum seekers isn't for our benefit. It is narrative. In the 18th century the Enclosures Acts privatised the land and created a refugee population of starving peasants, who flooded into cities seeking food. These people are universally described and historically recorded not as starving refugees looking for food but as workers looking for work.
Infinite growth is not a capitalist model in any world, not even in an insane “broom of Israel” world that doesn’t want you to know about Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink experiment. Please defy them.
Infinite growth is literally part of the NPV calculation formula in B-school. It usually assumes something like "3% growth forever" in year 10, which is obviously impossible.
I'd MUCH rather live in a world of a billion or fewer where we're eating prime rib in our McMansions, rather than a world of 20 billion or more where we're eating bugs in pods.
When we colonize the Moon, create an atmosphere, lakes and mountains and other areas will become prime real estate. Not soon, but i imagine 2 generations from now.
And then we will actually need more people to solve the new problems that will accompany this progress.
Well... in principle you could have large pressured habitat domes with atmosphere inside. That *might* happen before the century is out, but yeah, open atmo isn't likely to happen.
Pipe dream, humans have been talking about that for 50 years. We’re barely any closer. In the next 100 years, at best, it’ll be a bunker in a moon cave.
The author assumes his friend is empathetic and kind, but someone truly like that would bear with a friend whatever their political views. Especially so when the views are held by so many and so not beyond the pale - unless one is just to go about rejecting humanity generally. It might be reasonable to say that the rift was as much about the friend being unable to suffer feeling of animosity that contradicted their view of themselves. I would spare far less quarter than you do. Your friendship ended because he was up himself with a wholly unwarranted sense of saintliness
The author is clear, unless he is being histrionic, that he ends up falling out with most of his friends eventually, so I'm not sure your diagnosis that his friend was "up himself" is particularly warranted.
Empathy and kindness are admirable traits but no-one ever said they had to be infinite or otherwise they are worthless.
People change, and friendships wax and wane and break. That's just life.
I saw a segment on jesse Watters 2 days ago where the guest described the tragedy of suicidal empathy.
Feeling the pain of illegal immigrants is empathy… allowing 20 million unvetted non English speaking, low skilled immigrants into the country is suicidal empathy.
It's a mental defense. People don't want to accept that they live in a dystopia and are ruled by people who hate them. This is especially true the more one has something to lose: money, family, some kind of constructed community substitute, the promise of a pension or 401k. Hence the later someone was born, the more likely he'll be open to such ideas; as the system degrades it offers fewer opportunities to the youth, they don't remember "the good old days" and hence can't be in denial about them being gone.
I think this is just barely missing the heart of the matter (which my fellow leftists often also do). The “elite” is apathetic to us. They do not care about the changing of a nation. It is not a matter of hating white people, nor is it a matter of loving nonwhites. The left is caught up in itself over the latter, the right is in hysterics over the former. Elites, as they were in Antiquity, are entirely cosmopolitan. A billionaire in the US has much more in common with a billionaire from the UAE than he does with anyone below that level of wealth and power in the US.
The citizenry are a means to an end, that end being infinite growth of their wealth, meaning an infinite growth of their power. The fact is that natives are simply more expensive laborers. They demand a higher standard of living, more time with their family, more benefits, etc. as compared to migrants. I’d argue the reason we see anti-immigrant sentiment actually turning into policies is because the elite are having to reckon with the fact that the strain caused by this cheap labor ends up causing instability, and thus threatening their bottom line.
It’s a bit depressing how similar the rhetoric around automation is. The appeals to FOMO, the promise of higher QoL because less people are stuck working shitty jobs, the inevitability, even the moral framing (exchange “bigot” for “Luddite” and see what I mean).
The good ‘ole days were full of work, chores, serious education, delayed gratification, honesty and grit., and scraped knees. And you didn’t win shit for “participation “
Today’s kids won’t tolerate that, as they order their $10 doordash delivery.
Plus they feel “entitled “ although I have no clue why or from where that originated.
It’s basically the prodigal son asking for his inheritance before he earned it. (And then squandering it on foolish pleasures.)
I agree and I think ultimately each generation has to take accountability.
However young people today were essentially orphans, given to the state/TV/Internet. When what shaped your childhood was SpongeBob and Ramen noodles and not fishing with Dad or helping grandma shuck corn, riding bikes with friends, you end up living in a completely different reality. A $10 doordash to make up for the fact no one taught you to cook, you were made so neurotic by psychiatrists/helicopter parents/Internet you're afraid to drive, you have watched thousands of hours of porn starting at 8-10 years old and not one adult stopped it (some even said it was healthy), you were overweight and had asthma by that age as well and that the school never expected you to read a book seems not so immoral. Even if they can't vocalize it younger generations weren't simply parented differently, they weren't parented at all. But they didn't even get a Lord Of The Flies in the wild situation. They were handed over to mega corporations.
yeah the good old days were less comfortable, 100%. I would say the bridge between my claim and your claim is that the avenues for hard work, opportunity have narrowed markedly. The default is a Bowling Alone society, very alienating to young people, few compelling models of 'the good life'. Takes heroic virtue to scrape together some kind of historically normal existence.
This time it is very different. We are importing people that remain on the dole. That never happened before. My parents both came to the US poor but legally. They never took a dollar and paid the price and waited in line. We were poor and we all paid for our University like our parents did. My parents were Americans. They did not wander about with other countries flags. We spoke American and not English. They were and are proud to be Americans. Same for my wife who still has not taught our children how to speak her native tongue.
I'm interested to learn more about your "remain on the dole" comment. Is that based 9n your experience or is that something you heard/read about somewhere. I thought the unemployment rate between "immigrants and locals" was basically the same?
And if you’re not a bit anxious about the cultural ruin happening in the UK these days, then you need to to be mugged on the streets by a diverse crowd of illegal immigrants.
Finally you need to get a grip on that TDS you suffer from. My guess is you trust the BBC and read The Guardian too much.
Probably live in a “gated” community also, so you don’t have to endure what the regular folks endure.
Which geo are you talking about? In the US we see that heavily in Seattle and surrounding community. The numbers are published and lauded for how we help these people. The question is what is a refugee today if they go on vacation and visit their homeland?
My wife is a Latina who works heavily supporting the community. She helps families that depend on these monies. We are seeing a reverse flow of refugees from El Salvador moving back home. The flow is now reversed and the place is booming.
"I thought the unemployment rate between "immigrants and locals" was basically the same?"
So first lets define legal immigrants or not legal. Not legal falls into a grey area where they are not able to furnish documents and get paid less or not at all if the hiring party is a bad actor. The taxi owner lends his taxi to someone else who does not match the license picture and tell me he has been in the US for 10 years and just visited his homeland to see his family.
anecdotal evidence is why I am writing and responding here. Maybe if you knew some people that had illegal status you would not be so uninformed.
Its easy enough to look up the support my community allows here in Washington yet you somehow need me to tell you about what is already easily searchable?
Here is some for you with some state links:
Apple Health is state funded program with free healthcare coverage regardless of immigration status.
Alien Emergency Medical picks up use of the emergency rooms
State financial aid for Education is wide open and residency status is pretty easy to prove. (see drivers license)
Standard drivers license is open
Household Participation: Approximately 17% of households headed by an undocumented immigrant participated in SNAP as of 2022/2023 data. This represents about 1 million non-citizen households, making up roughly 4.8% of total SNAP participants.
The other inescapable contributor to the supporters of mass immigration is a legal level of compassion. The desire to help everyone, even at the cost of complete social destruction and the loss of the culture which created a successful country in the first place.
I just reread this and think this is hilariously stupid
I love how you tried to mention supply and demand when the supply and demand is exactly what’s happening above
If the second or third generation Asian family out performs an Irish family on Irish soil, that’s not the Asian family’s that’s the Irish family’s problem
And Ireland is better off for it, because that immigration may be 60 years ago is paying off dividends
If you can’t compete in the marketplace, that’s your problem
Not a leftist but I support mass immigration with some qualifiers. I can’t believe this is a “leftist thinking” thing. Conservatives should be the most supportive of as much immigration as possible
perhaps you’ve been red pilled and are beginning to see the Matrix .
I’ve noticed more and more former leftists begin to defect. You should know that The communist leaders will eat you first if they ever truly come to power.
No. It's not a coherent argument. It's a weak one. Human beings are not goods or services; they have their own interests and desires. What's more, unlike goods and services, human beings can vote and influence outcomes. You and your fellow open borders aficionados need to tell us WHY and HOW open borders would AUTOMATICALLY lead to higher levels of human capital after all things considered. You haven't.
Wonderful piece - and worth recognising that this outcome is something like the "best case" for immigration, one where those arriving are essentially hardworking, economically productive, genuinely culturally enriching and not prone to crime. The reality, aside from the obvious principle you are illustrating, is that in addition to the demands for change and special treatment, and the manifold negative impacts (both large and small) on existing communities, many immigrants are criminal and economically unproductive to boot
"It’s an uneasy cold peace that makes everyone a little more miserable". - is my favourite line, because it paints a very bleak picture of the netresult of even the best case mass immigration scenario and as such is a slam dunk argument against mass migration.
Why would you care to counter it, if you are not indifferent to the wellbeing of people?
- Nations, especially small ones, are made by their people. When the people change, the nation changes too.
- Those small, everyday structures that hold a society together don’t survive mass demographic change intact. They erode gradually, then suddenly, until people are left with quiet resignation and a country that no longer feels like theirs.
Honestly... I think this is kinda stepping over the longer-term problem. In the event that 4 million east asians moved to Ireland and were randomly sprinkled across the landscape they'd most likely intermarry with the natives within a couple generations, and then the Irish would cease to exist as a recognisable group genetically, not to mention culturally.
The rat race culture is a problem, sure, but that's almost self-correcting in that it guarantees the couples in question wouldn't reproduce very much, so I don't think that would persist for long.
It is indeed a puzzle that while Asians idolize book learning, cram for exams, and seek mastery of difficult subjects, all of the finest insitutions of higher learning are in the West where kids are recently descended from farmers, prefer football, goof off in class, and look down on book learning as geeky. It's a paradox that argues for a hidden truth in the West, a blunt contradiction in our approach to the intellect. I find it disturbing that a massive influx of Asians, however much I personally like them, would muddle if not sweep away the Western character that made the West an object of such intense, striving desire to Asians in the first place.
Simeon, Asians don't love the West because of its character. They love the West because it's richer and more prestigious. If China, Japan, or Korea were to somehow become as rich as your average northwestern European country, those immigration rates would plummet.
I'm not sure you've explained Asians entirely. As for riches, China and Japan outrank most European countries economically. Korea is about as rich as it can possibly be, given its population and territorial size. Yet that highest wealth hasn't translated into highest prestige, at least relative to Europe and America. Prestige proceeds out of high character. Countries lacking in fairness, honesty, and other kinds of moral rigor will be incapable of producing prestigious institutions. They may not be aware of it, but what attracts Asians to the West is its reputation, which is something that cannot be disentangled from the Western character.
China does not outrank many European countries. Japan has recently been surpassed by Poland. Prestige does not proceed out of high character. Many of the prestigious institutions in the West weren’t paragons of virtue at inception. Harvard was a pretty quaint seminary when it first started and only became prestigious after a run of good presidents.
I enjoy your articles, but there's a peculiar blindness in your comments here. Should Harvard's pedigree as a theological seminary have nothing to do with the virtue expected of its matriculants or its high standards over the centuries? Harvard's curriculum in the 1700's should be the envy of modern students, when you look at the details. They were expected to arrive well-versed in Latin, and went on to study everything from Astronomy to the Classics, since it was thought that clergy should be as knowledgeable as possible. You can't divorce an insitution from its roots unless you just don't care or you're wilfully bind. Perhaps all the Chinese students who cheat on their exams, something fairly normal for them, reveals a stark difference in culture and a dramatic limitation Asians impose on themselves because they don't understand the value of right conduct.
I’m telling you very clearly that western institutions aren’t prestigious because of their ethics or morals. There are plenty of amazing instructions in the west that are far more moral and robust but have zero prestige. A great example would be America’s remaining catholic colleges. I am not saying you can divorce an intuitions from its roots. I am saying that your analysis is faulty. Asians, and I should know because I am one myself, don’t give a damn about western values. They value western success. And frankly, many Asians openly hold western thought in contempt, as evidenced by the Chinese diaspora and the Chinese community party
There is, in fact, significant immigration to Japan at the moment, and China being somewhere between a basketcase kleptocracy and an outright dictatorship probably somewhat stymies the desire to move there. I'll grant there are European countries poorer than either but not many people desire to move there, at least from within the OECD.
University rankings are just bunk these days. A lot of a university's prestige now has less to do with its intellectual output than with the age and wealth of the institution. Part of the reason why excellent universities in Asia and Africa have yet to become as prestigious is a lack of white international students.
If we lived in a perfect world where Africa didn’t spent the 20th century stagnating thanks to anti white socialism, University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch would probably be probably be cracking the top 150. Witwatersrand is another candidate
Asians are social strivers, in general. An asiatic cannot understand something like Sprezzatura, for instance. Everything is overdone and in your face.
You're quite right in bringing up sprezzatura, which is so uniquely Western. Asians seems to distill everything down to a token of merit, whereas Westerners with their relative "relaxedness" achieve for the love of the endeavor. Ironically, Asians might turn "loving it" into a merit unto itself!
When will the DEd suffragettes in the DoE require that kiddies master integral calculus before trying out for high school varsity sports or marching band? We need to fail them out early and put them on a different path. AI can make stupid errors as well as stupid humans.
I am an American technologist. I studied, worked, and socialized with Asians like you describe. We were unanimous in blaming that frivolous national corporatist prep school indoctrination system for our academic divergence.
You realize we see the top 0.25% of Asians here, right?
Even those who fled Vietnam were those bold enough to try.
It's why they start businesses.
Now we are only sent the best and brightest. China filters out who even gets an education. If we removed the bottom 25% of kids from our schools, performance would skyrocket.
And even that top 0.25% isn't necessarily what it's cracked up to be. Most of them arrive at American universities with a bare minimum of English and not much critical thinking ability. Not sure why they should take a spot that a Westerner could fill.
Why is it that when someone wants the demographics of their nation to remain the same, they are regarded with suspicion and have to morally justify their belief, but those who want to change the demographics never have to morally justify their beliefs?
Your thought experiment actually describes Metro Vancouver, British Columbia. Starting in the mid 80’s with Hong Kongers and continuing now with elite Chinese the City and Province have been transformed by Chinese immigrants. They are definitely hard working people and many came with lots of money to stash - but the downside has been felt in many ways - the most obvious being Vancouver’s insanely expensive real estate that unaffordable for normal working people. Of course if you mentioned this up until about 5 years ago you were a ‘racist.’ I’m glad we didn’t get a bunch of North Africans or their equivalents — but your point is well made - population replacement is never good for the people being replaced.
thanks for working through all this so laboriously. but you know what? i don't really buy the reasoning of those who call white people racists or supremacists--i.e. i don't think they are arguing in good faith. i think they are either parroting leftist talking points to virtue-signal or else they are part of the evil contingent who are working for white genocide. basically, either conformist or evil.
Flip the script and ask how white people declining is a good thing. How is it desirable? How is it ideal? What do white people gain from their own groups erosion?
The obvious conclusion will be that it's not in a groups self interest to self destruct while every other group grows in power and representation.
There has been a whole generation of young people who has never known anything but a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. Their issue is not primarily that they are against nationalism; it is that they don’t know what it is.
They have been subject to relentless propaganda from media, education, TV series, commercials and rewritten history that a people is now, and has always been, something like the cast of Star Trek or Bridgerton.
Regarding immigration, they likewise cannot understand why that is bad or that immigrants should go home because they do not know that a nation is its people and could not conceive of a nation that way.
"Nations, especially small ones, are made by their people. When the people change, the nation changes too. It’s just a cold fact that we hate accepting."
Quantity (of people) is a quality all its own.
In this context, a country like the U.S. which has ... let's say for the sake of argument ... something like 300 Million either "fully Americanized" or at least "kind of, pretty much, more or less Americanized" persons ... that rather large "quantity" can provide somewhat of a buffer against some 30 Million aliens flooding in over the course of, say, 5 to 10 years ... which is exactly where the U.S. is, today. And most Americans agree that even the so-called immigrant nation of the U.S. is drowning; it's one big reason Trump got elected multiple times.
And yes, the concept of "Americanized" and my cited numbers are fuzzy and inexact; but the point is, the U.S. is pretty big, both in terms of geographic spread (and places where people actually can live) and population.
Canada (a lot of it frozen); Australia (a lot of it desert/outback); Ireland; Sweden ... comparatively small. Immigrants flooding in will literally overwhelm these countries in a way that the U.S. at least has some buffering capacity for.
As you imply, the smaller countries are in danger of drowning and losing their "legacy culture", more so than the U.S. is. So if the U.S. is in trouble -- and it is -- the situation in Ireland, Australia, Canada ... must be dire if not already fatal.
Re: Canada & Australia. These are tiny countries with much smaller populations than Britain.
Most of Canada is huddled adjacent to the north-east states of USA or along the 49th parallel & coastlines.
Australia is similarly urban, hugging the coastline.
Few live in the wastes. The immigrants don’t got there. Instead they take over towns or cities & form enclaves & voting blocks like in Britain.
All 3 of these nations have powerful Chinese infiltration & subversion. In Canada & Australia & New Zealand the “indigenous” (Indians & Abos) are used to undermine democracy.
When foreigners steal nations built by Europeans you get situations like Algeria & South Africa, i.e. White genocide; White slavery; resurgent Islam or primitivism.
Even countries with greater populations, like France, Spain or Germany, where it said immigrants are only a small percentage of the overall population fails the test because the migrants gather in the city centers virtually taking them over. Look around every train station in Europe these days.
FOE: you're saying -- more or less -- that Canada and Australia are NOT being inundated, that both are pretty much doing okay? Which was my whole post, the huge U.S. is bad off; Australia and Canada with much smaller "legacy" populations must be even worse off. You say, "nope".
We have already lost a lot. I had never in my life heard that confederates were ‘traitors’ or anything other than rebellious Americans until the last decade. I grew up watching Beverly Hillbillies and Bewitched and the Waltons and they all featured confederates and English/Celtic culture. Listened to Lynrd Skynrd and Confederate Railroad. We knew Shakespeare and Bible references. Nursery Rhymes. May baskets, May queens and May poles. Debutants.
Pretty much yah. Remember, the American revolution had happened not that long before. They thought they had a right to secede and more importantly, they voted on it. Lincoln said no, we are going to invalidate your votes and force you back into union. Looking at how divided we are today seems to just be an extension of it.
I read your piece, and I see what you’re trying to get at. You’re not wrong that change has a cost. People feel it when the texture of daily life shifts, especially when it happens quickly. That part is real.
I also think you’re pointing at something more specific, which is scale. When a lot of people arrive in a short period of time, it can strain housing, services, and the general sense of familiarity people rely on. That’s a practical concern, not a moral failing.
But I think the argument starts to drift when that concern gets extended into something more fixed and absolute.
I was at a work function recently at a Japanese restaurant here in Calgary, sitting with a couple in their late twenties. Both are the children of Sikh immigrants. She’s pregnant. They’ve built a good life here and were completely at ease in it.
At one point she said, very simply, that she doesn’t really follow the cultural traditions she grew up with. Not as a rejection. Just that her life has taken shape here, and that’s what feels natural to her.
That stayed with me, because it points to something your piece doesn’t really account for.
Cultures don’t move as intact units. People do. And people change. They keep some things, let others go, and absorb what’s around them. Over time, that process tends toward blending, not permanent separation.
Reading through the discussion around your piece, I noticed how quickly the conversation shifts from practical questions about scale into something more absolute, as if groups remain fixed over time. In real life, that’s very hard to sustain across generations.
And while I was reading, I kept circling one question.
Which Ireland are you trying to preserve?
The one from fifty years ago? The one shaped by emigration and a very different economy? The one before that? Each version replaced something that came before it.
So when you describe a country becoming “clean, rich, full of great food, and quietly miserable,” I’m not sure that’s an inevitable outcome so much as a particular way of looking at change.
The Calgary I live in isn’t the Calgary of decades ago. And yet it still feels like Calgary. Not because nothing has changed, but because people continue to live, adapt, and build something shared.
What I saw at that table wasn’t loss. It was continuity doing what it has always done, just in a form that doesn’t match a fixed picture.
And if that continuity looks unfamiliar at first glance, that may say as much about the picture we’re holding onto as it does about what’s actually changing.
I am not trying to preserve any type of Ireland, per se. I am not Irish, I don't go to Ireland very often, and it's not my business to tell Irish people what kind of immigration system or how diverse their country should become. The whole point of this piece is to argue two things.
1. Race is not skin deep.
2. Demographic change, whether that be homogenization or diversification, is as negative as it is positive. You only need to learn a bit of modern Polish history to understand the deleterious effects of rapid, painful homogenization.
If the Western world wants to be a showcase of proud and successful multiracialism, then there's nothing I can do to stop it. I am not White, I'm not even a citizen of a Western country, I've no business telling people how to vote or what to do.
But I do have a voice and a computer, and I'm going to do what I've always done well: tell people what I think is the truth.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I appreciate the clarity.
I think where we part ways is around your first point.
You say race is not skin deep, and I agree in the sense that people arrive shaped by culture, family, language, and inherited patterns. That’s real.
But I don’t see those things as fixed in the way your argument seems to require.
What I see, over and over again, is that those inherited patterns shift fairly quickly once people are living somewhere new, especially across generations. Not completely, not uniformly, but enough that the idea of stable, enduring “blocks” of difference doesn’t quite hold.
That’s why my example matters to me. It isn’t exceptional. It’s ordinary.
So while I can agree that large-scale demographic change has trade-offs, I don’t experience it as a simple balance of gain and loss. It feels more like an ongoing process of reshaping, where the outcome isn’t predictable in the way your thought experiment suggests.
On your second point, I think bringing in homogenization is useful. Poland is a good example of how forced or rapid cultural narrowing can be damaging. But I’m not convinced that diversification operates as a mirror image of that.
One tends to close possibilities down. The other tends to open them up, even if unevenly and with friction.
So I suppose my hesitation is this:
Your argument depends on difference being durable and cumulative in a way that, in my experience, doesn’t quite play out over time.
What I tend to see instead is something less tidy but more dynamic. People adapting, blending, and building something that still carries continuity, even if it doesn’t look like what came before.
Firstly, both things can be true. Durable/Cumulative differences between races or even different ethnicities can and do play out over time. This exists alongside organic evolution.
Think of any type of group difference like an endless rainbow. Every group/category/psychiatric diagnosis/race/food preference blends in together in the end (Canadian Sikhs, Black Brits, Irish Asians), but they still remain different altogether.
No matter how much you blend, adapt, and build, you're always going to end up changing whatever place you're in into something else. For many people, it's liberating. Very few Irish people, let alone Europeans or even Mexicans, would want to live in a pious catholic monoculture that only eats bacon and cabbage stew.
However, many other people have become exhausted and fearful of demographic change. Many of them feel this loss intensely and have (rightly or wrongly) decided to vote for some very nasty politicians.
Even Canada is not immune to this. Pierre Poilievre, a person who loves to think of himself as a socially moderate deficit hawk, spent much of the most recent Canadian election fearmongering about an alleged plan to bring in 100 million people to Canada. He wouldn't have been able to do it if successive Canadian policymakers (like the supposedly even-keeled Jason Kenney) hadn't used immigration and diversity as a political and economic piggy bank.
I want to stress that my preference should not automatically become policy. I just want people to debate this, settle this issue, and then hopefully move on.
I think we’re actually closer than it might sound at first pass.
I agree with you that differences exist and that they don’t just vanish. People arrive shaped by family, culture, expectations, all of that. And I also agree that large, rapid change can be disorienting enough that people react strongly, sometimes politically.
Where I’m still not convinced is in how durable and cumulative those differences are over time in the way your argument leans on.
Your “endless rainbow” metaphor is a good one, but I think we’re drawing a different conclusion from it. You’re emphasizing that the colours remain distinct even as they blend. What I tend to see is that, over time, the colours themselves shift. They don’t just sit beside each other or layer. They change in composition.
That’s the part that keeps pulling me back to lived examples rather than models.
What I see, again and again, is that second and third generations don’t simply carry forward a fixed cultural package. They negotiate it. They drop parts of it, reinterpret other parts, and absorb what’s around them. The result isn’t just “Group A plus Group B.” It’s something that neither group could have fully predicted in advance.
So yes, the place changes. I don’t think that’s in dispute.
Where I hesitate is in treating that change as a kind of cumulative displacement, where differences stack and persist in a stable way. In my experience, they tend to dissolve and re-form as much as they accumulate.
On the political side, I think you’re right that rapid change can generate exhaustion and fear. That seems observable. But I’m not sure that tells us something fundamental about the long-term viability of diverse societies so much as it tells us something about how sensitive people are to the rate of change.
So maybe this is the narrow point I’m holding:
Difference matters.
Speed of change matters.
But the long-term trajectory isn’t just accumulation. It’s transformation.
And that’s why I don’t experience what you’re describing as an inevitable slide toward something unrecognizable or quietly miserable. It looks more like a continuous process of redefinition, with continuity still present, even if it’s harder to name.
I understand what you are saying about how people from other cultures change and integrate into the host culture and I agree to a point.
My husband and I are both first generation immigrants. We both arrived here as young children and grew up in Australia. I had no extended family but he did, as a lot of his family immigrated around the same time. Whereas we are both fully integrated Australians, there were someembers of his family who barely spoke English and maintained their cultural enclave.
There were studies done a few years ago with Greek migrants. They found that those who had left Greece maintained their Greek customs more tenaciously than those who remained, with the result being that those who left ended up being “more Greek” than those who remained.
What is happening now with mass migration, particularly from Muslim dominated nations, is that the scale of migration Lap Gong spoke of inhibits successful integration. Let's face it, people who have a different language, culture, practices and religion are more likely to flock with birds of the same feather and less likely to adopt the prevailing lifestyle and practices of their host country, even if they want to.
The big risk with Islam is that many western lifestyles and practices are anathema to Muslims, entrenching a cultural divide rather than encouraging integration.
If you add to that the likelihood of migrants holding strongly to their culture of origin, our western nations could be in for a rough ride for decades to come.
I think some of what you’re saying about scale, enclaves, and integration challenges is fair. I’ve seen versions of that myself.
Where I still hesitate is in treating large groups, especially Muslims, as if they move through history as a single coherent block.
In reality, there are enormous differences within Muslim communities themselves. Secular, deeply religious, reformist, mystical, culturally Muslim, politically radicalized, completely assimilated, second-generation kids trying to escape their parents’ expectations, and everything in between.
I also think we underestimate how much conditions shape outcomes.
Young men, in almost any ideology or religion, tend to become more vulnerable to hardline thinking when they can’t find work, dignity, belonging, or a meaningful place in society. That isn’t unique to Islam. You can see versions of it across political and religious movements everywhere.
And to be honest, I sometimes think modern societies accidentally intensify this dynamic by constantly baiting identity conflicts while simultaneously weakening the broader cultural structures that once helped people integrate into a shared civic life.
That doesn’t mean extremism isn’t real. It is. But I’m cautious about treating it as an inevitable endpoint of diversity itself, because the social conditions surrounding people matter enormously too.
It is lovely talking to you, Judith. Even though we disagree somewhat, it is nice that it is done without animosity.
I understand the urge to accept immigrants who come from poor and broken countries and just want a better life for their families. That is why our families emigrated too.
However, if we want to create a climate where young men (who have potential to be radicalised when economic situations are unhelpful) are happy and well adjusted, the current situations in a number of countries are not conducive to that.
In both Australia and the UK, and other countries, I'm sure, we are in the midst of a housing crisis as well as a cost of living crisis. We don't have sufficient homes for the people we already have here but the government persists in bringing in hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of them unskilled, instead of the skilled workers we were promised. Is it any wonder, when these extra bodies put additional strain on the housing infrastructure (especially when they get preferential treatment over needy locals) that people are getting sick of it. The extra migrants also push up unemployment, inflation and access to services like hospitals. This in turn makes people angry and frustrated with immigrants which would make them feel marginalised and lead to the radicalisation we don't want.
What ideological Koolaid have global politicians been drinking that they are all operating from the same playbook? Why do they fail to see that massive migration pushes aren't good for the country or the newcomers?
I think this is probably where the conversation becomes more useful, honestly.
What you’re describing now sounds less like an argument against diversity itself and more like an argument against governments using immigration as a blunt economic instrument without maintaining the infrastructure, housing, and social cohesion necessary to support it properly.
And I think a lot of ordinary people are reacting to exactly that strain.
Where I get cautious is when frustration with policy failures hardens into conclusions about entire populations being inherently incompatible or permanently alien.
Because I don’t think those are the same thing.
A poorly managed system can generate resentment even between groups that might otherwise integrate quite successfully over time. Especially when people feel economically squeezed, culturally anxious, and politically unheard all at once.
And to be honest, I think modern governments have been astonishingly careless about how psychologically disruptive rapid change can feel, even for fairly tolerant populations.
That doesn’t mean the answer is ethnonationalism. But it also doesn’t mean people are irrational for feeling overwhelmed when the pace of change exceeds the capacity of institutions and communities to absorb it well.
(1) If you intrinsically attach value to your people (whether defined genetically or culturally) continuing to exist in some recognisable form- or even if you're genuinely committed to the preservation of human biocultural diversity as a general principle- then some kind of intra-group segregation policy is the only way to conserve that over long timeframes. The far left are correct that border control is just a different kind of apartheid, in some sense. But the left don't really have a coherent position on racial diversity.
(2) There are very few immigrant groups, even very skilled ones, that vote for more selective immigration policies. And not to be too blunt, but the vast majority of potential migrants on the planet are not going to enrich the OECD when global average IQ is around 90. (The general tendency of migrants to vote for left-wing parties that push any number of other, IMO, dysfunctional policies is also not a net plus, even if the runaway feedback effects leading to Planet CHAZ weren't a concern.)
I think where I keep getting hung up is that your argument quietly freezes human beings into much harder categories than real life usually does.
You’re talking as though people and cultures stay recognizably intact unless somebody actively walls them off from one another. But when I look at actual history, especially in places shaped by migration, trade, conquest, famine, war, intermarriage, religion, and economic upheaval, what I mostly see is people constantly changing each other.
Hell, I’m from Manitoba. You don’t have to read a theory book to see this stuff. You just have to live long enough and pay attention.
The Mennonites aren’t the Mennonites they were a hundred years ago. Ukrainians aren’t what they were when they arrived. The Irish weren’t what they were after a few generations either. Indigenous communities changed. The English changed. Everybody changed. Some things held. Some things vanished. Some things blended into entirely new forms nobody could have predicted beforehand.
That’s just what human beings do.
So I think where I part company with you is that you seem to treat transformation itself as evidence of loss. As though if a culture changes enough, something essential has died.
But cultures have always changed. Constantly.
And honestly, if you pulled most people out of their own ancestral line four hundred years ago, they probably wouldn’t even recognize the people they’re supposedly preserving.
The other thing that gives me pause is that your argument starts out sounding cultural, but then slowly slides toward biological permanence and population ranking.
That IQ line matters more than I think you’re admitting.
Because once the conversation becomes about which populations are likely to “enrich the OECD,” we’re no longer mainly talking about preserving cultural texture or social cohesion. We’re talking about assigning long-term civilizational value to whole groups of people based on aggregate assumptions.
That’s a very different conversation.
And I think it’s worth being honest about that shift instead of smuggling it in through the side door under “biocultural diversity.”
Now, do I think rapid change can strain a society? Absolutely. I live in Canada. You’d have to be blind not to notice housing pressure, infrastructure strain, social fragmentation, wage pressure, all of it.
But I still think scale and pace are different questions from whether human groups need to remain genetically and culturally partitioned to survive in a meaningful way.
Because in practice, people leak into each other constantly. They fall in love. Their kids become something else. Their grandkids become something else again. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. Usually stranger.
And despite all the internet diagrams trying to sort humanity into permanent boxes, real life keeps refusing to stay that tidy.
> "You’re talking as though people and cultures stay recognizably intact unless somebody actively walls them off from one another"
I assume you mean "so long as somebody walls them off"?
"...But when I look at actual history, especially in places shaped by migration, trade, conquest, famine, war, intermarriage, religion, and economic upheaval, what I mostly see is people constantly changing each other."
It's interesting that you're listing conquest, war, famine and economic upheaval in the same category as migration (it is of course true that historical episodes of mass migration overlapped extensively with episodes of genocide, so I'm not sure why this comparison is supposed to comfort me.)
But I mean... imagine what the analogous arguments here would be when it comes to anything that Leftists would like to conserve. "Oh I dunno, why does it matter if the climate changes or species go extinct or indigenous peoples disappear? The earth's climate has always been changing, humans have always been emitting CO2, warmer temperatures aren't always a bad thing, and species and peoples going extinct is a normal part of the Darwinian struggle for survival anyway. There'll be new species re-evolving in a couple million years, we can always look up the Arawak in documentaries, and the dodo was lame, so WTF cares", said no Leftist ever.
It's obvious that the processes driving climatic change and species extinction are currently operating hundreds of times faster than would have been typical for most of Earth's history, that the exceptions tended to be mass extinction events, that current CO2/methane emissions are overwhelmingly a product of recently-invented industrial economies and fossil-fuel consumption for which we are consciously responsible, and that the mechanisms which historically acted to regulate the carbon cycle and evolve biodiversity operate far too slowly to absorb the damage we are currently inflicting on the planet. Or at least, these are the objections that a Leftist would make, if you try to argue that Climate Change Is Nooormal Ackshually.
I'm really not seeing an argument for why it is good and moral to place an edict on interaction with the Andaman Islanders or any number of Amazon-dwelling hunter-gatherers, or why the indigenous tribes of Australia or the continental US should be entitled to land acknowledgements and territorial reservations, but the native peoples of Europe shouldn't get the same perks and privileges within their ancient ancestral homelands. The Left, again, has no coherent position on this topic.
It's also obvious that the processes currently driving toward Global Biocultural Homogeneity are currently operating hundreds of times faster than would have been typical for most of human history, that the exceptions tended to overlap heavily with episodes of invasion, conquest and massacre, that current patterns of migration, intermarriage and cultural diffusion are overwhelmingly driven by recently-invented communications and transport technologies which we have consciously chosen to adopt, and that the mechanisms which historically acted to absorb demographic influx and develop biocultural distinctiveness operate far too slowly to accommodate the current impacts of migration policy. Or at least, these are the objections that a Rightist should be able to make, if you try to argue that Mass Immigration is Noooormal Ackshually.
Just... stop. It's insulting.
> "The other thing that gives me pause is that your argument starts out sounding cultural, but then slowly slides toward biological permanence and population ranking"
I am in no way coy about my "race realist" beliefs, and if you're going to hold that against me I would suggest supplying some evidence that HBD is false or that IQ doesn't predict things we care about. I am pointing out there are two separate arguments here- one for the cultural particularist and one for anyone interested in maintaining industrial civilisation in the general sense. (I do consider the second priority more important, but your mileage may vary.)
Oh, I think you’re a smart man, but I also think you’re getting a little too enchanted with tidy categories that real human beings rarely stay inside for very long.
And yes, I caught the “Just… stop” and the “Noooormal Ackshually” too. That’s usually the point in a conversation where somebody who thinks they’re being purely analytical starts sounding a wee bit emotionally invested in winning the frame. Which is human. Lord knows I’ve done it myself. But let’s not pretend this is all taking place in some perfectly sterile laboratory of reason either.
Because I don’t actually disagree with you that rapid change can destabilize societies. Housing strain is real. Infrastructure strain is real. Social fragmentation is real. I live in Canada. We’d have to be huffing prairie pesticides not to notice some of this.
Where I keep side-eyeing the argument is in the way it keeps sliding from: “change has costs” into “human populations need to remain recognizably distinct over long periods of time in order for civilization itself to survive.”
That’s a much bigger claim than I think you’re fully acknowledging.
And honestly, the minute we start talking about “global average IQ” and which populations can properly sustain the OECD, we are no longer mainly talking about immigration levels, social cohesion, or even culture. We’ve wandered into ranking human groups according to perceived civilizational utility, and that is a very old road no matter how many new internet sweaters people put on it.
The other thing that keeps nagging at me is that your framework treats human continuity almost like species conservation. But people are not salamanders in a terrarium.
Human beings are messy little creatures. They marry each other. They imitate each other. They reject their grandparents. They rediscover their grandparents. Their kids become something neither side saw coming. Sometimes magnificent. Sometimes ridiculous. Usually both.
Hell, if you dropped most modern Europeans into the villages of their own ancestors four hundred years ago, half of them would get chased out for being strange degenerates who can’t milk a cow and think olive oil belongs in everything.
That’s what I mean when I say cultures are living systems rather than preserved artifacts.
And I think this is partly why your climate analogy doesn’t fully land for me. Climate change threatens the conditions that allow life broadly to continue. But demographic blending is not automatically equivalent to extinction. Human societies have always been porous and adaptive, even when the process was painful, uneven, or chaotic.
Now, does modern technology accelerate everything to a pace our nervous systems maybe aren’t built for? Oh, absolutely. I suspect that’s a huge part of what people are reacting to right now. It isn’t just immigration. It’s velocity. The whole damned world feels like it’s changing faster than people can metabolize.
But I still think there’s a meaningful difference between saying: “Rapid change can destabilize social trust” and saying: “Human populations must remain meaningfully separate to preserve civilization.”
Those are not the same argument, even if they sometimes travel together online.
Anyway. That’s my prairie-bog-witch read on it. Affectionate side-eye included free of charge.
> "Where I keep side-eyeing the argument is in the way it keeps sliding from: “change has costs” into “human populations need to remain recognizably distinct over long periods of time in order for civilization itself to survive.”"
I didn't actually make that argument. I argued, separately, that (A) "human populations must be separated in order to remain recognisably distinct" and (B) "mass immigration has a tendency to wind up importing 80-IQ congolese refugees even when it starts out selective, which leads to Planet CHAZ".
I mean- in *theory* you could combine the GloboHomo scenario with eugenic cross-racial fertility trends and industrial civilisation could continue to function, so long as the people with talent continued to propagate their genes. It wouldn't violate the laws of physics, technically, and hypothetically there would even be some potential benefits from hybrid vigour. Sure.
But politically.... I mean, who do I vote for to get this? The people who want mass migration are in a state of total denial about genetics and human nature more broadly, and almost anyone who's based and red-pilled on the topic wants border control, for obvious reasons. The only people taking the issue seriously are the nationalists and religious conservatives, and I can't leave that support on the table.
> "And I think this is partly why your climate analogy doesn’t fully land for me. Climate change threatens the conditions that allow life broadly to continue. But demographic blending is not automatically equivalent to extinction"
No, and 10 million years ago the entire planet was five degrees warmer than today. Yet no Permian Extinction Event followed. And plenty of species survived the Ice Ages just fine, even if others failed to adapt, so it would appear that dramatic climate shifts are not *automatically* equivalent to extinction. But do you want to play those odds?
So, sure, maaaaaybe the outcome of an open borders policy is that you just wind up living inside the social landscape of Brazil- a definite downgrade in a lot of ways, but broadly surviveable, as opposed to, say, turning up the dial on Radio Rwanda. But do you want to play those odds?
What probability of the worst-case scenario should I be willing to tolerate, precisely? If you can't prove to me the risk here is essentially zero percent, then how do you justify playing Russian Roulette with your civilisation?
I think this is a more useful clarification, honestly, because now we’re getting closer to the actual disagreement instead of orbiting around it.
And for what it’s worth, I don’t think concerns about social cohesion are inherently irrational. Human beings clearly do require some degree of shared norms, trust, institutional stability, and civic continuity for societies to function well. History gives us plenty of examples where fragmentation, corruption, sectarianism, or rapid destabilization produced genuine misery.
Where I still think you overstate the case is in how tightly you’re linking those outcomes to demographic mixing itself.
Brazil, Rwanda, CHAZ, extinction events, open borders, and industrial civilization are all very different phenomena with very different causal structures. Once everything gets folded into a single continuum of “diversity risk,” I think the model starts flattening history into something much tidier and more deterministic than it really is.
Because if we’re being historically honest, human populations have been mixing, colliding, assimilating, conquering, hybridizing, fragmenting, and reinventing themselves for thousands of years. Sometimes the result was catastrophic. Sometimes extraordinarily fertile. Usually some tangled combination of both.
And I think this is where I keep hesitating around the extinction analogy specifically.
Species extinction is irreversible because the species itself disappears.
Human cultural transformation is not quite the same process, because people continue carrying memory, language, habits, symbolic structures, aesthetics, ethics, and identity forward into new forms. Sometimes continuity survives precisely through adaptation rather than preservation.
That’s not a sentimental point. It’s just historically observable.
I also think your framing occasionally drifts toward treating population averages as though they straightforwardly determine civilizational destiny, and I’m not convinced the relationship is nearly that clean.
Institutional quality, geography, corruption, education, governance, historical circumstance, resource access, elite behaviour, and social trust all interact with one another in extraordinarily complicated ways. Otherwise wealthy Gulf states importing huge labour populations would already have collapsed into civilizational ruin, and highly homogeneous societies would reliably outperform heterogeneous ones across every dimension, which they plainly do not.
And to be honest, when conversations move too quickly from “pace and scale matter” into “some populations are likely to degrade civilization itself,” I start feeling the gravitational pull of older race-essentialist frameworks whether people intend that or not.
That doesn’t mean every concern about immigration is racist. I don’t believe that. But I do think it’s possible for understandable anxieties about rapid change to slide into overly rigid theories about human populations and historical destiny.
Where I probably differ from you most is that I don’t think civilization is quite as genetically brittle as your framework implies.
Human beings are astonishingly adaptive creatures. Often foolishly so. Sometimes beautifully so. And while modern globalization is absolutely accelerating change faster than many people are comfortable with, I’m still not convinced that demographic permeability itself is the primary existential threat facing advanced societies.
Frankly, I suspect institutional decay, economic atomization, technological alienation, elite dysfunction, and the collapse of shared meaning may be doing at least as much damage as immigration policy ever could.
Anyway, that’s my prairie-woman-who’s-seen-some-shit take on it.
Great piece. I really admire the way you wove this into a story that actually makes sense of the mess, giving us something to hold onto in our own situations.
And honestly, kudos for dancing around that elephant in the room. We’re all so afraid to talk about it, terrified of what happens when it finally takes up so much space there’s no room left to breathe.
Down here in NZ, we’re dealing with much the same, just waves of people constantly reshaping what it means to live here. But being such a small isolated population, it hits different. We’re like a tiny lab like ecosystem of rodents where if you introduce just a few new rat species into the mix, the whole balance shifts perceptibly overnight.
I really appreciate you putting words to the things lots of us are thinking but too scared to say out loud.
I honestly find it incredible that anyone in their right mind can continue to support mass immigration. The problem with leftist thinking is that it is still rooted in 19th century principles that have no relevance in the modern world. This makes their values irrelevant and their moral posturing empty. At what point in the last hundred years did they abandon the economic first principle of supply and demand? I too have lost many friends since I have drifted right but who wants to associate with a low infomation cult that's going to get us all killed anyway?
Also, the 19th century was mostly immigration from European countries to either other European countries, colonies, or the USA. Sure, there were still differences, but they remained vaguely compatible from the days of the Roman Empire. And at that point the countries probably needed to grow; at this point, I'd call them matured, and I don't want more people here in the USA at all. Even if they're white Europeans. And I definitely don't need 20 million illegal-alien or "temporary" (what is it, 15 years and counting, Haiti? Even the Covid scam ended faster!) protected-status criminal randos at my doorstep.
A radio program in my area summed it up nicely: they aren't making more beach. So, in my lifetime, 1 million people became 10 million people became 30 million people who all wanted the same beach/lake/wherever. Demand is up, price is up, satisfaction is down (because even if you do get in, it's crowded and heavily corporatized and not even as good, anyway), and what the hell do we need so much "unskilled" labor for if all the AI and robots are taking over anyway? The frequent complaint here is "we need more housing" but, really -- not to sound too much like Klaus Schwab -- I think we need fewer people. We're bumping into each other and all want our own space without the other guys. I have begun to theorize there is a population density threshold that causes a personality shift in most people and makes a society a much worse place to live. Even my extremely left-wing sister described a trip to India as insufferable due to "people everywhere." It might be more profitable to pack everyone in like it's Bangladesh or wherever, but I have zero interest in ever living like that.
Endless, inifinite growth is the capitalist model, so it's really weird that the self-proclaimed socialists want it. And if those evil bastards want something, that's as good a reason as any to be against it.
The language switcheroo is in play as they write the history of the future. Calling them asylum seekers isn't for our benefit. It is narrative. In the 18th century the Enclosures Acts privatised the land and created a refugee population of starving peasants, who flooded into cities seeking food. These people are universally described and historically recorded not as starving refugees looking for food but as workers looking for work.
Infinite growth is not a capitalist model in any world, not even in an insane “broom of Israel” world that doesn’t want you to know about Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink experiment. Please defy them.
https://www.zimbardo.com/the-behavioral-sink-experiment-calhouns-rat-study-setup-results-and-psychological-insights/
Infinite growth is literally part of the NPV calculation formula in B-school. It usually assumes something like "3% growth forever" in year 10, which is obviously impossible.
I'd MUCH rather live in a world of a billion or fewer where we're eating prime rib in our McMansions, rather than a world of 20 billion or more where we're eating bugs in pods.
might explain why everyone is not even bothered by the idea we might start WW3 (WWIII = 111th)
It seems that you were either talking about MMT or a limit.
Random fact, I had a G&T with Zimbardo's wife once, at a conference about 5yrs ago. Lovely lady.
19th century USA was also chaotic due to immigration. So was the Roman empire.
When we colonize the Moon, create an atmosphere, lakes and mountains and other areas will become prime real estate. Not soon, but i imagine 2 generations from now.
And then we will actually need more people to solve the new problems that will accompany this progress.
You are truly delusional.
And how do you plan to keep this atmosphere on the moon?
Well... in principle you could have large pressured habitat domes with atmosphere inside. That *might* happen before the century is out, but yeah, open atmo isn't likely to happen.
Pipe dream, humans have been talking about that for 50 years. We’re barely any closer. In the next 100 years, at best, it’ll be a bunker in a moon cave.
The author assumes his friend is empathetic and kind, but someone truly like that would bear with a friend whatever their political views. Especially so when the views are held by so many and so not beyond the pale - unless one is just to go about rejecting humanity generally. It might be reasonable to say that the rift was as much about the friend being unable to suffer feeling of animosity that contradicted their view of themselves. I would spare far less quarter than you do. Your friendship ended because he was up himself with a wholly unwarranted sense of saintliness
The author is clear, unless he is being histrionic, that he ends up falling out with most of his friends eventually, so I'm not sure your diagnosis that his friend was "up himself" is particularly warranted.
Empathy and kindness are admirable traits but no-one ever said they had to be infinite or otherwise they are worthless.
People change, and friendships wax and wane and break. That's just life.
I saw a segment on jesse Watters 2 days ago where the guest described the tragedy of suicidal empathy.
Feeling the pain of illegal immigrants is empathy… allowing 20 million unvetted non English speaking, low skilled immigrants into the country is suicidal empathy.
asymmetrical empathy is close to worthless or worse
It's a mental defense. People don't want to accept that they live in a dystopia and are ruled by people who hate them. This is especially true the more one has something to lose: money, family, some kind of constructed community substitute, the promise of a pension or 401k. Hence the later someone was born, the more likely he'll be open to such ideas; as the system degrades it offers fewer opportunities to the youth, they don't remember "the good old days" and hence can't be in denial about them being gone.
"It's a mental defense. People don't want to accept that they live in a dystopia and are ruled by people who hate them."
I think you hit the nail on the head. :(
I think this is just barely missing the heart of the matter (which my fellow leftists often also do). The “elite” is apathetic to us. They do not care about the changing of a nation. It is not a matter of hating white people, nor is it a matter of loving nonwhites. The left is caught up in itself over the latter, the right is in hysterics over the former. Elites, as they were in Antiquity, are entirely cosmopolitan. A billionaire in the US has much more in common with a billionaire from the UAE than he does with anyone below that level of wealth and power in the US.
The citizenry are a means to an end, that end being infinite growth of their wealth, meaning an infinite growth of their power. The fact is that natives are simply more expensive laborers. They demand a higher standard of living, more time with their family, more benefits, etc. as compared to migrants. I’d argue the reason we see anti-immigrant sentiment actually turning into policies is because the elite are having to reckon with the fact that the strain caused by this cheap labor ends up causing instability, and thus threatening their bottom line.
It’s a bit depressing how similar the rhetoric around automation is. The appeals to FOMO, the promise of higher QoL because less people are stuck working shitty jobs, the inevitability, even the moral framing (exchange “bigot” for “Luddite” and see what I mean).
The good ‘ole days were full of work, chores, serious education, delayed gratification, honesty and grit., and scraped knees. And you didn’t win shit for “participation “
Today’s kids won’t tolerate that, as they order their $10 doordash delivery.
Plus they feel “entitled “ although I have no clue why or from where that originated.
It’s basically the prodigal son asking for his inheritance before he earned it. (And then squandering it on foolish pleasures.)
I agree and I think ultimately each generation has to take accountability.
However young people today were essentially orphans, given to the state/TV/Internet. When what shaped your childhood was SpongeBob and Ramen noodles and not fishing with Dad or helping grandma shuck corn, riding bikes with friends, you end up living in a completely different reality. A $10 doordash to make up for the fact no one taught you to cook, you were made so neurotic by psychiatrists/helicopter parents/Internet you're afraid to drive, you have watched thousands of hours of porn starting at 8-10 years old and not one adult stopped it (some even said it was healthy), you were overweight and had asthma by that age as well and that the school never expected you to read a book seems not so immoral. Even if they can't vocalize it younger generations weren't simply parented differently, they weren't parented at all. But they didn't even get a Lord Of The Flies in the wild situation. They were handed over to mega corporations.
People aren't made neurotic; they're usually born neurotic.
People CAN be mentally abused, shaped, deformed.
The Tavistock, MK Ultra CIA crew certainly perfected the process.
yeah the good old days were less comfortable, 100%. I would say the bridge between my claim and your claim is that the avenues for hard work, opportunity have narrowed markedly. The default is a Bowling Alone society, very alienating to young people, few compelling models of 'the good life'. Takes heroic virtue to scrape together some kind of historically normal existence.
This time it is very different. We are importing people that remain on the dole. That never happened before. My parents both came to the US poor but legally. They never took a dollar and paid the price and waited in line. We were poor and we all paid for our University like our parents did. My parents were Americans. They did not wander about with other countries flags. We spoke American and not English. They were and are proud to be Americans. Same for my wife who still has not taught our children how to speak her native tongue.
I'm interested to learn more about your "remain on the dole" comment. Is that based 9n your experience or is that something you heard/read about somewhere. I thought the unemployment rate between "immigrants and locals" was basically the same?
And if you’re not a bit anxious about the cultural ruin happening in the UK these days, then you need to to be mugged on the streets by a diverse crowd of illegal immigrants.
Finally you need to get a grip on that TDS you suffer from. My guess is you trust the BBC and read The Guardian too much.
Probably live in a “gated” community also, so you don’t have to endure what the regular folks endure.
I’m interested to learn more about your comment that the unemployment rates were basically the same?
See how banal a conversation quickly becomes with a zero-sum, reductionist mindset.
Oh wait….. that’s the intention right?
You thought wrong.
Which geo are you talking about? In the US we see that heavily in Seattle and surrounding community. The numbers are published and lauded for how we help these people. The question is what is a refugee today if they go on vacation and visit their homeland?
My wife is a Latina who works heavily supporting the community. She helps families that depend on these monies. We are seeing a reverse flow of refugees from El Salvador moving back home. The flow is now reversed and the place is booming.
"I thought the unemployment rate between "immigrants and locals" was basically the same?"
So first lets define legal immigrants or not legal. Not legal falls into a grey area where they are not able to furnish documents and get paid less or not at all if the hiring party is a bad actor. The taxi owner lends his taxi to someone else who does not match the license picture and tell me he has been in the US for 10 years and just visited his homeland to see his family.
As to be expected he replied with just a bunch of random anecdotal evidence that doesn’t bear any relation to reality. These people aren’t serious.
anecdotal evidence is why I am writing and responding here. Maybe if you knew some people that had illegal status you would not be so uninformed.
Its easy enough to look up the support my community allows here in Washington yet you somehow need me to tell you about what is already easily searchable?
Here is some for you with some state links:
Apple Health is state funded program with free healthcare coverage regardless of immigration status.
Alien Emergency Medical picks up use of the emergency rooms
State financial aid for Education is wide open and residency status is pretty easy to prove. (see drivers license)
Standard drivers license is open
Household Participation: Approximately 17% of households headed by an undocumented immigrant participated in SNAP as of 2022/2023 data. This represents about 1 million non-citizen households, making up roughly 4.8% of total SNAP participants.
https://cis.org/Camarota/Illegal-Immigrants-Be-Hit-Hard-SNAP-and-WIC-Benefits-Expire
https://www.dshs.wa.gov/esa/citizenship-and-alien-status-requirements-specific-program/citizenship-and-alien-status-state-cash-programs
The other inescapable contributor to the supporters of mass immigration is a legal level of compassion. The desire to help everyone, even at the cost of complete social destruction and the loss of the culture which created a successful country in the first place.
They didn't have any relevance in the 19th century either. Racial equality is one of the most dangerous myths in history.
I just reread this and think this is hilariously stupid
I love how you tried to mention supply and demand when the supply and demand is exactly what’s happening above
If the second or third generation Asian family out performs an Irish family on Irish soil, that’s not the Asian family’s that’s the Irish family’s problem
And Ireland is better off for it, because that immigration may be 60 years ago is paying off dividends
If you can’t compete in the marketplace, that’s your problem
Not a leftist but I support mass immigration with some qualifiers. I can’t believe this is a “leftist thinking” thing. Conservatives should be the most supportive of as much immigration as possible
Come On, be proud of your Leftism… or …
perhaps you’ve been red pilled and are beginning to see the Matrix .
I’ve noticed more and more former leftists begin to defect. You should know that The communist leaders will eat you first if they ever truly come to power.
Perhaps you don’t understand your own political views and you’re allowing one person to dictate your personality
Pschobabble.
Nice try. Swing and a miss
Let me answer your question with a question. Are conservatives capitalist in free market people or not?
How does being inclined to free market capitalism automatically lead to mass immigration?
How does it not?
This is dogmatic thinking of the worst variety. As much nuance as a you’d get from a third grader.
IF free trade of goods and services = GOOD
THEN free movement of population groups = ALSO GOOD
And yet it’s the only coherent argument on the thread
No. It's not a coherent argument. It's a weak one. Human beings are not goods or services; they have their own interests and desires. What's more, unlike goods and services, human beings can vote and influence outcomes. You and your fellow open borders aficionados need to tell us WHY and HOW open borders would AUTOMATICALLY lead to higher levels of human capital after all things considered. You haven't.
Wonderful piece - and worth recognising that this outcome is something like the "best case" for immigration, one where those arriving are essentially hardworking, economically productive, genuinely culturally enriching and not prone to crime. The reality, aside from the obvious principle you are illustrating, is that in addition to the demands for change and special treatment, and the manifold negative impacts (both large and small) on existing communities, many immigrants are criminal and economically unproductive to boot
Brilliantly put.
"It’s an uneasy cold peace that makes everyone a little more miserable". - is my favourite line, because it paints a very bleak picture of the netresult of even the best case mass immigration scenario and as such is a slam dunk argument against mass migration.
Why would you care to counter it, if you are not indifferent to the wellbeing of people?
What are some of your other favorite lines?
- Nations, especially small ones, are made by their people. When the people change, the nation changes too.
- Those small, everyday structures that hold a society together don’t survive mass demographic change intact. They erode gradually, then suddenly, until people are left with quiet resignation and a country that no longer feels like theirs.
The second one perfectly exemplifies Canada. 100% accurate.
Honestly... I think this is kinda stepping over the longer-term problem. In the event that 4 million east asians moved to Ireland and were randomly sprinkled across the landscape they'd most likely intermarry with the natives within a couple generations, and then the Irish would cease to exist as a recognisable group genetically, not to mention culturally.
The rat race culture is a problem, sure, but that's almost self-correcting in that it guarantees the couples in question wouldn't reproduce very much, so I don't think that would persist for long.
Our Elites, judges, lords & politicians have created Hell on Earth for their antecedents.
It is indeed a puzzle that while Asians idolize book learning, cram for exams, and seek mastery of difficult subjects, all of the finest insitutions of higher learning are in the West where kids are recently descended from farmers, prefer football, goof off in class, and look down on book learning as geeky. It's a paradox that argues for a hidden truth in the West, a blunt contradiction in our approach to the intellect. I find it disturbing that a massive influx of Asians, however much I personally like them, would muddle if not sweep away the Western character that made the West an object of such intense, striving desire to Asians in the first place.
Simeon, Asians don't love the West because of its character. They love the West because it's richer and more prestigious. If China, Japan, or Korea were to somehow become as rich as your average northwestern European country, those immigration rates would plummet.
I'm not sure you've explained Asians entirely. As for riches, China and Japan outrank most European countries economically. Korea is about as rich as it can possibly be, given its population and territorial size. Yet that highest wealth hasn't translated into highest prestige, at least relative to Europe and America. Prestige proceeds out of high character. Countries lacking in fairness, honesty, and other kinds of moral rigor will be incapable of producing prestigious institutions. They may not be aware of it, but what attracts Asians to the West is its reputation, which is something that cannot be disentangled from the Western character.
China does not outrank many European countries. Japan has recently been surpassed by Poland. Prestige does not proceed out of high character. Many of the prestigious institutions in the West weren’t paragons of virtue at inception. Harvard was a pretty quaint seminary when it first started and only became prestigious after a run of good presidents.
I enjoy your articles, but there's a peculiar blindness in your comments here. Should Harvard's pedigree as a theological seminary have nothing to do with the virtue expected of its matriculants or its high standards over the centuries? Harvard's curriculum in the 1700's should be the envy of modern students, when you look at the details. They were expected to arrive well-versed in Latin, and went on to study everything from Astronomy to the Classics, since it was thought that clergy should be as knowledgeable as possible. You can't divorce an insitution from its roots unless you just don't care or you're wilfully bind. Perhaps all the Chinese students who cheat on their exams, something fairly normal for them, reveals a stark difference in culture and a dramatic limitation Asians impose on themselves because they don't understand the value of right conduct.
I’m telling you very clearly that western institutions aren’t prestigious because of their ethics or morals. There are plenty of amazing instructions in the west that are far more moral and robust but have zero prestige. A great example would be America’s remaining catholic colleges. I am not saying you can divorce an intuitions from its roots. I am saying that your analysis is faulty. Asians, and I should know because I am one myself, don’t give a damn about western values. They value western success. And frankly, many Asians openly hold western thought in contempt, as evidenced by the Chinese diaspora and the Chinese community party
There is, in fact, significant immigration to Japan at the moment, and China being somewhere between a basketcase kleptocracy and an outright dictatorship probably somewhat stymies the desire to move there. I'll grant there are European countries poorer than either but not many people desire to move there, at least from within the OECD.
University rankings are just bunk these days. A lot of a university's prestige now has less to do with its intellectual output than with the age and wealth of the institution. Part of the reason why excellent universities in Asia and Africa have yet to become as prestigious is a lack of white international students.
But I take your point.
I am honestly curious as to which African universities you think would compete with Yale or Cambridge?
If we lived in a perfect world where Africa didn’t spent the 20th century stagnating thanks to anti white socialism, University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch would probably be probably be cracking the top 150. Witwatersrand is another candidate
Oh, right, South Africa. Maybe, sure.
Asians are social strivers, in general. An asiatic cannot understand something like Sprezzatura, for instance. Everything is overdone and in your face.
You're quite right in bringing up sprezzatura, which is so uniquely Western. Asians seems to distill everything down to a token of merit, whereas Westerners with their relative "relaxedness" achieve for the love of the endeavor. Ironically, Asians might turn "loving it" into a merit unto itself!
I'm sorry, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Plenty of us have sprezzatura, it's simply different from Italian or English sprezzatura.
How it is called?
I believe they're calling it "lying flat."
Yellow peril is real
When will the DEd suffragettes in the DoE require that kiddies master integral calculus before trying out for high school varsity sports or marching band? We need to fail them out early and put them on a different path. AI can make stupid errors as well as stupid humans.
I am an American technologist. I studied, worked, and socialized with Asians like you describe. We were unanimous in blaming that frivolous national corporatist prep school indoctrination system for our academic divergence.
You realize we see the top 0.25% of Asians here, right?
Even those who fled Vietnam were those bold enough to try.
It's why they start businesses.
Now we are only sent the best and brightest. China filters out who even gets an education. If we removed the bottom 25% of kids from our schools, performance would skyrocket.
And even that top 0.25% isn't necessarily what it's cracked up to be. Most of them arrive at American universities with a bare minimum of English and not much critical thinking ability. Not sure why they should take a spot that a Westerner could fill.
Personal experience shows you are correct.
I'm including the subsequent generations exposed to the best of American culture with the most adventurous of the Eastern gene pool.
It's the same reason Americans of English desent outperformed England.
No foreigner should ever receive preference over a citizen.
Why is it that when someone wants the demographics of their nation to remain the same, they are regarded with suspicion and have to morally justify their belief, but those who want to change the demographics never have to morally justify their beliefs?
A good question and one that shd be asked more often.
Your thought experiment actually describes Metro Vancouver, British Columbia. Starting in the mid 80’s with Hong Kongers and continuing now with elite Chinese the City and Province have been transformed by Chinese immigrants. They are definitely hard working people and many came with lots of money to stash - but the downside has been felt in many ways - the most obvious being Vancouver’s insanely expensive real estate that unaffordable for normal working people. Of course if you mentioned this up until about 5 years ago you were a ‘racist.’ I’m glad we didn’t get a bunch of North Africans or their equivalents — but your point is well made - population replacement is never good for the people being replaced.
Put this pretend society under severe economic (or other) pressure and I doubt the ending will be as benign as quiet resignation.
thanks for working through all this so laboriously. but you know what? i don't really buy the reasoning of those who call white people racists or supremacists--i.e. i don't think they are arguing in good faith. i think they are either parroting leftist talking points to virtue-signal or else they are part of the evil contingent who are working for white genocide. basically, either conformist or evil.
Flip the script and ask how white people declining is a good thing. How is it desirable? How is it ideal? What do white people gain from their own groups erosion?
The obvious conclusion will be that it's not in a groups self interest to self destruct while every other group grows in power and representation.
There has been a whole generation of young people who has never known anything but a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. Their issue is not primarily that they are against nationalism; it is that they don’t know what it is.
They have been subject to relentless propaganda from media, education, TV series, commercials and rewritten history that a people is now, and has always been, something like the cast of Star Trek or Bridgerton.
Regarding immigration, they likewise cannot understand why that is bad or that immigrants should go home because they do not know that a nation is its people and could not conceive of a nation that way.
Well I am racist, so I guess this concern doesn't apply to me. But good article.
"Nations, especially small ones, are made by their people. When the people change, the nation changes too. It’s just a cold fact that we hate accepting."
Quantity (of people) is a quality all its own.
In this context, a country like the U.S. which has ... let's say for the sake of argument ... something like 300 Million either "fully Americanized" or at least "kind of, pretty much, more or less Americanized" persons ... that rather large "quantity" can provide somewhat of a buffer against some 30 Million aliens flooding in over the course of, say, 5 to 10 years ... which is exactly where the U.S. is, today. And most Americans agree that even the so-called immigrant nation of the U.S. is drowning; it's one big reason Trump got elected multiple times.
And yes, the concept of "Americanized" and my cited numbers are fuzzy and inexact; but the point is, the U.S. is pretty big, both in terms of geographic spread (and places where people actually can live) and population.
Canada (a lot of it frozen); Australia (a lot of it desert/outback); Ireland; Sweden ... comparatively small. Immigrants flooding in will literally overwhelm these countries in a way that the U.S. at least has some buffering capacity for.
As you imply, the smaller countries are in danger of drowning and losing their "legacy culture", more so than the U.S. is. So if the U.S. is in trouble -- and it is -- the situation in Ireland, Australia, Canada ... must be dire if not already fatal.
Re: Canada & Australia. These are tiny countries with much smaller populations than Britain.
Most of Canada is huddled adjacent to the north-east states of USA or along the 49th parallel & coastlines.
Australia is similarly urban, hugging the coastline.
Few live in the wastes. The immigrants don’t got there. Instead they take over towns or cities & form enclaves & voting blocks like in Britain.
All 3 of these nations have powerful Chinese infiltration & subversion. In Canada & Australia & New Zealand the “indigenous” (Indians & Abos) are used to undermine democracy.
When foreigners steal nations built by Europeans you get situations like Algeria & South Africa, i.e. White genocide; White slavery; resurgent Islam or primitivism.
Even countries with greater populations, like France, Spain or Germany, where it said immigrants are only a small percentage of the overall population fails the test because the migrants gather in the city centers virtually taking them over. Look around every train station in Europe these days.
Read that again. Canada and Australia were listed as in dire if not fatal circumstances.
FOE: you're saying -- more or less -- that Canada and Australia are NOT being inundated, that both are pretty much doing okay? Which was my whole post, the huge U.S. is bad off; Australia and Canada with much smaller "legacy" populations must be even worse off. You say, "nope".
LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL!
We have already lost a lot. I had never in my life heard that confederates were ‘traitors’ or anything other than rebellious Americans until the last decade. I grew up watching Beverly Hillbillies and Bewitched and the Waltons and they all featured confederates and English/Celtic culture. Listened to Lynrd Skynrd and Confederate Railroad. We knew Shakespeare and Bible references. Nursery Rhymes. May baskets, May queens and May poles. Debutants.
That culture is gone or insulted when referenced.
I'm not an expert on US history, but if they weren't traitors, taking arms against the US government, what were they?
Plucky rebels fighting against the evil Empire a la Star Wars?
Pretty much yah. Remember, the American revolution had happened not that long before. They thought they had a right to secede and more importantly, they voted on it. Lincoln said no, we are going to invalidate your votes and force you back into union. Looking at how divided we are today seems to just be an extension of it.
The safest and most obvious part that no one realises are these statistics
Indians, Africans, Middle Easterns and Asians ALL DO LESS THAN 3% DIVERSITY
India is 99.66 % Indian race
Africa is 99% African race
Middle East is 98% Middle Eastern
Asia is 97.80 % Asian race
“Demographic replacement is the murder of an identity and an ethnicity.
Once that ethnicity is gone, it’s never coming back. And the deliberate welcoming of its destruction is an evil thing.
Denying the identity of a race is the step towards committing the crime of genocide" and is "a benefactor of ethnic cleansing."
So ANY WHITE or Indigenous COUNTRY you cannot allow any more than 3% diversity just like they do
Especially because all 4 races total 7.2 BILLION GLOBALLY
THE REMAINING 900 MILLION ARE WHITE / indigenous countries like NZ or Australia
AND ITS ONLY THESE RACES THAT ARE BEING SLOWLY ETHNICALLY CLEANSED using multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is now MULTIRACIALISM
AND IT DOESNT HAPPEN IN THE 7.2 BILLION COUNTRIES
There’s the racial genocide
I read your piece, and I see what you’re trying to get at. You’re not wrong that change has a cost. People feel it when the texture of daily life shifts, especially when it happens quickly. That part is real.
I also think you’re pointing at something more specific, which is scale. When a lot of people arrive in a short period of time, it can strain housing, services, and the general sense of familiarity people rely on. That’s a practical concern, not a moral failing.
But I think the argument starts to drift when that concern gets extended into something more fixed and absolute.
I was at a work function recently at a Japanese restaurant here in Calgary, sitting with a couple in their late twenties. Both are the children of Sikh immigrants. She’s pregnant. They’ve built a good life here and were completely at ease in it.
At one point she said, very simply, that she doesn’t really follow the cultural traditions she grew up with. Not as a rejection. Just that her life has taken shape here, and that’s what feels natural to her.
That stayed with me, because it points to something your piece doesn’t really account for.
Cultures don’t move as intact units. People do. And people change. They keep some things, let others go, and absorb what’s around them. Over time, that process tends toward blending, not permanent separation.
Reading through the discussion around your piece, I noticed how quickly the conversation shifts from practical questions about scale into something more absolute, as if groups remain fixed over time. In real life, that’s very hard to sustain across generations.
And while I was reading, I kept circling one question.
Which Ireland are you trying to preserve?
The one from fifty years ago? The one shaped by emigration and a very different economy? The one before that? Each version replaced something that came before it.
So when you describe a country becoming “clean, rich, full of great food, and quietly miserable,” I’m not sure that’s an inevitable outcome so much as a particular way of looking at change.
The Calgary I live in isn’t the Calgary of decades ago. And yet it still feels like Calgary. Not because nothing has changed, but because people continue to live, adapt, and build something shared.
What I saw at that table wasn’t loss. It was continuity doing what it has always done, just in a form that doesn’t match a fixed picture.
And if that continuity looks unfamiliar at first glance, that may say as much about the picture we’re holding onto as it does about what’s actually changing.
Hello Judith,
I am not trying to preserve any type of Ireland, per se. I am not Irish, I don't go to Ireland very often, and it's not my business to tell Irish people what kind of immigration system or how diverse their country should become. The whole point of this piece is to argue two things.
1. Race is not skin deep.
2. Demographic change, whether that be homogenization or diversification, is as negative as it is positive. You only need to learn a bit of modern Polish history to understand the deleterious effects of rapid, painful homogenization.
If the Western world wants to be a showcase of proud and successful multiracialism, then there's nothing I can do to stop it. I am not White, I'm not even a citizen of a Western country, I've no business telling people how to vote or what to do.
But I do have a voice and a computer, and I'm going to do what I've always done well: tell people what I think is the truth.
Hi Lap,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I appreciate the clarity.
I think where we part ways is around your first point.
You say race is not skin deep, and I agree in the sense that people arrive shaped by culture, family, language, and inherited patterns. That’s real.
But I don’t see those things as fixed in the way your argument seems to require.
What I see, over and over again, is that those inherited patterns shift fairly quickly once people are living somewhere new, especially across generations. Not completely, not uniformly, but enough that the idea of stable, enduring “blocks” of difference doesn’t quite hold.
That’s why my example matters to me. It isn’t exceptional. It’s ordinary.
So while I can agree that large-scale demographic change has trade-offs, I don’t experience it as a simple balance of gain and loss. It feels more like an ongoing process of reshaping, where the outcome isn’t predictable in the way your thought experiment suggests.
On your second point, I think bringing in homogenization is useful. Poland is a good example of how forced or rapid cultural narrowing can be damaging. But I’m not convinced that diversification operates as a mirror image of that.
One tends to close possibilities down. The other tends to open them up, even if unevenly and with friction.
So I suppose my hesitation is this:
Your argument depends on difference being durable and cumulative in a way that, in my experience, doesn’t quite play out over time.
What I tend to see instead is something less tidy but more dynamic. People adapting, blending, and building something that still carries continuity, even if it doesn’t look like what came before.
I don’t think that’s automatically a loss.
Thank you for responding.
Firstly, both things can be true. Durable/Cumulative differences between races or even different ethnicities can and do play out over time. This exists alongside organic evolution.
Think of any type of group difference like an endless rainbow. Every group/category/psychiatric diagnosis/race/food preference blends in together in the end (Canadian Sikhs, Black Brits, Irish Asians), but they still remain different altogether.
No matter how much you blend, adapt, and build, you're always going to end up changing whatever place you're in into something else. For many people, it's liberating. Very few Irish people, let alone Europeans or even Mexicans, would want to live in a pious catholic monoculture that only eats bacon and cabbage stew.
However, many other people have become exhausted and fearful of demographic change. Many of them feel this loss intensely and have (rightly or wrongly) decided to vote for some very nasty politicians.
Even Canada is not immune to this. Pierre Poilievre, a person who loves to think of himself as a socially moderate deficit hawk, spent much of the most recent Canadian election fearmongering about an alleged plan to bring in 100 million people to Canada. He wouldn't have been able to do it if successive Canadian policymakers (like the supposedly even-keeled Jason Kenney) hadn't used immigration and diversity as a political and economic piggy bank.
I want to stress that my preference should not automatically become policy. I just want people to debate this, settle this issue, and then hopefully move on.
Hi Lap,
I think we’re actually closer than it might sound at first pass.
I agree with you that differences exist and that they don’t just vanish. People arrive shaped by family, culture, expectations, all of that. And I also agree that large, rapid change can be disorienting enough that people react strongly, sometimes politically.
Where I’m still not convinced is in how durable and cumulative those differences are over time in the way your argument leans on.
Your “endless rainbow” metaphor is a good one, but I think we’re drawing a different conclusion from it. You’re emphasizing that the colours remain distinct even as they blend. What I tend to see is that, over time, the colours themselves shift. They don’t just sit beside each other or layer. They change in composition.
That’s the part that keeps pulling me back to lived examples rather than models.
What I see, again and again, is that second and third generations don’t simply carry forward a fixed cultural package. They negotiate it. They drop parts of it, reinterpret other parts, and absorb what’s around them. The result isn’t just “Group A plus Group B.” It’s something that neither group could have fully predicted in advance.
So yes, the place changes. I don’t think that’s in dispute.
Where I hesitate is in treating that change as a kind of cumulative displacement, where differences stack and persist in a stable way. In my experience, they tend to dissolve and re-form as much as they accumulate.
On the political side, I think you’re right that rapid change can generate exhaustion and fear. That seems observable. But I’m not sure that tells us something fundamental about the long-term viability of diverse societies so much as it tells us something about how sensitive people are to the rate of change.
So maybe this is the narrow point I’m holding:
Difference matters.
Speed of change matters.
But the long-term trajectory isn’t just accumulation. It’s transformation.
And that’s why I don’t experience what you’re describing as an inevitable slide toward something unrecognizable or quietly miserable. It looks more like a continuous process of redefinition, with continuity still present, even if it’s harder to name.
Hi Judith,
I understand what you are saying about how people from other cultures change and integrate into the host culture and I agree to a point.
My husband and I are both first generation immigrants. We both arrived here as young children and grew up in Australia. I had no extended family but he did, as a lot of his family immigrated around the same time. Whereas we are both fully integrated Australians, there were someembers of his family who barely spoke English and maintained their cultural enclave.
There were studies done a few years ago with Greek migrants. They found that those who had left Greece maintained their Greek customs more tenaciously than those who remained, with the result being that those who left ended up being “more Greek” than those who remained.
What is happening now with mass migration, particularly from Muslim dominated nations, is that the scale of migration Lap Gong spoke of inhibits successful integration. Let's face it, people who have a different language, culture, practices and religion are more likely to flock with birds of the same feather and less likely to adopt the prevailing lifestyle and practices of their host country, even if they want to.
The big risk with Islam is that many western lifestyles and practices are anathema to Muslims, entrenching a cultural divide rather than encouraging integration.
If you add to that the likelihood of migrants holding strongly to their culture of origin, our western nations could be in for a rough ride for decades to come.
I think some of what you’re saying about scale, enclaves, and integration challenges is fair. I’ve seen versions of that myself.
Where I still hesitate is in treating large groups, especially Muslims, as if they move through history as a single coherent block.
In reality, there are enormous differences within Muslim communities themselves. Secular, deeply religious, reformist, mystical, culturally Muslim, politically radicalized, completely assimilated, second-generation kids trying to escape their parents’ expectations, and everything in between.
I also think we underestimate how much conditions shape outcomes.
Young men, in almost any ideology or religion, tend to become more vulnerable to hardline thinking when they can’t find work, dignity, belonging, or a meaningful place in society. That isn’t unique to Islam. You can see versions of it across political and religious movements everywhere.
And to be honest, I sometimes think modern societies accidentally intensify this dynamic by constantly baiting identity conflicts while simultaneously weakening the broader cultural structures that once helped people integrate into a shared civic life.
That doesn’t mean extremism isn’t real. It is. But I’m cautious about treating it as an inevitable endpoint of diversity itself, because the social conditions surrounding people matter enormously too.
It is lovely talking to you, Judith. Even though we disagree somewhat, it is nice that it is done without animosity.
I understand the urge to accept immigrants who come from poor and broken countries and just want a better life for their families. That is why our families emigrated too.
However, if we want to create a climate where young men (who have potential to be radicalised when economic situations are unhelpful) are happy and well adjusted, the current situations in a number of countries are not conducive to that.
In both Australia and the UK, and other countries, I'm sure, we are in the midst of a housing crisis as well as a cost of living crisis. We don't have sufficient homes for the people we already have here but the government persists in bringing in hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of them unskilled, instead of the skilled workers we were promised. Is it any wonder, when these extra bodies put additional strain on the housing infrastructure (especially when they get preferential treatment over needy locals) that people are getting sick of it. The extra migrants also push up unemployment, inflation and access to services like hospitals. This in turn makes people angry and frustrated with immigrants which would make them feel marginalised and lead to the radicalisation we don't want.
What ideological Koolaid have global politicians been drinking that they are all operating from the same playbook? Why do they fail to see that massive migration pushes aren't good for the country or the newcomers?
I think this is probably where the conversation becomes more useful, honestly.
What you’re describing now sounds less like an argument against diversity itself and more like an argument against governments using immigration as a blunt economic instrument without maintaining the infrastructure, housing, and social cohesion necessary to support it properly.
And I think a lot of ordinary people are reacting to exactly that strain.
Where I get cautious is when frustration with policy failures hardens into conclusions about entire populations being inherently incompatible or permanently alien.
Because I don’t think those are the same thing.
A poorly managed system can generate resentment even between groups that might otherwise integrate quite successfully over time. Especially when people feel economically squeezed, culturally anxious, and politically unheard all at once.
And to be honest, I think modern governments have been astonishingly careless about how psychologically disruptive rapid change can feel, even for fairly tolerant populations.
That doesn’t mean the answer is ethnonationalism. But it also doesn’t mean people are irrational for feeling overwhelmed when the pace of change exceeds the capacity of institutions and communities to absorb it well.
There are two main problems here:
(1) If you intrinsically attach value to your people (whether defined genetically or culturally) continuing to exist in some recognisable form- or even if you're genuinely committed to the preservation of human biocultural diversity as a general principle- then some kind of intra-group segregation policy is the only way to conserve that over long timeframes. The far left are correct that border control is just a different kind of apartheid, in some sense. But the left don't really have a coherent position on racial diversity.
(2) There are very few immigrant groups, even very skilled ones, that vote for more selective immigration policies. And not to be too blunt, but the vast majority of potential migrants on the planet are not going to enrich the OECD when global average IQ is around 90. (The general tendency of migrants to vote for left-wing parties that push any number of other, IMO, dysfunctional policies is also not a net plus, even if the runaway feedback effects leading to Planet CHAZ weren't a concern.)
I think where I keep getting hung up is that your argument quietly freezes human beings into much harder categories than real life usually does.
You’re talking as though people and cultures stay recognizably intact unless somebody actively walls them off from one another. But when I look at actual history, especially in places shaped by migration, trade, conquest, famine, war, intermarriage, religion, and economic upheaval, what I mostly see is people constantly changing each other.
Hell, I’m from Manitoba. You don’t have to read a theory book to see this stuff. You just have to live long enough and pay attention.
The Mennonites aren’t the Mennonites they were a hundred years ago. Ukrainians aren’t what they were when they arrived. The Irish weren’t what they were after a few generations either. Indigenous communities changed. The English changed. Everybody changed. Some things held. Some things vanished. Some things blended into entirely new forms nobody could have predicted beforehand.
That’s just what human beings do.
So I think where I part company with you is that you seem to treat transformation itself as evidence of loss. As though if a culture changes enough, something essential has died.
But cultures have always changed. Constantly.
And honestly, if you pulled most people out of their own ancestral line four hundred years ago, they probably wouldn’t even recognize the people they’re supposedly preserving.
The other thing that gives me pause is that your argument starts out sounding cultural, but then slowly slides toward biological permanence and population ranking.
That IQ line matters more than I think you’re admitting.
Because once the conversation becomes about which populations are likely to “enrich the OECD,” we’re no longer mainly talking about preserving cultural texture or social cohesion. We’re talking about assigning long-term civilizational value to whole groups of people based on aggregate assumptions.
That’s a very different conversation.
And I think it’s worth being honest about that shift instead of smuggling it in through the side door under “biocultural diversity.”
Now, do I think rapid change can strain a society? Absolutely. I live in Canada. You’d have to be blind not to notice housing pressure, infrastructure strain, social fragmentation, wage pressure, all of it.
But I still think scale and pace are different questions from whether human groups need to remain genetically and culturally partitioned to survive in a meaningful way.
Because in practice, people leak into each other constantly. They fall in love. Their kids become something else. Their grandkids become something else again. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. Usually stranger.
And despite all the internet diagrams trying to sort humanity into permanent boxes, real life keeps refusing to stay that tidy.
> "You’re talking as though people and cultures stay recognizably intact unless somebody actively walls them off from one another"
I assume you mean "so long as somebody walls them off"?
"...But when I look at actual history, especially in places shaped by migration, trade, conquest, famine, war, intermarriage, religion, and economic upheaval, what I mostly see is people constantly changing each other."
It's interesting that you're listing conquest, war, famine and economic upheaval in the same category as migration (it is of course true that historical episodes of mass migration overlapped extensively with episodes of genocide, so I'm not sure why this comparison is supposed to comfort me.)
But I mean... imagine what the analogous arguments here would be when it comes to anything that Leftists would like to conserve. "Oh I dunno, why does it matter if the climate changes or species go extinct or indigenous peoples disappear? The earth's climate has always been changing, humans have always been emitting CO2, warmer temperatures aren't always a bad thing, and species and peoples going extinct is a normal part of the Darwinian struggle for survival anyway. There'll be new species re-evolving in a couple million years, we can always look up the Arawak in documentaries, and the dodo was lame, so WTF cares", said no Leftist ever.
It's obvious that the processes driving climatic change and species extinction are currently operating hundreds of times faster than would have been typical for most of Earth's history, that the exceptions tended to be mass extinction events, that current CO2/methane emissions are overwhelmingly a product of recently-invented industrial economies and fossil-fuel consumption for which we are consciously responsible, and that the mechanisms which historically acted to regulate the carbon cycle and evolve biodiversity operate far too slowly to absorb the damage we are currently inflicting on the planet. Or at least, these are the objections that a Leftist would make, if you try to argue that Climate Change Is Nooormal Ackshually.
I'm really not seeing an argument for why it is good and moral to place an edict on interaction with the Andaman Islanders or any number of Amazon-dwelling hunter-gatherers, or why the indigenous tribes of Australia or the continental US should be entitled to land acknowledgements and territorial reservations, but the native peoples of Europe shouldn't get the same perks and privileges within their ancient ancestral homelands. The Left, again, has no coherent position on this topic.
It's also obvious that the processes currently driving toward Global Biocultural Homogeneity are currently operating hundreds of times faster than would have been typical for most of human history, that the exceptions tended to overlap heavily with episodes of invasion, conquest and massacre, that current patterns of migration, intermarriage and cultural diffusion are overwhelmingly driven by recently-invented communications and transport technologies which we have consciously chosen to adopt, and that the mechanisms which historically acted to absorb demographic influx and develop biocultural distinctiveness operate far too slowly to accommodate the current impacts of migration policy. Or at least, these are the objections that a Rightist should be able to make, if you try to argue that Mass Immigration is Noooormal Ackshually.
Just... stop. It's insulting.
> "The other thing that gives me pause is that your argument starts out sounding cultural, but then slowly slides toward biological permanence and population ranking"
I am in no way coy about my "race realist" beliefs, and if you're going to hold that against me I would suggest supplying some evidence that HBD is false or that IQ doesn't predict things we care about. I am pointing out there are two separate arguments here- one for the cultural particularist and one for anyone interested in maintaining industrial civilisation in the general sense. (I do consider the second priority more important, but your mileage may vary.)
Oh, I think you’re a smart man, but I also think you’re getting a little too enchanted with tidy categories that real human beings rarely stay inside for very long.
And yes, I caught the “Just… stop” and the “Noooormal Ackshually” too. That’s usually the point in a conversation where somebody who thinks they’re being purely analytical starts sounding a wee bit emotionally invested in winning the frame. Which is human. Lord knows I’ve done it myself. But let’s not pretend this is all taking place in some perfectly sterile laboratory of reason either.
Because I don’t actually disagree with you that rapid change can destabilize societies. Housing strain is real. Infrastructure strain is real. Social fragmentation is real. I live in Canada. We’d have to be huffing prairie pesticides not to notice some of this.
Where I keep side-eyeing the argument is in the way it keeps sliding from: “change has costs” into “human populations need to remain recognizably distinct over long periods of time in order for civilization itself to survive.”
That’s a much bigger claim than I think you’re fully acknowledging.
And honestly, the minute we start talking about “global average IQ” and which populations can properly sustain the OECD, we are no longer mainly talking about immigration levels, social cohesion, or even culture. We’ve wandered into ranking human groups according to perceived civilizational utility, and that is a very old road no matter how many new internet sweaters people put on it.
The other thing that keeps nagging at me is that your framework treats human continuity almost like species conservation. But people are not salamanders in a terrarium.
Human beings are messy little creatures. They marry each other. They imitate each other. They reject their grandparents. They rediscover their grandparents. Their kids become something neither side saw coming. Sometimes magnificent. Sometimes ridiculous. Usually both.
Hell, if you dropped most modern Europeans into the villages of their own ancestors four hundred years ago, half of them would get chased out for being strange degenerates who can’t milk a cow and think olive oil belongs in everything.
That’s what I mean when I say cultures are living systems rather than preserved artifacts.
And I think this is partly why your climate analogy doesn’t fully land for me. Climate change threatens the conditions that allow life broadly to continue. But demographic blending is not automatically equivalent to extinction. Human societies have always been porous and adaptive, even when the process was painful, uneven, or chaotic.
Now, does modern technology accelerate everything to a pace our nervous systems maybe aren’t built for? Oh, absolutely. I suspect that’s a huge part of what people are reacting to right now. It isn’t just immigration. It’s velocity. The whole damned world feels like it’s changing faster than people can metabolize.
But I still think there’s a meaningful difference between saying: “Rapid change can destabilize social trust” and saying: “Human populations must remain meaningfully separate to preserve civilization.”
Those are not the same argument, even if they sometimes travel together online.
Anyway. That’s my prairie-bog-witch read on it. Affectionate side-eye included free of charge.
> "Where I keep side-eyeing the argument is in the way it keeps sliding from: “change has costs” into “human populations need to remain recognizably distinct over long periods of time in order for civilization itself to survive.”"
I didn't actually make that argument. I argued, separately, that (A) "human populations must be separated in order to remain recognisably distinct" and (B) "mass immigration has a tendency to wind up importing 80-IQ congolese refugees even when it starts out selective, which leads to Planet CHAZ".
I mean- in *theory* you could combine the GloboHomo scenario with eugenic cross-racial fertility trends and industrial civilisation could continue to function, so long as the people with talent continued to propagate their genes. It wouldn't violate the laws of physics, technically, and hypothetically there would even be some potential benefits from hybrid vigour. Sure.
But politically.... I mean, who do I vote for to get this? The people who want mass migration are in a state of total denial about genetics and human nature more broadly, and almost anyone who's based and red-pilled on the topic wants border control, for obvious reasons. The only people taking the issue seriously are the nationalists and religious conservatives, and I can't leave that support on the table.
> "And I think this is partly why your climate analogy doesn’t fully land for me. Climate change threatens the conditions that allow life broadly to continue. But demographic blending is not automatically equivalent to extinction"
No, and 10 million years ago the entire planet was five degrees warmer than today. Yet no Permian Extinction Event followed. And plenty of species survived the Ice Ages just fine, even if others failed to adapt, so it would appear that dramatic climate shifts are not *automatically* equivalent to extinction. But do you want to play those odds?
So, sure, maaaaaybe the outcome of an open borders policy is that you just wind up living inside the social landscape of Brazil- a definite downgrade in a lot of ways, but broadly surviveable, as opposed to, say, turning up the dial on Radio Rwanda. But do you want to play those odds?
What probability of the worst-case scenario should I be willing to tolerate, precisely? If you can't prove to me the risk here is essentially zero percent, then how do you justify playing Russian Roulette with your civilisation?
I think this is a more useful clarification, honestly, because now we’re getting closer to the actual disagreement instead of orbiting around it.
And for what it’s worth, I don’t think concerns about social cohesion are inherently irrational. Human beings clearly do require some degree of shared norms, trust, institutional stability, and civic continuity for societies to function well. History gives us plenty of examples where fragmentation, corruption, sectarianism, or rapid destabilization produced genuine misery.
Where I still think you overstate the case is in how tightly you’re linking those outcomes to demographic mixing itself.
Brazil, Rwanda, CHAZ, extinction events, open borders, and industrial civilization are all very different phenomena with very different causal structures. Once everything gets folded into a single continuum of “diversity risk,” I think the model starts flattening history into something much tidier and more deterministic than it really is.
Because if we’re being historically honest, human populations have been mixing, colliding, assimilating, conquering, hybridizing, fragmenting, and reinventing themselves for thousands of years. Sometimes the result was catastrophic. Sometimes extraordinarily fertile. Usually some tangled combination of both.
And I think this is where I keep hesitating around the extinction analogy specifically.
Species extinction is irreversible because the species itself disappears.
Human cultural transformation is not quite the same process, because people continue carrying memory, language, habits, symbolic structures, aesthetics, ethics, and identity forward into new forms. Sometimes continuity survives precisely through adaptation rather than preservation.
That’s not a sentimental point. It’s just historically observable.
I also think your framing occasionally drifts toward treating population averages as though they straightforwardly determine civilizational destiny, and I’m not convinced the relationship is nearly that clean.
Institutional quality, geography, corruption, education, governance, historical circumstance, resource access, elite behaviour, and social trust all interact with one another in extraordinarily complicated ways. Otherwise wealthy Gulf states importing huge labour populations would already have collapsed into civilizational ruin, and highly homogeneous societies would reliably outperform heterogeneous ones across every dimension, which they plainly do not.
And to be honest, when conversations move too quickly from “pace and scale matter” into “some populations are likely to degrade civilization itself,” I start feeling the gravitational pull of older race-essentialist frameworks whether people intend that or not.
That doesn’t mean every concern about immigration is racist. I don’t believe that. But I do think it’s possible for understandable anxieties about rapid change to slide into overly rigid theories about human populations and historical destiny.
Where I probably differ from you most is that I don’t think civilization is quite as genetically brittle as your framework implies.
Human beings are astonishingly adaptive creatures. Often foolishly so. Sometimes beautifully so. And while modern globalization is absolutely accelerating change faster than many people are comfortable with, I’m still not convinced that demographic permeability itself is the primary existential threat facing advanced societies.
Frankly, I suspect institutional decay, economic atomization, technological alienation, elite dysfunction, and the collapse of shared meaning may be doing at least as much damage as immigration policy ever could.
Anyway, that’s my prairie-woman-who’s-seen-some-shit take on it.
Great piece. I really admire the way you wove this into a story that actually makes sense of the mess, giving us something to hold onto in our own situations.
And honestly, kudos for dancing around that elephant in the room. We’re all so afraid to talk about it, terrified of what happens when it finally takes up so much space there’s no room left to breathe.
Down here in NZ, we’re dealing with much the same, just waves of people constantly reshaping what it means to live here. But being such a small isolated population, it hits different. We’re like a tiny lab like ecosystem of rodents where if you introduce just a few new rat species into the mix, the whole balance shifts perceptibly overnight.
I really appreciate you putting words to the things lots of us are thinking but too scared to say out loud.