This substack writer named “Noah Smith“ has an article criticizing the Trump admin for taking actions to severely reduce H1B immigration.
He does a fair job of running through all of the arguments. I think it’s a great exercise to see how one can respond.
He makes the common argument that high-skilled immigration is an incredible boon to Muh Economy.
He says something that pro-immigration people NEVER say, which earned pushback in the comments.
”I’m actually slightly sympathetic to the fear of a demographic turnover among the elite. The number of slots for elite politicians, businesspeople, and academics in America is fairly constant, so it does become a zero-sum competition. It’s natural to be afraid of getting pushed out of that elite by hard-charging immigrants who were selected for their genius — and also by ethnic cartelization to monopolize the elite.”
His response to this (besides calling it “envy“ and thereby invoking the Ten Commandments like some kind of religious nutjob) is that the USA can’t have “the best team“ without the immigrants, and then he says some stuff about global power generally and some anti-China stuff: “Weakened alliances in Asia will make it nearly impossible for the U.S. to effectively resist the encroachment of Chinese power.”
Indeed, it seems the China thing is a major issue for him. He seems to be absurdly anti-China.
So, it turns out that the obsession with competing with China and being “the best in the world“ is driving pro-immigration attitudes in the Republican policy elite.
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So what’s the mission of all of this immigration? What are we accomplishing?
Apparently we are accomplishing some grand moral quest against the “axis” of China and Russia (his own word).
And, we are accomplishing “national greatness.“
But what is the point of national greatness? Are we truly participating in a futile activity that is similar to cheering for black sportsball players, but where the “players” are instead Asian scientists and engineers? Is this really what we are doing? I don’t see a great deal of evidence that we are doing this.
And how much happiness do we actually derive from cheering for our superior POC champions? Is it greater than the happiness we would have without the diversity? As far as I can tell, a LOT of white people are unhappy about this diversity.
It strikes me that “national greatness” is only desirable if you yourself are the one who is great, and if your achievements along with your nation earn glory for yourself.
In other words, arbitrary teams are not worth getting excited about. We do it to pass the time, but if you meet a grown adult who is a superfan of a sportsball team, he is probably a complete idiot and a pathetic man-child.
What IS worth getting excited about? Answer: If you are, yourself, amazing. And if you have an amazing society. And if the world looks to you with respect and love.
And white people do not gain adoration and respect when Asian-Americans succeed in the USA. I have no doubt that there are psychologically-abnormal, narcissistic white people who think that they can sneak around on the coattails of their Asian neighbors. And they are despicable. But in general, everybody in Asia knows that their cousins are the ones cranking out the science and tech in the USA.
White people actually lose respect from this. We are resented for economically benefiting from their work. We are resented for being inferior, and yet, in decades past, holding Imperial power over their own superior races. We are made fun of by Asian-Americans.
In short, the National Greatness argument just makes no sense from any realistic, mature perspective. It only makes sense from the perspective of a man-child superfan. And, it should not surprise us that MAGA rejects it.
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I want to make a positive argument against minority elites. My argument will basically be environmentalist (anti-hereditarian). So the alt-right will reject it. But it’s truth, so I’ll make it anyways.
I believe that, when you lose out on those limited elite slots in society, you actually cause people to regress in quality. Some examples of how this work can be seen in the higher quality of African (excluding tribal) blacks vs. African American blacks, the higher quality of the white people of Euro countries that had few/no Jewish presence (Britain, N. Europe, N. Italy) for long periods of history vs. Eastern Europe and Russia, which was ruled by Jews, Ottomans, Russians, etc. for most of their history.
Basically, excluding Jews allowed a domestic elite to form, and this domestic elite spread itself and taught young folks to be elite. In the UK, you had the class system, with the upper-class forming special schools and finishing schools to teach everybody to be Great Men. It was a good run, while it lasted.
The reason this happens is something I’ve experienced personally. Basically, being in positions of importance force you to take on a mentality of gravity. You must care about each mistake. You must behave in a highly virtuous way, so that the people you are above do not grow to hate you or try to subvert you. You must learn how to speak in a way that does not de-motivate people or engender rebellion. You often learn these things by simply copying the Great Men around you. They have a way of speaking that is different than lower-class people, and it works really well. And you would never have a chance to interact with these great men if you did not have a reasonably high position in society, yourself!
Thus, merely occupying a seat in high-status places has the ability to enormously improve a person.
These traits are vestigial for the lower class. The lower class can get by, saying rude things, acting wild, being unserious, making little mistakes. If you are locked into the lower class for long enough, these bad habits spread without bound, and the gentility and excellence of the elite are shed like all vestigial traits - gentility just looks anal to the lower classes.
The implication of this is that imposing a minority elite on a people group is rather like dooming them to a future of floundering. It doesn’t have to be this way. The people might make promethean effort to raise their performance. That effort must be buttressed by an ethnic ideology that mandates such class-climbing, social support from their in-group, and a philosophical perspective that such evolution is possible.
But the anti-envy, hereditarian consensus among white people makes such evolution impossible for us. We are, unfortunately, doomed to be an underclass in a society run by Jews and Asians, with a few shining stars “making it“ to the top universities.
This is also why the people of MAGA are so stupid. These people have been out of the elite for too long. They don’t know how to behave themselves. They don’t know how to double-check their ideas for correctness, or how to predict and plan for backlash to their actions. They are, for lack of a better term, idiots, because they’ve been doing nothing but manning the checkout counter at Walmart for 3 generations. The fact that, due to political controls in the USA, one can’t be a conservative and be in the American elite has forced the debasement of white conservatives.
Conservatism did not make them stupid - the leadership of Asia are conservative, and they are more competent than liberal Westerners.
The same debasement will happen to all white people in the Anglosphere as a result of Asian conquest.
Being an underclass feels like Hell. Why? Because the “sin“ of envy that Noah blasts is, unfortunately, a human instinct. It’s primal, and an ideology does not alter it any more than an ideology alters sexual stimulation at the sight of boobs. It reminds me of an ex-gf from Silicon Valley who informed me that white kids who grow up in Silicon Valley are totally miserable because Asians just totally dominate the place. I noticed these miserable younger generations of white people, working in retail, when I visited there last year. A genuine ignorance of the severity of white people’s emasculation might cause certain idiot-narcissist whites to not have these feelings of envy, and indeed many whites are genuinely ignorant of many demographic realities.
But on the whole, whites will be unhappy in this reality, but we will not be able to confront the reality of it, because we can’t be honest with ourselves that our true envious emotions are politically incorrect. Whites will be miserable and confused - a perfect recipe for bonafide insanity.
I’ve had this debate many times with alt-right people in chats, and I know the common alt-right responses. One response is that white IQs are high enough that whites will be relatively well-represented in the elite. The simple counterargument to this theoretical speculation about how many whites “should“ be in the elite is to just look at the damned elite and count how many white gentiles there are. Ron Unz has done this, and he finds that white gentiles are the most underrepresented group in the top universities. I mean, we are really badly underrepresented. Top universities nicely approximate the elite, so we have our answer. The second counterargument is that white people are doing ok in socioeconomic competition because “all the doctors here in my Midwestern city are white.“ Only imbeciles are fooled by the Big Fish in the small pond. And make no mistake - most of the girls who grow up in your small pond will grow up to resent it. So you will have to grapple with the real society sooner or later, just to please a woman and reproduce, at all.
These misconceptions will be held by a decent number of imbeciles, but what will we do about the people who are not misconceived? Many whites will see society for what it is - a place where Asians are at the top socioeconomically, blacks are at the top culturally, and whites have a guilt-identity. That is the tragedy.
We should not be surprised that there are such high rates of mental illness among white people throughout the Anglosphere.
